1963 was a busy year. It was the year I went down the London sewers, while still a fashion buyer, the year I got the sack from the John Lewis Partnership, the year I went to America for the first time, the year I went to stay in a lighthouse on a rock in the Scillies, the year we went to India and floated down the Ganges.
I had been fascinated by drains on a grand scale ever since seeing Orson Welles clattering up and down brightly-lit Viennese sewers in hand-made shoes, hotly pursued by policemen in special sewer-going suits, a fascination that not even a visit to the well-scrubbed section of the Parisian égouts under the Place Vendôme, which is open to the public and deadly dull, could dispel.
I soon found that one of the principal pleasures to be derived from craving permission to go down the London sewers was that the authorities did not want to give it. The London County Council made this clear to me in a surprising hand-out which read as follows:
Secretaries of religious, cultural, educational, political and social societies wishing to include a visit for their members to one of the Council’s pumping stations or Northern Outfall Works or to have an illustrated talk on the main drainage service should write to the Chief Engineer. Applications to visit sewers cannot be entertained.
After conducting a protracted correspondence with the chief engineer, in the course of which I was asked why I wanted to visit the sewers, and to which I replied, ‘Because they are there,’ I eventually received a letter which ended, ‘… happy to assist you, subject to the Committee’s approval, providing that your presence in the sewers does not increase the danger to personnel already working there.’
This letter, with its dark hint that my presence in the sewers might produce some sort of catalysis (something similar was suggested by the Elder Brethren of Trinity House when, later in the year, I was trying to get permission to stay in an offshore lighthouse), seemed more offensive on a first reading than it was intended to be.
Some time in February 1963 I took a day off from buying model gowns retailing at ten guineas upwards, and set off for my first sewer, King’s Scholars Pond, better known as the Tyburn River. As a river the Tyburn rose near Marble Arch and it could still be heard, as I had discovered, gurgling away merrily beneath a twenty-four-inch manhole outside No. 3 Shepherd Market in Mayfair, the village in which, while still at St Paul’s, I had had my first experience of the joys of commercial sex one afternoon after school. From Shepherd Market it ran under the dip in Piccadilly (which was really the valley of the Tyburn, and which was such an obstacle to the gun-carriage with the body of King George V on it when it was being hauled to Paddington in 1936), then under Green Park and Buckingham Palace and Pimlico, finally finding its way into the Thames by way of a disused dock, in which barges used to discharge cargo, behind the Sewer Depot in Grosvenor Road, near Vauxhall Bridge.
This last part was the only stretch of this unhallowed stream that was still open to the sky. And a good thing, too, I thought as Mr B, an assistant inspector of a London sewage area which extended from Flask Walk in Hampstead to Brondesbury and Tufnell Park, then to Blackfriars and from Blackfriars to Chelsea Bridge, led me along the muddy bottom of the dock to the underground part.
Mr B came from a family of sewermen. His father had spent thirty-eight years underground, while he himself had been at it for fifteen. He and his family lived in a charming Victorian cottage which overlooked the Thames opposite the Grosvenor Road depot, and the Tyburn ran right under it.
The bottom of the Tyburn was littered with some bizarre sorts of jetsam which included that morning a fine pair of unmounted antlers, a folio bible in the Welsh language, half a pram and an old bicycle – could they be from The Palace?
We entered the covered-in part. The water was not more than a foot deep, but the atmosphere was steamy. ‘The steamiest of the lot is Piccadilly,’ Mr B said, ‘on account of the hotels and baths and washing-up going on all day and night.’
‘What about The Palace?’ I asked. ‘Anything special about that?’
‘Well, you can take it from me,’ said Mr B, ‘that what comes down hasn’t got “By Appointment” on it.’
The truth was, as I discovered while I continued to make forays into them by day and night, that sewers are unpredictable, dangerous places into which, in addition to the more or less loathsome things they are constructed to receive, mad humanity pours all sorts of lethal stuff, all of it illegally. Even a short list of what found its way down the drains reads like a recipe for some twentieth-century witches’ brew: acetylene; petrol, sometimes in large quantities; carbon dioxide, given off by hospitals and ice-cream factories; hydrogen cyanide from electroplating works, which has a nice smell of almonds, the faintest suspicion of which sent any gang of sewermen, who were known as flushers, straight up the ladders to the street; and as smells went, which I was able to inspire for myself in the Tyburn, most ghastly of all when mixed with untreated sewage: ordinary coal gas from leaky pipes. What North Sea gas smells like, if it smells of anything, when mixed with untreated sewage, I leave to a younger explorer to discover.
For these reasons, on initially entering a sewer, my first, almost overwhelming, impulse was to light a cigarette, or if I had had one about me, a Trichinopoly cheroot; but with the possibility of some or all of these things lurking in the atmosphere I would have stood a good chance, had I done so, of rising majestically through a manhole, rather like a Polaris emerging from a submarine. Some years previously a whole stretch of Kingsway had suddenly erupted without any human intervention whatever.
There was a narrow, slippery walk on either side of the underground section of the Tyburn and we had to take care, as we were not wearing waders. There were a lot of rats slithering purposefully up- and downstream along the brickwork, jostling one another like commuters in a subway. We were bound for a side entrance called the Keyshop in Tachbrook Street, Pimlico, one of the comparatively few places underground with a fancy name. There was one called the Corkscrew, at the river end of Northumberland Avenue, but only one sewer had a name on a board corresponding to the street above – Knightsbridge.
After pointing out one or two places where the brickwork had broken away and in which rats were nesting, Mr B seemed to grow as tired of the atmosphere as I already was. At first, I had been hoping to go north under Green Park and The Palace, but the fight had gone out of me. Instead we went up a narrow side entrance, and very unpleasant it was, to the foot of a vertical iron ladder.
‘Blooming well stuck,’ said Mr B, trying to force open the cover. ‘Lend a hand.’ A hand was not enough, but by pushing hard with heads and shoulders we suddenly opened the cast-iron lid and shot out on to the pavement at the junction of Moreton and Tachbrook Streets, SW1, to the surprise of a girl exercising a poodle.
More serious was the visit to the Fleet Sewer. Outside Blackfriars Bridge Station a van was waiting in the road with seven men in it, all dressed in waders, flat caps and donkey jackets, and drinking tea. There was a lot of washing water on the boil and bottles of disinfectant handy. There is a nasty complaint called Weil’s Disease to which sewermen are prone, leptospiral jaundice, which is transmitted in the urine of rats, called by the flushers ‘bunnies’. If it is not diagnosed correctly – it starts with a splitting headache and the symptoms of flu – it is usually fatal in twenty-four hours. It can be contracted through a scratch, which was why all the flushers I met washed themselves as religiously as any Hindu. Another disease is Miners Nystagmus, which affects the eyeballs.
This gang had come all the way from the depot so that I could go down the Fleet and they already had the cover up. They were nice without being garrulous. There was something about this job that made one want to open one’s mouth as little as possible. They were glad, they said, that I was not an ambassador or some other sort of VIP, because they could only be taken down sewers that had been cleaned out specially for the occasion, and this meant a lot of work for nothing.
As soon as I had my waders on we went down a series of very slimy ladders into warm, steamy darkness, rather like a Turkish bath with something wrong with it. Again there was the awful smell that had made the Tyburn such a noxious place. Fulham Gasworks, I was told, was responsible. Whichever sewer I was in thereafter, all nasty smells were attributed to Fulham Gasworks and so far as I was concerned they could have closed the place down at any time they liked.
The Fleet at Blackfriars was a complex place. Great iron tubes spanned its upper levels, through which the station subways and the trains ran. Seen fitfully by the light of miners’ lanterns and special lamps, it was like one of the prisons designed by Piranesi. Everywhere there were rusty iron gratings, long chains hung from the roof and the storm relief sewer was fitted with metal doors which, although they each weighed three tons, were held open horizontally when the flood water came roaring over the weirs, as if they were the tongues of paper envelopes. At the lowest level the Fleet itself raced riverwards at a good ten knots, too strong to stand up in on a dry day, down a tunnel more than fourteen feet high. When there was a storm, they told me, first of all an apocalyptic wind raged through the sewer and then the rain water came thundering down, filling it up to the brim, by which time they themselves would be brewing up in their van on the surface. The most surprising thing that had ever been found in the upper levels of the Fleet, the senior member of the gang, with thirty-seven years’ service, told me, was an iron bedstead. No one knew how it got there, because you cannot get a bedstead down a household drain or even down a manhole without taking it to pieces, so someone must have taken it down in bits and reassembled it.
Best of all in my week in the sewers were the night shifts, after which I used to catch an early morning train to Wimbledon and undress in the garden before having a bath and breakfast and returning to Waterloo and the MG buying office in Oxford Street. One night I helped to flush out a four-foot sewer called the Opera, on the Embankment between Westminster Bridge and Charing Cross, which served Scotland Yard and other secret places, such as the Ministry of Defence. By eleven o’clock they had the manholes up in the side entrance in Richmond Terrace and a winch ready to haul up the iron buckets, which were called skips, to the surface. There were two top-men to work the winch and a lorry-man from a firm of contractors, who was waiting to drive the stuff away in the small hours of the morning and who was looking after the stove in the van. The men on the surface knew where the nearest telephone was in case there was need for an ambulance, the fire brigade, or smoke apparatus, or even all three at once. The nearest telephone was just over the railings inside Scotland Yard, where the policeman on duty watched our operations apprehensively, as if we might blow them to smithereens, something not beyond the bounds of possibility if we had wanted to. In addition it was the top-man’s job to watch out for rain and get the gang up to the surface the moment it started. In the van there was a lifeline, lifting harness and first-aid gear.
Before the other five men had gone down, the ganger had lowered a Spiralarm gas detector lamp and a piece of lead-acetate paper in a wire cage into the sewer. If the light had gone out or the red warning light had gone on, or if the paper had changed colour, then it would have been dangerous to go down. None of these things happened, so the first man down took the Spiralarm with him and hung it in the sewer for all to see.
Down in the Opera we were bent double like convicts in a Siberian mine. I was wearing a deep wading suit which came up to my chest. ‘Your lucky day, mate,’ they said. ‘Down the East End you’d be wearing a diver’s suit.’
The sewage was nice and warm, just right after the freezing air on deck. It was up to my middle and the sludge we had come to shift reached my knees. The place on my face where I had cut myself shaving that morning was throbbing in a curious way and I wondered whether I was going to get Weil’s Disease. I certainly had a splitting headache.
Everything was moving very slowly in the Opera, sewage-wise. This was because a band of loonies, masquerading as workmen extending the platform at Westminster Underground Station, had poured an enormous quantity of a special filling called Bensonite into the sewers and gummed up the Opera. The London County Council was sending the bill for the flushing to the building contractors, but as one flusher said: ‘Doesn’t make me feel any better, whoever pays for it.’ The gang was bitter because although the work was being paid for, a lot of Bensonite was still coming down. But in spite of everything, this was a good gang. They worked fast with their sleeves rolled up, up to their elbows in sewage, shovelling the Bensonite into the side entrance where the skips were. When it had dried off a bit they filled a skip and it was hauled to the surface. Apart from shouts of ‘Orl right!’ and ‘Steady, mate!’ they kept their mouths shut, like the men at Blackfriars. A night’s work, from ten-thirty until seven the following morning, is four cubic yards of grit, which is a lot of grit to shift in a confined space. I tried to photograph them at work but, even with the fastest available film, without a flash it was like trying to photograph a band of spiritualists.
Later, when they had finished and were washed up and drinking tea in the van, they all said how much more healthy it was working in the sewers than being in the open air, especially with the weather being so nasty. By this time I was in favour of more material rewards, such as grace-and-favour residences in perpetuity, for the flushers, who got £12.15 ($34) for a forty-four-hour week.
I went to the Northern Outfall at Barking, where everything north of the river came out. Not even the most impassioned sewage engineer could say that it was a gay place. Admittedly, the landscaping had been done by the Parks Department, but even Battey Langley might have been up against it if he had to work on a sewage outfall in what had been a marsh in the Thames Estuary, itself set in a nightmare landscape peppered with electric pylons; and with Beckton Gasworks on the right and, somewhere on the other side of it but invisible, the river, with invisible ships hooting their way up- and downstream.
The route to the Outfall was by an interminable processional way devoid of trees, which reminded me of pictures I had seen of parts of New Delhi, except that a blizzard was raging. Apart from a man bent over the handlebars of a bicycle saying, ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard!’, as he ground along into the teeth of it, there was not a soul in sight. Perhaps he was the secretary of a religious, cultural, educational, political or social society on his way to fix up a conducted tour for the members, or an illustrated talk on the main drainage.
Inside the embankment on which the road was built were five horseshoe-shaped sewers which delivered everything produced by three million people in an area of a hundred and twelve square miles of London north of the Thames. It was an experience that I was not particularly keen to repeat, to stand over the detritus pits, surrounded by drag-line scrapers, conveyor belts, hoppers and dumpers – all the tools of this melancholy trade mercifully worked here by remote control – with my mouth clamped grimly shut like a captain on the bridge of a destroyer closing with the enemy, and to think what was passing under my feet: something that looked like mulligatawny soup with dead rats floating in it.
The detritus pits caught the ten thousand tons of road grit not removed by the flushers from the sewers in the course of a year. Eventually it was dragged from the pits and used for what was called ‘reclamation’, whatever that meant. On a dry day, and this was a dry day, ‘on account of everything bar sewage being frozen solid’, as someone vividly put it, one hundred and seventy-eight million gallons of the stuff flowed out of the five horseshoe tubes. On a nice wet day it rose sharply to two hundred and eighty million gallons. Between eight and nine in the morning, with everything in North London going full blast, a hundred and ten million gallons went into the main sewers in that one hour. It took seven hours to arrive at the Outfall from the furthest points west, out towards Kensal Rise and Shepherd’s Bush. If it was high water for sewage at Kilburn at nine in the morning, it was high water at Beckton between three and four in the afternoon. Dead low water in London was around two in the morning, apart from the odd man from Fleet Street having a bath and Chinese restaurants still washing up, so that, in theory, the quiet hour for the staff at Beckton was around nine o’clock.
Most awful was the screen house where things that were not road grit passed through screens and were disintegrated. For the screen house only some disjointed notes in a discoloured notebook have survived, in which the word ‘Things’ appears frequently:
Pipes blowing Things back into the sewage upstream that have already passed through the Medium Screens … Bubbling sounds … Smells like Hell! … Looks like Hell! … Barrow loads of Things that failed to pass through the Coarse Screens … mechanical Rakes slowly lifting Things on which jets of water play until they fall off … Houseproud men painting everything in sight made of iron a dull red … Told that the nastiest job is clearing blocked pumps. See man doing this, or something similar – Could be inhumane alternative to capital punishment.
Outside, in the primary sedimentation tanks which looked shallow but were eleven feet deep, seventy per cent of the remaining solids were removed for further treatment. The liquid part was now chocolate-coloured. How this could be when the last time I looked it was mulligatawny was a mystery.
At this point about fifty per cent of the sewage, thirty per cent of it sludge and Lord knows what else, went straight into Barking Creek by a sort of stage door and then into the Thames. When the Outfall was originally built no allowance was made for any treatment of the sewage at all. Four large reservoirs were built which could hold six hours’ flow until the river was on the ebb, when it was all released, with spectacular results. At the time I was there the sewage men aimed to return to the river fifty per cent of well-treated sewage, the colour of mushrooms, free of sludge and apparently bounding with oxygen. This seemed pretty old-fashioned to me until I heard an Australian expert, who was on a grand tour of European sewage, say – with his teeth chattering, for the wind that day was straight off the Urals – ‘That’s nothing, sport. We let the whole lot out at good old Bondi Beach, just as mother makes it.’
The thickened sludge from the primary sedimentation tanks went through two processes of primary and secondary digestion – an unhappy term for these processes, especially for me, recovering from an unseemly lunch of overcooked sausages and custard wodge in the canteen. The sludge produced enough methane to operate a large power-house. The hard-core was pumped at the rate of six thousand tons a day to the end of what must have been the coldest jetty in Britain where, through a big black pipe that looked like an elephant’s trunk, it sank into the holds of four sludge ships and was taken twenty-seven miles out into the Thames Estuary to the Black Deep. There, at the south-western end, in the spoil grounds marked by four conical buoys, they let it go. I did not ask the crews whether they enjoyed their work or not. They sailed nine tides out of fourteen a week, in all weathers.1
1 These vessels were later replaced by a modern fleet of fully automated vessels, in one of which I subsequently had the opportunity to sail. They were spotlessly clean, as were the crew, although I would have hesitated to accept that the decks, as one of them contested, were ‘clean enough to eat your dinner off’.