FLUSHING THE SEWERS.
(Partly from a Daguerreotype by Beard, and partly from a Sketch kindly lent by Mr. Whiting.)
There have been two modes of effecting this object. The one has been the carting away of the more solid refuse, and the other the washing of it away, or, as it is termed, flushing in the case of the covered sewers, and plonging in the case of the open ones. Under both systems, whether the refuse be carted or flushed away, the hard deposit has to be first loosened by manual labourers—the difference consisting principally in the means of after-removal.
The first of these systems—viz., the cartage method—was that which prevailed in the metropolis till the year 1847. I shall therefore give a brief description of this mode of cleansing the sewers before proceeding to treat of the now more general mode of “flushing.”
Under the old system, the clearing away of the deposit was a “nightman’s” work, differing little, except in being more toilsome, offensive to the public, and difficult. A hole was made from the street down into the sewer where the deposit was thickest, and the deposit was raised by means of a tub, filled below, drawn up to the street, and emptied into a cart, or spread in mounds in the road to be shovelled into some vehicle. A nightman told me that this mode of work was sometimes a great injury to his trade, because “when it was begun on a night many of the householders sleeping in the neighbourhood used to say to themselves, or to their missusses, as they turned in their beds, ‘It’s them ere cussed cesspools again! I wish they was done away with.’ An’ all the time, sir, the cesspools was as hinnocent and as sweet as a hangel.”
This clumsy and filthy process is now but occasionally resorted to. A man who had superintended a labour of this kind in a narrow, but busy thoroughfare in Southwark, told me that these sewer labourers were the worst abused men in London. No one had a good word for them.
But there have been other modes of removing the indurated sewage, besides that of cartage; and which, though not exactly flushing, certainly consisted in allowing the deposit to be washed away. Some of these contrivances were curious enough.
I learn from a Report printed in 1849, that the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer, in the city of Westminster, running near the Abbey, contained a continuous bed of deposit, of soil, sand, and filth, from 10 to 30 inches in depth, and this for a mile and a half next the river—the first mile yielding more than 6000 loads of matter. This sewer was to be cleansed.