Parched City (7 page)

Sewer water and Grand Junction Company
, Plate 1
A microscopic examination of the water supplied to the inhabitants of London and the suburban districts
, Arthur Hill-Hassall (London: Samuel Highley, 1850) Wellcome Library, London.

Christopher Hamlin, a historian of nineteenth-century water analysis, pinpointed that the importance of Hill-Hassall’s book ‘was to make microscopic life a new category of impurity, and a great deal of debate in 1851 and 1852 was concerned with what exactly such creatures signified’.
⁶³
At this point chemists and microscopists were competing in the water analysis sphere, but neither knew how to conclusively explain the significance of the revelations produced under the lenses of their microscopes.

Hill-Hassall’s lurid microscopic drawings were presented to Parliament, possibly during the 1851 Metropolis Water Supply Bill’s debate when there was much discussion of animalcules.
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Whether the politicians involved were of the Chadwickian or Snowian schools of thought, the state of London’s water was equally problematic. Much of the debate revolved around the provision of more water to purify the slums, or ‘disgusting dens’ according to one speaker in the House of Commons. Water’s cost was also noted: ‘Nine different companies distribute water into the houses at exaggerated rates, and the poor people who cannot meet the demands of the companies are often obliged to drink the hard disagreeable water of the wells.’
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For that speaker, the well water was still not perceived to be unhealthy per se but he was clearly indicating that piped, softer water was more palatable. Quality was important to other debaters. Mr Moffat referred to evidence in the Board of Health’s reports which claimed that ‘the quality of the water was very objectionable and unwholesome, and that organic and vegetable matter was found
in it of a highly prejudicial character’.
⁶⁶

Beyond the House of Commons’ debating chamber, many an M.P. may have been enjoying a premium glass of drinking water at the Great Exhibition during the summer of 1851. The Exhibition was
the
social event of that year. Over six million people attended, many travelling by train from outside London and internationally. Covering twenty-six acres of Hyde Park a monumental glass structure, known as the Crystal Palace, was designed by the architect Joseph Paxton to showcase the wares of more than one thousand exhibitors from every nook and cranny of the British Empire. At this
Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations
, the burgeoning fashion for teetotalism was reflected in the catering specification: ‘The contractor at each area must supply fresh filtered water in glasses gratis to visitors, and keep a sufficient supply at each area…no wines, spirits, beer or intoxicating drinks can be sold or admitted by the contractor.’
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Schweppes was awarded the contract to keep the refreshment rooms supplied with this free water, though its origin was not described. Those who wanted to pay for their water at Schweppes’ concession could opt for soda water, an innovation made possible by the company’s development of carbonation and the mass production of fizzy soft drinks.
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A live soda-water aeration performance by one Mr Cox was also reported to be pulling in the Exhibition’s crowds, possibly because he gave away free samples.
⁶⁹
A water purification outfit also exhibited its wares.
⁷⁰
Teetotalism, otherwise known as temperance, was also present in a guerrilla stunt at the Great Exhibition’s centrepiece, the Crystal Fountain, where a mass of teetotallers ‘thronged from all parts of England into the metropolis in the pursuance of a half business-like, half-festive “temperance demonstration” ’.
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The demonstrators ritualistic surrounding of the Crystal Fountain — though it was a decorative rather than a drinking fountain — offers a curious insight into water’s symbolic potency as public health was becoming increasingly tied to social reform. From a
practical perspective, more teetotallers meant a greater demand for quality-assured drinking water.

Back at the House of Commons’ debate about the Metropolis Water Bill, a statement by Sir W. Clay drove to the heart of the issue: ‘The only question for the House was, what conditions they ought to impose on those to whom the supply of water was entrusted?’
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In the legislation that followed, London’s corporate water supplies were regulated for the first time and public health principles became legally tied to the supply of urban water. Following the vigorous exchanges of medical, public health and political opinions about water during the debate, the Metropolis Water Supply Act became law in 1852. By 1855, companies would be required to ‘effectually’ filter their water, transport it in covered aqueducts or pipes and provide a constant supply.
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From a quality perspective, the most significant clause picked up on the argument of Joseph Wright, that the point of abstraction in the Thames was critical: ‘No water company after August 31, 1855, should take its supply from the Thames below Teddington Lock.’
⁷⁴
This point on the river, in west London, was where it ceased to be tidal and therefore where, upstream, the water was entirely free from salt.

A competitor to the water companies’ river-derived source, the London (Watford) Spring Water Company promptly saw an opportunity to cash in on public concern about animalcules. The company employed two leading microscopists to dip their test tubes in the Thames above Teddington Lock and analyse the results. They reported that it was ‘a water much contaminated with organic matter…one of the last sources to which the Metropolis should look for a supply of pure water’.
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Watford Spring’s contents, on the other hand, were found to ‘be free from organic matter as any water can be in its natural state’, conveniently for those on the water company’s payroll.
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But before the new abstraction and effectual filtration systems were in place, cholera broke out again in 1854.

This time cholera struck in the heart of John Snow’s own cosmopolitan, central London neighbourhood of Soho. In the course of ten days between August and September 1854, cholera bacteria multiplied wildly within a short radius of a water-pump at the junction of Broad Street and Cambridge Street. Snow’s claims, in conjunction with the fieldwork of Reverend Whitehead, about the pump’s role in dispensing the disease convinced the local vestry to have the handle of the pump removed on the 8
^th
September.
⁷⁷
Snow’s famous cholera map was based on the lives that the epidemic claimed in relation to that Broad Street pump.

His insights into the consuming habits of Soho’s residents prove that, despite water’s bad press, earlier in the century, its consumption was a widespread practice in daily life. However, as Snow himself reflected about consumption habits: ‘The English people, as a general rule, do not drink much unboiled water, except in warm weather.’
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The outbreak occurred at the height of summer during this outbreak and the range of people ingesting the Broad Street pump’s water cold was clearly recorded by John Snow as he mapped the pattern of consumption and cholera contraction. It was consumed in a local coffee house at dinnertime, as a mixer for shops selling sherbet, or to dilute quick nips of brandy or other spirits in nearby pubs.
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That pump’s water quenched the thirst of workers in local percussion-cap and dentistry material manufactories, but plain water consumption was not confined to those who, economically at least, had no other choice.
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It was enjoyed by an army officer dining in Wardour Street and an ‘eminent ornithologist’ who lived on Broad Street, though he decided against drinking it after noticing the offensive smell around its vicinity on 2
^nd
September.
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An ex-Soho resident living in Hampstead was even brought a bottle from the pump by her visitors, as she apparently preferred its taste to her local supply.
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Snow’s record of these consumer habits shows the centrality of the pump to neighbourhood life, despite
the availability of piped water. This suggests at least two things. One is that the pump was reliable for a fresh supply given the intermittent nature of the corporate water. Or that the underground supplies were perceived to be more drinkable and tasted noticeably different to river-derived water. The popularity of the pump is mirrored by a detail in 1828’s
Monster Soup
caricature in which the stick figure of Paul Pry, who we have already met, doffs his cap to a parish pump.

There is little doubt that some Londoners preferred pumped to piped water. Still, Snow’s second tranche of evidence about 1854 also shows that drinking piped company water was habitual. Either way, water drinking was evidently a commonplace way to quench ones thirst and it was not widely associated with disease at that point.

John Snow explained that since cholera had disappeared in 1849, south London’s domestic water supply had significantly altered. Southwark and Vauxhall Company and the Lambeth Company were in competition, just like the pre-monopoly era at the beginning of the century. Their pipes ran side-by-side in certain districts. The parallel supply of different water provided an opportunity for Snow to further his thesis about the cholera tragedies recurring in London, and elsewhere. As he wrote: ‘Each Company supplies both rich and poor, both large houses and small; there is no difference either in the condition or occupation of the person receiving the water of the different companies…as there is no difference whatever, either in the houses or the people receiving the supply of the two water companies, or in any of the physical conditions with which they are surrounded, it is obvious that no experiment could have been devised which would more thoroughly test the effect of water supply on the progress of cholera…‘
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To aid his research, the Registrar General’s office agreed to provide the physician with the addresses of people as they died from cholera in those districts. Snow set about tracking the damage caused by the
Lambeth Company’s water, whilst a doctor called John Joseph Whiting volunteered to take on the districts supplied only by the Southwark and Vauxhall Company. Snow recounted: ‘Mr Whiting took great pains with his part of the inquiry, which was to ascertain whether the houses where the fatal attacks took place were supplied with the Company’s water, or from a pump-well, or some other source.’
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One frustration for the duo was that residents often did not even know which company they, or their landlords, were paying. If the dwellers could not find any receipts for bills, Snow had a back up plan. He took a sample of water from each of the cholera-struck properties and performed a chemical test. Results were matched with the average sodium and chloride levels that he had already established in the two companies’ supplies. Over the four weeks of the epidemic, three hundred and thirty-four people died from cholera in the area that the two companies supplied. Snow and Whiting established that 286 of the households affected were supplied with water by the Southwark and Vauxhall Company, whilst the Lambeth Company was found to be responsible for only 14 cases of infection.

Steven Johnson, author of a recently-published interpretation of Snow’s legacy,
The Ghostmap
, summed up the lukewarm response to the physician’s theory in those post-cholera years thus: ’…miasma retained its hold over many, and Snow himself was often subjected to derisive treatment by the scientific estab-lishment’ (for instance peers writing in
The Lancet
medical journal).
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The ideological gulf between the two schools of disease transmission continued but one clear decision was made as a result of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers fieldwork. London’s ‘filth’, quite crudely, its faeces, needed to be removed.

In the same year that Snow’s revised, and now seminal, thesis
On the Mode of Communication of Cholera
was published, 1855, the Metropolis Management Act was passed. The Act’s implications were seismic. It would institute a governance structure for
building the modern world’s first citywide underground water-based sewerage system, under the governance of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Painstaking surveying and designing by the Metropolitan sewer commissioners, including Joseph Bazalgette, had translated into a coherent set of plans for radical underground sewage works. New housing would be condemned if water closets failed to be ‘furnished…with suitable water supply and water supply apparatus’.
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Sewage was to be removed from sight, and therefore from contact with the air, and, most critically, it was to be discharged into the Thames in locations far removed from London’s population. These locations would also, therefore, be distant from points of water abstraction. Miasma theory was still going strong, but the vast plumbing system was equally instrumental in preventing water-borne disease transmission.