The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  After the old tosher'd hauled him out they had worked together till the old man died. Aside from the rats Tom liked it well enough. The stench of the channels never bothered him. He had found it roughish at first but it was nowhere near so bad as the others said, especially not if you were used to the river as he was. And the old tosher had taken to him, he'd been kind. He hadn't always shared the spoils fair as Tom might've liked but he'd taught him the tunnels till Tom knew them as well as the alleys of St Giles. The old man reckoned there was near on a thousand mile of sewers in London if you cared to follow the length of them but they stuck to the centre where the pickings were richest. In the open rural sewers the best you was like to find yourself was watercress. South wasn't so good either. Under the sugar bakeries the steam poured into the drains as hot as vapour from a kettle so that a tosher could be boiled alive. Under the gasworks was worse still, for all that the law said clear as day that they wasn't meant to use the sewers at all. Word was, the air under the Gas-Light and Coke Company could set a man aflame before he knew what hit him. Tom'd never been there. The one time he had seen the gas catch, there had been someone up ahead of him got a whiff of it so they was down on their backs before it could get them. He still remembered it. The blazing gas had rushed over them like a firework, a glorious whoosh of flame along the crown of the arch. It had been beautiful.

  Tom's favourites were the sewers beneath Mayfair and Belgravia. It satisfied him that beneath the fanciest homes in the city the drains were the worst of the lot. Beneath the snowy new stucco of Belgrave-square the sewers were crumbling so bad that any attempt to flush them would have brought them clattering down altogether. There were always riches to be found there amongst the kettles and the rags and the bits of broken stoneware. Young Tom could get into small places where the old man couldn't and when he got up near the grating in a street he'd stretch into the sludge and search about in the bottom of the sewer. It was his reach that had given him his nickname. There was usually penny pieces and often shillings and half-crowns. There were metal spoons, iron tobacco boxes, nails and pins, bits of lead, boys' marbles, buttons. Once he had found a silver jug big as a quart pot. They had celebrated that night, good and proper.

  Those had been the glory days, when toshing was a business passed down father to son. In those days, the sewers had opened straight on to the banks of the Thames and at low tide them that belonged there could walk in bold as brass. That had changed years ago. Now they had reinforced the arches with brick and hung iron gates over them that opened and closed with the tide. The notion was that the water could flow out but the people couldn't get in. For some of the sewer-hunters it was the end of things. The gates were treacherous and they didn't know no other way in. Of course there were still lads who thought it a lark to take the gates on, catching them when the water had raised them far enough open to slip through but before it was coming so fast they couldn't stay on their feet. Tom didn't trust that. There had always been other safer places to go down, although he wasn't in a hurry to tell about them. Long ago the old man had shared with him his secret map of traps and gullies, some of them used from time to time by the flushers, others so ancient and hidden away that likely no one else but he and Joe even knew they were there. Most of them you could only use after dark. It would have roused suspicion if anyone saw you. But they had used them all the same, even before the Thames doors were put up. There was only so far a man could get in the eight or nine hours the tide gave him and it didn't make sense always to start at the river, not if you wanted more than someone else's leavings. Besides, there were days when you were wrong about the rain. Those days you needed to be able to get out in a hurry.

  They were putting in more gratings and manholes these days, some to serve as vents, others iron-covered flues with bolts rammed into the brickwork for ladders. They were supposed to be kept locked although you could get them open if you knew how. The flushers forgot to lock them anyways, or perhaps it was easier not to bother with it now they was going down so much more often than they used to. Some sewers they went into as much as two or three times in a month, forcing water through the tunnels to scour away the mud and the sludge. Joe had said they was doing it to ruin honest men, so that the riches of the mud would be delivered to no one but the sea, but Tom knew it was on account of the cholera. It had run through the city like slop gas, the fever coming so sudden upon a man that he went from bright at breakfast to stiff at supper. Soon they were running out of room to bury the dead and out of grave-diggers too, on account of the numbers. You could see the piles of them sometimes, uncovered, their eyes still open, heaped up on wagons outside of the graveyards waiting their turn. It was then the doctors told the Government that it was the stink of the sewers what did for folk and there it was, decided. They flushed more often after that. When people stepped over gratings or passed above the places where the sewers emptied themselves into the Thames, they tried not to breathe. They still died. Whole families sometimes, all together, so there was no one even to go to the pump for a dipper of water. It was best not to think about it. If you thought about it too much you might be next.

  Now there was talk of Parliament rebuilding the whole entire sewer system, top to bottom. Tom would not have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes but in recent months gentlemen had started coming down the drains with the gangs of flushers, their silk hats and shiny shoes exchanged for the fan-tailed leather caps and high boots of the tunnel men. The men stayed down only an hour or two but they went into the tunnels like explorers to the other side of the world, their guides laden down with lanterns and packs and countless instruments for measuring and inspecting and whatever else. It wasn't hard to tell when they were down there. They left a trail of men posted at street level along their route, ready to give warning should the rain begin to fall. Sometimes Tom could hear it, the distant echoing clang of a dropping sewer cover that signalled the need to retreat. Once or twice Tom had got himself out on account of it but it'd never been nothing to worry about. Perhaps, Joe'd said with a glint in his eye, the gentlemen didn't like the feel of the water when it rose over their delicate white ankles. They weren't exactly rushing at it, that much was for sure. So far all they'd managed was a single new sewer tunnel, built beneath the new Victoria-street that ran north from Holborn Bridge. It had taken more than a year to complete and wasn't more than one hundred feet long. At that rate Tom would be long buried before they made it as far up as Clerkenwell.

  Still, it meant you had to be careful. There wasn't much hope for mercy from the beak if you fetched up nose to nose with a string of nobs slap under the Old Bailey It might be worth it though, Joe'd sniggered, just to see the look on their faces when the pair of them loomed up out of the darkness like a couple of ghosts. Tom hadn't laughed. Joe didn't know what he was talking about. He'd not done time inside. Tom had. He had no wish to do it again.

  Up above Tom's head the door shifted a little in its muddy base. Tom whistled softly and the answer came back in an echo before he heard the clatter of boots down the stairs.

  'What ho,' Joe muttered, raising his lantern to his face. The sudden flush of light caught the twin bushes of his whiskers so that they looked as though they were on fire. It was tradition to give toshers something in the way of a nickname, always had been, and some of the handles the men fetched up with took a bit of explaining, but it didn't take much to see why they called him Red Joe. When he took off his hat, which wasn't often, mind, his hair sprang up from his head in a veritable explosion of ginger. If you thought of life as a stretch of rope you had to admit that Joe, like Tom, was considerably nearer the end of it than the beginning, but so far there was not so much as a single strand of white to dampen the blaze. Not soot, not grime, not even the filthiest of sewers could contrive to put that fire out. Stiff and matted it might be but it still glowed bright as a brazier as soon as it managed to catch itself the faintest streak of light so that you almost thought to warm your hands against it. Above his pale eyes hi
s eyebrows sprawled like a pair of fiery caterpillars, each one thick as a thumb, and, beneath the fire of hair that licked along his arms, his skin was splattered with copper flecks. Out there on the main streets there were the brasses on the big houses and the harnesses of the horses and gaslight in shop windows and sunlight glinting off polished glass but here in the rookery nothing shone as bright as Joe. Beside Joe, Tom reckoned he looked like something knocked up out of ashes and dust.

  'We off then?'

  Tom nodded. Joe was nearly a head taller than Tom and, where Tom was lean, Joe was thick-legged and strong as a bull. He hoisted two crates easily on to his broad shoulders as Tom lashed the lantern to his hoe and checked the hidden pocket of his apron for his gloves. The sewer-rats' coats were poisonous and when you grabbed them they twisted and turned like street boys, screaming and lashing out with their yellow teeth. You didn't want to get bitten, not if you could help it. A rat's bite was three-cornered, like a leech's, only deeper, and the devil to stop bleeding. Tom had seen a man once swing a rat by the tail, more in the way of showing off than anything else, and before he knew it the creature had flipped itself round and bit him in the arm. Next day it was blown up big as a ham and black to boot. Tom didn't know what had happened to him after that. He'd not seen him again.

  Gripping a short thick stick in his right hand and his hoe in his left, Tom led the way across the sodden floor of the cellar. The house had once had a cesspool beneath it and at its far end the cellar led out into a small open sewer. If it had been under anything but the rookery it would have been built in brick with a roof too low for a child to get under, but beneath the crumbling padding-kens it was largely uncovered, the wooden roof nothing but the floor of the room above it and often pieces missing so that if you straightened up you could stare right into the blank eyes of women and children squatting there on the floor. More often there were just holes in the planks so that as you made your way through the tunnel you caught snatches of a hundred families shrieking and squalling and snoring. Sometimes tufts of dirty straw and rags poked through to stroke the crown of your hat. One time Joe had stood under such a place and listened. Winking at Tom, he had boomed out in a voice so deep it could have been the voice of the Devil himself, 'You think I don't see you there when you are so close to Hell?' The squeals and the scrabbles that followed would have put the rats to shame. Tom thought that Joe might choke himself, he laughed so hard.

  After about a quarter of a mile the tunnel fell away in a giant step down into a wider brick sewer. Tom and Joe slid down and headed east. It was easier going underfoot but with the gratings overhead they had to stop from time to time to shut off the light. They didn't talk as they walked. They'd already agreed on Newgate as the place. It was a ticklish spot to get to, seeing as you couldn't enter the tunnels anywhere close to it and had instead to make your way there underground, but Brassey's order had not been in the usual way of things. At Newgate they'd get the numbers and they'd also get the size. Brassey wanted them big. Directly beneath the meat market the stream was thick with blood and muck and lumps of discarded flesh. Sustained by a diet of such richness the Newgate rats were fat and ill-tempered as beadles. On one side of the tunnel they had succeeded in excavating a cavern as wide as a room and more than two yards high where the brutes bred their young. There had to be more than four hundred pair there, Tom reckoned, scrambling and crawling over each other like a live mountain of soot. No one had ever seen the toffs from Parliament at Newgate.

  They were almost there. The stink of rotting meat crammed the skull and a fatty brown foam curdled on the water. At the point where the tunnel began to sheer off towards the north Joe let the crates down. Tom untied his lantern from the hoe. Propping the pole against the wall, he fixed the lantern to a loop on the front of his canvas apron. That way he could have full use of hands and eyes. He pulled on his cuffed gloves. They were so stiff with age and dirt that they contained within them the perfect cast of his hands, each swollen knuckle finding its own hollow. He gave them a final tug, took up his cudgel and nodded at Joe. They were ready to start work.

  III

  The offices occupied by Joseph Bazalgette, Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, and his team of engineers, surveyors and draughtsmen, were located at i Greek-street, Soho. It was from these modest premises that Bazalgette planned to execute possibly the most ambitious feat of civil engineering ever attempted, the construction of a completely new underground drainage system for the entire city There was no disagreement about the urgent need for such a system. While improvements had been attempted by previous administrations they had led only to new problems. At the beginning of the century, each household had disposed of its waste into a private cesspool in its cellar which was regularly emptied by nightsoil men. However, as the population of the capital grew this system was decried as impractical and unsanitary. Instead all cesspools were to be connected to a local sewer which would conduct the flow, by way of a main sewer, to drain directly into the river. In the rotting and inadequate sewers, human excrement mixed with refuse from the slaughterhouses and knackers' yards, and waste from the tanneries and factories. Every day it drained into the Thames. It was not long before the river itself became the great cesspool of the city. At low tide the effluvium clung to the pillars of bridges or piled itself into stinking mudbanks and fermented.

  London, the largest metropolis in the world, was poisoning itself. That was the consensus reached by doctors and scientists as the century passed its midpoint. As the filth pooled and putrefied in local sewers, many of which were hardly more than open ditches, it exhaled highly poisonous gases. When these poisons were diffused into the atmosphere and carried by corrupted air and water into the lungs and stomach, they entered directly into the blood, spreading deathly disease. In twenty years London had been ravaged by three brutal epidemics of the cholera. Each time the disease had attacked the city most savagely in the places where the air and the water was foulest. No one doubted that something would have to be done.

  It was considerably less easy to reach agreement on a solution to the problem. Bazalgette's plan was for a new network of tunnels that would intercept the existing system of cesspools and sewers and take their vast polluted cargo to outfalls far downstream of the city. According to his scheme there would be required something in excess of eighty miles of new interceptory sewers, to be laid from west to east, three north of the river and two south. Since gravity in the low-lying basin of the Thames was inadequate to ensure the efficient flow of the water, Bazalgette had devised the tunnels on artificially steep gradients, placing at key intervals steam-driven pumping stations that would raise the flow by upwards of twenty feet and then release it once more, so that it might recommence its energetic downward course. As for the existing sewers, they were to be not only rebuilt but supplemented by tens of hundreds of miles of local sewers to feed these main channels, in order to enable the system to carry the half-million gallons of waste passing through the bowels of London every day. To complete the system, Bazalgette estimated, would take five years and cost the city in the order of three million pounds.

  The funds were not forthcoming. While Parliament provided the monies to maintain the Board, fiscal responsibility for structural improvements fell to the local vestries who dithered and debated and delayed. But Bazalgette refused to be disheartened. Slowly he assembled a team of junior engineers and surveyors who, content with the necessarily low wages, worked tirelessly alongside him to prepare the countless plans and drawings necessary to perfect his scheme. He begged his friends to appraise him of any suitable candidates. And so it was that in the spring of 1856 his friend Robert Rawlinson, a distinguished engineer recently returned from a posting with Sutherland's Sanitary Commission in Scutari, recommended to him a junior surveyor by the name of William May.

  May had been in Scutari for almost two months when Rawlinson arrived in the Turkish outpost at the end of the first savage winter of the Russian War. Although he had read the
newspaper reports and had considerable experience of sanitary engineering in the poorest parts of Liverpool, the conditions he found in Scutari shook Rawlinson profoundly The rotting Turkish barracks that served as hospitals were little more than slums, overcrowded, filthy and unspeakably ill-ventilated, and nearly half of the soldiers who contrived to survive the miserable four-day voyage from the front died in hospital when they got there. In the Barrack Hospital alone fifty men were lost every day, the bodies stitched up in their blankets, thrown into open carts, and laid in layers in hurriedly dug trenches. One nurse told Rawlinson how she watched as Turkish soldiers threw corpses into a shallow square ditch. When one soldier noticed a head protruding beyond the rest he jumped into the hole and stamped it down with an impatient boot. The burial had taken place less than sixty feet from the entrance to the hospital. Within four days Sutherland and Rawlinson had inspected all four hospitals and submitted their report. Within a week Rawlinson had begun to assemble a team of men to implement his improvements.

  The starched and sponged gentlemen of the Commission could not have stood out more starkly amongst the ragged soldiers of Scutari if they had arrayed themselves in bonnets and crinolines, but William hardly saw them. He had survived the horrors of Inkerman, only to be bayoneted six weeks later by a Russian foot soldier who had crept up on him as he stumbled, alone and half-asleep, along a frozen trench while on night-time duty. When the dawn relief discovered him, face down in the scarlet snow, he was barely conscious. He was disorientated for days afterwards. When pressed to talk he stuttered, vomited, and managed only a childish gibberish. Despite his weakness he was frequently violent. Angered by a glancing blow, an exhausted doctor had knotted William's hands together with a length of rope. It was in this state that he endured the long voyage to Scutari. When he finally arrived at the General Hospital his dressings had not been changed for four weeks. When she lifted the rag covering the wound to his stomach the nurse was obliged to remove a quart of maggots before she could bind it again.