Parched City (17 page)

This collision between the water expert and laypeople highlighted a lack of common knowledge about sanitation. For Londoners who had become accustomed to drinking from the tap without questioning its safety for more than two generations, water contamination was possibly hard to imagine. But the war was exposing the very infrastructure they unconsciously relied
on. What normally lay invisibly functioning below the streets was quite literally exposed as streets and roads were wrenched open.

Maintaining acceptable standards of water quality for drinking and quantity for sanitation was becoming increasingly fraught.

The likelihood of poisonous wastewater entering potable water pipes preoccupied Colonel MacKenzie, but some of his colleagues were sceptical about the danger this presented to public health. In their minds, chlorinating water at source was sufficient for cleansing any contamination further down the line. Fortunately, American research concurred with MacKenzie’s doubt that such contamination could be removed remotely. The American experiments proved that intensive chlorination, for prolonged and repeated periods was needed to pronounce pipes that had come into contact with raw sewage to be rendered absolutely germ free.
³¹
MacKenzie pointed out that one could often smell sewage in craters even if it was not visible. He suspected that the more silent culprits were minor stoneware drains from houses. Materially, they were more vulnerable to the effects of bombardment and even small leakages might prove fatal for the spread of pathogenic bacteria.
³²
MacKenzie’s policy for sterilising all damaged mains pipes after their repair was enacted, albeit in a mode compromised by the conditions of the war.

Arthur Durling recalled how staff worked from charts instructing them on the ratio of chlorine powder to water needed for the diameter of a given pipe.
³³
The correct proportions were mixed into a paste and simply poured from a bucket into the hydrants beside the valves where pipes were reconnected to the main water supply. When Durling recounted the procedure, Billingham laughed on the radio recording at the mention of the familiar bleach product — Stabichlor — which was apparently used rather more lavishly than the charts dictated. ‘Usually the
fellows who were doing it would err on the side of putting rather more in than perhaps the charts said’, confided Durling.
³⁴
Humour aside, the engineer proudly concluded: ‘We got away with it and there were no cases of typhoid in London during the Blitz and I think that’s quite a record because it was a serious problem…if there had been any waterborne disease in London, well it could have done more damage than the whole of the Blitz had done. At least to people.’
³⁵
According to the bacteriological tests, the staff were achieving outstanding results, but the Director of Water Examination was worried about a solution he perceived to be expedient rather than efficient.
³⁶

When it came to the decontamination of trunk mains (major arterial pipes) mobile chlorinators were dispatched on lorries. Under MacKenzie’s instruction ‘a fleet of vehicles and drivers for the sole purpose of towing the chlorinators was on stand by’.
³⁷
Chlorination Supervisors were allocated two mobile chlorinators apiece, each with their own Chlorine Attendant. The supervisors saw that the cargo of gas was pumped into pipes at a high dosage of ten-parts-per-million. Though the plan was to flush any trace of the intense chemical dose out of a pipe before putting it back into service, this did not always happen. On this matter of chlorine lingering in public supplies, Colonel MacKenzie reassured the Board: ‘There is widespread realisation that a chlorinous taste spells safety, and complaints have been few.’
³⁸
Success rates were convincing. From seven hundred water samples taken from repaired mains after mobile chlorination, only three were found to have traces of faecal contamination. During periods of heavy bombardment, such essential work was hampered by a lack of available vehicles (and presumably sometimes roads) to tow the trailers into position. The possibility of chlorination failing to counter the effects of sewage contamination may have given the Director of Water Examination sleepless nights, even in air raid shelters. By 1941, chlorination philosophy inside the treatment works had also changed. Pre-chlorination
was introduced as a ‘fourth line of defence’, in addition to ‘storage, filtration and terminal chlorination’.
³⁹
As the term suggests, pre-chlorination was a process in which stored water was flooded with chlorine before, rather than after, filtration. The measure was a bacteriological insurance policy. Reinforced buildings were constructed to shield the specialist chlorination technology.
⁴⁰

When mains supplies were lost, once the bottles of tap water householders had been advised to stash away had been drained and the contents of cisterns emptied, two potential water sources were left.
⁴¹
Standpipes were one source. These devices were a form of temporary plumbing, which involved makeshift vertical pipes poking out of the mains onto the street and fitted with taps. Mobile tanks were the second source, complete with a plumbing system that created a row of queue-reducing taps. In both cases, water access reverted to the pre-modern mode of carting supplies from source to the point of use.

Unsanitary City

On the matter of mobile tanks, the Board stated: ‘Attempts have been made to distribute both drinking water and “not drinking water”, ‘the latter being untreated water stored in former oil tanks to be used for sanitary purposes’ (effectively, a grey water solution to sustaining water supplies).
⁴²
It was found, though, that drinking water was favoured because people struggled to find sufficient containers to store separate supplies. ‘Sanitary purposes’ was simply a euphemism for toilet flushing. London’s much lauded, internationally replicated, sewerage system was highly dependent on one thing: a constant supply of water. Without it, the civilised City of London was fast becoming an unsanitary place. No alternative sewage disposal system could be mounted without running water. That fact was evident to tenants and office workers in the City of London during May 1941.

Between the 10
^th
and 11
^th
of May, the most widespread
damage to London’s water infrastructure occurred, during the final stage of the Blitzkrieg bombing campaign. 605 mains pipes were damaged alongside the dreadful human casualties and deaths.
⁴³
Other water authorities were drafted in to help, from as far afield as Glasgow. Almost three weeks later, the effects were still being felt in the City of London where the water pipes were bone dry. Gerald G. Caney, a solicitor, pleaded that ‘the question of lavatories is getting very serious’ in his letter to the local Medical Officer of Health.
⁴⁴
Another City tenant, the director of Oriental Carpet Importers, was also pining for running water to return to his offices, ‘particularly for toilet purposes’.
⁴⁵
The City’s Medical Officer offered his reassurance that standpipes would be erected near their premises, although on the proviso that property owners supplied buckets to transport the supply. Given that a period of three weeks after the serious bomb damage had elapsed since Caney’s letter and almost two months by the time the carpet importer wrote, the Metropolitan Water Board was evidently under severe strain.

Obviously desperate to secure alternative supplies, City workers persuaded the fire brigade to pump water from its storage tanks into buildings for toilet flushing.
⁴⁶
Huge containers of water were located in particular streets for fire fighting. One building that received the fire brigade water was the Avenue Telephone Exchange, just north of the Thames in the City. Staff symptoms soon indicated that the untreated water was being used for drinking as well as toilet flushing. In June, the Ministry of Health enquired about reports of an outbreak of gastroenteritis at the Telephone Exchange, potentially caused by contaminated water. Dr Charles F. White, a City doctor, verified ‘seventy cases of diarrhoea and vomiting amongst the telephone girls but added that he was disinclined to discourage altogether the practice of using the firemen’s water from static water dams in the streets’ because of the equally serious health consequences of leaving toilets unflushed.
⁴⁷
This case shows the difficult
balancing act of maintaining safe water for drinking and sufficient water for sanitation, each critical for the protection of public health.

Following the outfall from the May bombings, the national
War Emergency Water Committee
re-evaluated policy. In future attacks on a similar scale, public announcements were to be made via vehicle-mounted loudspeakers to advertise the loss of supplies and dangers of impure water consumption. Stock requests were to be broadcast, such as ‘please use as little as possible and help one another’ or ‘the water in this district is impure. Until further notice it should not be used for drinking or in the kitchen unless boiled or sterilised’.
⁴⁸

As the Metropolitan Water Board stepped up its plans for alternative methods of supply to the mains, other water sources also had to be considered in the event of chemical attack. If mustard gas, for instance, was unleashed close to rivers or reservoirs, they could not be used. Planning for this scenario led to a secret census of private wells to elicit the support of their owners for back up supplies.
⁴⁹
Any doubt about this water’s purity would be extinguished by dosing it with chlorine gas whilst private supplies were sucked from underground and transferred to tanks mounted on vehicles. In 1941, The Board’s Chief Engineer Mr Cronin was concerned about the cost of these private resources: ‘Arrangements for paying the private well owners are still very nebulous and it would be well if this matter were settled before the event…’
⁵⁰
One problem was that most of these private wells relied on modern electrical pumps; they would be useless if power went down.

Water for Feeding

London County Council was also interested in the results of the well census remaining covert. Its Londoners’ Meals Service was set up a year after the war broke out to feed those whose kitchens had been destroyed in the Blitz, or for whom cooking had become
unmanageable.
⁵¹
Meals were heavily subsidised, or free, to those who met the conditions. The papers of Mr L.J. Dillon, an employee of the Meals Service show how reliant the operation was on a pure water supply. The Council worked with schools and charities to mount the programme of 170 meal centres, including Mrs Franklin’s War Time Kitchen in Paddington for Air Raid Precautions personnel and Post Office workers, unemployed women and refugees. Older unemployed people could opt for the Over Thirty
Association
, located on Shaftesbury Avenue.
⁵²
Blitz Stew was one meal the communal kitchens offered. A vat of 120 portions required eight and a half gallons of drinking water to combine its other ingredients, which were as follows:

One could not be too choosy about the distinctive flavour of Marmite or the sweetness of evaporated milk, and vegetarians were in trouble, but the stew sounded nourishing. Superintendents were instructed by the London County Council ‘to make it routine before leaving the centres in the evenings to fill all suitable receptacles with water and cover the vessels to keep the water from contamination’ i.e. gas attack.
⁵⁴
Additionally, superintendents were reminded not to use any
water ‘for drinking purposes (including cleaning of teeth) unless a) it has been well boiled or b) effectively chlorinated’.
⁵⁵
A consistent demand for this service precipitated a conference in July 1941 about
Emergency Water Supplies for Meals Services
. The Council reported that the Metropolitan Water Board’s Chief Engineer had ‘prepared for us a list of private wells’.
⁵⁶
As an essential food supplier, this service was given priority for well water. The conference report also noted that large cisterns were salvaged from debris clearance dumps and sterilised for water storage at Meals Service centres. One such salvage centre was Hyde Park. Footage of the park in Rosie Newman’s documentary film
Britain at War
shows cisterns stacked high beside orderly piles of household doors and rows of baths.
⁵⁷

Imagining Invasion

Although the Blitz ceased after May 1941, the desire to secure access to private groundwater sources was further bolstered in 1942 by preparations for invasion.
⁵⁸
The Metropolitan Water Board issued permits to ensure that only a limited number of authorised personnel entered water works plants. Quantities of barbed wire on perimeter fences increased and steel doors were fitted at the mouths of tunnels leading to the mains.
⁵⁹
The
Invasion Defence Scheme for London
instructed that emergency water supplies must be established, in the event that municipal control of water sources and distribution was lost. Strategists envisaged parachute troops descending into waterworks and sabotaging plant machinery. Imagined simultaneously with an air offensive, sparking demand for fire-fighting supplies, the scenarios were pretty apocalyptic.

In the event of land invasion ‘water points’ were to be set up with an allocation of drinking water ‘on the basis of two gallons per head per day’.
⁶⁰
At these points, well water would be pumped into a tanker, promptly sterilised and doled out in a similar way to the existing emergency tanker drill.
⁶¹
Given the
deluge of people anticipated at these points, if mains water was lost across London, a test was carried out at John Barker and Company’s well source on 28
^th
November 1942, just off Kensington High Street.
⁶²
An orderly diagram recorded how the flow of people, and water, could be managed. These well-served water points were never needed, as land invasion did not occur, but some Londoners possibly accessed water from neighbours’ wells when supplies were scarce.