But by many Vestries the duty had been either entirely neglected or very imperfectly performed.
The Medical Officers of Health were unceasing in pressing upon their employers the necessity of inspection.
“It is only by the constant inspection and re-inspection of property inhabited by tenants of this class (tenement-houses) that the houses can be kept in decent sanitary condition,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Bethnal Green.
“My opinion of the value of regular house-to-house inspection throughout the year,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Poplar, “is more confirmed than ever, and that such is needed for the proper sanitary supervision of the district.”
“It is by constant inspection,” wrote another Medical Officer of Health, “that the Vestry can best do its duty in preserving the lives and health of its parishioners.”
“Facts are stubborn things,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for St. Mary, Newington, after 28 years’ sanitary work himself, “and they clearly demonstrate the necessity for a continual supervision of the dwellings of the poor (more especially) and for as constant an attack on all removable insanitary conditions. This after all is the real work to be done.”
But the Vestries and District Boards paid little heed to this advice.
Naturally, inspection was not welcome to sanitary defaulters or misdoers; naturally, the light of the sanitary policeman’s lantern into the dark places of slum-owners and ‘house-knackers’ was resented. It was an invasion of the rights of property, of the privacy of an Englishman’s home, even if he did not live in that home himself, but let it to somebody else to live in. “Why should not a man do as he liked with his own?”
And so, as inspection was, from the house “owners’” point of view, an unpopular thing, too much money was not spent by Vestries upon Sanitary Inspectors’ salaries, and even in the best inspected parishes or districts the portion inspected was small indeed compared with the whole of the parish or district. How much was left undone, and left undone for years, was proved over and over again by whole areas being represented by their Medical Officers of Health as insanitary, or by their having to shut up houses as unfit for human habitation.
The attempt made by Parliament in 1866—in the scheme embodied in the 35th Section of the Sanitary Act—to provide a remedy for overcrowding, and to secure the maintenance of a moderate standard of cleanliness and sanitation in the tenement-houses, had been an excellent one; and Parliament improved the scheme in 1874 by extending its scope. Almost the whole of the existing evils lay in these tenement-houses, for it was there where the great mass of the disease, filth, and misery of London was to be found, and there where the greatest overcrowding, and the deepest moral and physical degradation existed.