Parched City (10 page)

One pragmatic voice had raised the water cost issue at the inaugural meeting but his tentative words were lost in the excitement of the occasion. W.F. Cowper had emphasised Melly’s point about free water: ‘It is desirable the water rates should be paid by local bodies, the association only erecting, or contributing to the erection of, and maintaining the mechanical appliances of the fountain.’
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Whilst Cowper’s point was astute, what he was suggesting was more complex in London than in Liverpool. In Melly’s city, one body controlled its water supply. In London, the pipes of the eight different private companies were snaking around under the streets. Wherever these pipes pierced the ground for a new fountain, that patch of public thoroughfare could be under the jurisdiction of one of many organisations. In whose interest was it to foot the bill? It was unlikely that any of
the Association’s members could have forgotten about the cost of water, when they all had to pay for a supply to be piped into their own homes. But the outlay for private water versus public water was a very different affair.

Some vestries were convinced of the fountain’s local benefits and committed to the whole cost of the water supply. Other vestries agreed to pay a share, and some refused to contribute to any of the project’s costs at all. In the City of London, Gurney must have wooed the Commissioners of Sewers and Highways. The body agreed to pay the full cost for a number, though not all, of the fountains on its territory. No organisation was bound by law to embrace the Association’s charitable scheme. Even where agreement was secured, pro-fountain committees inevitably changed membership over time. Whilst the granite remained fixed in place, there was no guarantee that the water supply would flow without the consistent willpower of some party or other. In the Association’s 1867 report, donors were reminded that, of the capital’s 100,000,000 gallon daily supply, ‘every drop in this vast store is the property of water companies, who require to be paid for all they deliver…enabled by steam power and engineering skill to supply the wants of their customers by forcing their water into every house in London’.
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Obsolete fountains would not look impressive. To ensure that donated fountains did not run dry, the Association either had to pay for the water supply itself, or convince water companies to become donors. This angle had the advantage of good public relations for the corporations. Even in homes equipped with plumbing, the supplies purchased from the companies were notoriously intermittent. Taps often ran only once a day, during which time householders filled up as many storage containers as possible and used the resource gradually.
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In the competitive water marketplace, having a company’s name etched into public space, as the New River Company’s had been on Gurney’s first fountain, could not have been bad for business.

The New River Company donated ten guineas per annum to the scheme in 1861, though whether that money was for water alone was not stated.
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Certainly by 1867, it granted a free supply along with Grand Junction and Vauxhall Water Companies.
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The annual cost for each fountain had been calculated at about five pounds, so Chelsea Water Company’s subsidised ‘two-pounds per annum’ rate reflected a decent donation (about £100, in 2011). Before its first decade was out, the term ‘free’ had become such a misnomer that it was evident why the charity dropped the word when it elongated its name to the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association to embrace public water provision for animals (troughs can be seen across contemporary London today, often operating as flowerbeds).
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Fountain water was not free, so wasting it was also controversial. Some companies stipulated that the quantity of water should be controlled by the installation of a tap to prevent waste. The Association found maintaining this system impractical because of the ‘rough usage to which it [the tap] must always be exposed at a street drinking fountain’.
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This surprising operational fact reveals that, without a tap, the fountains ran continuously day and night, despite the furore about the expense of water. The Association quoted from the fountain gospel of Charles Melly once more, to justify the need for a constant flow of water. Melly advocated that the sight of running water was attractive; it naturally cleansed dust from clogging up the apparatus; fountains were perceived as operational and reliable; the water could be heard at night and more drinkers would be served rapidly during busy spells because a tap would not have to be turned on and off each time somebody drank.
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The West Middlesex Water Company did not want the function of its public supply to supplant the need for domestic water. The company wrote a letter of complaint to the Association about water being carried home from a fountain in Chiswick for private use and threatened to cut off its supply unless a tap was
installed.
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Unsurprisingly, that company was not a free water donor to the Association.

Relationships with the companies were uneven. By 1873, the East London and New River Companies both retracted commitments of a free supply and began to charge for a metered rate, Chelsea stuck to the subsidy system, whilst Lambeth charged the full rate.
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Only Southwark and Vauxhall offered an entirely free water supply, along with Kent Water Company.
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The Association was at the mercy of the whims of corporate water culture.

The Long Haul

Water supply was a necessity but maintaining each object was also critical to ensuring they were the great ‘boon’ to London that the Association had claimed. Once the idealism of the early years abated, the organisation’s improvised operations had to enter into some nuts and bolts pragmatism. For instance, in order to manage a programme of maintenance, the Association had to be informed about instances of damage. There was also the inevitable wear and tear to installations as the first decade took its toll.

A concern that arose only months into the Association’s operations was the weather.
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As autumn turned into winter, temperatures plummeted and pipes threatened to freeze and crack. Problems also came when water over-spilling from the constant flow caused a hazardous, frozen surface to form around the fountains and the possibility of turning London’s streets into an impromptu ice ballet was not entertained.
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The Association’s committee decided that the fountains needed to be turned off during frosty weather. After that first winter, operations revolved around the ‘season’.
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For those people who had come to rely on the free water source, losing it during these months must have affected their daily consumption. Horrifyingly for the temperance supporter, perhaps the thirsty returned to the
comfort of the public house?

Maintenance needs increased with the volume of fountains. Fittingly, Gurney’s own installation was the first casualty, with the loss of a few bricks. Some parishes that had agreed to participate in fountain upkeep reneged on this commitment. After a couple of years, the fountains in Mile End and St Mary’s, Islington, were said to be in a disgraceful state.
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Deliberate vandalism, such as stolen cups, was common — one man was even imprisoned for fountain vandalism
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— but accidents were also inevitable. Consequently, an ad hoc programme of maintenance was supplanted with a bi-weekly inspection and cleaning routine for each installation, swelling the presence of the Association’s maintenance staff amongst the array of street workers.

By the mid-1860s, neighbourhoods across central London had fountains dotted along their arterial routes. Poor neighbourhoods such as St Giles, Mile End and Whitechapel all had provision to cure drunkenness, with mural fountains installed outside workhouses. Many fountains were also located in strategic proximity to public houses. Copycat fountains also began sprouting up without the involvement of the Association. Perhaps fearing that neglected objects, built under the baton of others would tarnish its name, the Secretary was instructed to write to the daily newspapers in 1866 urging corporate bodies and private individuals to place all dry and dilapidated fountains under the care of the Association at once.
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Soon it took responsibility for ensuring the water supply and maintenance of all London’s fountains (whether or not they were under the Metropolitan Fountain Association’s official banner). Commitment to a high quality service was fuelled by the extraordinary calculation that up to 400,000 drinkers a day were using these amenities in 1867.
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If it was exaggerated, the fountains must certainly have been busy enough for readers of the Annual Report to credit this kind of figure. Such use conveys a sense of
how significant a part of daily life the fountains had become.

Charitable Brewers

Temperance was still in fashion. Zealous claims were made in the Association’s literature that the fates of the thousands who are now ruined in body and soul, the occupants of lunatic asylums and prisons might have been saved by drinking from water fountains.
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The National Temperance League and the Vulcan Temperance Society were donors and Gurney also promoted his cause at the Band of Hope’s annual meetings.
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The latter’s objective was to divert young people from parental alcoholic paths. Meetings took place at Exeter Hall on the Strand, a building at the centre of London’s evangelical Christian world. It was also a venue where middle-class brewers could go and salve their beer-soaked consciences.
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The Quaker name Hanbury was synonymous with brewing and yet it appeared repeatedly in the Association’s list of donors. As the historian Vanessa Taylor stresses: ‘Drink traders were to be found at all levels in the Association: as executive committee members, vice-presidents, trustees, regular subscribers and occasional donors. Most were members of Samuel Gurney Junior’s family network, which remained central to the Association from 1859 into the twentieth century. Apart from the Gurneys, this comprised members of the Fry, Hanbury, Hoare, Buxton, Barclay, Bevan, Bell, Birkbeck and Pelly families.’
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Such outright hypocrisy was tied up with Victorian class relations and moral politics in which brewers were keen to profit whilst remaining respectable.

In John Stuart Mill’s 1859 book
On Liberty
, the political philosopher criticised temperance culture by decrying how ‘the limitation in number, for instance, of beer and spirit houses, for the express purpose of rendering them more difficult of access and diminishing the occasions of temptation, not only exposes all to an inconvenience because there are some by whom this
facility would be abused, but it is suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages’.
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One can imagine Mill furiously penning this statement from a cosy nook of a heaving Victorian pub. During the national debate over pubs closing on Sundays in 1864, a left-wing professor of political economy also went on the offensive. He raged: ‘The poor man’s Sunday dinner is to be spoilt, while the gentleman or tradesman who keeps a cellar may enjoy himself…The working man will not stand this sort of legislation. Every sober and respectable man who has been accustomed all his life to fetch his beer for his Sunday dinner from the public-house round the corner, will feel himself personally insulted when he finds the shutters up, and the law tells him that men of his class cannot be trusted with intoxicating liquors.’
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Voices of the fountain users are conspicuously absent from the Association’s records. Members were evidently convinced that they knew what was best for the population at large. A brief glimpse of a fountain user’s view arrived in a letter from one Mr Day. He requested permission for boys to sell lemonade powder at the fountains. A cold response was recorded in the minute book: ‘The Committee decided that it would not be advisable to adopt Mr Day’s suggestion.’
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Sticky hands spoiling donor fountains might have aroused disdain. Newgate Market butchers also wrote a sarcastic note to Samuel Gurney, published in the
City Press
, praising him for his great temperance reform.
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One gets the impression that they got their refreshment elsewhere. Listings for publicans in a contemporary business directory filled more than ten pages (in a very small typeface), so the clash of cultures was not insignificant. Fountains were often situated in close proximity to licensed premises. Some of the great names in British brewing found emblazoned on public houses were also neatly listed in the Association’s annual reports. Social status could be accrued by donating drinking water whilst raking in beer profits.

Bombastic Benevolence

Victoria Fountain (restored), Victoria Park, London, November 2012. Author’s own photograph.

High society figures were attracted to the Association’s work. Angela Burdett-Coutts, the wealthiest heiress in Britain at the time, donated a fountain to Victoria Park in East London in 1862.
With its ‘rus in urbe’ design, the park embodied the contemporary spirit of environmentally led social reform. Under the watch of the government’s Commissioner of Works, who happened to be W.F. Cowper, Victoria Park was a high profile urban reform project. However, this donation was not to be credited to the Association. Angela Burdett-Coutts was the only name to be connected with the gift.
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