Parched City (5 page)
Authors: Emma M. Jones
That decade was also significant in terms of less toxic drinking issues. Medical historian Anne Hardy highlights 1756 as a pivotal year in her pioneering study of London’s relationship between water and public health in the eighteenth century.
89
In this year, the medical doctor Charles Lucas’
Essays on Waters
was published. Lucas retaliated against prevailing water snobbery by studying, as he explained ‘medicinal quality and uses of simple
waters’.
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Mineral water profiteers cannot have been pleased with this attempt to endow un-bottled water with equally medicinal virtues. The physician examined London’s water as part of his project.
Though Charles Lucas siphoned murky water from the Thames, its appearance did not equate with contamination in his eighteenth century eyes. Apparently it was still acceptable in this state for ‘drinking or bathing…for dressing of food…making malt and for brewing, for preparing medicines’.
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Anne Hardy notes that, for this physician, the solid content in the water samples he drew from the river, ponds, pumps and springs — all sources that Londoners were consuming from –was not perceived to present any danger to health. Significantly, the other 1756 event Hardy points to was a publication by another physician warning of ‘drinking beer brewed with well water’.
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Whether it was purported to be good or bad for health, water’s drinking quality seemed to be under a new level of scrutiny, in medical-scientific circles at least.
The next significant event in Hardy’s account was in the 1790s, when she argues that the emergence of New Chemistry propelled quality analysis forward. New Chemistry was propelled forward by the research of Antoine Lavoisier in France, who reduced chemical substances into a simpler set of elements in a forerunner of the periodic table. Through his experiments, he showed that air could be further defined as oxygen and that water a compound of hydrogen and oxygen.
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This focus on substances’ minutiae brought attention to water’s organic contents. Was this a source of impurity? Hardy asserts that such thoughts permeated beyond medical and scientific circles, for example to the architect James Peacock. Peacock patented the theory and hardware for a water filtration system in 1791.
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His invention pre-dated any use of large-scale filtration technology. In 1793, the designer self-published
A Short Account of a New Method of Filtration by Ascent
. Peacock’s aim was to produce a soft water
that was not turbid, on the grounds that it was healthier for human consumption than hard water: ‘Many are sensible of the indelicacies of turbid soft water; and are thence driven to the use of hard water, although they are not apprized of the probable danger to their health, from the petrifying quality, or from the metallic, or other mineral taints too frequently suspended and concealed therein.’
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It was certainly an alternative position from the wonders of minerals that the bottlers of spa waters were glorifying. ‘Indelicacies’, however, were not quite diseases.
James Peacock was promoting his filtration cistern as a domestic product: ‘This little apparatus will yield an ample sufficiency of perfectly clear soft water for every necessary use of a small family, of six to eight persons.’
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The architect envisaged transforming the quality of water in homes by capturing the supply as it entered the service pipe. Peacock’s cistern was an elite product intended for those residences that were already plugged into the corporate water network, rather than one designed for water fetched from the parish pump to be poured into. The invention did not make the architect a household name but his notion of filtering water was truly ahead of his time. Sadly for Peacock, he would have enjoyed a more lucrative career a few decades later.
Such technological entrepreneurship in last decade of the eighteenth century was consistent with the age of the industrial revolution that was transforming Britain’s economic and social fabric. The growth of cities to fuel the labour for this industrialised society and to transport its products abroad would mean a new demand for water and sanitation facilities.
Consequences for water quality soon became apparent as nineteenth-century London swelled along the banks of the Thames.
Chapter Two
And so suspicious had several of the great metropolitan brewers become of Thames water that they had been forced, at vast expense, to look to wells for their supplies
.
1
(Pollution and Control, Bill Luckin)
The brewers’ unease with polluted Thames water described by the historian Bill Luckin marked the specific shift in public attitude towards the river that occurred in the 1820s. It was in that decade that the sharp decline in the river’s stock of fish also had an impact on the fishing economy in central London.
2
The culprit was obvious. A prohibition on household drainage connection to public sewers flowing straight into the Thames had been lifted in 1815.
3
Unfortunately, this coincided with the rise in purchases of the flush water closet and improved water supplies to these facilities, at least for those who could afford both luxuries.
Prior to the 1820s, as James Graham Leigh comments in his account of London’s water companies’ machinations, ‘water quality does not seem to have been considered so important’.
4
Population growth precipitated a rising demand for water for domestic and industrial uses. More labouring Londoners meant more call for refreshing beers and, consequently, that all-essential raw material. Between 1801, the year of Britain’s first census, and 1821, central London’s population rose from 959,310 to 1,379,543. A further 200,000 people were counted in Greater London.
5
Industrial revolution and imperial growth, such as the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800, created a new flow of migrant labour into the capital to boost productivity.
6
Many people continued to rely on the public resource of the parish pump, but as the century
progressed, piped water, even if only to shared communal sources became a standard of modern London life. This chapter explores how notions of water quantity and water quality became contested as Britain’s public health movement emerged.
Before 1806, four private companies served piped water to wealthy households, at least those without the convenience of private wells.
7
London Bridge Water Works and the New River companies were still going strong. Also serving homes and businesses north of the river, York Buildings Water Works started pumping supplies at the end of the seventeenth century, followed by the Chelsea Water Works Company in 1723.
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Early in the nineteenth century competitors to those established water providers surfaced in London’s water supply market. West Middlesex Water Works began pumping to homes in the affluent neighbourhoods of Hammersmith, Kensington, Marylebone and Paddington in 1806, whilst in 1807 the East London Water Works Company set its sights on serving the hydration needs of the less well-off side of the city by exploiting the natural resource of London’s other river; the Lee.
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Then, in 1811, the Grand Junction Company promised to supply water of a superior quality from the rivers Colne and Brent to consumers in Oxford Street and Drury Lane.
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Suburban companies included the Hampstead Water Company, the Shadwell Water Works and, on the south side of the river, the Lambeth Water Works and Borough Water Works.
Areas of supply were ungoverned and unregulated. Consequently, company pipes overlapped in neighbourhoods and those enterprises competed for neighbouring customers. This unsustainable system did not last for long. Between 1815 and 1818, the water companies hammered out agreements to carve London into water supply monopolies. Some corporations did not survive those negotiations.
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The companies left standing had extraordinary power. As water rates rose steeply in some areas rose following monopolisation, many educated residents
were disgruntled.
Anti-Water Monopoly Association
Historians of nineteenth-century water consumerism, Frank Trentmann and Vanessa Taylor point to the mobilisation of residents in ‘affluent St Marylebone’ under the banner of the Anti-Water Monopoly Association in 1819 as an important, if brief, period of consumer activism. This episode shaped the future of London’s public water discussions by igniting ‘debate about the rights of householders’ of London’s middle classes.
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The minutes of the Anti-Water Monopoly Association’s inaugural meeting state that its purpose was ‘mutual protection against the arbitrary and oppressive proceedings’ of the West Middlesex and Grand Junction water companies.
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Petitioning about ‘supply of this first necessity of life’
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gained sufficient momentum for a parliamentary select committee enquiry in 1821, however it resolved that the companies’ prices were fair.
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We cannot say that this water debate was specific to drinking water; however the description of water as a ‘first necessity’ suggests its role in biology and basic health, along with other uses. Flushing toilets had been entering the homes of the wealthy in larger numbers alongside piped water supplies, however the removal of human waste with water rather than the earth was still a nascent idea, because a waterborne sewage system did not exist.
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Also, what might have been meant by good quality water at that pre-microbiological point is difficult to discern.
Perceptions of consuming water as a lone substance can be tricky to trace, particularly in terms of its use across the social strata, but the use of mineral water as a medicine was certainly still in vogue in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Mr Lambes Mineral Water Warehouse on fashionable New Bond Street was brimming with competing products, and he had been in business since 1799. One advert prescribing the use of Aluminious Chalybeate Water hints at contemporary thinking
about drinking water quality: ‘The patient is to begin with one ounce of water, diluted with two ounces of pure rain water.’
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Specifying the use of rainwater for the ill certainly cast a shadow of doubt over the perceived health merits other sources, such as piped water. Late in the 1820s, any latent doubts Londoners generally might have about whether their water was good, bad or indifferent were awakened when an incendiary pamphlet was published.
The Dolphin ¦ Monster Soup
John Wright claimed that Mr Robson, a former director of the Grand Junction Water Company, had confided in him in 1826 that the source of the company’s supply was not from ‘the streams of the vale of Ruislip’ as its customers had been led to believe.
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Robson led Wright to the point at the Thames where the Grand Junction was extracting its domestic supply and urged him to expose the company’s corruption in his capacity as a writer and publisher. Wright’s polemical pamphlet,
The Dolphin
,
or Grand Junction Nuisance
was published in March 1827, just a couple of months after Robson’s death.
The pamphlet’s title was a reference to the decorative opening of the Grand Junction Water Company’s intake pipe in the Thames. An illustration accompanying the booklet showed the proximity of that pipe to the outfall of sewers. Wright condemned the private water monopolies as an ‘unholy alliance’ and the Grand Junction Water Company in particular for distributing ‘a necessary of life, so loaded with all sorts of impurities, as to be offensive to the sight, disgusting to the imagination, and destructive to health’.
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Though he was unaware of the precise impact of sewage on drinking water, Wright instinctively knew it was not a good practice for excrement and drinking water to mingle. The author viewed the Company as particularly corrupt because of its misleading adverts to supply ‘pure and excellent soft water’, when the source was evidently not as pure as the
New River’s fairly priced and ‘wholesome’ water.
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Wright dramatically exclaimed: ‘The very sight of a glass of Grand Dolphin water serves as an excuse for a glass of spirits, to qualify the effects it may have on the stomach.’
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He also pointed out the capital’s water supply inequalities, on the basis that members of the nobility and gentry had private wells attached to their mansions.
The pamphlet’s dissemination led to a ‘numerously attended’ meeting of ‘respectable’, presumably concerned, people.
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Sir Frances Burdett raised the water quality exposé in Parliament and soon a
Commission for Inquiry into the Supply of Water
was launched to examine the truth of Wright’s claims.
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Throughout January 1828
The Times
published extracts from a document that Wright had furnished the Inquiry with as a supplement to
The Dolphin
pamphlet. The serial was entitled
The Water Question
. This phrase would become synonymous with public and political discourse surrounding London’s water until the end of the nineteenth century.
In the first edition of
The Water Question
, Wright records his pleasure that the Dolphin pipe intake ‘in the Thames at the foot of Chelsea Hospital…is now almost as well known and as much pointed at, by passengers going up and down the river as the Royal Hospital itself’.
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He also declared that customers should have been informed about the new point of extraction and supplied with an analysis of the water. His latter point raised the important question of how quality was measured, and by whom?
Passionate as he was about his water pollution position, Wright had no scientific acumen to offer. In the next instalment of
The Water Question
, he claimed: ‘The impurity of the water, which so greatly injured the health of inhabitants, arose, not from particles of matter floating in the fluid, but from the quantities of matter held in chymical solution‘, adding that ‘no filtration could remove this species of impurity.’
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Unlike the eighteenth century water-testing doctor we met in chapter one, Charles Lucas,
Wright saw matter in water as ‘impure’. Evidence was needed to back up this position.
Chemists were to become critical figures in the water quality and treatment debate, though the science was still an occupation populated by amateurs.
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Wright pronounced that one chemist, Dr Paris, agreed that filtration was pointless, however other experts did not concur. Those chemists who publicly defended the filtration solution in the scientific press were, in Wright’s mind, trying to extinguish the validity of the government Inquiry. Wright’s rhetoric reached fever pitch over this ‘doctored’, that is filtered, water.
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For him, consuming filtered water, which masked impurities, might make the English a filthy race and a mockery of the cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness maxim.
Grotesque imaginings of the Thames’ contents in this public debate was an irresistible subject for the leading caricaturist of the period, William Heath, or Paul Pry (his pseudonym). Published in 1828, Heath’s
Monster Soup
presented Wright’s claims with equal doses of humour and horror. The etching’s publisher, Thomas McLean, issued daily caricatures of popular political subjects, so it is likely that the image was widely circulated, for instance in coffee or teahouses, or perhaps even the public house, where beer consumers may have been keen to scrutinise the raw materials of their pints more closely.
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Those who were passed a copy of
Monster Soup
might well have dropped their cup or glass, like the caricature’s human subject. Hydras; gorgons and chimeras with razor-like teeth, over-sized eyes, spines and pincers presented an unsettling view of the teeming inhabitants of London’s main water source. Of course, it was satire, but was it exaggeration or merely magnification?
A contemporary archivist noticed the caricaturist’s final stroke of humour: ‘The P.P. of the signature raises his hat to a tiny pump, saying,
Glad to see you hope to meet you in every Parish through London.’
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This footnote might well have indicated that Heath, and others, thought pump water to be a safer bet than piped water. That view certainly tallies with Dr Charles Lucas’ analysis of London’s water sources back in 1756: ‘Well or pump water approaches nearest of that of springs or fountanes.’
30
Despite the time lapse between these two pieces of evidence, it certainly points to a differentiation between water sources and therefore drinking water quality made by, at least some of, London’s citizens.
Monster Soup, commonly called Thames Water
, 1828. William Heath
(1795–1840) Wellcome Library, London.
Monster Filter
In 1829 Chelsea Waterworks responded to the water confidence crisis by dismissing Wright’s negative position on filtration and employed a filtering system invented by James Simpson to treat its supply.
31
We can consider this move to capture the minute or invisible contents of London’s raw water as the first step towards modern, industrial water treatment.
John Wright’s critique of London water suppliers alluded to
the connection between drinking water and disease, mooted in some medical circles. For instance, he referred to a doctor’s report about army troops contracting dysentery as result of their drinking water supply.
32
His question about disease striking London in the context of the water quality inquiry was prescient: ‘Although this enormous metropolis may at the present moment be, generally speaking, in a healthy condition, does it therefore follow that it will always remain so?’
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It was not long before his question was answered. Cholera morbus, also known as malignant diarrhoea, was a disease that had been previously associated only with ‘natives’ in the east.
34
Cholera’s geography changed in 1832.