Parched City (20 page)

Front cover of London Anti-Fluoridation Campaign pamphlet, 1966
Author unknown. City of London, London Metropolitan Archives.

In the meantime, the Metropolitan Water Board issued numerous stock responses to concerned members of the public stating that health authorities rather than the supplier were ultimately responsible for that fluoridation decision.
⁷³

Un-Britishness

To clarify the uneasy position of the Board, it wrote to each of the local health authorities to establish which were in favour of fluoridation or not.
⁷⁴
Responses were tallied in spring 1968. Twenty-four were pro-fluoridation, two had approved it in principle and nine were against the measure.
⁷⁵
The influential City of London Corporation was an anti-fluoridation island surrounded by boroughs favouring fluoridation such as Southwark and Tower Hamlets. Other opposing borough and county councils were curiously concentrated on the outer edges of the city; Brent in the north and Sutton to the south. Inner city poverty, with resultant poor oral health of many young people may well have been more visible to those in central London. Translated into approximate populations, the opposing areas added up to 918,100 people whilst the pro-fluoridation majority was 6,219,600.
⁷⁶
Still, the principle remained that the water supply could not be cordoned off to exclude those areas, such was the nature of the technological network and water’s very nature as a fluid.

On 26th April 1968 the Board declared an amendment to its own stance on fluoridation: ‘That it be recommended to the Board that they take no policy decision with regard to the fluoridation of London’s water supply pending the outcome of the Birmingham fluoridation scheme, or the introduction of government legislation on the subject.’
⁷⁷
In May 1968, a small article in London’s
Evening News
publicised the Board’s policy decision with the headline ‘No Fluoride for Londoners’ Teeth’.
⁷⁸

As legislation, or a change of mood, in the opposing councils
was awaited protest continued into 1969. A statement issued by Patrick Clavell-Blount’s London Anti-Fluoridation Campaign was decorated with a list of prominent signatories from the Houses of the Lords and Commons, including the violinist Yehudi Menhuin. ‘…we do not consider such medication has any place in the British way of life’, declared LAFC’s supporters.
⁷⁹

Even in 2012, fluoride has yet to be artificially added to London’s supply. The latest enquiry into the subject, convened by the Greater London Authority, published a report in 2003 and advised against the chemical’s introduction. This recommendation was made on the basis of the consent needed from five strategic health authorities in collaboration with four water suppliers.
⁸⁰
Mass medication was not cited as a reason for the enquiry’s conclusion, yet the subject of environmental toxicology is, rightly, remains a current concern.

Public Fountains in Decline

During the span of the anti-fluoridation campaign, a sense of pride and trust in the quality of public water is apparent. That sentiment was perhaps unknowingly reinforced by an international set of
Guidelines for Drinking-Water Quality
, which were first published by the World Health Organisation in 1958. One reason for their establishment was the rise in debate about drinking water safety amongst those enjoying international air travel in the 1950s.
⁸¹
Although the United Kingdom was one of the key nations informing the science for these standards, at that point no law for precise drinking water standards had been passed. Faith in tap water did not appear to be affected by absence of legislation in the 1950s and 60s.

Outside the home, drinking water was promoted by modern fountain designs suitable for a variety of potential indoor, public locations. As demonstrated by the drinking fountains in Thomas Crapper’s 1954 Puritas range, the modernist bubble jet invented in the 1930s was still in vogue. In gleaming white porcelain and
china, the bounty of pure water produced by modern industrial nations could be relished from these hygienic objects.

Drinking Water Fountains. Crapper Puritas, Catalogue No. 30, Thomas
Crapper and Co. Ltd. 1954, p. 50.

Crapper’s catalogue does not tell which organisations purchased and installed the Puritas models, but the range of four designs suggest a demand for drinking fountains as a somewhat utilitarian sanitary ware. Puritas fountains may well have been exported internationally, but it is likely that some of these designs could be found later that decade in schools, hospitals or other public institutions and places of work. Certainly the 1937
Factories Act
stipulated that a supply of wholesome drinking
water had to be supplied by employers.
⁸²
Though the word fountain did not appear in the legislation, a device featuring an ‘upward jet’ was specified. Thomas Crapper’s elegant ceramics would not have survived for very long outdoors, where the public fountain idealism of the post-war years was facing some challenges.

The Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association pointed out the ‘menace of vandalism’ to supporters in its 1968 annual report: ‘It is a regrettable fact that, without close supervision at all times, fountains are only too likely nowadays to be put out of action at the hands of hooligans. Consequently our activities are now largely directed towards the provision of fountains in parks, public gardens, playing fields and children’s playgrounds, which can be closed and secured when not in use.’
⁸³
The organisation’s retreat from the street had been prefaced by a move from Victoria Street, where it had been based since 1872, to the suburbs in 1960.
⁸⁴
Though a high profile office location was surrendered that year, a prestigious new pair of drinking fountains were also inaugurated within the walls of London’s most iconic public space: Trafalgar Square. The Association’s 1960 report noted that its Chairman ‘was again invited by the B.B.C. to appear on television in connection with the installation of the fountains’.
⁸⁵
A public drinking fountain in a striking location was evidently still a newsworthy item.

In an informal survey conducted for this book, many Londoners of the post-war era testified to using drinking fountains habitually. Ron Brooker confirmed that fountains flowed in his south London borough during the ‘50s: ‘At that time Croydon’s Park Department ran and maintained the town’s parks very well.’
⁸⁶
One respondent commented on water pressure problems with his local fountain, but still recalled using it. David Khan remembered using the bubble jet ‘press-down tap that allowed a flow to bubble upwards, enabling a drinker to partake without any direct contact with the actual outlet’.
⁸⁷
Hygiene fears did not seem to preoccupy many respondents, who described how they freely drank from the clunky metal cups, many of which were still firmly affixed to nineteenth-century models. Lesley Ramm remembered of Priory Park, in Hornsey: ‘As children we used the old metal cups, attached by chains, to scoop water from basins on hot summers days after playing.’
⁸⁸
And in Clapham Common, Peter Skuse also used the fountain’s metal cups, with this proviso: ‘My Dad had told me to dip only my lips into the water in the cup.’
⁸⁹
At that four-sided fountain, a strict protocol surrounding the cups’ use developed: ‘As we grew older, we would collectively adopt one cup, and take it in turns, leaving the others free for other children; indeed I recall once at least where we defended a cup against bigger boys, letting smaller girls and boys drink while they had to wait for another to become free. Someone saw us that day, and gave us a bag of Sharps toffees for being public-spirited!’ By 1960, he claimed that the fountain was dry, but other areas of London were still in receipt of public hydration. For instance, Virginia Smith recalled of her Hampstead neighbourhood and elsewhere: ‘You would always expect to have a fountain in a park, though some were fancier than others.’
⁹⁰
Bernard Pellegrinetti clearly remembered the ‘old fashioned fountain’ near Kenwood House, also in Hampstead, where he and his brother regularly refreshed themselves.
⁹¹
Lesley Ramm noted a gradual disuse and total disappearance of public fountains: ‘I think they were working into the 1970s but when the council withdrew Park Wardens and Gardeners, the park became a no-go area and much was vandalised.’ Ron Brooker concurred that ‘in later years, one noticed park drinking fountains not working and that was probably due to neglect by the local councils’. The ideals of the welfare state’s healthy urban parks were slowly rotting, as the investment in public services from the state dwindled.

One thing that is certain from the 1950s and ‘60s era of fluoridation and fountains is that Londoners were drinking water,
whether it was indoors or outdoors. Valerie Scott, who also responded to the fountain survey, pointed out ‘there was no alternative in the days before bottled water’.
⁹²
The anti-fluoridation campaigners were possibly so worried about the proposed additive because they were aware of how intrinsic tap water was to their diets and daily lives. Bottled water’s proposition as a more ‘natural’ product than tap water did not arise in the records of the fluoridation debate that this chapter’s research consulted. Possibly this was because fluoride naturally occurs in mineral or spring water sources but, more likely, because bottled water was uncommon and expensive. Mineral waters from Bath or even Schweppes Table Water remained elite, not everyday products. So how did Londoners develop such a penchant for bottled water by the late 1980s?

Chapter Eight

So wrote Patrick Wright about the state of public drinking water opinion in London in 1990. His comment reflects the continuum from fluoridation concerns to the gradual deterioration of tap water’s public image during the 1980s, to the privatisation of the water industry in Britain in 1989.
²

This chapter joins the dots between various episodes, and policies, before and during the 1980s that destabilised both the perception of tap water and its actual safety record on the world stage. It builds on the research of four British water books of this period:
Watershed
by the environmental journalist Fred Pearce (1982),
The Good Water Guide
co-authored by mineral water gurus Maureen and Timothy Green (1985),
Troubled Water
by the water economist David Kinnersley (1988) and
Britain’s Poisoned Water
by Frances and Phil Craig (1989). This chapter shows how the creation of the bottled water mass market emerged from a matrix of economic, environmental and political conflicts rather than from the maxims of artful advertisers alone. Bottled water marketeers were opportunists manipulating a total crisis of faith in municipal drinking water. However, this thirst for packaged water — from pristine far-away landscapes — was not a quirky taste unique to the palates, or pockets, of Londoners. Therefore, this chapter ventures beyond the M25 (also, incidentally, a child
of the 1980s) into a national frame of drinking water politics and culture.

Authorities and Acts

Although the Metropolitan Water Board had survived the upheavals of the mid-60s during the creation of the Greater London Council, in 1971 its viability was under scrutiny once again. Water management philosophy was changing. Recommendations issued by the Government’s Central Advisory Water Committee proposed that the whole river basin’s use should integrate plans for water abstraction and wastewater.
³
This holistic view of water management forged the 1973 Water Act. New Regional Water Authorities would oversee all human water needs for drinking, industry and sanitation. The protection of rivers and underground water sources from pollution also fell under the new authorities’ remit. Even boating, canoeing and fishing were incorporated under its functions. London’s rivers and aquifers became the responsibility of the Thames Water Authority in 1974.
⁴
However, the Act also dissolved the Metropolitan Water Board.

London’s 73-year-old municipal water provider, that had led ground-breaking international research; introduced chlori-nation; endured the First World War; survived the Blitz and kept afloat during the fluoridation storm was no more. On 28
^th
March 1974 a ‘Dinner and Dance to mark the end of the Board’s existence‘, with more than a thousand guests, took place at the London Hilton Hotel on Park Lane.
⁵
The invite poignantly announced that a toast would be raised to the organisation’s ‘Glorious Memory’ at dinner. Sentimental relief was on offer for the Board’s soon to be ex-staff on the dance floors of the Hilton’s Grand Ballroom or a ‘discotheque’ in the hotel’s Coronation Room. Elsewhere in the country, boards and statutory water companies weathered the act, but not in London where the whole water and waste water system was rationalised.

Reflecting on this period eight years on, in Fred Pearce’s environmental polemic about the state of Britain’s rivers,
Watershed
, the journalist labelled the new Water Authorities ‘strange hybrid bodies, neither nationalised industry, nor local government’.
⁶
Despite the authorities’ identity crisis perceived by Pearce, the thrust of his critique of these new organisations was directed at their failure to provide much-needed investment for the country’s geriatric water infrastructure. In the wake of the economic shockwaves produced by the 1973 international oil crisis, another supranational event changed the course of drinking water more specifically, when the United Kingdom joined the European Community (EC) in 1973.
⁷

The 1973 U.K. Water Act repeatedly mentioned the protection of raw supplies for ‘wholesomeness’, though how this was to be done seemed rather vague. ‘Restoration’ of the nation’s rivers more bluntly hinted that all was not well with the water environment.
⁸
Strangely, local authorities were to be charged with reporting any failures on the quality front to the new regional water authorities: ‘It shall be the duty of every local authority to take such steps from time to time as may be necessary for ascertaining the sufficiency and wholesomeness of water supplies within their area…‘
⁹
This elastic attitude was not consistent with the tone of directives that were being issued from Brussels whose rigour pleased Fred Pearce: ‘By the late 1970s almost the only effective kick up the Government’s environmental rear came from the EEC. Implementation on the Control of Pollution Act will bring Britain within EEC law on a range of directives.’
¹⁰

Importantly, the 1974 Pollution Act’s scope spelled out stringent protection of raw water sources: ‘…a person shall be guilty of an offence if he causes or knowingly permits a) any poisonous, noxious or polluting matter to enter any stream or controlled waters or any specified underground water…’
¹¹
Precisely what poisonous, noxious or polluting matter the Act
¹²
referred to (apart from sewage) was not defined, however Pearce was confident that the Act had to implement the directive from Brussels on black list chemicals — mercury, cadmium, aldrin and dieldrin — as well as substances on a secondary ‘grey list’. Threats to the health of aquatic life were being tackled, but what about assuring drinking water’s wholesomeness for humans? That question was swiftly addressed when the first EC directive on the quality of raw water abstracted for drinking, landed in Westminster in 1975.
¹³
Member States had to comply within two years.

Dramatic new limits for lead traces in water were proposed in the Directive, halving the World Health Organisation’s existing recommendation.
¹⁴
Sceptics in Whitehall queried the evidence base for such a drastic reduction. One British participant in the construction of the directive reflected in 2002 on the somewhat arbitrary process that took place inside the European Community, explaining how the value for nitrates was reached: ’…we went around the table and various people said it should be 100 ppm [parts per million], 1000 ppm, and finally, the difference was split.’
¹⁵

At the time, in 1976,
The Times
reported a debate about the EC’s raft of radical environmental directives, including the drinking water policy, in the House of Lords. According to the Conservative Party’s lead sceptic, Lord Sandford: ‘The need for the monitoring of lead levels in the atmosphere was not supported by any evidence that there was widespread damage from lead poisoning or any disease attributed to it, and the same applied to the sweeping directive calling for the monitoring of drinking water.’
¹⁶
As
The Times’
reporter concluded, the Peers needed some convincing. Some felt that contaminants should be rated in the Directive to be either ‘of proven harm to human health’ or ‘merely undesirable’.
¹⁷
Significant funds were required to make these health and quality determinations, which was an unappealing prospect at a time of economic stress.

‘Save Water: Bath with a Friend’
¹⁸

An unusual decline in rainfall was recorded in May 1975 and dry conditions persisted throughout the winter across England and Wales. In July 1976 an official state of drought precipitated an emergency Drought Bill.
¹⁹
The drought’s effect on the capital was not as severe as in the southwest of the country — where standpipes replaced domestic supplies for 65,000 households for two weeks — but Londoners were requested to alter their daily water habits. ‘Save water, bath with a friend’ was one national slogan that was hoped might sustain stressed resources, whilst undoubtedly causing many a raised eyebrow.
²⁰

Domestic supplies were not lost in London but reserves were low. ‘Water Rations on the Way’ ran the
Evening News’
front-page headline on 2
^nd
July 1976. The accompanying report indicated a rising level of panic about the prospect of taps being turned off: ‘…in London it has been a case of July bursting out all over. The Thames Water Authority [has] dealt with 200 burst pipes and water mains in the past month. The capital has plenty of water but the delivery system is threatening to crack under the strain. Public demand has doubled and resulting high pressure is breaking joints in the older pipes, especially in East London. Londoners were warned to turn off their taps or face days without water.’ Within a fortnight, the newspaper announced that a Drought Act had been ‘rushed through Parliament to fight Britain’s worst drought in 250 years’.
²¹
Ironically, two days later rain broke London’s heat wave and the official state of drought. Hydrological effects were still being felt the next month, as this description of the Thames demonstrates: ‘In August 1976 it ceased to flow at Teddington (the tidal limit) for the only time in its 128-year record. This was due to a combination of intense drought conditions and the substantial abstractions to meet London’s water supply needs…‘
²²
Fortunately, the Thames did not remain in this state for long but, as some subsequent researchers of this episode summarised: ’…for the consumer the
drought brought bricks in lavatory cisterns, fewer baths, unwatered gardens, unwashed cars…’
²³
Though it is difficult to quantify precisely how many Londoners changed their consumption habits, this experience undermined the illusion of an endless supply of tap water. One British water expert, David Kinnersley — who we will meet properly later in this chapter — reflected that public adaptation to scarcity had been admirable, but cynically added ‘this mood is not readily sustained: once the drought broke, normal patterns of consumption soon re-estab-lished themselves.’
²⁴

When the rains finally did come, accumulated chemicals from agricultural land were washed into adjacent rivers in much higher concentrations that usual. Some mainly rural areas, such as East Anglia, suffered nitrate pollution as a result. Fred Pearce recorded water professionals’ worries in 1977 about the potential toxicity of water in the East Anglian region to babies, in the form of the dreaded ‘blue baby syndrome’, which was fatal. Supplies of bottled water were apparently used in East Anglia, presumably as an alternative to mix powdered milk but perhaps also instead of breast milk if there was real concern that breast-feeding mothers’ own water consumption could pass on the contaminants.
²⁵
The details of these personal water fears are not verified in Pearce’s account. Clearly the vulnerability of a baby’s constitution to toxins, in comparison to an adult, magnified greatly any chemical threat to human health and therefore gave rise to a new level of drinking water awareness and scrutiny amongst the general public.

In subsequent years, intakes of the River Lee for East London’s supply were temporarily suspended when nitrate levels were deemed too high for safe human consumption.
²⁶
The necessity of this measure is a reminder of the environmental interconnectedness of rural and urban life, with groundwater and rivers linking and serving both populations. Technically, what is known as the ‘water catchment’ area describes this
holistic relationship. Both pollution and scarcity could now be tangibly associated with public water supplies.

Enter Thatcher

Unemployment in London had grown during the 1970s following the demise of the capital’s manufacturing economy in tandem with the impact of the oil crisis. Crime levels were conspicuously rising along with petty vandalism.
²⁷
As the national recession’s social impact bit more deeply in the late ‘70s, the Thames Water Authority’s focus shifted from fears of pollution to potential picket lines. Apart from a few unofficial skirmishes, the water industry’s manual workforce did not join the public sector strikes during the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978–79. During these cold months, public services entered a dirty state of crisis when waste was uncollected and bodies were left unburied in morgues across England.
²⁸
Amidst this state of dysfunction and the highest unemployment rates on record to date, of over three million people, Margaret Thatcher was viewed as a beacon of hope by enough people to be elected as Prime Minister of a new Conservative government on 4
^th
May 1979.
²⁹

Mrs Thatcher had been a Thames Water Authority ratepayer in her suburban north Finchley constituency, before her salubrious change of address, but was she aware of the rot further down London’s municipal and national water pipelines? Under her Government the water industry would have to adapt to the EC’s first water quality directive within five years. The Directive challenged the basis of the U.K.’s existing water treatment and testing regime. As an academic water report described the significance of the EC policy’s implications: ‘First, the shift from relative and negotiated to absolute and regulatory definitions of water quality, based upon maximum permitted concentrations of known pollutants, represents a major change in British practice.’
³⁰
Though the United Kingdom led the world in drinking water treatment at the outset of the century and participated
in the formation of the World Health Organisation’s international drinking water quality guidelines, there was still no legal basis for these standards, nationally. The EC’s new drinking water quality parameters accompanying the Directive covered bacteriological, organoleptic (colour, turbidity, odour and taste), physiochemical (water’s naturally variable constituents such as potassium), undesirable levels of organic and non-organic chemicals, known toxins such as arsenic and lead, regulations on artificially-softened water and, finally, microbiological parameters.
³¹
Systemically, the troubled water industry had to be transformed to ensure that the new mechanisms for monitoring drinking water could be instituted.