Parched City (13 page)

Percy Frankland was employed to apply bacteriological analysis to the Lee and the Thames for the first time in history,
between 1885 and 1888.
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His tests revealed seasonal variations in the microbial population such as that in the wetter months the rivers became increasingly laden with agricultural effluent from land upstream. How could water be treated to offer protection from the pathological microbes such material, or other effluent, carried?

Micro-Organisms in Water
reflected on the outcome of tests that the Franklands had conducted on different water companies’ filtration results. Their analyses of slow-sand filtration practices showed surprising results. Generally, the technique reduced the presence of microbial life effectively.
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Variations in filtration methods across the companies provided data about which techniques caused the most potent levels of bactericide. Quirks in London’s treatments, rather than standards, furnished the scientists with rich bacteriological evidence about water treatment. They noted how these variables were innately beneficial to progressing their discipline: ’…in no two of them is the process at the present time carried on under precisely similar conditions.’
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Filtration’s success in removing bacteria, good or bad, was naturally not known when the Chelsea Waterworks Company invested in London’s first ‘monster’ filter, as Flora Tristan christened it in the 1830s.

The efficacy of domestic water filtration, in bacteriological terms, also concerned the Franklands: ‘…suspicion has fallen upon filters as a class‘, they reported.
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Filters were clearly a lay device thought to improve the quality of water to a wholesome category, suggesting generally safe use after filtration for drinking and cooking. But by the time the Franklands published their book in 1894, they assessed the contemporary fashion for filtration, remarking that ‘it is becoming not an uncommon practice with many to boil suspicious water intended for drinking, and thus to dispense with filters, or, at most, to use them only for aerating the water after boiling, and so remove the flat and vapid taste possessed by boiled water’.
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Boiling was
also in vogue on the other side of the Atlantic. The Franklands cited an 1890
New York Medical Record
article, which explained the devastation caused to water’s microbial population when it was boiled for five minutes at one hundred degrees centigrade.
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This method for sterilising water was only just percolating from the scientific community to other literate publics.

Another accidentally beneficial factor in the production of healthy water, documented by the Franklands, would be highly significant in the future of modern water treatment. During their experiments, the bacteriologists discovered that the containment of water before it was filtered caused organisms to die off rapidly: ’…a process of starvation may go on, for the organisms present in the impounded water find themselves imprisoned with a limited amount of sustenance…’
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They suggested that the relationship between water’s storage and bacteriology needed further research, in London and internationally.

The scientific gauntlet they threw down would be picked up, but not until the next century. By then, Grace Frankland had been elected a ‘Fellow’ of the Royal Microscopical Society when she was forty-two; a high honour for a female scientist (her application to the Chemical Society was rejected).
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Before that Fellow accolade was bestowed on her in 1900, London’s century-long water question drama had a fraught closing act.

A series of ‘water famines’, as they became popularly known, turned the possibility of water shortages, raised as a concern during the Balfour Commission, into a live issue.
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Strangely, these shortages were not called droughts but ‘famines’, perhaps more aptly given drinking water’s dietary necessity. Consequently, the pitfalls of a disjointed system of water management and ownership re-entered the public and political spotlight.

1895’s harsh winter caused widespread damage to mains pipes. Customers in Lambeth and riverside residents from Kew to Rotherhithe (served by Southwark and Vauxhall Water
Company) lost supplies temporarily, or completely. The Lambeth Water Company unleashed seven hundred men to repair pipes.
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In the districts where supplies were entirely lost; the company dispatched other staff with water carts for dehydrated households. In spite of these measures, there was a public backlash against the water companies. One critic blamed the impact of the natural disaster on the companies’ failure to lay their pipes at sufficient depths to withstand the effects of the frost.
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Just months after the havoc wrought by 1895’s cold weather, a hot summer severely depleted the River Lee’s reserves. East London inhabitants suffered. According to
The Times’
Special Correspondent ‘the most numerous and indignant complaints have come from Hackney‘, where the ‘very poor’ and ‘middle-class population’ were both reduced to three hours of running water instead of a constant supply.
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In Hackney Wick, categorised as very poor, stagnating sewage was blamed for fatal cases of diarrhoea.
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Shortages recurred in 1896.

Notices were posted by the East London Waterworks Company in July stating that supplies would be restricted to six hours a day.
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Furthermore, ‘consumers are advised to fill any available vessels while the water is on, to use it strictly for domestic purposes, and beyond all things to avoid WASTE in any form. Persons are especially cautioned against using water for gardening or other similar purposes’.
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Another company notice warned that ‘WILFULLY or NEGLIGENTLY’ wasting water would lead to penalties of £5, with re-offenders risking their supplies being deliberately severed.
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A blame game unfolded, with the public accusing the companies of exacerbating natural causes by poor operational control, whilst the East London Waterworks Company’s management was convinced that consumers were wasteful. Casting doubt on the behaviour of the poor was a familiar dynamic in the paternalistic culture of the water companies and public health reformers, but this power dynamic was being unsettled by the increasing enfranchisement
of the (male) public.

East London Water Supply. Punch or the London Charivari
, 8th August 1896. City of London, London Metropolitan Archives. Courtesy of
Thames Water.

In
Punch’s
satire depicting the social outfall of the water shortages in East London, it is hardly likely that the women featured could have washed many pairs of socks or watered many plants with the vessels they were being berated for using.
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Drought did not strike East London again in 1897 but its recurrence in 1898 brought public outrage to a head. Again, supplies ceased to be constant and householders could only turn on their taps for three hours each in the morning and evening.
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Notices with instructions in Hebrew reflected the impact on East London’s Jewish residents.
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Whether English speaking or not, consumers were vocal. Frank Trentmann and Vanessa Taylor’s research exposes how the water famines revitalised Water Consumer Defence Leagues born in the 1880s after a high profile court case when a barrister successfully challenged the inequity of corporate water rates.
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The East London Water Consumers Defence Association, for instance, was pro-municipilization and threatened to boycott payments to its water supplier in lieu of periods when supply waned.
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These disgruntled consumer experiences echoed decades of jibes against corporate water ownership and management from state public health officials, medical professionals and, in this final decade of the century, the London County Council. Trentmann and Taylor have established how this period forged consumer empowerment in London specifically because of the ongoing water question. Their argument ties this new consumer consciousness more broadly to citizen entitlements in the modern city, due to water’s core value in defining and providing a civilised standard of urban life.
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The case of London was indeed complex but more fuel was added to the water question’s finale by events some forty miles away from the city.

Typhoid started claiming lives in Maidstone in September 1897. By the 8th of October,
The Times
reported that 1,457 people in the town had been diagnosed with the fever. The same article
mentioned that a company had donated 3,600 bottles of soda water to the sick, reflecting the knowledge that all was not well with the piped water supply. Progress in water science was officially evident from the engagement of a bacteriologist, Dr Sims Woodhead, to advise Maidstone’s water company.
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He proposed using a chemical measure usually only employed to treat sewage; ‘chloride of lime‘, or bleaching powder.

Chemical sewage treatment commenced commercially in the late 1840s alongside the development of land-based treatment (sewage farms), due to public health legislation and the commercial opportunities associated from re-using the human waste that had to be removed from public sight.
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By the late 1850s sewage treatment became industrialised and ‘cream of lime’ was routinely added to deodorise and disinfect sewage.
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Then, disinfection was not understood in the context of germs. But by 1897, a disinfectant meant something very different to bacteriologists. Even so, Sims Woodhead’s solution for Maidstone was maverick. Rather than merely filter water or analyse its chemical and bacteriological constituents, this scientist wanted to
treat
water. Adding ingredients into water was novel.

Maidstone’s radical water treatment solution was covered in
The Times
, as part of an ongoing series of articles about the epidemic. Though it was by no means headline news, the procedure was described in some detail: ‘About ten tons of lime were mixed in the reservoir with 200,000 gallons of water, and afterwards the mains throughout the town were charged at full pressure with the solution.’
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The article conveyed Dr Sims Woodhead’s view that new cases of typhoid were likely to be secondary and, therefore, that his move to disinfect the water was a reassuring precaution. Apart from an experiment in Worthing with quicklime, the bacteriologist said that he was unaware of any other trial with chloride of lime in public water supplies, in the country.
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A week later, the success of the treatment appeared to be vindicated in the latest article covering the epidemic. Its
author noted that only one new case had been identified in the preceding twenty-four hours.
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The flushing of the mains with chloride of lime most likely involved about thirty per cent active chlorine in the solution, as a one-off emergency measure. There was no suggestion that such a chemical treatment should be continuous.

Back in London, a new Royal Commission on London’s water supply proceeded before the close of 1897.
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Debating the water companies’ future and the viability of a municipal alternative was the Commission’s central purpose; the former point was clearly shaky post-famine and the latter was being pushed by the London County Council (it had presented two bills to parliament, unsuccessfully, in 1895 and this very year). A subsidiary issue was whether London’s water supply could be brought from elsewhere, on the model of other cities, such as Glasgow. Siphoning the virgin waters of Wales’ pristine mountain lakes might solve both the quality and quantity questions.

On this proposal to lay one hundred and fifty miles of pipes from Wales to London, the writer Arthur Shadwell wryly commented: ‘What is to prevent an Irish American from blowing up the aqueduct at some point and leaving London without half its water…?‘
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He argued in his populist fin de siècle review of the London water question that the subject had become a ‘political question’ since the formation of the London County Council.
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Anti-corporate-water sentiment was being expressed, wrote Shadwell in an ‘orgy of vituperation’ in which ‘good manners’ and the ‘amenities of civilised life are thrown to the winds’.
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He defended the companies’ reputations on the basis that water had been disease-free for thirty years.

Shadwell was stretching the statistical truth and also displaying yet another example of the time lag between scientific and lay knowledge. For instance, infant mortality statistics from diarrhoea did not figure in his equation even though the disease
was still prevalent.
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Diarrhoea contracted from sewage-infected water was an ongoing symptom of the malaise running through the second half of the nineteenth century’s sanitation debate. In short, sewage and drinking water should never mix. Following germ theory’s absorption into public health research and practice, bacteriologists were looking into alternative forms of sewage treatment. Public Analysts, as they became professionalised, were pivotal for the resolution of drinking water analysis and treatment, and sewage treatment, by bacteriological means.
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One public analyst in particular would revolutionise drinking water science in the first two decades of the twentieth century.