Parched City (11 page)

Named the Victoria Fountain, her sixteen-metre high and twelve-metre wide canopied edifice, replete with Gothic Revival arches and cherubs, cost the equivalent of £250,000.
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Burdett-Coutts favourite architect, H.A. Darbishire, was the designer. Drinkers could be sheltered under the canopy as they refreshed themselves, from cups inscribed ‘Temperance is a Bridle of Gold’. If the spectacle of Connemara marble from the west of Ireland and pink marble was not theatrical enough, the fountain’s unveiling on a summer’s day was equally audacious. The unveiling was a major social occasion, at which two brass bands played and some 10,000 spectators were in attendance according to
The Times’
reporter. Local newspaper coverage heaped praise on the benefactress, gushing that the gift showed her Christian love, and that ‘she knew the wants of her fellow-creatures’.
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Burdett-Coutt’s over-the-top gift reflected the Association’s success for tapping into the environmental and moral reform zeitgeist in the highest of social echelons. She set the precedent for flamboyant fountains.

The M.P. Charles Buxton, who was also a member of the Association, followed her extravagant lead; however his fountain had a less egotistical function. It was produced at arms-length from the association, perhaps because it was an intensely personal project, as its inscription suggested: ‘This fountain is intended as a memorial to those members of Parliament who, with Mr Wilberforce, advocated the abolition of the British slave trade, achieved in 1807; and of those members of Parliament who, with Sir T. Fowell Buxton, advocated the emancipation of the
slaves throughout the British dominion, achieved in 1834.’
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This was Buxton’s memorial to his father. With a budget of £1200 the architect S.S.Teulon, a rebel interpreter of the Gothic Revival’s principles, was let loose. The fountain was sited in Parliament Square and unveiled in March 1866.
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Solemn, yet ornate, the object’s arched octagonal structure with an eight-metre spire. In its original state, the fountain was surrounded with bronze figures, each one representing a British ruler from Londinium through to Pax Britannica. The modern innovation of brightly-coloured enamel overlaid on its iron surfaces, as a technological buffer to the effects of air pollution, was applauded by critics.

In the summer of 1866, however, cholera revisited London. One week’s death toll, as recorded by the Registrar General, was 2,661 people.
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Those victims were concentrated in East London. Just a few years earlier, at the other end of the social spectrum, Queen Victoria’s husband Albert had died suddenly from typhoid fever
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(now known to be a bacterial disease transmitted via faeces or urine).
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,
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Bad drainage at Windsor was blamed, but precisely how it was transmitted was contested.
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During the ensuing resurgence of political and public debates over sanitation, water and disease in the late 1860s, the subject of public drinking fountains did not arise. As we have noted, they were peripheral to the official sanitary revolution that was underway. As the state was fast creating a template for modern sanitation, the notion of water access on the street perhaps evoked a somewhat retrogressive step towards the medieval city of conduits, rather than a plumbed-in metropolis as the flagship civilisation of the British Empire. Still, in the margins of the Victorian city’s sanitary upheavals, sufficient donations enabled the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association to continue its charitable work.

London’s 1875 drinking water map showed that it had built 276 fountains across the capital, financed by a plethora of donors.
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But the infamous ‘water question’ was still far from being resolved.

Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association Map,
1875. City of London, London Metropolitan Archives. Courtesy of The
Drinking Fountain Association.

Whether water was being pumped into drinking fountains or domestic cisterns, the public health furore over the role of this ‘basic good’ in epidemics was still being contested. How water could be scientifically determined as being conclusively good or bad for human health was to transform by the end of the century. But the process of that transformation was by no means smooth.

Chapter Four

The tap water quality guarantee that Dr Arthur Shadwell proclaimed all Londoners could enjoy by this point may have been debated by his readership.
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As a medical professional, who had reported in 1892 from the front line of cholera epidemics in Germany and Russia, he was more than aware of the dangers the tap could dispense. His confident statement demonstrates that, by that point, drinking water had divided into two clear categories: either it was safe or unsafe for human consumption. This chapter investigates how, by the close of the century, it was science rather than social reform that led drinking water and sanitation standards into the twentieth century.

Testing the Waters

Post the 1866 cholera epidemic, those who were already convinced about the theory of water-borne disease transmission had good reason to view the tap with suspicion. The disease’s recurrence posed at least three questions. First, could water companies be breaching the Metropolis Water Act’s requirement that water should only be abstracted from above Teddington Lock? Second, were filtration methods failing to remove the cause of disease? Third, was the ongoing construction of London’s subterranean plumbing still permitting sewage to leak into mains water pipes? As the sleuthing carried out by John
Snow had demonstrated, cholera’s presence could be traced to a particular company pipe, but what test could detect water’s contamination
before
it was transmitted to the consumer? Preventing epidemics required an accurate method of water testing, which scientists struggled to devise because of the yawning gap between theory and practice. Essentially, scientists were not sure what they were looking for under the microscope.

One French researcher was suggesting a new view of organic matter’s presence in liquids. We can thank France’s love affair with wine for driving Louis Pasteur’s research. His advances in microbiology — though the science did not yet have that disciplinary title — were focused on preventing the unidentified diseases that destroyed vats of profitable wine. Pasteur built on research conducted in the 1830s that proved the involvement of living, organised beings in both making and spoiling alcohol.
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His experiments in 1864 endorsed that nascent theory by demonstrating how these tiny life-forms could be starved of life by heating wine to a precise temperature for a minimum duration.
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Despite the evidence of life shown by Pasteur, the infusoria (as these unexplained agents were named) remained in the realm of chemistry.
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His discoveries did not cause an immediate link to the contemporary understanding of water quality, however, it is significant that microbiology’s gradual emergence was mirrored by the struggle to conclusively analyse water quality in Britain.

As mentioned in chapter two, London’s water analysts were divided into two camps. Microscopists remained at large in the second half of the nineteenth century, but chemists won the prestigious contracts for advising the government.
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London was centre stage in the profession’s development.
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Though public health was a national campaign, the scale of London’s social problems, married with its status as the national and imperial capital, made disease prevention an imperative there.

With the Metropolis Management Act of 1855, Medical Officer of Health posts were created in 1856 to keep a local eye on
diseases and their potential causes.
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Officers were part of a developing public health administration as the pendulum of the water question swung from quantity to quality. Other experts were needed to decide whether new sewage removal and treatment methods were improving water quality. The professional status of a ‘water analyst’ was relatively obscure in the late 1850s, when this post was created within the offices of the Registrar General. William Farr was also still based in that office.
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As we learned in chapter two, the statistician worked with Snow during his groundbreaking research in 1854.
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Farr evidently had a more than cursory interest and faith in the connection between drinking water and disease. As his
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
entry states, he ‘used many of his reports to demonstrate the waste of human life caused by preventable diseases’.
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When the celebrated chemist Dr Edward Frankland was appointed as the department’s water analyst in 1865, in Farr he had at least one sympathetic and learned colleague in situ.
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The urgency of Frankland’s task was soon augmented by the new cholera outbreak in the summer of 1866, in East London. Statistics from the Registrar-General’s office, for late July and early August, recorded circa 1,000 deaths a week from the disease.
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The Times
report of the latest figures poignantly noted: ‘It is remarkable how large a number of the victims are very young children.’
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This comment included London’s weekly toll of around 300 deaths from diarrhoea, showing the extent of the waterborne and sanitation issues.

At that point, Frankland’s method of water analysis failed to detect a source of cholera but later that year, as historian Christopher Hamlin points out, he began to read the water patterns differently.
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The chemist began to separate water’s microscopic constituents into two identifiable groups; decay and life. His growing expertise led to his enlistment as a consultant to the government’s
Royal Commission on Water Supply
, which was first launched in 1866. From that point, there was a serious focus
on water examination.

Tests on various corporate water supplies for the commission produced hard data to show that filtration’s efficacy was patchy.
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Success or failure was measured in degrees of clarity or turbidity. Frankland found that only the New River and West Middlesex companies had achieved a consistently clear water standard. ‘Very turbid’ water was recorded in supplies produced by Chelsea, Lambeth, and, with its grand double-barrel title, Southwark and Vauxhall companies.
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In 1869, a local Medical Officer also recorded that Southwark and Vauxhall’s product still left much to be desired, when he likened a sample to ‘diluted pea-soup or to a yellow November fog’.
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Evidently, the clause of 1852’s Metropolis Water Act stipulating that companies must achieve ‘effectual filtration’ was not being satisfied in that corporation. This is not surprising when engineering techniques were open to interpretation and no company was being put on trial for failing to meet these standards. In response to hard evidence of water quality disparities, the government’s Privy Council dispatched a recently appointed Sanitary Inspector, Mr J. Netten Radcliffe (a sympathiser with John Snow’s theories), to inspect how various company filtration regimes and technologies differed.

Wading through Mr Netten Radcliffe’s in-depth 1869 report, the
Turbidity of Water of Certain London Companies
, graphic details about water treatment practices, including Southwark and Vauxhall’s filtration method are available. Prior to filtration, that company allowed water to subside in reservoirs before transferring it to filter beds. These beds were constructed from layers of sand and gravel of varying coarseness, forming a total depth of six feet, six inches.
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In general, vast spaces were required to hold the quantity of water to be poured into these enormous sieves. In East London, for instance, the Middlesex Filter Beds occupied ten acres (today, the beds are preserved as a wildlife sanctuary in suburbia).
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Between the Southwark and Vauxhall, and West
Middlesex, companies the former’s pea soup appearance and the latter’s crystal clear product were found to be the result of subtle variations in the thoroughness of subsidence and differing ratios of water-quantity-to-filtration surface area.
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West Middlesex’s subsidence technique was extremely thorough and its ratio of water-quantity-to-filtration surface was low. Southwark’s was the reverse. However, a third company — Grand Junction — with a similar profile to Southwark and Vauxhall in terms of subsidence and filtration method produced water that was only ‘occasionally’ turbid. In the end, the factor unique to Southwark and Vauxhall’s infrastructure and procedures was found to be its complete lack of ‘storage or service reservoirs for filtered water’.
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Post filtration, this company’s water was transferred directly out of the filtration system into the engine wells and pumped into the mains. This infrastructural gap was thought to cause the fluctuations in filtration speed, which in turn produced a negative effect on water quality. Still, the value of such detailed inspections was restrained by the use of the naked eye to read water quality as simply clear or turbid.

For Frankland, the invisible was becoming more pertinent to his view on determining drinking water quality. One interpretation of the chemist’s view of water pollution was offered by the Chief Medical Officer, John Simon, as a ‘skeleton of sewage’.
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It was certainly an evocative, if repulsive, phrase. But pollution was not the
Royal Commission of Water Supply’s
only concern.

The
Royal Commission on Water Supply’s
other objective was to explore the ‘practicability of obtaining large supplies of water from the mountainous districts of England and Wales’.
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There was a prevailing sense in the public health establishment that London’s water sources could never be wholesome, with or without effective analysis. That view of water’s literal dirt was paralleled by an ethical critique of its corporate ownership, control and governance.
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A statement from the Registrar General’s office in the Commission’s 1869 report clarified its anti-corporate-water
position: ‘There seems to be no efficient means of enforcing an observance of this provision of the Act [Metropolis Water Supply Act 1852], and the neglect of the companies to comply with it…shows the necessity for some change in the system of supervision to which the supply of the Metropolis is subjected.’
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A House of Commons committee reached the same conclusion.

Within the din of these arguments, it was the overriding desire for a
constant
water supply that became the most audible cry for a change in London’s water management (not achieved since the 1852 Act). A description of the intermittent supply to one neighbourhood was used as evidence of this great need: ‘Smaller service pipes, into which the water is “turned on”, as it is called, during only one to two hours each day, the consumers receiving during this short time the whole quantity required for the day’s consumption, and storing it for use in cisterns provided by themselves. On Sundays, as a general rule, no supply is given but exceptions are made by many of the companies in poor neighbourhoods where the receptacles are insufficient.’
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These storage arrangements were deemed to be responsible for the proliferation of diseases in poor areas, whilst in wealthier homes the cisterns were considered to be inconvenient because of the cost of their maintenance and repair.

A stunning suggestion was emerging from the Commission’s 1869 report that was finally given voice in the conclusion, that ‘a sufficiency of water is too important a matter to all classes of the community to be made dependent on the profits of an associ-ation’.
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The report suggested that London’s water be managed municipally, like Dublin, Glasgow, Liverpool or Manchester. John Simon, Medical Officer to the Privy Council, passionately endorsed this conclusion in his own public health report of the following year, writing that the water companies’ ‘colossal power of life and death is something for which till recently there has been no precedent in the history of the world; and such a power,
in whatever hands it is vested, ought most sedulously to be guarded against abuse’.
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Simon also pointed out that no water company had yet been sued for negligence. There was certainly no shortage of data to support any claims against the water suppliers.

Despite the swell of anti-corporate sentiment, the public versus private water ownership argument was parked for a couple more decades. Legislation consolidating the Commission’s findings still ensured radical changes to meet the daily water needs of Londoners.

1871’s Metropolis Water Act enforced the demand for a constant water supply. For the first time, Londoners might enjoy running water on Sundays.
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All the companies had to comply with the act swiftly; within eight months. Not only was the supply to be regular; but its distribution had to be engineered to reach the top storey of any building in London, no matter how high.
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Co-operation from property owners was mandatory. Providing and maintaining plumbing for pressurised mains water to be conducted through their buildings became a legal duty. The protocol for transferring to the new regime was strict. A water company had to announce, in the press, its intention to switch to providing constant supply in a particular district, after which landlords had two months to deliver their ends of the bargain. If the landlord failed to comply, premises were categorised as unfit for human habitation. Essentially, a new standard of living, in water terms at least, was set. Significant clauses concerning quality also appeared in the Act. A Water Examiner post was created within the Board of Trade, with the authority to ‘inspect water quality’.
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The terms of those inspections mutated as the discipline of bacteriology gained notoriety.