Part 18

Report of Committee, 1845.

Report of Committee, 1849.

In two local improvement Acts (those of Leeds and Manchester) clauses have been introduced in accordance with the sense of these conclusions; and in order to render them as little oppressive as possible to those whose interests might be affected by their operation, the enactments (which apply to every variety of furnace) have been so framed as to enforce penalties for the issuing of smoke only when it should appear (as no doubt it commonly would appear) that the proprietor had refrained from “using the best practicable means for preventing or counteracting such annoyance.”

Surely if such applicable means exist, it is a just and reasonable thing that the public should be defended against offence and injury, arising in the mere indifference or obstinacy of those who inflict them; and I venture to hope that your Hon. Court, in renewing your application to Parliament, may procure the enactment of a clause, giving you control over so much of the nuisance as is wanton and avoidable.

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There are still under the present head, some points to which I am anxious to advert. During the two years that your Act has been in operation, various complaints have been made with respect to nuisances arising in particular trades; and with many of the causes of complaint you have been unable effectually to contend. Soap-makers, tallow-melters, gut-spinners, naphtha-distillers, preparers of patent manure, dealers in soot, exposers of stinking hides, wire-makers, dealers in kitchen-stuff, fish-curers, tripe-boilers, type-founders, gold-refiners, slaughterers, varnish-makers, roasters of coffee and chicory, whalebone-boilers, iron and brass-founders, keepers of cattle-sheds, makers of printing-ink, dealers in camphine, cookers of cats’-meat, and manufacturing chemists, have all, at different times and in various degrees, been complained of.

In respect of those of the enumerated trades which deal in the manufacture or sale of organic materials in a putrid or putrescent state, I have already submitted to you my opinion that the City of London, the home of a large and crowded population, is no place for them. With regard to the many other occupations, it would obviously be absurd, in the present state of society, to think of banishing them from the City which their industry has contributed to enrich, and where immemorial custom has given sanction to their continuance, unless you could with certainty affirm of them, that they cause direct and inevitable detriment to their neighbourhood. Every useful purpose, as regards the health of the City, might be fulfilled by the enactment of some moderate restriction.

Manifestly, it is opposed to the spirit of your Act of Parliament, that any trader or manufacturer should possess the right of diffusing in the vicinity of his house, to the detriment and disgust of his neighbours, any product (whether in the form of running fluid, or volatile dust, or vapour, or smoke, or odour) which is either disagreeable to the senses or may be hurtful to the health. Many of the instances which I have enumerated fall within this description, and yet remain unaffected by the restrictive sections of your Act.

I would submit to the consideration of your Hon. Court, whether, in the renewal of your Act, some comprehensive clause might not be introduced, which should deal with these difficulties, as well as with the nuisance of smoke--and deal with them, too, on the same principle: a clause, which (without enumerating all trades which have been, or possibly may become, sources of nuisance in the City, and without specifying too narrowly the nature of the nuisances to be guarded against) should empower your Commission generally, in respect of every trade practised within the City, to require that its operations shall be conducted with the least possible amount of inconvenience to the neighbourhood; and which should enable you to enforce penalties in case of every nuisance arising in such operations, unless it should be distinctly shown on the part of the proprietor, that every practicable measure for abatement of the inconvenience had been constantly and thoroughly employed.

Such a clause was introduced in the Act of 1851 (see page 193) and has been worked with considerable advantage.--J. S., 1854.

I would beg to express my conviction that your possession of the authority with which such a clause would invest you, would very largely increase your powers of utility, in respect of many acknowledged grievances hitherto beyond your control; and the influence of your example, in the achievement of this great municipal purpose, would, I doubt not, speedily lead to the adoption of general measures throughout the metropolis, for the total suppression of smoke, and for the mitigation of other nuisances which now exist around your territory no less than within it.

This expectation has recently been fulfilled in the Smoke Prevention Act, for which the metropolis has to thank Lord Palmerston.--J. S., 1854.

Burial-Grounds.

In my last year’s Report I had occasion to represent to your Hon. Court the evils of intramural sepulture. I testified to that large accumulation of human remains, by which, in numerous parts of the City, the soil of burial-grounds has been raised many feet above its original level; and I advised you of the injury which must accrue to health from the constant organic decomposition thus suffered to proceed in the midst of our crowded population. I likewise invited your attention to the still greater evil of burial in vaults; I explained and endeavoured to remove the misconception which commonly prevails, as to the preservation of bodies under those circumstances; and I showed you how unfailingly, sooner or later after such burial, the products of putrefaction make their way from within the coffin (whatever may have been its construction) and diffuse themselves offensively and injuriously through the air. I concluded by expressing to you my strong conviction of the necessity that some comprehensive measure should be undertaken, for abolishing, at once and for ever, all burial within the City of London.

During the session of Parliament that has intervened between that Report and my present one, an event has occurred, which promises to remove effectually the evils on which I then addressed you. Her Majesty’s government, acting at the instigation of the General Board of Health, carried through Parliament a Bill, enacting that the Queen, by Order in Council, may prohibit further burials within any district of the metropolis, so soon (after the close of this year) as the General Board of Health should have provided the means of extramural interment. The operation of this Act of Parliament is such as, I have every reason to believe, you will welcome within the City of London: and I look forward to the complete cessation of burial within your territory, as a matter for warm congratulation among all who are interested in the cause of sanitary improvement.

The Act of Parliament here referred to never passed into operation, and was repealed in 1852 by a second Metropolitan Burials Act, under which the City Commissioners of Sewers are at present acting as a Burial Board for the City of London. See the last Reports of this Volume, from page 280 to the end.--J. S., 1854.

From the terms of the Act in question I find that Her Majesty’s Order in Council is to be preceded by a Report from the General Board of Health, stating their opinion of the expediency, that (in any particular case reported on) burial should forthwith be discontinued. Accordingly, in the present state of the law, it will devolve on that Board to initiate whatever measures may be necessary for the prohibition of further interment in the City.

Two clauses of your Act of Parliament, which have hitherto been inoperative, may perhaps come into requisition whenever Her Majesty’s Order in Council closes the burial-grounds of the City; viz., clause 89, which empowers your Commission, if you shall “think fit, to provide fit and proper places, in which the poor, under proper rules and regulations, may be permitted to deposit the bodies of their dead previous to interment;” and the following clause, which authorises your Officer of Health, in case of necessity, and for protection of the living, to cause any dead body to be removed at your expense, to whatever building may have been provided for the reception of the dead, previous to interment. It may hardly be necessary that I should trouble you with any remarks on the subject of these clauses, till such time as they are likely to come into operation.

With respect to the burial-grounds within the City, which will fall into disuse so soon as the new Interment Act becomes operative, I trust that your Hon. Commission will procure the power of regulating and supervising their maintenance, so that they may no longer be hurtful to the health of their vicinity. The arrangement of them, which would be most advantageous to their locality, would be that of planting them with whatever trees or shrubs may be made to flourish in a London atmosphere. The putrefactive changes, which for some years longer must proceed in these saturated soils, will be rendered comparatively harmless and imperceptible, if at the same time there advance in the ground a sufficiency of vegetation, which for its growth would gradually appropriate, as fast as they are evolved, the products of animal decay.

It seems almost superfluous for me to observe, that, from the time when burials are discontinued, no unnecessary disturbance of the soil should be allowed; nor any attempts at levelling or the like, except under the direct sanction of your Hon. Court.

Another point in connexion with these burial-grounds, to which I may here advert (though I must recur to it hereafter) is, that while great advantage may be expected from the discontinuance of their former uses, if their several areas be left open and without building, so as to subserve the ventilation of their neighbourhood, all that advantage would be lost, and a heavier evil inflicted on the neighbourhood than that of which it purports to be relieved, if these spaces were at any time to be covered with houses; and I trust it may be found within the province of your Hon. Court to obtain authority for preventing any encroachment of this nature on the limited breathing-spaces of the City.

Habitations and Social Condition of the Poor.

In my last Report (under its fifth and sixth heads) I particularly solicited the attention of your Hon. Court to certain circumstances connected with the dwellings and habits of the poor, which, though they then lay apparently out of your jurisdiction, as defined by the Act of Parliament, yet appeared to me of immeasurable weight in the sanitary fluctuations of the City, as tending in their operation constantly to thwart your endeavours for improvement, and to neutralise day by day whatever good you could achieve.

I reported to you that there were sanitary defects, inherent in certain large proportions of your municipal cure, which the most absolute control of drainage and water-supply would do nothing to amend,--constructional defects of houses and of courts, whereby their crowded inhabitants were excluded from a sufficiency of light and air, and were constrained, without remission or change, to breathe an atmosphere fetid with their own stagnant exhalations. I reported to you that, however unexceptionable might be the arrangement of such localities in matters already within your control--however clean their pavements, however pure their water, however effective their drainage, yet fever and the allied disorders could never be absent from their population; while under opposite arrangements, with nuisances around them, with organic poisons rising from the soil or mingling in the water, their mortality would rise to the horrors of pestilence, and might easily renew the most awful precedents in history. I described to you the class of miserable dwellings alluded to--‘Courts and alleys with low, dark, filthy, tenements, hemmed in on all sides by higher buildings, having no possibility of any current of air, and (worst of all) sometimes so constructed, back to back, as to forbid the advantage of double windows or back doors, and thus to render the house as perfect a cul-de-sac out of the court, as the court is a cul-de-sac out of the next thoroughfare:’ I affirmed that ‘this could never be otherwise than a cause of sickness and mortality to those whose necessities allot them such residence;’ and assured you of the ‘incontrovertible fact, that subsistence in closed courts is an unhealthy and short-lived subsistence, in comparison with that of the dwellers in open streets.’

In habitations of this kind the death-rate would of necessity be high, even if the population were distributed thinly in the district. A single pair of persons, with their children, having such a court for their sole occupancy, would hardly be otherwise than unhealthy; the infants would die teething, or would live pallid and scrofulous; or a parent would perish prematurely--the father, perhaps, with typhus, the mother with puerperal fever. Judge then, gentlemen, how the mortality of such courts must swell your aggregate death-rate for the City, when I tell you that their population is in many instances so excessive, as, in itself, and by its mere density, to breed disease.

Statistics can give you no conception of this crowding. If you refer to the results of the last census, you find the average population per house, in the City of London Union to be 7·1; in the East and West London Unions, 8·8; for the construction of these averages, the most dissimilar materials are blended together; and the density of population is apparently reduced by the very large number of business-houses which have no resident inmates, beyond the porter or the housekeeper who has charge of them. If you turn from the deceptions of an average to the exact analysis of detail, you will find many single rooms in the City with a larger number of inmates than you might otherwise ascribe to entire houses. Instances are innumerable, in which a single room is occupied by a whole family--whatever may be its number, and whatever the ages and sexes of the children; where birth and death go on side by side; where the mother in travail, or the child with small-pox, or the corpse waiting interment, has no separation from the rest.

This is evil enough; but worse remains behind. It is no uncommon thing, in a room of twelve feet square or less, to find three or four families styed together (perhaps with infectious disease among them) filling the same space night and day--men, women, and children, in the promiscuous intimacy of cattle. Of these inmates it is nearly superfluous to observe, that in all offices of nature they are gregarious and public; that every instinct of personal or sexual decency is stifled; that every nakedness of life is uncovered there. Such an apartment is commonly hired in the first instance by a single pair, who sub-let a participation in the shelter, probably to as many others as apply. Sometimes a noxious occupation is carried on within the space: thus, I have seen mud-larks (chiffonniers) sitting on the floor with baskets of filth before them, sorting out the occasional bit of coal or bone, from a heterogeneous collection made along the bed of the river, or in the mouths of the sewers; and this in a small room, inhabited night and day by such a population as I have described.

I purposely refrain from any attempt to illustrate all the horrors which are incidental to this method of life; but, as a single exemplification of the text (chosen, not because of its rarity, but because it happens to occur at the moment) I insert an extract from a note, with which I was favoured a fortnight ago, by Mr. Hutchinson, Surgeon to the North District of the West London Union: ‘I was sent for to attend a poor Irish woman in labour, at half-past six o’clock yesterday morning, at 17, Fox and Knot court. There were three families, each consisting of a man and wife and two or more children, in a small room, 15 feet by 8, all lying upon dirty rags on the floor. I found one of the children suffering under small-pox. The adjoining room was occupied by six grown-up persons and two children.’ In the circumstances to which my Report refers, scenes of this description must of necessity be habitual: and it is to their habit, not to their exceptional occurrence, that my remarks apply.