Introductory material (continued 2)

The “City” differed also in that it was able to obtain from the Government and Parliament powers which neither Government nor Parliament would grant to “greater London.”

It differed too in that from 1848 onwards it was in beneficial enjoyment of the services of a Medical Officer of Health.

But in many respects the “City” was a microcosm of the metropolis; and though possessed of a local government, yet was it cursed with evils which were the terrible legacy left it by the ignorance, indifference, neglect, incapacity, or cupidity, of previous generations.

The graphic reports of its Medical Officer of Health—Dr. John Simon—have left us a most vivid and valuable contemporary picture of the sanitary condition and surroundings of the people living in the favoured area about the middle of the last century, and they disclose, in no hesitating manner, the desperate evils prevalent therein.

The Thames, “with the immeasurable filth” which polluted it, and its acres of mud banks saturated with the reeking sewage of an immense population, vitiated the atmosphere of the City, just as it did that of other parts of London. But sewers there were in the City, of one sort or another, over forty miles of them, and some of the filth of the City was carried away, at least into the river.

House drainage into the sewers was, however, either lamentably deficient or non-existent, and cesspools abounded—abounded so freely that “parts of the City might be described as having a cesspool-city excavated beneath it.”

“It requires,” reported Dr. Simon to his employers, “little medical knowledge to understand that animals will scarcely thrive in an atmosphere of their own decomposing excrements; yet such, strictly and literally speaking, is the air which a very large proportion of the inhabitants of the City are condemned to breathe…. In some instances, where the basement storey of a house is tenanted, the cesspool lies, perhaps merely boarded over, close beneath the feet of a family of human beings whom it surrounds uninterruptedly, whether they wake or sleep, with its fœtid pollution and poison.”

For such evils, and such a state of things, he said, house drainage, with effective water supply, were the remedies which could alone avail; and it was only in the Session of 1848 that the authority to secure and enforce these remedies was vested by the Legislature in any public body whatsoever. The City was fortunately included, but the metropolis, with its two and a half millions of inhabitants, was unfortunately not.

The unrestricted supply of water, he pointed out, was the first essential of decency, of comfort, and of health; no civilisation of the poorer classes could exist without it; and any limitation to its use in the metropolis was a barrier which must maintain thousands in a state of the most unwholesome filth and degradation.

Even in the City, however, the supply of water was but “a fraction of what it should have been, and thousands of the population inhabited houses which had no supply of it.”

Nor was what was supplied by the Water Companies much to boast of.

“The waters were conducted from their sources in open channels; they received in a large measure the surface-washing, the drainage, and even the sewage of the country through which they passed; they derived casual impurities from bathers and barges, and on their arrival were, after a short subsidence in reservoirs, distributed without filtration to the public.”

In some cases the scanty distribution was from a stand-pipe in a court or alley, for a very short time of the day. In other cases the water was delivered into butts or cisterns. Their condition is thus described:—

“In inspecting the courts and alleys of the ‘City,’” he wrote, “one constantly sees butts, for the reception of water, either public or in the open yards of houses, or sometimes in their cellars; and these butts, dirty, mouldering, and coverless; receiving soot and all other impurities from the air; absorbing stench from the adjacent cesspool; inviting filth from insects, vermin, sparrows, cats, and children; their contents often augmented through a rain-water pipe by the washings of the roof, and every hour becoming fustier and more offensive. Nothing can be less like what water should be than the fluid obtained under such circumstances.”

It is interesting to observe that the evils of the system of water supply by private companies were, even in the “City,” so manifest that Dr. Simon expressed his opinion that the only satisfactory solution of the difficulty in connection therewith was the acquisition by the public authority of the control of the supply, and he urged the adoption of the principle of what is now denounced by some people as “municipal trading.”

In every practical sense the sale of water in London was a monopoly.

“The individual customer,” wrote Dr. Simon, “who is dissatisfied with his bargain can go to no other market; and however legitimate may be his claim to be supplied with this prime necessary of life at its cheapest rate, in the most efficient manner, and of the best possible quality, your Honourable Court (the Commissioners of Sewers) hitherto possesses no power to enforce it.”

In the Public Health Act of 1848 the principle had been recognised by Parliament so far as towns in the country were concerned—local Boards of Health being authorised to provide their district with such a supply of water as might be proper or sufficient, or to contract for such a supply. He urged that the City should obtain a similar power.

“All the advantages which could possibly be gained by competition, together with many benefits which no competition could ensure, would thus be realised to the population under your charge.”

But that solution of the difficulty was more than half a century in advance of its accomplishment so far as either the “City” or “greater London” was concerned.

As to the atmosphere in the “City,” there seems to have been no limit to the pollutions thereof, all of which were injurious to the health of the public.

Numerous noxious and offensive trades were carried on in the most crowded places.

Directly and indirectly, slaughtering of animals in the “City” was prejudicial to the health of the population, and exercised a most injurious influence upon the district.

The number of slaughter-houses registered and tolerated in the “City” in 1848 amounted to 138, and of these, in 58 cases, the slaughtering was carried out in the vaults and cellars.[40]

And there were very many noxious and offensive trades in close dependence upon “the original nuisance” of the slaughter-house, and round about it, “the concomitant and still more grievous nuisances of gut-spinning, tripe-dressing, bone-boiling, tallow-melting, paunch-cooking, &c., &c.”

Certain it is that offensive businesses of these and other sorts were carried on by their owners with an absolute disregard to the comfort or health of the public.

The matter was a difficult one to deal with, as any severe restrictions might destroy the trade or manufacture and take away from the people the employment which gave them the means of earning a livelihood. Furthermore, such restrictions were usually resented as an infraction of personal liberty. Dr. Simon forcibly and conclusively answered this contention.

“It might,” he wrote, “be an infraction of personal liberty to interfere with a proprietor’s right to make offensive smells within the limits of his own tenement, and for his own separate inhalation, but surely it is a still greater infraction of personal liberty when the proprietor, entitled as he is to but the joint use of an atmosphere which is the common property of his neighbourhood, assumes what is equivalent to a sole possession of it, and claims the right of diffusing through it some nauseous effluvium which others, equally with himself, are thus obliged to inhale.”

Some improvement in this respect was rendered possible by the Act of 1851, which enacted that whatever trade or business might occasion noxious or offensive effluvia, or otherwise annoy the inhabitants of its neighbourhood, “shall” be required to employ the best known means for preventing or counteracting such annoyance.

But the remedy scarcely appears to have been availed of or enforced, and “greater London” was, as usual, excluded from the Act.

Another more constant pollution of the air was that resulting from intramural burial. “Overcrowding” in the “City” was not limited to the living; it extended even to the dead, and though the dead themselves had passed beyond any further possible harm from it, yet their overcrowding affected disastrously those they had left behind. Here the evils already described as existing in “greater London” existed also in acute form. Two thousand bodies or more were interred each year actually within the “City” area, and the burial grounds were densely packed. And “in all the larger parochial burying grounds, and in most others, the soil was saturated with animal matter undergoing slow decomposition.”

And the vaults beneath the churches were “in many instances similarly overloaded with materials of putrefaction, and the atmosphere which should have been kept pure and without admixture for the living, was hourly tainted with the fœtid emanations of the dead….”

In Dr. Simon’s words:—

“Close beneath the feet of those who attend the services of their church there often lies an almost solid pile of decomposing human remains, heaped as high as the vaulting will permit, and generally but very partially coffined.”

The Metropolitan Burials Act of 1852 effected a great improvement in this respect by putting a term to the indefinite perpetuation of this horrible evil. It gave the Secretary of State power to prohibit further intramural burials, and it gave the “City,” and other local authorities, the power to establish burial places beyond the boundaries of the metropolis. But, even when thus stopped, years had to elapse before the condition of intramural burial grounds and vaults would cease to vitiate the air around them.[41]

The atmosphere of the “City,” the air which people breathed, was thus vitiated in varying degrees of intensity by numerous and various abominations—the polluted Thames, defective sewerage and drainage, offensive trades, intramural interments.

As regards the houses in which the people lived, these were crammed together—packed as closely together as builders’ ingenuity could pack them—many of them combining every defect that houses could have, and so situated that ventilation was an impossibility.

“In very many parts of the City you find a number of courts, probably with very narrow inlets, diverging from the open street in such close succession that their backs adjoin, with no intermediate space whatsoever. Consequently each row of houses has but a single row of windows facing the confined court, and thus there is no possibility of ventilation, either through the court generally or through the houses which compose it…. Houses so constructed as to be as perfectly a cul-de-sac out of the court as the court is a cul-de-sac out of the street.”[42]

And the climax of insanitary conditions was reached when these densely-packed houses were overcrowded by human beings.

The process of converting dwelling-houses into warehouses, or business offices, or for trade or manufactures was in full swing—a constant force—and so the number of houses for people to live in became ever fewer.

And the “tenement houses,” in which the great bulk of the working classes lived, became more and more crowded; houses wherein “each holding or tenement, though very often consisting but of a single small room, receives its inmates without available restriction as to their sex or number, and without registration of the accommodation requisite for cleanliness, decency, and health.”

The Census of 1851 had shown an increase of over 4,200 in the population of the “City,” and a diminution of nearly 900 houses.

“Probably,” wrote Dr. Simon, “for the most part it represents the continued influx of a poor population into localities undesirable for residence, and implies that habitations previously unwholesome by their overcrowdedness are now still more densely thronged by a squalid and sickly population….

“It is no uncommon thing, in a room twelve feet square or less, to find three or four families styed together (perhaps with infectious disease among them), filling the same space night and day—men, women, and children, in the promiscuous intercourse of cattle. Of these inmates it is nearly superfluous to observe that in all offices of nature they are gregarious and public; that every instinct of personal or sexual decency is stifled; that every nakedness of life is uncovered there…. Who can wonder at what becomes, physically and morally, of infants begotten and born in these bestial crowds?…”

Of overcrowding or “pestilential heaping of human beings,” this matter of “infinite importance,” he wrote:—

“While it maintains physical filth that is indescribable, while it perpetuates fever and the allied disorders, while it creates mortality enough to mask the results of all your sanitary progress, its moral consequences are too dreadful to be detailed.”

Pursuing his masterly analysis of the sanitary condition of the people in the “City” and its causes, he wrote:—

“Last and not least among the influences prejudicial to health in the City, as elsewhere, must be reckoned the social condition of the working classes…. Often in discussion of sanitary subjects before your Honourable Court, the filthy, or slovenly, or improvident, or destructive, or intemperate, or dishonest habits of these classes are cited as an explanation of the inefficiency of measures designed for their advantage. It is constantly urged that to bring improved domestic arrangements within the reach of such persons is a waste and a folly.

“It is unquestionable that in houses containing all the sanitary evils enumerated—undrained and waterless, and unventilated—there do dwell whole hordes of persons who struggle so little in self-defence against that which surrounds them that they may be considered almost indifferent to its existence, or almost acclimated to endure its continuance.

“It is too true that among the lower classes there are swarms of men and women who have yet to learn that human beings should dwell differently from cattle—swarms to whom personal cleanliness is utterly unknown; swarms by whom delicacy and decency in their social relations are quite unconceived.

“My sphere of duty lies within the City boundary.

“I studiously refrain from instituting comparisons with other metropolitan localities.

“I feel the deepest conviction that no sanitary system can be adequate to the requirements of the time, or can cure those radical evils which infest the under framework of society, unless the importance be distinctly recognised and the duty manfully undertaken of improving the social condition of the poor….

“Who can wonder that the laws of society should at times be forgotten by those whom the eye of society habitually overlooks, and whom the heart of society often appears to discard?

“To my duty it alone belongs, in such respects, to tell you where disease ravages the people under your charge, and wherefore; but while I lift the curtain to show you this—a curtain which propriety may gladly leave unraised—you cannot but see that side by side with pestilence there stalks a deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous, and scattering, while Society averts her eyes, the retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence, and pauperism.”

And what was the physical result of this state of living?

“In some spots in the City you would see houses, courts, and streets, where the habitual proportion of deaths is far beyond the heaviest pestilence rate known for any metropolitan district aggregately—localities where the habitual rate of death is more appalling than any such averages can enable you to conceive.

“Among their dense population it is rare to see any other appearance than that of squalid sickness and misery, and the children who are reproduced with the fertility of a rabbit warren perish in early infancy.

“The diseases of these localities are well marked. Scrofula more or less completely blights all that are born … often prolonging itself as a hereditary curse in the misbegotten offspring of those who, under such unnatural conditions, attain to maturity and procreation.

“Typhus prevails as a habitual pestilence.

“The death rate during the last five years has been at the rate of about twenty-four per 1,000 per annum.

“The City of London appears peculiarly fatal to infant life.

“Of the 15,597 persons who died within your jurisdiction in the five years 1847–8 to 1852–3, nearly three-eighths died in the first five years of life.”

To his employers he mostly appeals. He hopes that the statements in his reports may suffice to convince them of the necessity which exists in the “City” of London for some effectual and permanent sanitary organisation.

“For the metropolis generally there is hitherto no sanitary law such as you possess for your territory.”

He pointed out that—

“Inspection of the most constant, most searching, most intelligent, and most trustworthy kind is that in which the provisional management of our said affairs must essentially consist.

“The committee was given power by the Act for the amendment or removal of houses presenting aggravated structural faults.

“Wherever your Medical Officer of Health may certify to you that any house or building is permanently unwholesome and unfit for human habitation, you are empowered to require of the owner (or in his neglect yourselves to undertake) the execution of whatever works may be requisite for rendering the house habitable with security to life.”

And he urged that:—

“The principle might be distinctly recognised that the City will not tolerate within its municipal jurisdiction the continuance of houses absolutely incompatible with healthy habitation.

“Here terminates my statement of the powers now vested in you for the maintenance of the public health.

“Authority so complete for this noble purpose has never before been delegated to any municipal body in the country.

“If the deliberate promises of Science be not an empty delusion, it is practicable to reduce human mortality within your jurisdiction to nearly the half of the present prevalence.”

The most valuable and weighty of all his conclusions was that affixing the responsibility for the existing mass of insanitation and consequent misery. With a courage worthy of all admiration he did not hesitate, regardless of the consequences to himself, to fix the responsibility and blame where they were due.

“The fact is that, except against wilful violence, life is very little cared for by the law.”

Of Parliament he wrote:—

“Fragments of legislation there are, indeed, in all directions; enough to establish precedents, enough to testify some half-conscious possession of a principle; but for usefulness little beyond this. The statutes tell that now and then there has reached to high places the wail of physical suffering. They tell that our law makers, to the tether of a very scanty knowledge, have, not unwillingly, moved to the redress of some clamorous wrong…. But … their insufficiencies constitute a national scandal, … something not far removed from a national sin….

“The landlord must be held responsible for the decent and wholesome condition of his property, and for such conduct of his tenants as will maintain that condition.”

The clear, precise, and unqualified enunciation of such a principle must have given a shock to many of the members of the governing authority of the “City,” and excited their wrath, the more especially as it was so absolutely sound and true.

“The death of a child by smallpox,” he went on to say, “would in most instances call for a verdict of ‘homicide by omission’ against the parent who had neglected daily opportunities of giving it immunity from that disease by the simple process of vaccination; the death of an adult by typhus would commonly justify still stronger condemnation (though with more difficulty of fixing and proportioning the particular responsibility) against those who ignore the duties of property, and who knowingly let for the occupation of the poor dwellings unfit even for brute tenants, dwellings absolutely incompatible with health.”

And then he proceeds to explain and justify and enlarge upon his assertion of the responsibility of the landlord.

“There are forty-five miles of sewerage in your jurisdiction, ready to receive the streams of private drainage, and leaving the owners of house property no excuse for the non-performance of necessary works…. But … the intentions of your Court, and the industry of its officers, have been in great measure frustrated by the passive resistance of landlords. Delays and subterfuges have been had recourse to in order to avoid compliance with the injunctions of the Commission.”

In his evidence before the Royal Commission of 1853–4 he said:—

“The poorer house property of the City is very often in the hands of wealthy people who have only the most general notion of its whereabouts, have perhaps never visited the place for which they receive rent, and in short know their property only through their agents.

“Instances have come to my knowledge of the very worst description of property being thus held ignorantly and carelessly by wealthy persons. Often for years we can get at no representative of the property other than the agent or collector who receives the weekly rent for some anonymous employer.”

In his third Report to the Commissioners of Sewers he wrote:—

“It is easy to foresee the numerous obstacles which interested persons will set before you to delay the accomplishment of your great task.

“When your orders are addressed to some owner of objectionable property—of some property which is a constant source of nuisance, or disease, or death; when you would force one person to refrain from tainting the general atmosphere with results of an offensive occupation; when you would oblige another to see that his tenantry are better housed than cattle, and that, while he takes rent for lodging, he shall not give fever as an equivalent—amid these proceedings you will be reminded of the ‘rights of property’ and of ‘an Englishman’s inviolable claim to do as he will with his own.’

“Permit me to remind you that your law makes full recognition of these principles and that the cases in which sophistical appeal will often be made to them are exactly those which are most completely condemned by a full and fair application of the principles adverted to. With private affairs you interfere only when they become of public import, with private liberty only when it becomes a public encroachment. The factory chimney that eclipses the light of heaven with unbroken clouds of smoke, the melting house that nauseates an entire parish, the slaughter-house that forms round itself a circle of dangerous disease—these surely are not private but public affairs.

“And how much more justly may the neighbour appeal to you against each such nuisance as an interference with his privacy; against the smoke, the stink, the fever that bursts through each inlet of his dwelling, intrudes on him at every hour, disturbs the enjoyment and shortens the duration of his life. And for the rights of property—they are not only pecuniary. Life, too, is a great property, and your Act (of 1851) asserts its rights.”

“The landlord of some overthronged lodging-house complains that to reduce the number of his tenantry, to lay on water, to erect privies, or to execute some other indispensable sanitary work, would diminish his rental—in the spirit of your Act it is held a sufficient reply that human life is at stake—and that a landlord in his dealings with the ignorant and indefensive poor cannot be suffered to estimate them at the value of cattle, to associate them in worse than bestial habits, or let to them for hire at however moderate a rent the certain occasions of suffering and death.”

“Seeing the punctuality with which weekly visitation is made for the collection of rents in these wretched dwellings it would not be unreasonable to insist on some regulations for the clean and wholesome condition of his premises, water supply, and scavenging, &c.”

Such a regulation would “render it indispensable to the landlord of such holdings to promote cleanly and decent habits among his tenants—even to obtain security for their good behaviour.”

The picture thus presented of the sanitary condition of the people residing in the “City” about the middle of the last century is—it must be acknowledged—a terrible one; but it rests upon unimpeachable testimony.

The very grave and serious conclusion, however, follows from it—that if the evils were thus terrible in the “City,” with a comparatively small population, only a little more than a twentieth of that of the metropolis, and where there was a local government with wide powers for dealing with matters affecting the public health—how infinitely more serious was the condition of things in the “greater London” with its huge population, and where there was practically no local government, and no punitive law for insanitary misdoings and crimes.

In some degree, the evils the people suffered under were of their own making, though many excuses can be urged in extenuation. In some degree, too, the people were unquestionably the victims of circumstances. But in the main, they were the victims of other people’s iniquities. It was those circumstances which the Government should have altered, or, at any rate, have endeavoured to control or modify—it was the unlimited power to do evil that the Government should have checked and curbed; but “greater London” was virtually left outside the pale of remedial legislative treatment by Parliament.

IV

The great cholera epidemic of 1848–9 had deeply stirred public feeling in London. It had destroyed 14,600 people (and diarrhœa, its satellite, had destroyed many thousands more), and it had been “accompanied by an amount of sickness and physical misery beyond computation.” But even all its horrors, and all the proofs it afforded of the desperately insanitary condition of the masses in the metropolis, were not sufficient to induce the Government to depart from its policy of neglect, or to wring from Parliament measures which would lay the basis for the alleviation of the sufferings of the working population of the metropolis, or which would remove even a small part of the evils which fell so heavily upon those least able to sustain them, and least able to remove them.

The health of London was becoming worse every year. The number of persons dying from preventable disease had been steadily increasing.

One gleam of hope there was, however. An increasing number of persons were becoming interested in the health of the people, and were awakening to the gravity of the subject, and to the public discredit and inhuman scandal of the existing condition of things—an awakening of interest which, in February, 1850, reached to the extent of a public meeting.

The Bishop of London presided, and the meeting was rendered the more remarkable by speeches from Lord Ashley, then actively pressing sanitary and social questions forward, and by Charles Dickens.

Lord Ashley said:—

“The condition of the metropolis, in a sanitary point of view, was not only perilous to those who resided in it, but it was an absolute disgrace to the century in which they lived. It was a disgrace to their high-sounding professions of civilisation and morality. They were surrounded by every noxious influence—they were exposed to every deadly pestilence…. The water they drank, the air they breathed, the surface they walked on, and the ground beneath the surface, all were tainted and rife with the seeds of disease and death….

“Let them look at another abomination—the existence of putrefying corpses in graveyards and in vaults amidst the habitations of the living—an abomination discountenanced by all the civilisation of modern days, as it was by that of the ancient days—the practice of intramural interments.

“Could anything be worse than the graveyards of the metropolis? Under a surface of ground not amounting to 250 acres there had been interred within thirty years in the metropolis far more than 1,500,000 human beings. What must be the condition of the atmosphere affected by the exhalations from that surface?…

“And what were the financial and social consequences of allowing such a state of things to exist?

“At least one-third of the pauperism of the country arose from the defective sanitary condition of large multitudes of the people….”

Charles Dickens said:—

“The object of the resolution he was proposing was to bring the Metropolis within the provisions of the Public Health Act, most absurdly and monstrously excluded from its operation…. Infancy was made stunted, ugly, and full of pain; maturity made old; and old age imbecile.

“He knew of many places in London unsurpassed in the accumulated horrors of their long neglect by the dirtiest old spots in the dirtiest old towns under the worst old governments in Europe.

“The principal objectors to the improvements proposed were divided into two classes.

“The first consisted of the owners of small tenements, men who pushed themselves to the front of Boards of Guardians and parish Vestries, and were clamorous about the rating of their property; the other class was composed of gentlemen, more independent and less selfish, who had a weak leaning towards self-government. The first class generally proceeded upon the supposition that the compulsory improvement of their property when exceedingly defective would be very expensive….

“No one,” he went on to say, “who had any knowledge of the poor could fail to be deeply affected by their patience and their sympathy with one another—by the beautiful alacrity with which they helped each other in toil, in the day of suffering, in the hour of death.

“It hardly ever happened that any case of extreme protracted destitution found its way into the public prints without our reading at the same time of some ragged Samaritan sharing his last loaf or spending his last penny to relieve the poor miserable in the room upstairs or in the cellar underground. It was to develop in the poor people the virtue which nothing could eradicate, to raise them in the social scale as they should be raised, to lift them from a condition into which they did not allow their beast to sink, … to cleanse the foul air for the passage of Christianity and education throughout the land, that the meeting was assembled. The object of their assembly was simply to help to set that right which was wrong before God and before man.”

The realisation of this object, noble as it was, was not easily attainable.

The Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields said that “the difficulty of legislation in these matters was to hit the medium between the rights of property and the rights of humanity.” He might have added, with truth, that the difficulty had so far been met by sacrificing the rights of humanity to the rights of property.

Lord Ashley had pointed out that they “had to contend with ignorance, indifference, selfishness, and interest;” or as Lord Robert Grosvenor more vigorously expressed it, in a phrase which should live in history as giving the key to the mystery of the slow sanitary evolution of this great city, they had to contend against “vested interests in filth and dirt.”

One thing was already absolutely clear, that it was hopeless to expect anything from the spontaneous action of land-owners or house-owners.

“They knew it was quite impossible,” said the Bishop of Chichester, “to bring the owners of even one small court or alley, much less the owners or occupiers of any large district, to concur in any measure for the general good of their particular locality.”

The fact was that nothing but the imperative directions of the law would secure the removal of evils or curtail the practice of infamous abuses—and even when the law was enacted for their remedy, nothing but its rigorous enforcement with adequate penalties would make it effective.

As the result of the meeting, a deputation waited on Lord John Russell, the then Prime Minister. His reply was not encouraging.

“In this city,” he said, “there is very naturally and properly great jealousy of any interference either with local rights or individual will and freedom from control.”

That great jealousy proved to be so powerful that nothing was attempted by the Government except an abortive effort to deal with the loathsome and insanitary evils of intramural interments where vested interests were neither powerful nor loud voiced.

The Act was so defective that it never came into operation, and two more years elapsed before the Government again essayed to deal with the subject. And in the meanwhile that most horrible evil was permitted to work its will upon the dwellers in the metropolis.

To the enthusiasm of an individual, and not of the Government, was due the first effective attempt to grapple with one of the widespread, deep-seated evils which were working such havoc among the people. The most disastrous and vicious forms of overcrowding were at the time to be found in the so-called Common Lodging Houses—the sink of insanitary abominations.

These were the temporary and casual abodes of the dregs of London humanity—of the tramps, and the unfortunates, and the mendicants and criminals, male and female—when they could afford the penny or pence to pay for their night’s lodging. In most cases these houses were low brothels and hotbeds of crime and moral degeneracy, their foul and filthy condition making them great sources and propagators of contagious and loathsome diseases.

In the “City” the authorities had power to regulate and control them. Not so, however, in the metropolis. There, no one had any authority in the matter, nor was there any authority for any one to have.

Lord Ashley, truly discerning that the one and only way of dealing with this evil was by regulation and constraint, introduced a Bill[43] and actually carried it through Parliament, and two years later got another Act[44] embodying amendments which made it more effective.

What the Common Lodging House owner or keeper—anxious to secure the utmost profits from his property and regardless of all consequences to others—would not do, he was, by those Acts, made to do.

The houses which he devoted to this purpose, solely for his own profit, were placed under the control and inspection of the police, and had to be registered as “Common Lodging Houses.” Overcrowding in them was checked by restricting the number of inmates who might be in each room; regulations (confirmed by a Secretary of State) were made, and steadily enforced, for the separation of the sexes; for the proper cleansing of the houses; and for compelling the keeper to give immediate notice of fever or any contagious or infectious disease occurring therein. The accumulation of refuse was to be prevented, and provision had to be made for adequate sanitary accommodation, for better drainage, and for sufficient water supply.

A very brief experience showed that great practical benefits resulted from thus regulating these houses, and the amount of sickness and mortality in them became astonishingly small, considering the character of their inmates and the localities where they were situated; and inasmuch as the number of such houses was nearly 5,000, and the population in them about 80,000, the benefit was a really substantial one.

How obstinate and pertinacious was the opposition of house-owners, or middlemen, to regulation and supervision of any kind is illustrated by a case reported by the Assistant Police Commissioner.[45] The owner of certain premises in St. Giles’ had been often applied to, without success, to remedy some gross sanitary defects therein which had resulted in the loss of life by fever. Brought to bay at last, at the Police Court, and ordered to remedy the evil, he said that he was willing to do all in his power to abate the nuisance … but, “he thought he ought not to be dictated to as to the way his property was to be managed.” His words embodied the predominant spirit of the time. “There are,” wrote the Assistant Police Commissioner in commenting upon this case, “owners of property whom nothing but the strong arm of the law can move.”

Unfortunately the Act did not go far enough. Single rooms occupied by families did not come within its scope. They constituted an enormous proportion of the habitations of the people, and they were allowed to continue the prolific cause of sanitary evils and of physical and moral degradation.

Limited in its scope though the Act was, it afforded nevertheless one great object lesson—the lesson which since that time has been consistently preached by all who had actual experience as regarded the sanitary condition of the people of London—the lesson that the worst of the sanitary and social evils could only be effectually grappled with, on the one side by the supervision and regulation and constant inspection of the houses in which the poorer classes lived, and upon the other side by insistent compulsion of house-owners to maintain a certain standard of sanitation and cleanliness in those houses.

That, however, was a course which Parliament for many years did not think it desirable to adopt, and which, when adopted in a tentative and half-hearted sort of way, suffered the usual fate of sanitary legislation—that of being neglected, opposed, evaded, or thwarted by land-owners, house-owners, middlemen, and by hostile local authorities.

Lord Ashley also originated and succeeded in the same Session in obtaining from Parliament another Act of notable interest, namely, “The Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act,”[46] which aimed at increasing the quantity of houses for working men by facilitating the establishment of well-ordered houses for such persons.

It gave power to vestries to adopt the Act, and thereafter to purchase or lease land, and to erect houses thereon for the working classes, and to borrow money on the security of the rates for this purpose.

In advocating his plan in the House of Commons he enforced the importance of the reform. He said:—

“Until the domiciliary condition of the working classes were Christianised (he could use no less forcible a term) all hope of moral or social improvement was utterly vain. Though not the sole, it was one of the prime sources of the evils that beset their condition; it generated disease, ruined whole families by the intemperance it promoted, cut off or crippled thousands in the vigour of life, and filled the workhouses with widows and orphans.”[47]

He specially mentioned one of the objections urged to this proposal for the construction of better houses—an objection which since then has invariably found expression when any amelioration of the housing of the working classes has been proposed to be done by a public authority.

“It was said those matters ought to be left to private speculation. He should much object to that. Private speculation was very much confined to the construction of the smallest houses, and of the lowest possible description, because it was out of these the most inordinate profits could be made. Private speculation was almost entirely in that direction.”

He might have added that “private speculation” had hitherto had a completely free field in the sphere of housing, with all the evil results visible before them, and that it had aggravated and intensified the evil instead of removing or mitigating it.

The debate in Parliament was interesting, as it drew from the Home Secretary an expression of the Government view of the situation.

“After all,” said Sir G. Grey, “it was not to the Government, it was rather to the efforts of individuals, and associations of individuals, that they must look for real and general improvement among the great body of the people. All that the Government could do was to remove obstacles in the way, and to present facilities by modifications of the law more useful than direct legislation.”[48]

An “association of individuals” had already been formed—“The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes”—and work of this class had to the extent of over £20,000 been carried out by it. The new piles of buildings erected were eagerly availed of by people of the working classes, and in a sanitary point of view they at once demonstrated their very satisfactory immunity from disease.

The Act, however, being a voluntary or adoptive Act, was not likely to be adopted and put into force by those by whom a certain amount of financial liability might be incurred as the result. As a matter of fact it never was put in force by any vestry, and it remained a dead letter.

It was memorable, however, as embodying for the first time in legislation the idea that the housing of the people was a public matter with which a public authority might properly concern itself, even to the extent of competing with private enterprise, and pledging the rates as security.

The supply of water to London, both as regarded quality and quantity, had, since the epidemic of 1848–9, been engaging the attention of Committees of Parliament, the belief that the epidemic of cholera had been increased and propagated by the filthy and impure water having given an impetus to the demand for ameliorative measures. In 1852 an Act[49] was passed by which the companies taking their water from the Thames were required to remove their intakes to some place above Teddington Lock, where the tide would not affect it, and the sewage of London would not be intermixed with it. This was a considerable step in the right direction, for though the river above Teddington Lock received the sewage of many large towns and villages, it was at least free from contamination by the sewage and filth of the metropolis.

Other improvements were also enacted. Reservoirs within a certain distance of St. Paul’s Cathedral were to be covered in, and all water intended for domestic use was to be filtered before being supplied to the consumer; and provision was also made for a constant supply of water by every company within five years after the passing of the Act.

But the companies were given five years within which to effect the removal of the intake from the foulest parts of the river to above tidal reach—and thus for a wholly unnecessary term the cause which had wrought such havoc among the people was permitted to continue its disastrous effects.

V

The epidemic of cholera in 1849 had failed to produce any lasting effect upon the local authorities or the public opinion of London, and the nemesis of renewed neglect and indifference was once again to fall upon the metropolis.

Cholera had kept hovering about. In 1852 a number of suspicious cases occurred in various districts. In 1853 suspicion passed into certainty, and the disease assumed the form of an epidemic—as many as 102 deaths from it occurring in the first week in November. Then it died down.

In the following year it again appeared in more severe epidemic form over the whole of the metropolis. On one day—September 4th—there were 459 deaths from it. The climax was reached in the second week in September (almost the identical date on which the epidemic of 1849 occasioned the highest mortality) and there were 2,050 deaths from it.[50] In that one month 6,160 persons died from it, and from July 1st to December 16th, when it at last disappeared, there was a total mortality from cholera alone of 10,675 persons.

Every conclusion which had been arrived at as regards the disease during the previous epidemics was confirmed by this third great epidemic, and many previous theories passed into the region of proved facts. Cholera was once more proved to be a filth disease, and in the main confined to filthy localities. The more defective and abominable the methods of drainage, the larger the number of victims. The filthier and more contaminated the water supplied for drinking and household purposes, the more numerous the cases, and the more virulent the disease. This was demonstrated beyond further question.

The mortality on the south side of the Thames was above threefold what it was on the north side; and both as regarded water supply and drainage, South London was in a worse sanitary state than North London. The water consumed by the population there was generally worse than that on the north. Lying lower, too, the drainage had less chance of being conveyed away, and in the miles upon miles of open sewer ditches it was left to rot and putrefy in close propinquity to the houses and to poison the air.

And the most remarkable proof was afforded by the effects of the consumption of water taken from different sources.

In 1849 both the Lambeth and the Southwark Water Companies pumped the water they supplied to their customers from the very foulest part of the Thames—near Hungerford Bridge—with equally disastrous results. In the course of the following years the Lambeth Company removed its source of supply to a part of the river above Teddington Lock—the Southwark Company, however, went on as before. In the epidemic of 1854 the inhabitants of houses supplied with the water by the latter company suffered eight times as much as those supplied by the better water of the Lambeth Company, whilst the number of persons who died in the houses where the impure was drunk was three and a half times greater than that in the houses where the purer water was supplied.

Of all the conclusions arrived at by those who had been engaged in combating the disease during this epidemic, the most important was that where cholera had become localised it was connected with obvious removable causes, and was in fact a preventable disease.

Most unfortunately, and reprehensibly, many of those who could have done most to prevent it failed signally to take action.

Once more, and this time in an accentuated degree, the widespread prevalence of the disease, and the frightful mortality, were distinctly due to the inertia, laxity, or deliberate neglect of those local authorities who by law were charged with the duty of cleansing localities and removing some of the causes of disease.

The General Board of Health, of which Sir Benjamin Hall was President, did all that it could do. Medical inspectors were appointed by it to visit all the parishes most severely affected; and the fullest and minutest instructions were issued to the Boards of Guardians as to the course they should pursue, and the action they should take.

But several of the Boards of Guardians took no notice of the instructions sent them; others sent unsatisfactory replies. In not one of the parishes in which the epidemic was most fatal was the preventive machinery, sanitary and medical, organised in accordance with the instructions; and although some parishes did more than others, yet, speaking generally, the administration of the sanitary and medical relief measures by the Boards of Guardians was inefficient in character and extent, except in some of the larger and more healthy parishes where they were least wanted.[51]

At Rotherhithe, the Guardians declined to proceed with the removal of nuisances as entailing a useless expense. At Deptford, where cholera was at the worst, no Inspector of Nuisances was appointed, even for the emergency. Nor did Greenwich, where it was also bad, appoint one. In Bethnal Green, where memories ought to have been bitter, the authorities practically did nothing, although promising almost everything.

In Lambeth, the parish was left without any adequate protection against the epidemic; and it was only after urgent remonstrances by the Medical Inspector, and after his threatening to place himself in communication with the coroner in any cases of death occurring in localities where the proper cleansing measures had not been carried out, that he succeeded in obtaining the adoption of measures even to a limited extent.[52]

In Clerkenwell, the Guardians utterly disregarded the recommendations of the Board of Health, and from the first there was an openly expressed determination not in any way to be interfered with by the Board.

And the disastrous state of affairs was, that the Nuisances, &c., Removal Acts gave the Board of Health no power to enforce upon the Guardians the execution of the regulations made.

The whole sanitary administration—so far as any existed in London—was in a state of chaos, and the various local authorities were able, with absolute impunity to themselves, to ignore and even defy the General Board of Health. Of these authorities, as has been already said, there was a multiplicity, and it was no infrequent occurrence to find the administrative authority of some of them in the hands of parties directly interested in the continuance of the existing state of matters, evil though those were. In fact, the “vested interests in filth and dirt” were a power in local administration in “greater London,” and the practical result was that the great majority of the population of the metropolis were left without any protection against the ravages of epidemic or other preventable diseases.

The indifference of Parliament, moreover, had left London without any effective or systematic sanitary supervision; and in no part of it, except the “City,” was there any officer conversant with the effect of local influences on the health of the population, or who could advise as to the sanitary measures which should be adopted.

The Board of Health having had it brought home to them that, with their limited powers, they were unable to introduce order into this chaos, or to enforce even the most elementary precautions against the spread of the disease, their President addressed a letter on the 29th of January, 1855, to Lord Palmerston, the then Home Secretary (and a few weeks later the Prime Minister), in which he set forth the exact state of affairs as ascertained by his own observation and by the experience of some of the best and most well-informed medical men in London.

In this letter he summarised the main causes of the insanitary condition in which the people of London were forced to live.

He wrote:—

“The evidence on the localising conditions of cholera given in the report of Dr. Sutherland points to the following as among the more prominent of the removable causes of zymotic disease.

“Open ditches as sewers. Want of sewers. Badly constructed sewers accumulating deposits and generating sewer gases.

“The pollution of the atmosphere in streets and within houses from untrapped drains, from sewer ventilating openings in streets, and from cesspools, whereby the air was contaminated and the sub-soil saturated with filth.

“Want of house drainage.

“The absence of any organised daily system of cleansing, and the consequent retention of house refuse in or near dwellings.

“Bad water, badly distributed. Unwholesome trades. Unwholesome vapours exhaled from the Thames. Cellar habitations.

“Neighbourhoods, the houses of which are closely packed together with narrow overcrowded streets, alleys and courts so constructed as to prevent ventilation. Houses structurally defective, filthy, unventilated, and overcrowded—absolutely unfit for human habitation.”

And several others which need not be here enumerated.

“Lastly, and applying to all these—multiplicity of local authorities, and the want of sufficient powers in such authorities to deal with these evils.”

“Great as these evils are in London,” he wrote, “… there is not one among them that cannot be remedied if proper steps be taken.

“The first and most obvious necessity in the metropolis is to sweep away the existing chaos of local jurisdiction.”

Included in that chaos were two Boards with great powers of taxation over which the ratepayers had no control.[53]

One of them consisted of the persons appointed under the Metropolitan Building Act of 1844, who, at a cost of £24,000 a year, entirely neglected their work. The other, the Commissioners of Sewers, who had demonstrated their utter incapacity, the cost of whose establishment was “something extraordinary,” and who in the five years of their existence had only attempted one great work—“the Victoria Sewer”—which cost a large sum, and which not many years after fell to ruins.

The great epidemic of cholera, its attendant panic, its gruesome accompaniments, its revelation of the actual condition of the masses, and of the rottenness of the local authorities, and the growing outcry against the iniquity of such a state of things in a civilised and Christian country, brought matters to a head.

The state of the Thames had also become a greater danger than ever to the community, and a more unbearable nuisance.

As described by The Lancet in July, 1855:—

“The waters are swollen with the feculence of the myriads of living beings that dwell upon the banks, and with the waste of every manufacture that is too foul for utilisation. Wheresoever we go, whatsoever we eat or drink within the circle of London, we find tainted with the Thames…. No one having eyes, nose, or taste, can look upon the Thames and not be convinced that its waters are, year by year, and day by day, getting fouler and more pestilential…. The abominations, the corruptions we pour into the Thames, are not, as some falsely say, carried away into the sea. The sea rejects the loathsome tribute, and heaves it back again with every flow. Here, in the heart of the doomed city, it accumulates and destroys.”

And the Government, compelled at last by the force of events to take some steps for the better sanitary government of the metropolis, and for remedying some of the evils the people suffered under, decided on taking action.

Acknowledging the necessity for giving local government to “greater London”—the “City” of course already had its own—it proposed the creation of a central authority which should deal with certain matters affecting London as a whole, and local authorities which should deal with local affairs affecting their own localities.

And, in 1855, a group of measures giving effect to these views, and containing also what amounted to a sanitary code similar to that in the Public Health Act already for years in force in England, was passed by Parliament.

Those most important measures marked the end of one great period in the sanitary history of this great metropolis.

Of that period it is to be said that there is none in the history of London in which less regard was shown for the condition of the great mass of the inhabitants of the metropolis; no period when the spirit of commercialism recked so little of the physical condition and circumstances of those upon whom, after all, it depended; no period when the rights of property were so untrammelled by any consideration for the welfare of human flesh and blood; no period when private individuals not alone so strained, for their own advantage or aggrandisement, the utmost rights the law allowed them, but far exceeded those rights, and too often successfully filched from the public that to which the law gave them no right.

Never had there been a time in which the rights of property had been more insisted upon and exercised. Never a time in which land-owners, house-owners, and builders did as freely as they liked with their own, regardless of the injury or damage inflicted upon others; nor in which manufacturers carried on, without interference, trades for their own benefit, which were not merely offensive, but actually death-dealing to their neighbours.

And throughout this period the people in their daily lives and circumstances were absolutely unprotected by any public authority, or by any local governing body. There was no one to help them to contend against the extremest exercise of real or even assumed rights.

In this period London, the metropolis, had grown up, and had not merely been permitted by the Government and the Legislature to grow up practically without government, guidance, supervision, or restraint, but it had been absolutely denied any system of local government, and so been denied all provision for the sanitary needs of the community.

In 1835 a large and liberal measure of municipal self-government was given to all the cities and towns and municipalities large and small of England and Wales—many of them not a tithe so populous as the great parishes of London—and a governing body, elected by the ratepayers, and with almost all the essential powers of local government, was instituted in each. But the Municipal Corporations Act expressly excluded the great towns which surrounded the walls of the “City” and which constituted the metropolis, and the law continued to recognise them only as rural parishes.

Twelve years later, namely in 1847, the Towns Improvement Act was passed, by which towns of much smaller size were given facilities for obtaining considerable powers of local government. By it general sanitary provisions were framed, which, with the sanction of Parliament, might be applied in any town for the management by the local authorities of the supply of water, of drainage, of the paving, cleansing, and lighting of the streets, and the prevention of fires; and for the regulation of buildings, of slaughter-houses, of public baths, and of the interment of the dead.

But even this more limited but still liberal system of local government was not extended to London, and once more the metropolis was excluded.

The “City” did not wish to extend its own borders, and the authorities of the “City” viewed with dislike the idea of the creation at their very gates of local bodies which might develop into formidable rivals.

And so “greater London” was left by successive governments and by Parliament to scramble along as best she could, and to suffer.

And just as there was no local government so were there practically no laws safeguarding the sanitary condition of the people except the temporary and imperfect ones provided by the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Acts of 1848, and such very limited protection as the common law afforded.

The Public Health Act of 1848—a sanitary code in itself—was an Act for England and Wales alone. The benefits it conferred were refused to London; and, as a consequence, the masses of her people were doomed to continue in circumstances of the utmost misery; year by year tens of thousands of her citizens were sent to an unnecessarily early death, and ten times their number were made to undergo diseases which even then were recognised as preventable.

And all the time that she was thus left without a local government, without any permanent sanitary laws, other forces were at work inflicting ever-widening evil, and intensifying already existing evils.

The population had increased by leaps and bounds, and the increasing trade of London had brought great numbers of workmen to the metropolis. The necessity for offices and warehouses had led to the substitution of such houses for houses previously used as residences.

And so the growing population was forced to herd ever closer together, houses were packed thicker and thicker, and, in the central districts, every available spot of ground was built upon. And the overcrowding of human beings in those houses, and all the attendant ills, increased countless-fold. And the result was unparalleled, indescribable, unspeakable misery of the industrial and working classes, and of the lower and poorer orders.

Not merely years, but generations of neglect and indifference on the part of the governing classes had multiplied and intensified in London every evil to which the poorer classes of a nation are liable.

For long the great process of social and economic change at work in “greater London,” and all that it entailed, was let go its own way—a way which, in default of the regulation and the alleviation a government should have given it, was beset with creakings and groanings like those of some badly constructed piece of machinery; only instead of machinery, inanimate and insensitive, they were the groanings, the agonies, of suffering thousands and tens of thousands of sick and perishing people, sinking annually into the abyss.

All through the earlier half of the nineteenth century, in fact, London, the great metropolis, was left to evolve itself so far as regarded the public health and sanitary condition of the people.

The tremendous import of such deliberate inaction by Parliament, and by successive Governments, is even now only partly comprehended. But the nemesis has been truly a terrible one. The injury wrought was in many ways irreparable, and we are still reaping the crop of evil sown by such seed—are still far from the end of the appalling consequences such a disastrous policy has entailed.