The Sanitary Evolution of London

by Henry Jephson

IV

The great cholera epidemic of 1848–9 had deeply stirred public feeling in London. It had destroyed 14,600 people (and diarrhœa, its satellite, had destroyed many thousands more), and it had been “accompanied by an amount of sickness and physical misery beyond computation.” But even all its horrors, and all the proofs it afforded of the desperately insanitary condition of the masses in the metropolis, were not sufficient to induce the Government to depart from its policy of neglect, or to wring from Parliament measures which would lay the basis for the alleviation of the sufferings of the working population of the metropolis, or which would remove even a small part of the evils which fell so heavily upon those least able to sustain them, and least able to remove them.

The health of London was becoming worse every year. The number of persons dying from preventable disease had been steadily increasing.

One gleam of hope there was, however. An increasing number of persons were becoming interested in the health of the people, and were awakening to the gravity of the subject, and to the public discredit and inhuman scandal of the existing condition of things—an awakening of interest which, in February, 1850, reached to the extent of a public meeting.

The Bishop of London presided, and the meeting was rendered the more remarkable by speeches from Lord Ashley, then actively pressing sanitary and social questions forward, and by Charles Dickens.

Lord Ashley said:—

“The condition of the metropolis, in a sanitary point of view, was not only perilous to those who resided in it, but it was an absolute disgrace to the century in which they lived. It was a disgrace to their high-sounding professions of civilisation and morality. They were surrounded by every noxious influence—they were exposed to every deadly pestilence…. The water they drank, the air they breathed, the surface they walked on, and the ground beneath the surface, all were tainted and rife with the seeds of disease and death….

“Let them look at another abomination—the existence of putrefying corpses in graveyards and in vaults amidst the habitations of the living—an abomination discountenanced by all the civilisation of modern days, as it was by that of the ancient days—the practice of intramural interments.

“Could anything be worse than the graveyards of the metropolis? Under a surface of ground not amounting to 250 acres there had been interred within thirty years in the metropolis far more than 1,500,000 human beings. What must be the condition of the atmosphere affected by the exhalations from that surface?…

“And what were the financial and social consequences of allowing such a state of things to exist?

“At least one-third of the pauperism of the country arose from the defective sanitary condition of large multitudes of the people….”

Charles Dickens said:—

“The object of the resolution he was proposing was to bring the Metropolis within the provisions of the Public Health Act, most absurdly and monstrously excluded from its operation…. Infancy was made stunted, ugly, and full of pain; maturity made old; and old age imbecile.

“He knew of many places in London unsurpassed in the accumulated horrors of their long neglect by the dirtiest old spots in the dirtiest old towns under the worst old governments in Europe.

“The principal objectors to the improvements proposed were divided into two classes.

“The first consisted of the owners of small tenements, men who pushed themselves to the front of Boards of Guardians and parish Vestries, and were clamorous about the rating of their property; the other class was composed of gentlemen, more independent and less selfish, who had a weak leaning towards self-government. The first class generally proceeded upon the supposition that the compulsory improvement of their property when exceedingly defective would be very expensive….

“No one,” he went on to say, “who had any knowledge of the poor could fail to be deeply affected by their patience and their sympathy with one another—by the beautiful alacrity with which they helped each other in toil, in the day of suffering, in the hour of death.

“It hardly ever happened that any case of extreme protracted destitution found its way into the public prints without our reading at the same time of some ragged Samaritan sharing his last loaf or spending his last penny to relieve the poor miserable in the room upstairs or in the cellar underground. It was to develop in the poor people the virtue which nothing could eradicate, to raise them in the social scale as they should be raised, to lift them from a condition into which they did not allow their beast to sink, … to cleanse the foul air for the passage of Christianity and education throughout the land, that the meeting was assembled. The object of their assembly was simply to help to set that right which was wrong before God and before man.”

The realisation of this object, noble as it was, was not easily attainable.

The Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields said that “the difficulty of legislation in these matters was to hit the medium between the rights of property and the rights of humanity.” He might have added, with truth, that the difficulty had so far been met by sacrificing the rights of humanity to the rights of property.

Lord Ashley had pointed out that they “had to contend with ignorance, indifference, selfishness, and interest;” or as Lord Robert Grosvenor more vigorously expressed it, in a phrase which should live in history as giving the key to the mystery of the slow sanitary evolution of this great city, they had to contend against “vested interests in filth and dirt.”

One thing was already absolutely clear, that it was hopeless to expect anything from the spontaneous action of land-owners or house-owners.

“They knew it was quite impossible,” said the Bishop of Chichester, “to bring the owners of even one small court or alley, much less the owners or occupiers of any large district, to concur in any measure for the general good of their particular locality.”

The fact was that nothing but the imperative directions of the law would secure the removal of evils or curtail the practice of infamous abuses—and even when the law was enacted for their remedy, nothing but its rigorous enforcement with adequate penalties would make it effective.

As the result of the meeting, a deputation waited on Lord John Russell, the then Prime Minister. His reply was not encouraging.

“In this city,” he said, “there is very naturally and properly great jealousy of any interference either with local rights or individual will and freedom from control.”

That great jealousy proved to be so powerful that nothing was attempted by the Government except an abortive effort to deal with the loathsome and insanitary evils of intramural interments where vested interests were neither powerful nor loud voiced.

The Act was so defective that it never came into operation, and two more years elapsed before the Government again essayed to deal with the subject. And in the meanwhile that most horrible evil was permitted to work its will upon the dwellers in the metropolis.

To the enthusiasm of an individual, and not of the Government, was due the first effective attempt to grapple with one of the widespread, deep-seated evils which were working such havoc among the people. The most disastrous and vicious forms of overcrowding were at the time to be found in the so-called Common Lodging Houses—the sink of insanitary abominations.

These were the temporary and casual abodes of the dregs of London humanity—of the tramps, and the unfortunates, and the mendicants and criminals, male and female—when they could afford the penny or pence to pay for their night’s lodging. In most cases these houses were low brothels and hotbeds of crime and moral degeneracy, their foul and filthy condition making them great sources and propagators of contagious and loathsome diseases.

In the “City” the authorities had power to regulate and control them. Not so, however, in the metropolis. There, no one had any authority in the matter, nor was there any authority for any one to have.

Lord Ashley, truly discerning that the one and only way of dealing with this evil was by regulation and constraint, introduced a Bill[43] and actually carried it through Parliament, and two years later got another Act[44] embodying amendments which made it more effective.

What the Common Lodging House owner or keeper—anxious to secure the utmost profits from his property and regardless of all consequences to others—would not do, he was, by those Acts, made to do.

The houses which he devoted to this purpose, solely for his own profit, were placed under the control and inspection of the police, and had to be registered as “Common Lodging Houses.” Overcrowding in them was checked by restricting the number of inmates who might be in each room; regulations (confirmed by a Secretary of State) were made, and steadily enforced, for the separation of the sexes; for the proper cleansing of the houses; and for compelling the keeper to give immediate notice of fever or any contagious or infectious disease occurring therein. The accumulation of refuse was to be prevented, and provision had to be made for adequate sanitary accommodation, for better drainage, and for sufficient water supply.

A very brief experience showed that great practical benefits resulted from thus regulating these houses, and the amount of sickness and mortality in them became astonishingly small, considering the character of their inmates and the localities where they were situated; and inasmuch as the number of such houses was nearly 5,000, and the population in them about 80,000, the benefit was a really substantial one.

How obstinate and pertinacious was the opposition of house-owners, or middlemen, to regulation and supervision of any kind is illustrated by a case reported by the Assistant Police Commissioner.[45] The owner of certain premises in St. Giles’ had been often applied to, without success, to remedy some gross sanitary defects therein which had resulted in the loss of life by fever. Brought to bay at last, at the Police Court, and ordered to remedy the evil, he said that he was willing to do all in his power to abate the nuisance … but, “he thought he ought not to be dictated to as to the way his property was to be managed.” His words embodied the predominant spirit of the time. “There are,” wrote the Assistant Police Commissioner in commenting upon this case, “owners of property whom nothing but the strong arm of the law can move.”

Unfortunately the Act did not go far enough. Single rooms occupied by families did not come within its scope. They constituted an enormous proportion of the habitations of the people, and they were allowed to continue the prolific cause of sanitary evils and of physical and moral degradation.

Limited in its scope though the Act was, it afforded nevertheless one great object lesson—the lesson which since that time has been consistently preached by all who had actual experience as regarded the sanitary condition of the people of London—the lesson that the worst of the sanitary and social evils could only be effectually grappled with, on the one side by the supervision and regulation and constant inspection of the houses in which the poorer classes lived, and upon the other side by insistent compulsion of house-owners to maintain a certain standard of sanitation and cleanliness in those houses.

That, however, was a course which Parliament for many years did not think it desirable to adopt, and which, when adopted in a tentative and half-hearted sort of way, suffered the usual fate of sanitary legislation—that of being neglected, opposed, evaded, or thwarted by land-owners, house-owners, middlemen, and by hostile local authorities.

Lord Ashley also originated and succeeded in the same Session in obtaining from Parliament another Act of notable interest, namely, “The Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act,”[46] which aimed at increasing the quantity of houses for working men by facilitating the establishment of well-ordered houses for such persons.

It gave power to vestries to adopt the Act, and thereafter to purchase or lease land, and to erect houses thereon for the working classes, and to borrow money on the security of the rates for this purpose.

In advocating his plan in the House of Commons he enforced the importance of the reform. He said:—

“Until the domiciliary condition of the working classes were Christianised (he could use no less forcible a term) all hope of moral or social improvement was utterly vain. Though not the sole, it was one of the prime sources of the evils that beset their condition; it generated disease, ruined whole families by the intemperance it promoted, cut off or crippled thousands in the vigour of life, and filled the workhouses with widows and orphans.”[47]

He specially mentioned one of the objections urged to this proposal for the construction of better houses—an objection which since then has invariably found expression when any amelioration of the housing of the working classes has been proposed to be done by a public authority.

“It was said those matters ought to be left to private speculation. He should much object to that. Private speculation was very much confined to the construction of the smallest houses, and of the lowest possible description, because it was out of these the most inordinate profits could be made. Private speculation was almost entirely in that direction.”

He might have added that “private speculation” had hitherto had a completely free field in the sphere of housing, with all the evil results visible before them, and that it had aggravated and intensified the evil instead of removing or mitigating it.

The debate in Parliament was interesting, as it drew from the Home Secretary an expression of the Government view of the situation.

“After all,” said Sir G. Grey, “it was not to the Government, it was rather to the efforts of individuals, and associations of individuals, that they must look for real and general improvement among the great body of the people. All that the Government could do was to remove obstacles in the way, and to present facilities by modifications of the law more useful than direct legislation.”[48]

An “association of individuals” had already been formed—“The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes”—and work of this class had to the extent of over £20,000 been carried out by it. The new piles of buildings erected were eagerly availed of by people of the working classes, and in a sanitary point of view they at once demonstrated their very satisfactory immunity from disease.

The Act, however, being a voluntary or adoptive Act, was not likely to be adopted and put into force by those by whom a certain amount of financial liability might be incurred as the result. As a matter of fact it never was put in force by any vestry, and it remained a dead letter.

It was memorable, however, as embodying for the first time in legislation the idea that the housing of the people was a public matter with which a public authority might properly concern itself, even to the extent of competing with private enterprise, and pledging the rates as security.

The supply of water to London, both as regarded quality and quantity, had, since the epidemic of 1848–9, been engaging the attention of Committees of Parliament, the belief that the epidemic of cholera had been increased and propagated by the filthy and impure water having given an impetus to the demand for ameliorative measures. In 1852 an Act[49] was passed by which the companies taking their water from the Thames were required to remove their intakes to some place above Teddington Lock, where the tide would not affect it, and the sewage of London would not be intermixed with it. This was a considerable step in the right direction, for though the river above Teddington Lock received the sewage of many large towns and villages, it was at least free from contamination by the sewage and filth of the metropolis.

Other improvements were also enacted. Reservoirs within a certain distance of St. Paul’s Cathedral were to be covered in, and all water intended for domestic use was to be filtered before being supplied to the consumer; and provision was also made for a constant supply of water by every company within five years after the passing of the Act.

But the companies were given five years within which to effect the removal of the intake from the foulest parts of the river to above tidal reach—and thus for a wholly unnecessary term the cause which had wrought such havoc among the people was permitted to continue its disastrous effects.