The Birth of Bacteriology and the Death of
Corporate Water 1866–1899
‘…the Londoner may go to bed at home in full confidence that he could hardly find a town in the country so free from the dangers of the tap.’ 1
(The London Water Supply, Arthur Shadwell, 1899)
The tap water quality guarantee that Dr Arthur Shadwell proclaimed all Londoners could enjoy by this point may have been debated by his readership.2 As a medical professional, who had reported in 1892 from the front line of cholera epidemics in Germany and Russia, he was more than aware of the dangers the tap could dispense. His confident statement demonstrates that, by that point, drinking water had divided into two clear categories: either it was safe or unsafe for human consumption. This chapter investigates how, by the close of the century, it was science rather than social reform that led drinking water and sanitation standards into the twentieth century.
Testing the Waters
Post the 1866 cholera epidemic, those who were already convinced about the theory of water-borne disease transmission had good reason to view the tap with suspicion. The disease’s recurrence posed at least three questions. First, could water companies be breaching the Metropolis Water Act’s requirement that water should only be abstracted from above Teddington Lock? Second, were filtration methods failing to remove the cause of disease? Third, was the ongoing construction of London’s subterranean plumbing still permitting sewage to leak into mains water pipes? As the sleuthing carried out by John Snow had demonstrated, cholera’s presence could be traced to a particular company pipe, but what test could detect water’s contamination before it was transmitted to the consumer? Preventing epidemics required an accurate method of water testing, which scientists struggled to devise because of the yawning gap between theory and practice. Essentially, scientists were not sure what they were looking for under the microscope.
One French researcher was suggesting a new view of organic matter’s presence in liquids. We can thank France’s love affair with wine for driving Louis Pasteur’s research. His advances in microbiology — though the science did not yet have that disciplinary title — were focused on preventing the unidentified diseases that destroyed vats of profitable wine. Pasteur built on research conducted in the 1830s that proved the involvement of living, organised beings in both making and spoiling alcohol.3 His experiments in 1864 endorsed that nascent theory by demonstrating how these tiny life-forms could be starved of life by heating wine to a precise temperature for a minimum duration.4 Despite the evidence of life shown by Pasteur, the infusoria (as these unexplained agents were named) remained in the realm of chemistry.5 His discoveries did not cause an immediate link to the contemporary understanding of water quality, however, it is significant that microbiology’s gradual emergence was mirrored by the struggle to conclusively analyse water quality in Britain.
As mentioned in chapter two, London’s water analysts were divided into two camps. Microscopists remained at large in the second half of the nineteenth century, but chemists won the prestigious contracts for advising the government.6 London was centre stage in the profession’s development.7 Though public health was a national campaign, the scale of London’s social problems, married with its status as the national and imperial capital, made disease prevention an imperative there.
With the Metropolis Management Act of 1855, Medical Officer of Health posts were created in 1856 to keep a local eye on diseases and their potential causes.8 Officers were part of a developing public health administration as the pendulum of the water question swung from quantity to quality. Other experts were needed to decide whether new sewage removal and treatment methods were improving water quality. The professional status of a ‘water analyst’ was relatively obscure in the late 1850s, when this post was created within the offices of the Registrar General. William Farr was also still based in that office.9 As we learned in chapter two, the statistician worked with Snow during his groundbreaking research in 1854.10 Farr evidently had a more than cursory interest and faith in the connection between drinking water and disease. As his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry states, he ‘used many of his reports to demonstrate the waste of human life caused by preventable diseases’.11 When the celebrated chemist Dr Edward Frankland was appointed as the department’s water analyst in 1865, in Farr he had at least one sympathetic and learned colleague in situ.12 The urgency of Frankland’s task was soon augmented by the new cholera outbreak in the summer of 1866, in East London. Statistics from the Registrar-General’s office, for late July and early August, recorded circa 1,000 deaths a week from the disease.13 The Times report of the latest figures poignantly noted: ‘It is remarkable how large a number of the victims are very young children.’14 This comment included London’s weekly toll of around 300 deaths from diarrhoea, showing the extent of the waterborne and sanitation issues.
At that point, Frankland’s method of water analysis failed to detect a source of cholera but later that year, as historian Christopher Hamlin points out, he began to read the water patterns differently.15 The chemist began to separate water’s microscopic constituents into two identifiable groups; decay and life. His growing expertise led to his enlistment as a consultant to the government’s Royal Commission on Water Supply, which was first launched in 1866. From that point, there was a serious focus on water examination.
Tests on various corporate water supplies for the commission produced hard data to show that filtration’s efficacy was patchy.16 Success or failure was measured in degrees of clarity or turbidity. Frankland found that only the New River and West Middlesex companies had achieved a consistently clear water standard. ‘Very turbid’ water was recorded in supplies produced by Chelsea, Lambeth, and, with its grand double-barrel title, Southwark and Vauxhall companies.17 In 1869, a local Medical Officer also recorded that Southwark and Vauxhall’s product still left much to be desired, when he likened a sample to ‘diluted pea-soup or to a yellow November fog’.18
Evidently, the clause of 1852’s Metropolis Water Act stipulating that companies must achieve ‘effectual filtration’ was not being satisfied in that corporation. This is not surprising when engineering techniques were open to interpretation and no company was being put on trial for failing to meet these standards. In response to hard evidence of water quality disparities, the government’s Privy Council dispatched a recently appointed Sanitary Inspector, Mr J. Netten Radcliffe (a sympathiser with John Snow’s theories), to inspect how various company filtration regimes and technologies differed.
Wading through Mr Netten Radcliffe’s in-depth 1869 report, the Turbidity of Water of Certain London Companies, graphic details about water treatment practices, including Southwark and Vauxhall’s filtration method are available. Prior to filtration, that company allowed water to subside in reservoirs before transferring it to filter beds. These beds were constructed from layers of sand and gravel of varying coarseness, forming a total depth of six feet, six inches.19 In general, vast spaces were required to hold the quantity of water to be poured into these enormous sieves. In East London, for instance, the Middlesex Filter Beds occupied ten acres (today, the beds are preserved as a wildlife sanctuary in suburbia).20 Between the Southwark and Vauxhall, and West Middlesex, companies the former’s pea soup appearance and the latter’s crystal clear product were found to be the result of subtle variations in the thoroughness of subsidence and differing ratios of water-quantity-to-filtration surface area.21 West Middlesex’s subsidence technique was extremely thorough and its ratio of water-quantity-to-filtration surface was low. Southwark’s was the reverse. However, a third company — Grand Junction — with a similar profile to Southwark and Vauxhall in terms of subsidence and filtration method produced water that was only ‘occasionally’ turbid. In the end, the factor unique to Southwark and Vauxhall’s infrastructure and procedures was found to be its complete lack of ‘storage or service reservoirs for filtered water’.22 Post filtration, this company’s water was transferred directly out of the filtration system into the engine wells and pumped into the mains. This infrastructural gap was thought to cause the fluctuations in filtration speed, which in turn produced a negative effect on water quality. Still, the value of such detailed inspections was restrained by the use of the naked eye to read water quality as simply clear or turbid.
For Frankland, the invisible was becoming more pertinent to his view on determining drinking water quality. One interpretation of the chemist’s view of water pollution was offered by the Chief Medical Officer, John Simon, as a ‘skeleton of sewage’.23 It was certainly an evocative, if repulsive, phrase. But pollution was not the Royal Commission of Water Supply’s only concern.
The Royal Commission on Water Supply’s other objective was to explore the ‘practicability of obtaining large supplies of water from the mountainous districts of England and Wales’.24 There was a prevailing sense in the public health establishment that London’s water sources could never be wholesome, with or without effective analysis. That view of water’s literal dirt was paralleled by an ethical critique of its corporate ownership, control and governance.25 A statement from the Registrar General’s office in the Commission’s 1869 report clarified its anti-corporate-water position: ‘There seems to be no efficient means of enforcing an observance of this provision of the Act [Metropolis Water Supply Act 1852], and the neglect of the companies to comply with it…shows the necessity for some change in the system of supervision to which the supply of the Metropolis is subjected.’26 A House of Commons committee reached the same conclusion.
Within the din of these arguments, it was the overriding desire for a constant water supply that became the most audible cry for a change in London’s water management (not achieved since the 1852 Act). A description of the intermittent supply to one neighbourhood was used as evidence of this great need: ‘Smaller service pipes, into which the water is “turned on”, as it is called, during only one to two hours each day, the consumers receiving during this short time the whole quantity required for the day’s consumption, and storing it for use in cisterns provided by themselves. On Sundays, as a general rule, no supply is given but exceptions are made by many of the companies in poor neighbourhoods where the receptacles are insufficient.’27 These storage arrangements were deemed to be responsible for the proliferation of diseases in poor areas, whilst in wealthier homes the cisterns were considered to be inconvenient because of the cost of their maintenance and repair.
A stunning suggestion was emerging from the Commission’s 1869 report that was finally given voice in the conclusion, that ‘a sufficiency of water is too important a matter to all classes of the community to be made dependent on the profits of an associ-ation’.28 The report suggested that London’s water be managed municipally, like Dublin, Glasgow, Liverpool or Manchester. John Simon, Medical Officer to the Privy Council, passionately endorsed this conclusion in his own public health report of the following year, writing that the water companies’ ‘colossal power of life and death is something for which till recently there has been no precedent in the history of the world; and such a power, in whatever hands it is vested, ought most sedulously to be guarded against abuse’.29 Simon also pointed out that no water company had yet been sued for negligence. There was certainly no shortage of data to support any claims against the water suppliers.
Despite the swell of anti-corporate sentiment, the public versus private water ownership argument was parked for a couple more decades. Legislation consolidating the Commission’s findings still ensured radical changes to meet the daily water needs of Londoners.
1871’s Metropolis Water Act enforced the demand for a constant water supply. For the first time, Londoners might enjoy running water on Sundays.30 All the companies had to comply with the act swiftly; within eight months. Not only was the supply to be regular; but its distribution had to be engineered to reach the top storey of any building in London, no matter how high.31 Co-operation from property owners was mandatory. Providing and maintaining plumbing for pressurised mains water to be conducted through their buildings became a legal duty. The protocol for transferring to the new regime was strict. A water company had to announce, in the press, its intention to switch to providing constant supply in a particular district, after which landlords had two months to deliver their ends of the bargain. If the landlord failed to comply, premises were categorised as unfit for human habitation. Essentially, a new standard of living, in water terms at least, was set. Significant clauses concerning quality also appeared in the Act. A Water Examiner post was created within the Board of Trade, with the authority to ‘inspect water quality’.32 The terms of those inspections mutated as the discipline of bacteriology gained notoriety.
Germ Theory and Table Water
When Dr Robert Koch’s observations of bacteria’s reproduction on slices of potato led to his ‘germ theory’ of disease being reported in the early 1880s, the theory was met with scepticism in some sanitary circles. A report from the 1884 International Congress of Hygiene in The Hague referred to the ‘supposed germ of cholera’ and, the following year, a journalist attending the Annual Sanitary Institute Congress in Leicester reminded his readers of the doubt which shrouded the German doctor’s analyses: ‘…even if the germ theory of cholera were accepted to be true.’33 But, as one science historian claims: ‘The development of solidified culture media by Koch was without a doubt the most important single development in the history of microbiology after the perfection of sterilisation techniques.’34 Germs were still the preserve of scientific professionals for a few years, as the discipline of bacteriology became more widely practised in London’s laboratories and was applied to water analysis.
In the domestic sphere, a drinking water filter from the first half of the 1880s and the appearance of a new drinking water product by the end of that decade shows how germs entered the public domain.
Advertisement for Maignen’s Patent Filter Rapide, 1883. Wellcome Library,
London.
An 1883 advertisement for a dining room filter for the London-based purveyors of the Maignen’s Patent Filtre Rapide assured would-be customers that ‘it removes all organic matter, lead, copper and poisonous gases’.35 Germs were not mentioned. Customers could opt for a plain brown Cottage Filter or a Bijou Filter; the latter was decorative white porcelain. Whatever ones aesthetic preference might be, from a functional point of view the size was commensurate with the rate of filtration. The most expensive filter, at £1 15d. was said to produce three gallons of filtered water an hour. Maignen’s filter was apparently superior to other brands on the market (at least according to its promoter) because it ‘is so easily cleaned and renewed’.36 Other filters, claimed a chemist vouching for the product, were feared to do more harm than good to health because they gathered dirt.
By 1889, the negative publicity about germs relationship to public water supply opened up the market for new drinking water products, such as Puralis by the Pure Water Company.37 A reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette visited its producer’s premises in Battersea the same year. There, ‘pure’ water was being produced through distillation, for use as ‘table water’ and even for a luxurious, lime-free bath as a beauty treatment for ladies.38
Advertisement of the Pure Water Company, Battersea, ca. 1889.
Wellcome Library, London.
The Pure Water Company’s proprietor pronounced to the Gazette’s reporter ‘we cater for the masses’ and his sales testified to a successful product, with figures doubling in ten years from 10,000 to 20,000.39 Not all of these purchases were for the London market. Mr Hartley’s product was also being shipped to Egypt and South America, where the gospel of temperance had spread. His advertisement’s claim that distilled water was the only reliably pure water was backed up with a quote from Professor Frankland, no less, reminding consumers that boiling water was not a guarantee against germs. Perhaps Frankland did not trust the general public to sufficiently boil their water. Either that, or his product endorsement was highly lucrative. The Pure Water Company was also conscious of the need to differentiate its product from mineral water brands: ‘It is well to bear in mind that aerated distilled water, not being a mineral water, does not lower the system. It can be drunk daily.’40
The Balfour Commission
The same year that the Pure Water Company was touting its wares (1889), the London County Council was formed. It was not long before the infamous London water question arose as a governance issue for the Council.41 Should it be the controller of London’s water supply? That question was central to the proceedings of the Balfour Commission (named after its Chairman Lord Balfour), or the Royal Commission to Inquire into the Water Supply of the Metropolis, which held its first session in Charing Cross, on a spring day in 1892.42 Discussion of depleted water supplies dominated the Commission, amidst fears that London’s water was running out.
A contributor to the Commission’s enquiry, Mr William Booth Bryan, engineer to the East London Water Company, blamed people rather than the hydrological cycle for the low reserves. In Booth Bryan’s view, shortages were the result of ‘the carelessness of the poorer class of their customers. The alien immigration in the east of London had especially caused an immense amount of waste’.43 He cited clothes washing techniques by the ‘aliens’ as one cause of lavish water use and the engineer relayed to the commission how he had personally observed taps that had been left running from a train (it must have been slow-moving for Booth Bryan to catch such details). East London’s growing demand, with population growth, did raise the topic of where water might come from other than the Lee River. Drawing from The Chalk aquifer beneath London was one option but there were concerns that its use might deplete the New River’s sources for middle and upper class homes in Islington.
Such tensions over future water resources and their distribution between different corporate providers, and their diverse customers, renewed the question of municipalising London’s water supply. Within the debate on that subject, one pro-munici-palisation representative from the London County Council voiced his concern that the Council might be obliged to supply public fountains for free.44 This reference to drinking fountains is a rare mention of the public sources in official sanitation discourse, but it suggests their prominence in daily life at that point. Despite the fears germ theory unleashed in some London circles, 16,452 people were recorded drinking from three fountains maintained by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountains Association, over twenty-four hours at Clapham Common, Bishopsgate Church and London Bridge in 1891.45 The Association’s drinking fountains count in the capital was 690 in 1892.46 If the London County Council official read the organi-sation’s latest report then he may have known that it was struggling to cover the costs of building, maintaining and supplying the fountains with water. In fact, the Association was refusing to construct any more because of financial restraints. It may seem like a minor issue in the vast urban water network, but the drinking fountains were a highly visible public emblem of Victorian London’s water politics. If water supply moved to state governance and ownership, then should free drinking water be a public service rather than the work of a charity? Free drinking water was an issue far removed from the quantity of supply that concerned the engineers contributing to the deliberations of the Royal Commission.
An engineer from East London Waterworks was convinced that the River Lee’s capacity should be boosted ‘by means of a system of storage reservoirs’.47 Other engineers agreed about similar proposals for west London. Mr C.J. More, engineer to the Conservators of the Thames proposed that ‘the storage of water in reservoirs at the upper end of the Thames basin would be the most beneficial arrangement which could be adopted for the river generally’.48 In the Commission’s report, storage reservoirs were also recommended for abstractions from both the rivers Lee and Thames, with a combined capacity of 352,000,000 litres but the need for reservoir construction was not immediately enforced on the water companies by law (the significance of this stasis will become apparent in the next chapter). Quality issues also featured strongly in the Commission’s final report. On the munic-ipalisation question, the jury was still out.
The Balfour Commission’s 1893 report acknowledged that the science of water quality for human consumption had ‘passed from the domain of chemistry into that of biology’.49 Pathogenic bacteria were now accepted as an official threat to drinking water’s safety. The report concluded that London’s water quality was excellent and pure, citing the lack of Asiatic cholera as one reflection of the supply standard.50 Even so, recommendations for quality assurance were made: ‘In order to preserve the wholesomeness of the water as delivered to the consumer and in order further to meet the not unnatural sentiment against drinking water, which, though wholesome, has been polluted at an earlier stage, all possible vigilance should be exercised to prevent unnecessary contamination of the Thames and Lea and their respective tributaries, to ensure the thorough treatment of all sewage, before it is allowed to pass into the rivers, by the most efficacious methods that science and experience may dictate, and to enforce the adequate storage and filtration of such water as is abstracted at the intakes.’51 Filtration regulations were also to be stepped up and enforced by the Public Water Examiner.
A new understanding of the interdependence of drinking water quality and sanitation was becoming integrated into environmental and urban policy decisions. 1894’s Thames Conservancy Act legalised the Commission’s recommendations and instituted the prevention of pollution in the river’s catchment area, specifically for the protection of water for ‘domestic supply’.52 For the first time in its history, London’s primary water source became a conservation area.
The Franklands
Also in 1894, a seminal text that applied germ theory to water quality was published. One of the authors of Micro-Organisms in Water was Edward Frankland’s son, Percy. Initially he followed in his father’s footsteps as a chemist, but was seduced by the modern lure of bacteriology. The book’s second author was Percy Frankland’s talented research colleague. She was his wife.
Grace Frankland was a scientist, a writer and an illustrator. When the husband-and-wife team’s book hit the international science shelves, her drawings of bacilli showed the frail intricacies of the world she routinely viewed through her microscope.
The rational style of her translation of bacillus from the lens to the page shows how the era of sensationalist animalcules had evolved with the establishment of microbiology as an official science. The Franklands’ research was groundbreaking in applying bacteriology, as a branch of microbiology, to drinking water. This explained how they realised that after Koch’s ‘the possibility was at once opened up of approaching the solution of problems connected with water-supply which had long been matters of dispute and speculation amongst hygienic author-ities’.53 In practice, they had already been working on developing solutions in the context of London’s water supply.
Grace Frankland’s sketches of bacilli, Plate 2. Micro-Organisms in Water,
Percy Frankland and Mrs Percy Frankland (London: Longmans and
Green, 1894). Wellcome Library, London.
Percy Frankland was employed to apply bacteriological analysis to the Lee and the Thames for the first time in history, between 1885 and 1888.54 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.55 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.’56 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.57 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’.58 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.59 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…’60 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).61 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.62 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.63 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.64
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.65 In Hackney Wick, categorised as very poor, stagnating sewage was blamed for fatal cases of diarrhoea.66 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.67 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’.68 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.69 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.70
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.71 Notices with instructions in Hebrew reflected the impact on East London’s Jewish residents.72 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.73 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.74 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.74
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.75 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.76 By the late 1850s sewage treatment became industrialised and ‘cream of lime’ was routinely added to deodorise and disinfect sewage.77 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.’78 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.79 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.80 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 1897.81 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…?‘82 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.83 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’.84 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.85 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.86 One public analyst in particular would revolutionise drinking water science in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Before that could happen, the ownership and governance of water supply radically altered. As the sun set on London’s nineteenth century water questions, the era of private water was also fading fast.