Many of the Vestries and District Boards were not only not above reproach, but were strongly to be condemned.
Sir Charles Dilke, then President of the Local Government Board, speaking in 1883, said:—
“There were some parishes in London which had very zealously tried to work the existing law, but, on the other hand, there were more parishes the government of which was a flagrant scandal.”
And Mr. Chamberlain, in an article in the Fortnightly Review of December, 1883, wrote:—
“In the metropolis, where the evil is greatest, the want of an efficient and thoroughly representative municipal government stands in the way of reform.
“The Vestries, often in the hands of cliques and chosen at elections which excite no public interest, are largely composed of small house-property owners, who cannot be expected to be enthusiastic in putting the law in force against themselves.”
And in the House of Commons, on the 4th of March, 1884, Sir Charles Dilke stated that—
“In Clerkenwell, the two joint dictators of the parish, who had control of the Vestry and its leading Committee, one of them being Chairman of the principal Committee, were the largest owners in the whole district of Clerkenwell of bad or doubtful property…. In Clerkenwell there were fourteen house-farmers on the Vestry and twelve publicans who seemed to work very much with them.”
Nothing more decisively demonstrates the hostility of the Vestries to the Act of 1866, indeed to all this branch of sanitary reform, than the fact that they would not make adequate provision for the performance of the sanitary duties imposed on them by divers Acts of Parliament.
A return compiled by the Medical Officer of Health for Bethnal Green in 1885, from information supplied him by the Medical Officers of Health of thirty-eight Vestries, shows how the local sanitary authorities crippled sanitary work by a wholly inadequate staff of Inspectors.