country if, by your book, you can only teach sanitary authorities generally that the crux of the whole question is the necessity for practical commonsense measures against sewage stagnation, and if those measures are taken nature will do the work of purification without the assistance of expensive patents or artificial devices.
Yours very truly,
(Signed) REDVERS BULLER.
To Col. A. S. Jones, V.C., C.E.
It must not be gathered from the foregoing account that the War Office authorities are prejudiced in favour of the natural treatment of sewage, for, like many other sanitary authorities, they have been bewildered of late years by the numerous forms of “artificial” treatment in vogue, and I know of more than one experimental installation for barracks where good available land has been neglected, for I read last summer of ghastly failures among the bacterial arrangements in some of those.
Success mainly due to activity of farm bailiff, foremen and other workers.
I cannot quit the above account of the vicissitudes of the Camp Farm in fourteen years’ growth from a sandy waste to a condition which tempted a tenant to pay a rent of 3l. odd per acre in 1880—its retrogression to its primitive waste during the following fifteen years—and restoration to its present measure of fertility, without expressing the belief that Mr. Blackburn’s success and my own have been mainly due to our good fortune in obtaining the willing services of excellent intelligent foremen and workers who, one and all, have taken a real interest in their several tasks.
Mr. Cameron and other engineers may boast of their labour saving (?) automatic appliances for opening and shutting valves on sewage works, but practical workers, responsible for dealing with a million gallons a day and
upwards average, in hourly varying flow of town sewage, will agree with me in hesitation as to placing entire confidence in the substitution of automatic machines for any large proportion of their manual labour.
Education and encouragement of sewage employees advocated.
I have for many years advocated education of sewage farm managers and watermen, to be selected from the rapidly decreasing class of agricultural labourers by the tender of high wages, houses and good gardens, with other profit-sharing allowances which it will well pay sanitary authorities to hold out to their sewage employees.