“1435. Then if that has occurred in the midst of your district, it is a matter you never heard of?—Just so.
“1436. Do you know Baker’s-Arms-alley?—That is in the parish of Hackney; that is in our district; but it is a very open place.
“1437. If it is the fact that there is a narrow court with a dead wall about two yards from the houses, as high as the houses; that the principal court is intersected by other courts extremely narrow, in which it is scarcely possible for air to penetrate close to the dead wall; that between the wall and the houses there is a gutter, in which is always present a quantity of stagnant fluid full of all sorts of putrefying matter, the effluvia from which are most offensive, and the sense of closeness extreme; that all the houses are dark, gloomy, and extremely filthy; that at the top of the innermost courts are the privies, which are open and uncovered, the soil of which is seldom removed, and the stench of which is abominable; you have not heard of that?—No, I have not heard of any of those circumstances; I have heard of very few complaints of fever in the Tower Hamlets.
“1440. Do you not recollect that there are most fearful accounts of fever prevailing in that district?—No, I had a report sent to me, which I understood came from Dr. Southwood Smith, and there was a communication I think from the Secretary of State upon it.”
At the very time that this witness had heard of few complaints of fever in the Tower Hamlets, the Board found themselves compelled, on account of the appalling prevalence of fever amongst the poor resident in that district, to direct the special inquiry by Dr. Arnott, Dr. Kay, and Dr. Southwood Smith, as to the causes of the fever which led to the present extended inquiry. The description given in the question of the narrow court, with the dead wall about two yards from the houses was taken from one of those reports. That self-same court was the Bakers’-Arms alley, named in the preceding question; but instead of being situate, as described by the witness, in the parish of Hackney, two or three miles from the office of the Commissioners of Sewers, it is in Rosemary-lane, distant from that office only the length of a street, and that not a very long one—Leman-street.
On the subject of the escapes of gas from the sewers there is no one point on which medical men are so clearly agreed, as on the connexion of exposure of persons to the miasma from sewers, and of fever as a consequence. It appears that the evils of these escapes, on which several medical men to whose testimony we have alluded gave evidence before the Committee of 1834, may be prevented, and one of them prepared a plan for this purpose. He states that the Commissioners having expressed their doubts as to whether they were justified in trying the experiment at the public expense, he said—
“Very well, gentlemen, I suppose you are quite right there; I will enter into an undertaking with you to do it at my own expense, to a limited extent, in any part that the surveyor of the sewers will say he thinks it will fail; at the worst part that he can point out I will try it; and moreover, in that undertaking I engaged to replace the things in statu quo if they failed. I entered into that understanding, and, as I was given to understand, the parish sent their bond, with a copy of the request, to the Commissioners. Some time elapsed and I heard nothing of it, and in fact I thought the thing was so simple, and as I heard nothing to the contrary, I began to make inquiries as to getting these traps cast, when one morning the parish surveyor brought me the model back, with a verbal message, which was, that ‘whether it would answer or not, it should not be tried;’ the Commissioners had made up their minds that the stink should not be kept down.”
The reply made to this before the Committee on behalf of the Commissioners, by one of the officers, was, “The sewers must have vent somewhere; if you stop the vent in the street, it will penetrate into the houses; also the danger from the gas-explosions are continually taking place, and our people are frequently sent to the hospital. Our surveyor can show a specimen of an entire new skin to his hand, and he had an entire new skin to his face, and laid up in a very dangerous state. This was from an explosion in the sewers. This is a danger the Commissioners must of necessity look to.” “The gas always ascends from its lightness. If the air-trap was put at the upper end of the gully-drain, that would be the place where the gas would lodge, and any candle brought near to this outlet into the upper part would occasion an explosion.”
Now it is precisely because “the gas always ascends from its lightness” that men of competent science declare, without reference to the particular plan proposed in this instance, that by means of a shaft or chimney properly placed, private houses as well as the workmen may be relieved from the dangers of the escapes of this gas, which is becoming more deleterious from the increasing drainage from private houses as well as from the escapes of gas from the gas-pipes, into the sewers of which very strong instances are stated in the evidence.
In the map of Leeds, where the cholera track is pourtrayed, it will be observed that it followed closely the fever track; and were such maps so far improved as to show at a view the condition of a district in respect to dwelling and drainage, the marks to denote sites where the drainage was imperfect would at the same time denote the seats of epidemic disease. This had been so far observed by medical men that there was, perhaps, no point on which they were more anxious and urgent than that increased sewerage and cleansing should be adopted as preventives of the cholera. Yet in one extensive densely populated district, the Commissioners, because they had observed no effects on their own men, who were accustomed to the sewers, took upon themselves to disregard all the precautions advised by persons of complete knowledge. “At the time of the cholera the arching over the sewers was very much applied for” in the Ravensbourne Commission; “but,” says the officer of the commission, “I do not think there was anything done on account of the cholera, because the court held a different feeling on that point. Out of all the men employed by the Commissioners of Sewers, and who were constantly in those sewers, there was not one of those attacked by the cholera.”