Sweet Thames

by Matthew Kneale

  Seek, instead, that most dazzling of prizes; to see through the delusions of your own time. Every generation has its vanity, its scorn of preceding eras, and its determination to be the first – or last – example of humanity of real distinction. Each era and place has its own maddened assumptions, no more evident to their populations than distortions of colour are detectable to a fellow who has from birth seen the world through yellow-painted spectacles. You will not fully escape the influence of your own time – that is an impossible hope – but, if you trouble always to find your own thoughts, you may just rise above the fog of its more ludicrous imaginings.

  And that is no small achievement.

  Such are the lessons I won from the summer of 1849, the summer of revelations. An exchange I made – and a most favourable one, as I see it – in which the false comforts of old faiths were surrendered, in return for the noble, if sometimes harsh, clarity of the world seen in truth.

  Most of all, however, that long season gave me as its gift my own wife.

  THE END

  Epilogue

  THE REAL END

  Some readers may be curious to know a little more about the historical matters dealt with in this novel. And so learn the true end of the story.

  The Cholera epidemic of 1849 killed 14,000 people in London alone. As I have told, the scale of the catastrophe was greatly worsened by the measures taken by various authorities to deal with the disease.

  First there was Edwin Chadwick, upon whom I based the character of Edwin Sleak-Cunningham; a civil servant of great influence, also an early champion of government intervention in social matters. A man with quite a taste for personal and secret power, he determined to save the capital from the Cholera by flushing clean the sewers, in the belief that the miasma cloud would thus be destroyed at its source. There being no miasma cloud, he caused the disease – which was water-borne – to be ejected into the Thames, which was the main source of drinking water. Thousands fewer would have perished had he chosen to do nothing.

  The actions of the Poor Law Guardians, though they caused fewer deaths, were in their way more alarming, not least because the Guardians were ordered to act with greater humanity, but rebelled against their instructions.

  The Guardians’ superiors, the Board of Health, were insistent that doctors be sent out to help those afflicted, and that they be taken to hospitals where necessary. In addition the Board was much influenced by a new theory; that, in areas struck by the Cholera, those who had not yet contracted the disease could be saved if they were removed to a place of refuge, as they would escape the effects of the miasma cloud. The logic of this idea was false, but the action would have been effective; people would have been taken away from the infected water supplies.

  The Poor Law Guardians simply refused to obey. They believed Chadwick to be a man of dangerous ideas, and went out of their way to thwart his efforts. Not a single parish or union made any effort to seek out Cholera sufferers in their homes, as the Board of Health had demanded. Hardly any places of refuge were opened, denying the chance of escape from the disease. Most remarkable, as the epidemic approached, some dispensaries were actually closed down, and medical staff dismissed.

  The Board of Health found itself unable to overcome this rebellion, as its powers had been poorly drawn. Only when the Cholera epidemic was all but over was something done. Lord Ashley, that great social reformer, rushed a bill through Parliament giving the Board proper powers, and the Guardians were coerced into changing their ways.

  The story of London’s drains, if less shocking, was hardly less a catalogue of incompetences.

  The famed Great Exhibition can give a misleading impression of London in the middle of the nineteenth century; a visitor from our own era would find it most resemblant to a present-day Third World metropolis, struggling to swallow the stream of migrants arriving each day from the country. The city’s population increased many-fold in fifty years. Transport, street cleaning, house construction, drainage, schooling; all these bones of the urban skeleton were inadequate for the inhabitants’ ever-growing needs. London further suffered also for being the first such phenomenon; New York, Berlin, São Paolo, Calcutta and others had the advantage, at least, of being able to look back to the mistakes of their predecessors.

  By 1848, when a great campaign of public pressure brought about the creation of Chadwick’s Metropolitan Commission for Sewers, the issue of drainage was beyond urgency. It was a national scandal. Though some of the drainage ideas of that time – described in chapter three – now seem comical (Jeavons’ scheme, incidentally, is based upon the ‘Sump’s’ plan of Mr Henry Austin, son-in-law to none other than Charles Dickens), they were not all so, while the need for action to be taken clearly required one to be chosen, refined until practical, and put into effect. In the end, however, none was.

  The first problem was the slowness with which the Commission for Sewers acted; largely because Chadwick wanted to have London surveyed before he came to a firm decision. As a result nothing had been done when, the following year, the Cholera came. The Times saw its chance, and, working itself into a state of outrage – its favourite mood – launched attacks that made Chadwick little less than a scapegoat for the epidemic. Ironically the newspaper did not concentrate so much upon his flushing of the sewers (which really had killed thousands) as on his delays, and the secretive and power-hungry nature of his character.

  Chadwick was deposed. The Commission never recovered its sense of purpose, and, though the problem became ever more pressing, years passed and next to nothing was done.

  It was the dreadful odours themselves that finally broke the deadlock. The sewers continued to pollute the Thames, more thoroughly as the city grew. In 1858 – known as ‘The Summer of the Great Stink’ – the stench became so bad that sittings in the Houses of Parliament were much affected, with members fainting. All at once the government became wonderfully motivated. Money was found, a scheme chosen, a new body – The Metropolitan Board of Works, that replaced the Commission for Sewers – set to action.

  Thoughts of making profit from sewage being now discredited, the scheme chosen – designed by the talented Mr Bazalgette – sought only to expel the substances as efficiently as possible, without polluting the Thames. A series of systems of sewers were constructed, with surprising ease and speed, that met at a pumping station in Abbey Mills – still to be seen – grandly constructed in the Venetian Gothic style. An opening ceremony was held in 1865, attended by archbishops, cabinet ministers, the Lord Mayors of London and Dublin, and the Prince of Wales. Thereafter the British were regarded as experts in this new field, and civic authorities from St Petersburg to the United States sought out their engineers for the construction of their cities’ sewers.

  The system is still functioning today, expelling London’s waste into the North Sea; now, at last, a cause for concern, and challenge to the drain men of our own age. Who knows, a scheme such as that of Joshua Jeavons may yet come back into fashion.

  Lastly there was the business of cracking the mystery of the Cholera; no less a story of delays and chances missed.

  The remarkable thing is that some had guessed the answer to the riddle as early as 1849; a Punch cartoon of that time shows a child drinking from a water pump marked ‘The Cholera’. Yet the hold of the miasma theory on men’s minds proved tenacious, and two further epidemics were to pass before it was overcome. During the attack of 1854 there was the famous incident of the Broad Street Pump, the handle of which was smashed – much as by Joshua Jeavons – by the pioneering physician John Snow, who correctly saw the link between drinking water and the disease. Still many adhered to the notion of a poisonous gas-cloud, and it was only after the next epidemic of 1865, when a whole series of cases were traced back to a single polluted reservoir, that the argument was largely won.

  By the 1880s London was transformed. Bazalgette’s drainage system, together with better constructed houses and improved water supplies, had done much to drive back d
isease. Underground railways and the creation of new highways – often bringing about the demolition of infamous slums and criminal nests – made journeying across the city greatly easier. Londoners woke to find themselves inhabitants of a city which – though duller than its old self – was almost a pleasure to live in.

  Mr Henry Mayhew

  This book is in part drawn from the writings of Henry Mayhew. It would be wrong not to say a little about this great man.

  A journalistic genius, Mayhew was, within his different field, something of a Dickens; in fact Dickens used his writings as source material for some of his later novels. Working for the Morning Chronicle, Mayhew began a series of studies, written as ‘letters’, of London slumland and its inhabitants, discovering them for his readers much as others might have revealed exotic tribes of the tropics. For, although slums were dispersed all across the metropolis, the ‘respectable’ population – who made up the great majority of Londoners – rarely ventured into such places, though they might be only a few dozen yards from their own homes. Mayhew’s investigations were the subject of much interest, and were later compiled and expanded into the four great volumes of London Labour and the Landon Poor.

  Reading Mayhew, one has the refreshing feeling that he was a man above the moral narrowness of many of his contemporaries. His studies of the London poor do not set out to prove where they ‘went wrong’. He is more concerned with what sort of people they were, the words they liked to use, their daily habits. This openness of intention seems to have had no small effect on his interviewees and, with only rare exceptions, he seems to have quite won over those whose homes he visited. The accounts are finely alive, and detailed, frequently including long and lively quotations.

  Mayhew also offers remarkable pictures of London at that time. Whether he is describing a Saturday night market lit by hissing gaslamps, the silent Thames traffic, the crowded alleyways of a London slum, or the heroic squalor of the Hounsditch second-hand clothes market, his reports include an almost cinematic attention to detail, including sounds and smells.

  The London slums were – as he was well aware – a world fast disappearing, and he himself became something of a victim of their demise. The Londoners of the sanitized and respectable metropolis of the 1880s wanted only to forget the poverty and dirt of earlier times. They chose also to forget Mayhew, and he died poor and unhonoured. Now his writings and the city they portray seem to be the subject of ever greater interest. He is well deserving of such a revival.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Dr Angus Macintyre of Magdalen College, Oxford for his help in setting me in the right direction in my researches and his careful inspection of the manuscript. Likewise I am grateful to Dr John Davis of Queen’s College for his advice and thorough scrutiny of the text. Also to Nicky Young for her reading suggestions. And, most of all, Vicky Egan, who proved equally invaluable as editor, adviser and friend.