“It is now acknowledged,” wrote the Port Medical Officer of Health in his first report, “that, as a natural result of the insular position of the kingdom, and the vast extent of our commerce, the sanitary condition of shipping and of the floating population must exercise a considerable influence on the health of the country as regards the importation and transmission of epidemic diseases … the urgent advisability of using all means to prevent the introduction of disease into this the largest port in the world is sufficiently apparent.”
Hitherto the prevention of the importation of the various sorts of disease into London by vessels trading to the Port of London from all quarters of the world had been confided to the officers of Her Majesty’s Customs, and was of the most superficial and inadequate character.
The district assigned to the Port of London Sanitary Authority extended from Teddington Lock to the North Foreland, and was 88 miles in length. It included 8 sets of docks and 13 “creeks.”
In the section of river lying between London Bridge and Woolwich Arsenal Pier, about 10 miles in length, there was a constant average of no less than 400 vessels of all descriptions moored on both sides of the river, more than 90 per cent. of which had crews on board.
The creeks were more or less occupied by barges containing manure, street-sweepings, gas-liquor, bones and other varieties of foul cargoes, inasmuch as depôts for the storage of these materials existed on the banks.
And lying in the docks there was an average of between six to seven hundred vessels, over none of which had the sanitary authorities on the sides of the river any control whatever.
This was a most unsatisfactory condition of things, and left London open to the practically unchecked importation of infectious and contagious disease of every kind.
By “Provisional Order” of the Local Government Board, the Corporation of London was constituted the Sanitary Authority of the Port of London,[126] and was made responsible not only for taking proper steps, under Orders in Council, to prevent the introduction of cholera, but was required also to carry out, within its allotted area, the provisions of the various Nuisances Removal Acts and Prevention of Diseases Acts for England, and the Sanitary Act of 1866.
Its authority extended only to things afloat. Whatever was landed came within the province of the local Sanitary Authority, except things landed in the docks, and things “in bond,” which were under the control of Her Majesty’s Customs.