A fair amount of drainage work was also carried out—thousands of cesspools were filled in and drains made. Also a certain amount of inspection, with the disclosure of an enormous amount of insanitation.
Thus, in the Strand District in 1856—where 813 houses were inspected—in 774, or 91 per cent. of these, works had to be done to remedy sanitary defects. In the following year 1,760 houses were inspected, and in 1,102 sanitary defects were found. In Poplar, of 1,299 houses which were visited, 795 required sanitary improvement. In Paddington 2,201 houses were inspected; in over 1,600 works had to be executed to put them in sanitary order; figures which showed that, roughly speaking, two out of every three houses were sanitarily defective.
“The last year,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Hackney (1857)—where 1,518 houses had been connected with the sewers—“has been a year of drainage.”
Parliament having enacted that the “owner” was responsible for the state of his property, this work had to be done at the expense of the owners; but how many decades had passed in which “owners” had spent nothing on the property, and had been receiving large rents; and how many cases of sickness and death had occurred in their houses, the result of the insanitary condition in which they had been allowed to fall, and in which they were allowed to continue.
In Holborn such works cost the owners about £3,400 in 1857, and in Lambeth about £10,700.
But the work thus chronicled touched little more than the fringe of the matter. Most of the local authorities had, out of a spirit of economy, or for some other reason, appointed only one Inspector of Nuisances; yet in nearly every one of their parishes there were thousands of houses—in Greenwich 11,000, in St. Marylebone 16,000, in Lambeth 22,000—and years would have had to elapse before the solitary inspector could have completed even one round of inspection and got the houses he inspected put in order; whilst the others would inevitably have been existing in, or falling into, a state of insanitation. For years, therefore, the most vile disease-begetting nuisances might not merely exist throughout the parish, but work endless evil without any interference, as indeed they did.
Some of the Vestries put forward their economy as a claim for praise. Thus, the Wandsworth Board said that “a due and careful regard to economy had characterised all their proceedings,” and the Vestry of St. Mary Newington said, in 1860, that it had carried out its operations out of current income and had incurred no debt.
The Medical Officers of Health held their offices at the pleasure of the Vestries, and, therefore, if they valued their position, had to be cautious in their criticisms of the management of the affairs of the parishes.
But their reports convey that the work which ought to have been done was not being done as rapidly as they wished.