The Sanitary Evolution of London

Chapter Vii (1901-1906) 401

INDEX 435

REFERENCE TO NAMES OF PARISHES AND DISTRICTS NUMBERED ON THE MAP.

1. Clerkenwell. 2. Holborn. 3. St. Giles'. 4. Strand. 5. St. Martin-in-the-Fields. 6. Whitechapel. 7. St. James', Westminster. 8. Westminster. 9. St. Saviour's, Southwark. 10. St. Olave's, Southwark. 11. St. George the Martyr, Southwark.]

The Sanitary Evolution of London

CHAPTER I

THE health of the people of a country stands foremost in the rank of national considerations. Upon their health depends their physical strength and energy, upon it their mental vigour, their individual happiness, and, in a great degree, their moral character. Upon it, moreover, depends the productivity of their labour, and the material prosperity and commercial success of their country. Ultimately, upon it depends the very existence of the nation and of the Empire.

The United Kingdom can claim no exemption from this general principle; rather, indeed, is it one which, in the present period of our history, affects us more vitally than it has ever done before, and in a more crucial manner than it does many other nations.

The more imperative is it, therefore, that every effort should be made to raise the health of our people to the highest attainable level, and to maintain it at the loftiest possible standard.

The subject is so vast and complicated that it is impossible, within reasonable limits, to treat more than a portion of it at a time.

London, the great metropolis, the capital of the Empire itself, constitutes, by the number of its inhabitants, so large a portion of the United Kingdom, that the health of its people is a very material factor in that of the kingdom. It has a population greater than either Scotland or Ireland, greater than any of our Colonies, except Canada and Australasia, greater than that of many foreign States--"the greatest aggregate of human beings that has ever existed in the history of the world in the same area of space."

And, in a measure too, it is typical of other of our great cities.

A narrative of the sanitary history and conditions of life of the people of London, therefore, would be a material contribution to the consideration of the general subject in its national aspect, whilst it cannot but be of special interest to those more immediately concerned in the amelioration of the existing condition of the masses of the people of the great capital.

Such a narrative is attempted in the following pages.

It is, in the main, based upon the experiences, and inferences, and conclusions, of men who, more than any others, were in a position closely to observe the circumstances in which the people lived, their sanitary condition, and the causes leading thereto and influencing the same.

It includes the principal measures from time to time passed by the Legislature to create local governing authorities in sanitary matters--the various measures designed and enacted to improve the condition of the people--and the administration of those measures by the local authorities charged with their administration.

It is a narrative, in fact, of the sanitary--and, therefore, to a great extent of the social--evolution of this great city.

It is doubtful how long a time would have elapsed before the condition of the people came into real prominence had it not been for the oft-recurring invasions of the country by epidemic disease of the most dreaded and fatal forms. Ever-present diseases, disastrous and devastating though they were, did not strike the imagination or appeal to the fears of the public as did the sudden onslaught of an awe-inspiring disease such as cholera.

An epidemic of that dreaded disease swept over London in 1832, and there were over 10,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths in the districts then considered as metropolitan--the population of those districts being close upon 1,500,000.

For the moment, the dread of it stimulated the people, and such governing authorities as there were, to inspection, and cleansings, and purifications, and to plans for vigorous sanitary reform; but the instant the cholera departed the good resolutions died down, and the plans disappeared likewise.

There were, however, some persons upon whom this visitation made more abiding impression; and they, struck by the waste of human life, by the frequent recurrence of epidemics which swept away thousands upon thousands of victims, and distressed by the perpetual prevalence and even more deadly destructiveness of various other diseases among the people, bethought themselves of investigating the actual existing facts, and the causes of them--so far at least as London, their own city, was concerned.

And then slowly the curtain began to be raised on the appalling drama of human life in London, and dimly to be revealed the circumstances in which the great masses of the working and labouring classes of the great metropolis lived, moved, and came to the inevitable end, and the conditions and surroundings of their existence.

The slowness with which England as a nation awoke to the idea that the public health was a matter of any concern whatever is most strange and remarkable. It seems now so obvious a fact that one marvels that it did not at all times secure for itself recognition and acknowledgment. But men and women were growing up amidst the existing surroundings, foul and unwholesome though those were, and some, at least, were visibly living to old age; population was increasing at an unprecedented rate; wealth was multiplying and accumulating; the nation was reaching greater heights of power and fame. What, then, was there, what could there be wrong with the existing state of affairs?

Real social evils, however, sooner or later, force themselves into prominence. For long they may be ignored, or treated with indifference by the governing classes; for long they may be endured by the victims in suffering and silence; but ultimately they compel recognition, and have to be investigated and grappled with, and, if possible, remedied.

The real beginning of such investigations was not until near the close of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. Information then for the first time was collected, of necessity very limited in extent, crude in form, and of moderate accuracy, but none the less illuminating in its character--information from which one can piece together in a hazy sort of way a general impression of the condition of the working and poorer classes in London at that period.

Foremost among the diseases which worked unceasing and deadly havoc among the people was fever. By its wide and constant prevalence and great fatality, it was the first upon which attention became fixed. The returns which were collected as regarded it related to twenty metropolitan unions or parishes, and in them only to the pauper population, some 77,000 in number. But they showed that in the single year of 1838, out of those 77,000 persons, 14,000, or very nearly one-fifth, had been attacked by fever, and nearly 1,300 had died.

Being limited to the technically pauper population this information related only to one section of the community; but it nevertheless afforded the means of forming a rough estimate of the amount of fever among the community as a whole.

And another fact also at once became apparent, namely, that certain parts of London were more specially and persistently haunted or infested by fever than others. In Whitechapel, Holborn, Lambeth, and numerous other parishes or districts, fever of the very worst forms was always prevalent--"typhus, and the fevers which proceed from the malaria of filth." The sanitary condition of those districts was fearful, every sanitary abomination being rampant therein, whilst certain localities in them were so bad that "it would be utterly impossible for any description to convey to the mind an adequate conception of their state." And most marvellous and deplorable of all was the fact that this fearful condition of things was allowed, not merely to continue, but to flourish without any attempt being made to remedy, or even to mitigate, some of the inevitable and most disastrous consequences.

As regarded the districts in which the wealthier classes resided, systematic efforts had been made on a considerable scale to widen the streets, to remove obstructions to the circulation of free currents of air, and to improve the drainage--an acknowledgment and appreciation of the fact that these things did deleteriously affect people's health. But nothing whatever had been attempted to improve the condition of the districts inhabited by the poor. Those districts were not given a thought to, though in them annually thousands and tens of thousands of victims suffered or died from diseases which were preventable.

Reports such as these attracted some degree of attention, and awakened a demand for further information, and in 1840 the House of Commons appointed a Select Committee to inquire as to the health, not only of London, but of the large towns throughout the country. Their report enlarged upon the evils previously in part portrayed, and emphasised them.

"Your Committee," they wrote, "would pause, from the sad statements they have been obliged to make, to observe that it is painful to contemplate in the midst of what appears an opulent, spirited, and flourishing community, such a vast multitude of our poorer fellow-subjects, the instruments by whose hands these riches were created, condemned for no fault of their own to the evils so justly complained of, and placed in situations where it is almost impracticable for them to preserve health or decency of deportment, or to keep themselves and their children from moral and physical contamination. To require them to be clean, sober, cheerful, contented under such circumstances would be a vain and unreasonable expectation. There is no building Act to enforce the dwellings of these workmen being properly constructed; no drainage Act to enforce their being properly drained; no general or local regulation to enforce the commonest provisions for cleanliness and comfort."

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