“I don’t think flushing work disagrees with my husband,” said a flusherman’s wife to me, “for he eats about as much again at that work as he did at the other.” “The smell underground is sometimes very bad,” said the man, “but then we generally take a drop of rum first, and something to eat. It wouldn’t do to go into it on an empty stomach, ’cause it would get into our inside. But in some sewers there’s scarcely any smell at all. Most of the men are healthy who are engaged in it; and when the cholera was about many used to ask us how it was we escaped.”
The following statement contains the history of an individual flusherman:—
“I was brought up to the sea,” he said, “and served on board a man-of-war, the Racer, a 16-gun brig, laying off Cuba, in the West Indies, and there-away, watching the slavers. I served seven years. We were paid off in ’43 at Portsmouth, and a friend got me into the shores. It was a great change from the open sea to a close shore—great; and I didn’t like it at all at first. But it suits a married man, as I am now, with a family, much better than being a seaman, for a man aboard a ship can hardly do his children justice in their schooling and such like. Well, I didn’t much admire going down the man-hole at first—the ‘man-hole’ is a sort of iron trap-door that you unlock and pull up; it leads to a lot of steps, and so you get into the shore—but one soon gets accustomed to anything. I’ve been at flushing and shore work now since ’43, all but eleven weeks, which was before I got engaged.
“We work in gangs from three to five men.” [Here I had an account of the process of flushing, such as I have given.] “I’ve been carried off my feet sometimes in the flush of a shore. Why, to-day,” (a very rainy and windy day, Feb. 4,) “it came down Baker-street, when we flushed it, 4 foot plomb. It would have done for a mill-dam. One couldn’t smoke or do anything. Oh, yes, we can have a pipe and a chat now and then in the shore. The tobacco checks the smell. No, I can’t say I felt the smell very bad when I first was in a shore. I’ve felt it worse since. I’ve been made innocent drunk like in a shore by a drain from a distiller’s. That happened me first in Vine-street shore, St. Giles’s, from Mr. Rickett’s distillery. It came into the shore like steam. No, I can’t say it tasted like gin when you breathed it—only intoxicating like. It was the same in Whitechapel from Smith’s distillery. One night I was forced to leave off there, the steam had such an effect. I was falling on my back, when a mate caught me. The breweries have something of the same effect, but nothing like so strong as the distilleries. It comes into the shore from the brewers’ places in steam. I’ve known such a steam followed by bushels of grains; ay, sir, cart-loads washed into the shore.
“Well, I never found anything in a shore worth picking up but once a half-crown. That was in the Buckingham Palace sewer. Another time I found 16s. 6d., and thought that was a haul; but every bit of it, every coin, shillings and sixpences and joeys, was bad—all smashers. Yes, of course it was a disappointment, naturally so. That happened in Brick-lane shore, Whitechapel. O, somebody or other had got frightened, I suppose, and had shied the coins down into the drains. I found them just by the chapel there.”
A second man gave me the following account of his experience in flushing:—
“You remember, sir, that great storm on the 1st August, 1848. I was in three shores that fell in—Conduit-street and Foubert’s-passage, Regent-street. There was then a risk of being drowned in the shores, but no lives were lost. All the house-drains were blocked about Carnaby-market—that’s the Foubert’s-passage shore—and the poor people was what you might call houseless. We got in up to the neck in water in some places, ’cause we had to stoop, and knocked about the rubbish as well as we could, to give a way to the water. The police put up barriers to prevent any carts or carriages going that way along the streets. No, there was no lives lost in the shores. One man was so overcome that he was falling off into a sort of sleep in Milford-lane shore, but was pulled out. I helped to pull him. He was as heavy as lead with one thing or other—wet, and all that. Another time, six or seven year ago, Whitechapel High-street shore was almost choked with butchers’ offal, and we had a great deal of trouble with it.”
Of the Rats in the Sewers.
I will now state what I have learned from long-experienced men, as to the characteristics of the rats in the sewers. To arrive even at a conjecture as to the numbers of these creatures—now, as it were, the population of the sewers—I found impossible, for no statistical observations have been made on the subject; but all my informants agreed that the number of the animals had been greatly diminished within these four or five years.