Parched City (8 page)

Governance to build London’s sewage system was in place, but the essential finances were not. Consequently, the subterranean makeover made a sluggish start. Sewage farms were already in vogue at that point, but any waterborne sewage entering the Thames, pre-1858, was raw. In 1856 the Board of Health’s Medical Officer, John Simon, published a report which examined the plausibility of cholera’s waterborne transmission, and though he was not entirely convinced about the veracity of John Snow’s theories, he admitted that more evidence pointed towards disease transmission via water rather air. On that basis he wrote: ‘Whether water can be securely drunk from rivers polluted by urban drainage, interests more or less every part of the country and whatever facts can terminate this doubt, bear upon every plan for the water supply of a population, and upon every plan for the drainage of a town.’
⁸⁷
In essence, Simon was questioning the natural capacity of a river to recover from sewage pollution. The answer lay in a method for examining water that could offer a definitive ruling on its quality for human consumption, but that science was still floundering.

Plans for sewers to bypass central London were still on the drawing board when the famous ‘Great Stink’ occurred. As temperatures rose in the summer of 1858, the stench from the Thames wafted into national newspaper headlines.
The Era
vented its disgust by suggesting that the Thames be renamed ‘the great sewer of London’.
⁸⁸
A visceral verse from
The Morning Chronicle
also conveyed the inhaling horror to its readers. Those remote from the Thames certainly got a vicarious whiff:

The excretions of two million people must have been quite a convincing olfactory argument, especially when they were lapping up against the river’s north bank at the Houses of Parliament. Promptly, the Government rushed through a bill to unlock funds for the Metropolitan Board of Works to get things flowing, out of central London.
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The historian Bill Luckin argues that the motivation to clean up the Thames was not only a result of the river’s impact on the quality of local life, but because of its secondary role as a symbol of the heart and power of the British Empire.
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A polluted Thames was a source of international humiliation. As Luckin argued: ‘To save the river was to consolidate the new urban-industrial order.’
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Within that industrial order, steam engines had by then revolutionised control over water distribution through vast pumping technology and therefore modes of production and consumption in turn. New technological water innovation would also be ushered in with the Local Government Act of 1858, which acknowledged that urban municipalities needed to invest in large-scale infrastructure to treat sewage
before
it entered rivers.
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On the sewerage front, London’s revolutionary sanitary
engineering project led by Joseph Bazalgette transformed underground infrastructure during the 1860s, creating embankments such as Chelsea to house the pipes. How soon water quality would be transformed by sewerage and diseases like cholera extinguished remained to be seen.

Above ground, a minor clause in the 1855 Metropolis Management Act raised the issue of public water access: ‘Every Vestry and District Board shall have full Power and Authority to cause any Wells to be dug and sunk in such public Places as they think proper, and also to erect and fix any Pumps in any public Places, for the gratuitous Supply of Water to the Inhabitants of the Parish or District.’
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What this water might be used for was not specified, though it seems likely that it was intended largely for cleansing, of streets for instance, rather than primarily for drinking. If the sources were imagined for drinking use, it was a worrying proposal given the Broad Street example. Quite separately from the dictates of the state’s public health administration, public fountains were about to become extremely fashionable.

Chapter Three

French hydro-geologist Henry Darcy’s acerbic comment was unlikely to have reached the ears or eyes of the people who propelled London’s fashion for fountains throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century. He wrote it in a book about public fountains in Dijon — certainly a niche subject — of which the English translation was only published recently. Whether or not his scorn for the commodification of water crossed the English Channel, it most certainly applied to London’s tangle of corporate water suppliers in contrast to other English cities’ municipal systems. This chapter investigates how Darcy’s statement could not have been applied to the drinking water on offer on London’s streets just ten years later. The story starts, however, not in London but in the north of England.

A Liverpudlian Gentleman

Like London, Liverpool experienced unprecedented population growth in the early nineteenth-century. As the port for northern manufacturing cities and a departure point for immigrants journeying across the British Empire, ships were constantly sailing into and out of its docks. In 1801 the city had eighty thousand inhabitants, yet by 1841 there were more than a quarter of a million people recorded in the census.
²
Liverpool was a
centre for the flow of labour. Karl Marx’s analysis of Capitalism’s mode of wealth production would soon deduce, human Labour was an essential cog in propelling the economic system’s perpetual motion towards profit. Industrialised cities such as Liverpool did not have the built infrastructure for its inhabitants to keep pace with the growth of the human workforce that was needed to sustain the increasing scale of Victorian merchants’ profits.

Similarly to London, the consequences of people living without adequately planned sanitary infrastructure in Liverpool endangered lives and threatened to spread infectious diseases. Liverpool pioneered the collective ‘cleansing’ of the working classes before any other city in Britain of the period, with the opening of Frederick Street baths in 1842.
³

The bathhouse was a product of concern from prominent citizens, who pressurised the city council that a sanitary overhaul was needed to prevent the recurrence of a cholera epidemic like 1832.
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Frederick Street bathhouse was considered to be a national model for social improvement and contributed to the passing of the Baths and Washhouses Acts later in the decade.
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As socially important as Liverpool’s bathhouse was, the building was eclipsed by the scale of the city’s other civic and industrial architecture. Vast warehouses had been constructed to house cotton, sugar and tobacco at the port’s docks, before their dispatch for processing elsewhere. The merchants who owned and controlled these goods had formed a powerful new middle class in the city. Charles Melly was one of these businessmen.

Melly had a Swiss father and the Liverpudlian family remained connected with relatives in Geneva throughout his life. As a boy he visited a Swiss spa, so he had an early introduction to the cult of hydrotherapy, which involved being immersed in, or ingesting, mineral water.
⁶
When he married, the newlyweds travelled to Geneva as part of their honeymoon tour in 1852. This kind of tourism had become increasingly common to people of
his class, with the advent of train connections to Britain’s ports. An 1838 guidebook,
Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland
, pointed out something that became a source of fascination for Melly in Geneva: ‘One characteristic and very pleasant feature are the Fountains, the never-failing ornament of every Swiss town and village.’
⁷

Though he may have seen such fountains in Switzerland when he was younger, the mature Melly, coming from the working city of Liverpool, was impressed that people had access to a free drinking water supply on the street in Geneva.
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He later wrote of ‘the beautiful stone water fountains which are so abundant in that city, indeed in every town in Switzerland, and on the Continent generally’.
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Rome’s influence on urban design during the Renaissance saw the spread of public water to many European cities as a trope of Baroque architecture.
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In Switzerland, fountain keepers were appointed in the sixteenth century to supervise public fountain construction and to ensure their maintenance.
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Caring for these public resources evidently survived as a civic job into the 1850s when Melly was honeymooning.

Melly returned to Liverpool inspired. He conducted interviews around the docks to find out of if public water was needed and observed the way others used the city. The pattern of people’s working lives in Liverpool meant that they were out of their homes for long periods of time. The merchant’s research concluded that ‘the labourers, shipwrights and porters employed in our docks and warehouses live at a considerable distance from their work; often two or three miles…they generally carry their dinner out with them, and only return home after their day’s work is done’.
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Quizzing dockworkers and local policemen, he was satisfied that the quantity of immigrants leaving from the port to America and Australia alone created sufficient demand for drinking water.
¹³
In 1853 he arranged for two modest public taps to be installed at the docks. Their popularity convinced the
merchant that a fully-fledged fountain would be used. The following year, Melly financed the building of Britain’s first ‘Continental-style’ granite drinking fountain on Prince’s Dock. Three months after its inauguration, the use of the fountain was surveyed over twelve hours. More than two thousand drinkers were recorded.
¹⁴
Judging by an illustration of a Liverpudlian fountain in 1856, the bold sensuality of the baroque fountains Melly viewed on his honeymoon was not replicated in his gift. Its utilitarian design was more no-nonsense English, than romantic European.

Ideologically, there was something radical about Charles Melly’s project. He was advocating that drinking water should be free, indignantly exclaiming that ’…although Liverpool’s domestic water supply was municipally owned and managed, not one drop of it was to be had without paying a water rate’.
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Melly compared the situation with Geneva: ‘There the water is the property of the town authorities, and is distributed by them to the citizens through the means of large public fountains, free of cost.’
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A capitalist promoting such a view about natural resources and profit making may seem surprising, however he was typical of many merchants for whom economic and religious philosophies ran on parallel tracks. As a Unitarian, Melly had a moral duty to do good deeds. The historian Howard Malchow points out that northern non-conformists, such as those of Unitarian faith, were also culturally wedded to promoting ‘cleanliness and sobriety’.
¹⁷

Melly appears to have convinced Liverpool’s municipal water supplier of the merits of free water. In just five years, the city was supplying water to forty of the merchant’s public fountains.
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Cities and towns such as Derby, Glasgow and Hull soon followed his lead, however London was still without such civic facilities. In 1858, Melly publicised his hydration achievements to an audience at the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. At the same event, W.F. Cowper also presented a
paper.
¹⁹
Cowper was an M.P. who had senior governmental roles in the development of education and health policies. He must have been convinced by the Liverpudlian’s arguments because the following year Cowper was instrumental in London’s public fountain movement. However, he was not the leader of the ambitious project. That role would fall to his fellow M.P. and personal associate Samuel Gurney.

In 1857, when he was in his early forties, Gurney took his seat for the first time in the Chamber of the House of Commons. Within a year, the civility and comfort of that gentlemanly environ was unsettled by the infamous ‘Great Stink’.

A Benevolent Banker

Although Gurney had been elected an M.P., he appeared to be more driven by his religious and moral convictions as a Quaker, rather than his political convictions. His time in Westminster did not cause much of a stir but his impact on the philanthropic sphere would be significant.

The name Gurney is historically associated with both Quakerism and banking. Quakers numbered less than fourteen thousand people in Britain in 1861 yet their influence in business was disproportionate to the size of this community.
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Without Quaker entrepreneurship, Barclays bank or Cadburys would not exist. Quakers, or the Society of Friends, did not accept the doctrine of the Anglican Church of England. Their belief that God, or the spirit, resides within each person, without the need for an external intermediary was considered to be radical. For one, it challenged the need for powerful male leaders. Quakers were branded, with other Christian minorities, such as Unitarians, as non-conformists. By Samuel Gurney’s time, the ban on the open worshipping of the ‘peculiar people’, as they were also known, had been lifted.

One benefit from the Quakers historical marginalisation was the development of a strong kinship network, which preserved
their religious culture. Known amongst themselves as Friends or Cousins, this community embraced members of their own faith through extended family networks, both nationally and internationally.
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The economic, moral and spiritual flow of support from this social network created a fertile ground for Quaker-run businesses to flourish.
²²
Whilst most Quakers were ordinary middle-class folk, a group of highly successful industrial innovators and financiers, of whom Samuel Gurney was one, formed an elite group of Friends. Whilst the mantra of free trade they advocated kept the profits rolling in, a Quaker businessman also had to be involved in good works which were the outward signs of a man’s sanctification.
²³
The wave of social reform sweeping through Victorian Britain in the mid-nineteenth century provided a perfect vehicle for wealth to be channelled, visibly, into charitable Christian deeds.

Quakers were also active in the temperance movement, through which they participated in a broader social and religious sphere of respectability. Charles Melly’s fountains were featured in a popular temperance publication, the
British Workman’s Almanac
in 1858. The Almanac provided a calendar of monthly prayer, verse and illustrations to help working people keep themselves on an honest, sober path.
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In the midst of these pages, a labourer and two male youths were shown drinking from ladles at a fountain in a northern city. The brief accompanying article proclaimed that a metropolitan equivalent was needed.

Literature of this nature was endorsed by London’s own network of temperance supporters. In November 1858, a letter by Samuel Gurney was published in the London newspaper, the
Morning Chronicle
. It was penned from number 25 Lombard Street, where his family bill broker firm was based. This lengthy quote from the letter importantly clarifies Gurney’s motivations: ‘I have long been sensible to the great public want there is of drinking fountains in London. As the case now stands, there is
little choice for the wayfaring poor between actual thirst and the quenching of it with beverages supplied at public-houses…In Liverpool, where, through the wisely-directed liberality of Mr Melly, free public drinking fountains have been erected…There can be no reasonable doubt but that drinking fountains, similarly distributed throughout the leading metropolitan thoroughfares, would confer an immense boon on the poorer classes…with a view of commencing the movement in London, I caused a respectful memorial to be addressed to the vestry of St Pancras, requesting permission to erect a public drinking fountain near King’s Cross Railway station, at my own expense.’
²⁵

Gurney then proceeded to vent his frustration at the vestry of St Pancras’ subsequent refusal to entertain the idea. He suggested that publicising its opposition would rouse more ‘“enlightened”’ supporters.
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The philanthropist was already on a mission, but it was obviously one designed to dispense sobriety as opposed to social justice. He announced that he was about to make similar offers to other vestries. The negotiations with the proprietors of the land, where fountains might best serve Gurney’s proposed target users, were underway.

If the vestry of St Pancras was not convinced, other prominent people rapidly endorsed his proposal. ‘What is good in Liverpool is good in London seems to be the dictate of Mr Gurney’s philosophy, and I think most Christian minds will pronounce it to be a sound one‘, wrote Mr H. Burdett Worthington.
²⁷
Professor Marks of Marylebone announced that his parish colleagues ‘would not be doing their duty if they did not…aid this noble project’.
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Such publicity also aroused the interest of a barrister, Edward Wakefield, who became Gurney’s key ally. Fortunately Wakefield was also a talented wordsmith. He penned
A Plea for Free Drinking Fountains (1859)
, which was instrumental in attracting the prestigious supporters in the competitive Victorian market for good causes.

Taking up Charles Melly’s radical baton, Wakefield argued
that water was a necessity for human life, no less than air. His attack on his own class asserted that ‘those who lead sedentary lives, or have always at hand the means of anticipating such wants, know little of the intensity of thirst generated by bodily exertion, especially in hot weather’.
²⁹
He reminded readers of John Snow’s discovery of polluted pump water and repeated the popular urban myth that decomposing matter from the bodies in London’s graveyards had infected the groundwater. Wakefield argued that fountains could help people to change their consuming habits and eventually cure the great national stigma of intemperance.