Let the maids bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport ‘Good-night;’
And next morrow ev’ry one
To his own vocation.”
When Herrick wrote these lines, I do not know how it may have been at Dean Priors, but London was but indifferently supplied with water. But now London is supplied with water from eight different sources. Five of them are on the north, or Middlesex, side of London, three on the Southwark and Surrey side. The first comprise the New River, at Islington; the East London, at Old Ford, on the Lea; the West Middlesex, on the Thames, at Brentford and Hammersmith; and the Chelsea and Grand Junction, on the same river, at Chelsea. The south side is entirely supplied from the Thames, by the Southwark, Lambeth, and Vauxhall Waterworks, whose names are descriptive of their locality.
The daily supply amounts to about 35,000,000 of gallons, of which more than a third is supplied by the New River Company. The original projector of this Company was Sir Hugh Myddelton, who proposed to supply the London conduits from the wells about Amwell and Ware. The project was completed in 1613, to the benefit of posterity and the ruin of the projector. The old hundred-pound shares are now worth ten times their original cost.
In 1682 the private houses of the metropolis were only supplied with fresh water twice a week. Mr. Cunningham, in his “Handbook of London,” informs us that the old sources of supply were the Wells, or Fleet River, Wallbrook and Langbourne Waters, Clement’s, Clerk’s, and Holy Well, Tyburn, and the River Lea. Tyburn first supplied the City in the year 1285, the Thames not being pressed into the service of the City conduits till 1568, when it supplied the conduit at Dowgate. There were people who stole water from the pipes then, as there are who steal gas now. “This yere,” (1479,) writes an old chronicler of London, quoted by Mr. Cunningham, “a wax-charndler in Flete Strete had bi craft perced a pipe of the condite withynne the ground, and so conveied the water into his selar; wherefore he was judged to ride thurgh the Citee with a condite upon his hedde.” The first engine which conveyed water into private houses, by leaden pipes, was erected at London Bridge, in 1582. The pipes were laid over the steeple of St. Magnus; and the engineer was Maurice, a Dutchman. Bulmer, an Englishman, erected a second engine, at Broken Wharf. Previous to 1656, the Strand and Covent Garden, though so near to the river, were only supplied by water-tankards, which were carried by those who sold the water, or by the apprentice, if there were one in the house, whose duty it was to fill the house-tankard at the conduit, or in the river. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Ford erected water-works on the Thames, in front of Somerset House; but the Queen of Charles II.—like the Princess Borghese, who pulled down a church next to her palace, because the incense turned her sick, and the organ made her head ache—ordered the works to be demolished, because they obstructed a clear view on the river. The inhabitants of the district depended upon their tankards and water-carriers, until the reign of William III., when the York-buildings Waterworks were erected. The frequently-occurring name of Conduit-street, or Conduit-court, indicates the whereabout of many of the old sources whence our forefathers drew their scanty supplies.
Water is not necessarily unhealthy, because of a little earthy matter in it; mineral, or animal, or vegetable matter held in it, by solution, or otherwise, renders it decidedly unwholesome. Rain water is the purest water, when it is to be had by its natural distillation in the open fields. When collected near towns, it should never be used without being previously boiled and strained.
The hardness of water is generally caused by the presence of sulphate of lime. Horses commonly refuse to drink hard water,—a water that can make neither good tea, nor good beer, and which frequently contains many salts. Soft water, which is a powerful solvent of all vegetable matters, is to be preferred for all domestic purposes. River water is seldom pure enough for drinking. Where purest, it has lost its carbonic acid from long exposure; and in the neighbourhood of cities it is often a slow poison, and nothing more, scarcely to be rescued from the name by the process of filtration. London is still supplied, at a very costly price, with water which is “offensive to the sight, disgusting to the imagination, and destructive to the health.” Thames water, as at present flowing into our houses, is at once the jackal and aide-de-camp of cholera. People are apt to praise it, as being the water from which is made the purest porter in the world; but it is a well-known fact, that the great London brewers never employ it for that purpose.