III
The “City” of London, though constituting territorially and by population but a small portion of the metropolis, affords much matter of deep interest in connection with the sanitary evolution of London, totally apart from those great economic forces emanating from it which have dominated the whole of London life.
The “City” differed mainly, as has already been pointed out, from “greater London” in that it had a real and active governing body for its local affairs, and that that body was possessed of considerable powers for dealing with the sanitary condition and requirements of its inhabitants. That those sanitary powers were annually delegated to a body entitled the Commissioners of Sewers in no way diminished its sanitary authority or weakened its efficiency, for that body was practically a Committee of its own, and had authority, directly or indirectly, over nearly every one of the physical conditions which were likely to affect the health or comfort of its inhabitants.
The “City” differed also in that it was able to obtain from the Government and Parliament powers which neither Government nor Parliament would grant to “greater London.”
It differed too in that from 1848 onwards it was in beneficial enjoyment of the services of a Medical Officer of Health.
But in many respects the “City” was a microcosm of the metropolis; and though possessed of a local government, yet was it cursed with evils which were the terrible legacy left it by the ignorance, indifference, neglect, incapacity, or cupidity, of previous generations.
The graphic reports of its Medical Officer of Health—Dr. John Simon—have left us a most vivid and valuable contemporary picture of the sanitary condition and surroundings of the people living in the favoured area about the middle of the last century, and they disclose, in no hesitating manner, the desperate evils prevalent therein.
The Thames, “with the immeasurable filth” which polluted it, and its acres of mud banks saturated with the reeking sewage of an immense population, vitiated the atmosphere of the City, just as it did that of other parts of London. But sewers there were in the City, of one sort or another, over forty miles of them, and some of the filth of the City was carried away, at least into the river.
House drainage into the sewers was, however, either lamentably deficient or non-existent, and cesspools abounded—abounded so freely that “parts of the City might be described as having a cesspool-city excavated beneath it.”
“It requires,” reported Dr. Simon to his employers, “little medical knowledge to understand that animals will scarcely thrive in an atmosphere of their own decomposing excrements; yet such, strictly and literally speaking, is the air which a very large proportion of the inhabitants of the City are condemned to breathe…. In some instances, where the basement storey of a house is tenanted, the cesspool lies, perhaps merely boarded over, close beneath the feet of a family of human beings whom it surrounds uninterruptedly, whether they wake or sleep, with its fœtid pollution and poison.”
For such evils, and such a state of things, he said, house drainage, with effective water supply, were the remedies which could alone avail; and it was only in the Session of 1848 that the authority to secure and enforce these remedies was vested by the Legislature in any public body whatsoever. The City was fortunately included, but the metropolis, with its two and a half millions of inhabitants, was unfortunately not.
The unrestricted supply of water, he pointed out, was the first essential of decency, of comfort, and of health; no civilisation of the poorer classes could exist without it; and any limitation to its use in the metropolis was a barrier which must maintain thousands in a state of the most unwholesome filth and degradation.
Even in the City, however, the supply of water was but “a fraction of what it should have been, and thousands of the population inhabited houses which had no supply of it.”
Nor was what was supplied by the Water Companies much to boast of.
“The waters were conducted from their sources in open channels; they received in a large measure the surface-washing, the drainage, and even the sewage of the country through which they passed; they derived casual impurities from bathers and barges, and on their arrival were, after a short subsidence in reservoirs, distributed without filtration to the public.”
In some cases the scanty distribution was from a stand-pipe in a court or alley, for a very short time of the day. In other cases the water was delivered into butts or cisterns. Their condition is thus described:—
“In inspecting the courts and alleys of the ‘City,’” he wrote, “one constantly sees butts, for the reception of water, either public or in the open yards of houses, or sometimes in their cellars; and these butts, dirty, mouldering, and coverless; receiving soot and all other impurities from the air; absorbing stench from the adjacent cesspool; inviting filth from insects, vermin, sparrows, cats, and children; their contents often augmented through a rain-water pipe by the washings of the roof, and every hour becoming fustier and more offensive. Nothing can be less like what water should be than the fluid obtained under such circumstances.”
It is interesting to observe that the evils of the system of water supply by private companies were, even in the “City,” so manifest that Dr. Simon expressed his opinion that the only satisfactory solution of the difficulty in connection therewith was the acquisition by the public authority of the control of the supply, and he urged the adoption of the principle of what is now denounced by some people as “municipal trading.”
In every practical sense the sale of water in London was a monopoly.
“The individual customer,” wrote Dr. Simon, “who is dissatisfied with his bargain can go to no other market; and however legitimate may be his claim to be supplied with this prime necessary of life at its cheapest rate, in the most efficient manner, and of the best possible quality, your Honourable Court (the Commissioners of Sewers) hitherto possesses no power to enforce it.”
In the Public Health Act of 1848 the principle had been recognised by Parliament so far as towns in the country were concerned—local Boards of Health being authorised to provide their district with such a supply of water as might be proper or sufficient, or to contract for such a supply. He urged that the City should obtain a similar power.
“All the advantages which could possibly be gained by competition, together with many benefits which no competition could ensure, would thus be realised to the population under your charge.”
But that solution of the difficulty was more than half a century in advance of its accomplishment so far as either the “City” or “greater London” was concerned.
As to the atmosphere in the “City,” there seems to have been no limit to the pollutions thereof, all of which were injurious to the health of the public.
Numerous noxious and offensive trades were carried on in the most crowded places.
Directly and indirectly, slaughtering of animals in the “City” was prejudicial to the health of the population, and exercised a most injurious influence upon the district.
The number of slaughter-houses registered and tolerated in the “City” in 1848 amounted to 138, and of these, in 58 cases, the slaughtering was carried out in the vaults and cellars.[40]
And there were very many noxious and offensive trades in close dependence upon “the original nuisance” of the slaughter-house, and round about it, “the concomitant and still more grievous nuisances of gut-spinning, tripe-dressing, bone-boiling, tallow-melting, paunch-cooking, &c., &c.”
Certain it is that offensive businesses of these and other sorts were carried on by their owners with an absolute disregard to the comfort or health of the public.
The matter was a difficult one to deal with, as any severe restrictions might destroy the trade or manufacture and take away from the people the employment which gave them the means of earning a livelihood. Furthermore, such restrictions were usually resented as an infraction of personal liberty. Dr. Simon forcibly and conclusively answered this contention.
“It might,” he wrote, “be an infraction of personal liberty to interfere with a proprietor’s right to make offensive smells within the limits of his own tenement, and for his own separate inhalation, but surely it is a still greater infraction of personal liberty when the proprietor, entitled as he is to but the joint use of an atmosphere which is the common property of his neighbourhood, assumes what is equivalent to a sole possession of it, and claims the right of diffusing through it some nauseous effluvium which others, equally with himself, are thus obliged to inhale.”
Some improvement in this respect was rendered possible by the Act of 1851, which enacted that whatever trade or business might occasion noxious or offensive effluvia, or otherwise annoy the inhabitants of its neighbourhood, “shall” be required to employ the best known means for preventing or counteracting such annoyance.
But the remedy scarcely appears to have been availed of or enforced, and “greater London” was, as usual, excluded from the Act.
Another more constant pollution of the air was that resulting from intramural burial. “Overcrowding” in the “City” was not limited to the living; it extended even to the dead, and though the dead themselves had passed beyond any further possible harm from it, yet their overcrowding affected disastrously those they had left behind. Here the evils already described as existing in “greater London” existed also in acute form. Two thousand bodies or more were interred each year actually within the “City” area, and the burial grounds were densely packed. And “in all the larger parochial burying grounds, and in most others, the soil was saturated with animal matter undergoing slow decomposition.”
And the vaults beneath the churches were “in many instances similarly overloaded with materials of putrefaction, and the atmosphere which should have been kept pure and without admixture for the living, was hourly tainted with the fœtid emanations of the dead….”
In Dr. Simon’s words:—
“Close beneath the feet of those who attend the services of their church there often lies an almost solid pile of decomposing human remains, heaped as high as the vaulting will permit, and generally but very partially coffined.”
The Metropolitan Burials Act of 1852 effected a great improvement in this respect by putting a term to the indefinite perpetuation of this horrible evil. It gave the Secretary of State power to prohibit further intramural burials, and it gave the “City,” and other local authorities, the power to establish burial places beyond the boundaries of the metropolis. But, even when thus stopped, years had to elapse before the condition of intramural burial grounds and vaults would cease to vitiate the air around them.[41]
The atmosphere of the “City,” the air which people breathed, was thus vitiated in varying degrees of intensity by numerous and various abominations—the polluted Thames, defective sewerage and drainage, offensive trades, intramural interments.
As regards the houses in which the people lived, these were crammed together—packed as closely together as builders’ ingenuity could pack them—many of them combining every defect that houses could have, and so situated that ventilation was an impossibility.
“In very many parts of the City you find a number of courts, probably with very narrow inlets, diverging from the open street in such close succession that their backs adjoin, with no intermediate space whatsoever. Consequently each row of houses has but a single row of windows facing the confined court, and thus there is no possibility of ventilation, either through the court generally or through the houses which compose it…. Houses so constructed as to be as perfectly a cul-de-sac out of the court as the court is a cul-de-sac out of the street.”[42]
And the climax of insanitary conditions was reached when these densely-packed houses were overcrowded by human beings.
The process of converting dwelling-houses into warehouses, or business offices, or for trade or manufactures was in full swing—a constant force—and so the number of houses for people to live in became ever fewer.
And the “tenement houses,” in which the great bulk of the working classes lived, became more and more crowded; houses wherein “each holding or tenement, though very often consisting but of a single small room, receives its inmates without available restriction as to their sex or number, and without registration of the accommodation requisite for cleanliness, decency, and health.”
The Census of 1851 had shown an increase of over 4,200 in the population of the “City,” and a diminution of nearly 900 houses.
“Probably,” wrote Dr. Simon, “for the most part it represents the continued influx of a poor population into localities undesirable for residence, and implies that habitations previously unwholesome by their overcrowdedness are now still more densely thronged by a squalid and sickly population….
“It is no uncommon thing, in a room twelve feet square or less, to find three or four families styed together (perhaps with infectious disease among them), filling the same space night and day—men, women, and children, in the promiscuous intercourse of cattle. Of these inmates it is nearly superfluous to observe that in all offices of nature they are gregarious and public; that every instinct of personal or sexual decency is stifled; that every nakedness of life is uncovered there…. Who can wonder at what becomes, physically and morally, of infants begotten and born in these bestial crowds?…”
Of overcrowding or “pestilential heaping of human beings,” this matter of “infinite importance,” he wrote:—
“While it maintains physical filth that is indescribable, while it perpetuates fever and the allied disorders, while it creates mortality enough to mask the results of all your sanitary progress, its moral consequences are too dreadful to be detailed.”
Pursuing his masterly analysis of the sanitary condition of the people in the “City” and its causes, he wrote:—
“Last and not least among the influences prejudicial to health in the City, as elsewhere, must be reckoned the social condition of the working classes…. Often in discussion of sanitary subjects before your Honourable Court, the filthy, or slovenly, or improvident, or destructive, or intemperate, or dishonest habits of these classes are cited as an explanation of the inefficiency of measures designed for their advantage. It is constantly urged that to bring improved domestic arrangements within the reach of such persons is a waste and a folly.
“It is unquestionable that in houses containing all the sanitary evils enumerated—undrained and waterless, and unventilated—there do dwell whole hordes of persons who struggle so little in self-defence against that which surrounds them that they may be considered almost indifferent to its existence, or almost acclimated to endure its continuance.
“It is too true that among the lower classes there are swarms of men and women who have yet to learn that human beings should dwell differently from cattle—swarms to whom personal cleanliness is utterly unknown; swarms by whom delicacy and decency in their social relations are quite unconceived.
“My sphere of duty lies within the City boundary.
“I studiously refrain from instituting comparisons with other metropolitan localities.
“I feel the deepest conviction that no sanitary system can be adequate to the requirements of the time, or can cure those radical evils which infest the under framework of society, unless the importance be distinctly recognised and the duty manfully undertaken of improving the social condition of the poor….
“Who can wonder that the laws of society should at times be forgotten by those whom the eye of society habitually overlooks, and whom the heart of society often appears to discard?
“To my duty it alone belongs, in such respects, to tell you where disease ravages the people under your charge, and wherefore; but while I lift the curtain to show you this—a curtain which propriety may gladly leave unraised—you cannot but see that side by side with pestilence there stalks a deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous, and scattering, while Society averts her eyes, the retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence, and pauperism.”
And what was the physical result of this state of living?
“In some spots in the City you would see houses, courts, and streets, where the habitual proportion of deaths is far beyond the heaviest pestilence rate known for any metropolitan district aggregately—localities where the habitual rate of death is more appalling than any such averages can enable you to conceive.
“Among their dense population it is rare to see any other appearance than that of squalid sickness and misery, and the children who are reproduced with the fertility of a rabbit warren perish in early infancy.
“The diseases of these localities are well marked. Scrofula more or less completely blights all that are born … often prolonging itself as a hereditary curse in the misbegotten offspring of those who, under such unnatural conditions, attain to maturity and procreation.
“Typhus prevails as a habitual pestilence.
“The death rate during the last five years has been at the rate of about twenty-four per 1,000 per annum.
“The City of London appears peculiarly fatal to infant life.
“Of the 15,597 persons who died within your jurisdiction in the five years 1847–8 to 1852–3, nearly three-eighths died in the first five years of life.”
To his employers he mostly appeals. He hopes that the statements in his reports may suffice to convince them of the necessity which exists in the “City” of London for some effectual and permanent sanitary organisation.
“For the metropolis generally there is hitherto no sanitary law such as you possess for your territory.”
He pointed out that—
“Inspection of the most constant, most searching, most intelligent, and most trustworthy kind is that in which the provisional management of our said affairs must essentially consist.
“The committee was given power by the Act for the amendment or removal of houses presenting aggravated structural faults.
“Wherever your Medical Officer of Health may certify to you that any house or building is permanently unwholesome and unfit for human habitation, you are empowered to require of the owner (or in his neglect yourselves to undertake) the execution of whatever works may be requisite for rendering the house habitable with security to life.”
And he urged that:—
“The principle might be distinctly recognised that the City will not tolerate within its municipal jurisdiction the continuance of houses absolutely incompatible with healthy habitation.
“Here terminates my statement of the powers now vested in you for the maintenance of the public health.
“Authority so complete for this noble purpose has never before been delegated to any municipal body in the country.
“If the deliberate promises of Science be not an empty delusion, it is practicable to reduce human mortality within your jurisdiction to nearly the half of the present prevalence.”
The most valuable and weighty of all his conclusions was that affixing the responsibility for the existing mass of insanitation and consequent misery. With a courage worthy of all admiration he did not hesitate, regardless of the consequences to himself, to fix the responsibility and blame where they were due.
“The fact is that, except against wilful violence, life is very little cared for by the law.”
Of Parliament he wrote:—
“Fragments of legislation there are, indeed, in all directions; enough to establish precedents, enough to testify some half-conscious possession of a principle; but for usefulness little beyond this. The statutes tell that now and then there has reached to high places the wail of physical suffering. They tell that our law makers, to the tether of a very scanty knowledge, have, not unwillingly, moved to the redress of some clamorous wrong…. But … their insufficiencies constitute a national scandal, … something not far removed from a national sin….
“The landlord must be held responsible for the decent and wholesome condition of his property, and for such conduct of his tenants as will maintain that condition.”
The clear, precise, and unqualified enunciation of such a principle must have given a shock to many of the members of the governing authority of the “City,” and excited their wrath, the more especially as it was so absolutely sound and true.
“The death of a child by smallpox,” he went on to say, “would in most instances call for a verdict of ‘homicide by omission’ against the parent who had neglected daily opportunities of giving it immunity from that disease by the simple process of vaccination; the death of an adult by typhus would commonly justify still stronger condemnation (though with more difficulty of fixing and proportioning the particular responsibility) against those who ignore the duties of property, and who knowingly let for the occupation of the poor dwellings unfit even for brute tenants, dwellings absolutely incompatible with health.”
And then he proceeds to explain and justify and enlarge upon his assertion of the responsibility of the landlord.
“There are forty-five miles of sewerage in your jurisdiction, ready to receive the streams of private drainage, and leaving the owners of house property no excuse for the non-performance of necessary works…. But … the intentions of your Court, and the industry of its officers, have been in great measure frustrated by the passive resistance of landlords. Delays and subterfuges have been had recourse to in order to avoid compliance with the injunctions of the Commission.”
In his evidence before the Royal Commission of 1853–4 he said:—
“The poorer house property of the City is very often in the hands of wealthy people who have only the most general notion of its whereabouts, have perhaps never visited the place for which they receive rent, and in short know their property only through their agents.
“Instances have come to my knowledge of the very worst description of property being thus held ignorantly and carelessly by wealthy persons. Often for years we can get at no representative of the property other than the agent or collector who receives the weekly rent for some anonymous employer.”
In his third Report to the Commissioners of Sewers he wrote:—
“It is easy to foresee the numerous obstacles which interested persons will set before you to delay the accomplishment of your great task.
“When your orders are addressed to some owner of objectionable property—of some property which is a constant source of nuisance, or disease, or death; when you would force one person to refrain from tainting the general atmosphere with results of an offensive occupation; when you would oblige another to see that his tenantry are better housed than cattle, and that, while he takes rent for lodging, he shall not give fever as an equivalent—amid these proceedings you will be reminded of the ‘rights of property’ and of ‘an Englishman’s inviolable claim to do as he will with his own.’
“Permit me to remind you that your law makes full recognition of these principles and that the cases in which sophistical appeal will often be made to them are exactly those which are most completely condemned by a full and fair application of the principles adverted to. With private affairs you interfere only when they become of public import, with private liberty only when it becomes a public encroachment. The factory chimney that eclipses the light of heaven with unbroken clouds of smoke, the melting house that nauseates an entire parish, the slaughter-house that forms round itself a circle of dangerous disease—these surely are not private but public affairs.
“And how much more justly may the neighbour appeal to you against each such nuisance as an interference with his privacy; against the smoke, the stink, the fever that bursts through each inlet of his dwelling, intrudes on him at every hour, disturbs the enjoyment and shortens the duration of his life. And for the rights of property—they are not only pecuniary. Life, too, is a great property, and your Act (of 1851) asserts its rights.”
“The landlord of some overthronged lodging-house complains that to reduce the number of his tenantry, to lay on water, to erect privies, or to execute some other indispensable sanitary work, would diminish his rental—in the spirit of your Act it is held a sufficient reply that human life is at stake—and that a landlord in his dealings with the ignorant and indefensive poor cannot be suffered to estimate them at the value of cattle, to associate them in worse than bestial habits, or let to them for hire at however moderate a rent the certain occasions of suffering and death.”
“Seeing the punctuality with which weekly visitation is made for the collection of rents in these wretched dwellings it would not be unreasonable to insist on some regulations for the clean and wholesome condition of his premises, water supply, and scavenging, &c.”
Such a regulation would “render it indispensable to the landlord of such holdings to promote cleanly and decent habits among his tenants—even to obtain security for their good behaviour.”
The picture thus presented of the sanitary condition of the people residing in the “City” about the middle of the last century is—it must be acknowledged—a terrible one; but it rests upon unimpeachable testimony.
The very grave and serious conclusion, however, follows from it—that if the evils were thus terrible in the “City,” with a comparatively small population, only a little more than a twentieth of that of the metropolis, and where there was a local government with wide powers for dealing with matters affecting the public health—how infinitely more serious was the condition of things in the “greater London” with its huge population, and where there was practically no local government, and no punitive law for insanitary misdoings and crimes.
In some degree, the evils the people suffered under were of their own making, though many excuses can be urged in extenuation. In some degree, too, the people were unquestionably the victims of circumstances. But in the main, they were the victims of other people’s iniquities. It was those circumstances which the Government should have altered, or, at any rate, have endeavoured to control or modify—it was the unlimited power to do evil that the Government should have checked and curbed; but “greater London” was virtually left outside the pale of remedial legislative treatment by Parliament.