Chapter Six

Blitz on the Board 1937–1945

No. No way you would have got me into one of those. ¹

(George Billingham, Engineer, Metropolitan Water Board)

‘Those‘, in the above quote, referred to air raid shelters. George Billingham’s memories of working as a water engineer before, and during, World War Two are recorded in a rare interview about London’s water supply during the war. During civil defence preparations, the engineer personally studied hundreds of proposals from local authorities suggesting air raid shelter locations. As underground buildings, water engineers needed to advise local authorities about the proximity of mains pipes to suggested sites. Billingham maintained that some of his department’s recommendations for relocating sites for proposed shelters were dismissed: ‘I didn’t like the look of where many of these were going, to be quite candid.’² He imagined scenarios of shelters flooding with water. For the duration of the Blitz, the engineer refused to enter an air raid shelter despite the subterranean nature of his profession. As Billingham’s recollection confirmed, the nightmare he imagined was realised in one air raid shelter in Stoke Newington in northeast London. He does not elaborate on the scale of the tragedy in the interview but, fortunately, he also does not mention any other similar events.

This chapter reveals how imagining the worst was critically important for the defence of London’s drinking water supply during the crisis of war. Preparation for the imagined war and its lived experience are filtered through records revealing the efforts to both protect and maintain a constant flow of potable water to the city during the conflict.

Imagining the Blitz

Air Raid Precautions were drawn up at the Metropolitan Water Board long before war was declared. By the end of 1937 conflict was highly likely, if not imminent, and that London would be targeted as the administrative and economic capital of Britain was inevitable.

Commander Blackwell, the Board’s Air Raid Precautions Officer, issued a secret document in December 1937 about his plans. In the document, he acknowledged to its select readership the monumental challenge of defending infrastructure that lay below every street and building likely to be bombed. To focus his strategy, Blackwell identified what would cause the most ‘serious dislocation of the system of water supply’.³ Logically, the mains pipes were his primary concern because of their centrality to the supply network that fed all of London’s homes and businesses. The Commander was confident, he declared, that sections of mains pipes could be dug out and replaced in forty-eight hours. ‘Fouled mains’ also had to be considered.⁴ Colonel MacKenzie — the Director of Water Examination who replaced Alexander Houston — had been consulted on this point and proposed that portable gas chlorination units were needed for swift responses to mains pipe casualties. The Board’s strategists could not ignore the fact that if clean water pipes could be ruptured, sewage pipes were equally vulnerable to damage and, consequently, sanitary mayhem. At that point, sewerage was under the management of the London County Council.⁵ To defend London’s potable water supply from external and internal threats, the Board mounted its wartime strategy on two main fronts: engineering and examination.

The Chief Engineer issued an outline of his plans to protect the Metropolitan Water Board’s infrastructure in 1938. He was concerned about how the source of the supply itself might be damaged. What would happen if aerial assaults contaminated the main waterworks or stopped their supplies flowing? To reduce the possibility of the plants becoming sitting ducks, the windows of Engine Houses were to be fitted with blackout blinds and wire netting.⁶ For East London, the mains pipe visibly crossing the River Lee was noted as being particularly ‘open to sabotage‘, so it was proposed that members of the Home Guard patrolled that area in the event of emergency.⁷ As the Board’s staff did not usually linger in that vicinity, the Chief Engineer pointed out a practical, and somewhat ironic point: ‘There is no water laid on at these works for sanitary purposes.’⁸ A temporary convenience would be installed. Later in the war, kits for detecting poison in reservoirs were also doled out to each waterworks for the possibility of deliberate acts of contamination.⁹

Before the war broke out, in June 1939 the Metropolitan Water Board issued warnings about how domestic water supplies might be affected in a bulletin issued to householders. Air Raid Precautions: Advice to Consumers writ large the reminder that all indoor pipes were the responsibility of householders.¹⁰ The Board would only deal with outdoor, public pipes i.e. those in the sphere of municipal water. Consumers were advised to familiarise themselves with the stopcock’s location to turn off supply when necessary to prevent flooding amongst other damage. Domestic cisterns were to be kept clean for reserve supplies in the event of the loss of mains water. Water from cisterns was to be boiled before use. The document contained a recurrent wartime water theme. ‘Consumers should do their utmost to economise in the use of water as large quantities will probably be required for fire fighting.’ Water’s social and economic value was being reassessed.

Phoney War

On 31^st August 1939, the Board’s Emergency Committee met to plan for the imminent state of emergency. Key men who were on annual leave, such as the Director of Water Examination, were recalled to their posts.¹¹ Just three days later on 3^rd September, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcast live from Downing Street declaring that Britain was at war with Germany.¹²

For some time the so-called ‘phoney war’ ensued before London saw any bombing raids, but social upheavals were already in motion. The prospect of the Board losing its youngest and fittest men prompted a representation to the Ministry for Health and Labour about the consequences of a severely depleted workforce.¹³ Employee representatives, the National Union of Water Works, offered to come to the Board’s staffing rescue, but another solution was soon ratified to redress the imminent labour shortage, for a complement of temporary assistants.

Those assistants were only to ‘be women, or men not liable to be called up for service with H.M. Forces’.¹⁴ The move was as novel in the water industry as for the many professional spheres where women replaced men for the first time. These female recruits included Mrs Gardiner, who took up an unspecified senior post in the laboratories, and Miss E.A. Flint (MSc), who became a ‘temporary technical assistant in the Water Examination Department at a salary of £400 per annum’.¹⁵ Such opportunities for women in the water workforce presented themselves because of the extreme conditions of the war. However, over its course, seven thousand volunteers were also trained to assist core staff, though the gender of these recruits is not mentioned in the records. Another human resources precaution the Board took in 1939 was compulsory blood testing. Any employees testing positively for pathogenic bacteria were removed from direct contact with the water supply. This ban extended to employees ‘suffering from any intestinal upset associated with looseness of the bowels’.¹⁶ Civil defence was also, therefore, mounted on a biomedical front.

As the likelihood of air raids on London increased, Finsbury Borough Council (now Islington) requested that the Board open its air raid shelters and basement to the public.¹⁷ Permission was granted, at least temporarily. Such arrangements, and their use, show how boundaries between work and home life, private and public space blurred, as unprecedented levels of social cooperation was required.

By August 1940, the war’s phoney phase was drawing to a close. Mobilising defence operations, Colonel MacKenzie performed a radio broadcast on the 13^th of August to teach Londoners about sterilising their water at home. If supplies were pronounced to be unsafe following an air raid, the sterilising method he described was to be used immediately. MacKenzie encouraged listeners to transcribe his instructions: ‘Keep in your house a bottle of chlorinated soda solution. Your chemist can supply you with it…Add ten drops of chlorine disinfectant — I will spell that — CHLORINE — to one pint of water. Stir and allow to stand for five minutes or longer. Then add a crystal of Hypo — HYPO. Dissolve this and you may then drink the water.’¹⁸ The last ingredient was intended to neutralise the flavour of chlorine. Hopefully householders faithfully transcribed MacKenzie’s lecture and stuck his sterilisation lesson up in their kitchens or bathrooms. The Colonel claimed that only two brands of disinfectants would safely do the job. Those brands were Milton or Chlor-San. London’s chemists must have stocked up to the gills after his high-profile announcement. Milton promptly launched its own advertising campaign, for this essential wartime household accessory.

In MacKenzie’s message to Londoners and numerous other drinking water missives that would follow over the next couple of years, the same brands were advocated. Milton and Chlor-san cornered a lucrative market, so anybody with shares in the companies was assured of an undiluted stream of profit with bottles going from between six pence to eight-pence (the equivalent of seventy-five pence to a pound in modern currency).¹⁹ For four and a half pence, a slim-line ‘emergency flask’ of Milton could also be purchased, for slipping into one’s pocket or handbag.²⁰ Handsome sales of Hypo were also guaranteed assuming that the Colonel’s safe drinking water drill was obeyed. It was to be enacted when a notice printed in red ink, was delivered through one’s letterbox.²¹ When the threat was deemed to have passed, a second notice, printed in green ink, gave the all clear. A leap of faith was required to view the tap’s contents as dangerous one moment and innocuous the next. Even those who might have been partial to Schweppes’ ‘table water’ before the war, could not have reverted to that option (unless they had a secret stash), as the product was suspended under the Ministry of Food’s rationing protocol.²² Schweppes brand of soda water was still being produced, so perhaps some who could afford it kept a few bottles of that tucked away for emergencies. This seems to be a petty concern in the wake of what followed.

Advertisement for Milton, 1940. Wellcome Library, London.
Reproduced with kind permission from Milton Pharmaceutical
Company.

The Blitz

Blitzkrieg, as the German army’s lightning bombing policy was named, was launched on 7^th September 1940 over London, in daylight.²³ Fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing followed.²⁴ On the ground, the Board’s operations were directed from a control room in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.²⁵ Regular shift patterns were replaced by emergency responses. For staff like George Billingham and his fellow engineer Arthur Durling, there were three-day stretches without sleep as they attempted to repair and restore mains pipes.²⁶ Billingham acknowledged the Board’s preparedness for the Blitz in terms of infrastructure but the chaos unleashed by the bombing of London presented an equal crisis in managing scarce human resources. As he reflected: ‘The notion that everything could be controlled centrally at the height of the Blitz wasn’t possible.’²⁷ Districts had to focus on local crises.

Effective communication was decimated by the air raids. The telephone system was often down, or inaccessible. For instance the all-important turncocks, who had the equipment and knowhow for switching off supplies to mains pipes had to take shelter from the air raids, just like other civilians. Alternative communications came in the form of a 130-person strong fleet of human messengers on bicycles. They worked in shifts around the clock relaying messages between district foremen and turncocks. A mid-war report from the Board recorded the organisation’s delight with the usefulness of the 350 pedal cycles that it had purchased before the war.²⁸ Arthur Durling, Billingham’s colleague, remembered travelling to Plaistow on one of those bicycles after a particularly heavy air raid to determine why the pressure gauges in his district had plummeted to zero.²⁹ He detoured past areas where unexploded bombs were cordoned off, stopping to peer into open fire hydrants. When he saw that air was being sucked into the mains through the hydrants, part of the reason for pressure loss was explained. As he approached Plaistow high street, Durling saw the other reason. A large bomb crater in the middle of the road was filled with water. The engineer vividly remembered that scene: ‘The main had been fractured and there were women with kettles from the houses that hadn’t been bombed coming out and they were getting their water from out of the crater, and I suggested to them that they’d better not do this because it was probably contaminated.’³⁰ It follows that the supply these households had lost, or would imminently lose, made any water precious whether it came from a polluted crater or not. For Durling, the contamination of most concern was effluent from sewer pipes also punctured by the bomb.

This collision between the water expert and laypeople highlighted a lack of common knowledge about sanitation. For Londoners who had become accustomed to drinking from the tap without questioning its safety for more than two generations, water contamination was possibly hard to imagine. But the war was exposing the very infrastructure they unconsciously relied on. What normally lay invisibly functioning below the streets was quite literally exposed as streets and roads were wrenched open.

Maintaining acceptable standards of water quality for drinking and quantity for sanitation was becoming increasingly fraught.

The likelihood of poisonous wastewater entering potable water pipes preoccupied Colonel MacKenzie, but some of his colleagues were sceptical about the danger this presented to public health. In their minds, chlorinating water at source was sufficient for cleansing any contamination further down the line. Fortunately, American research concurred with MacKenzie’s doubt that such contamination could be removed remotely. The American experiments proved that intensive chlorination, for prolonged and repeated periods was needed to pronounce pipes that had come into contact with raw sewage to be rendered absolutely germ free.³¹ MacKenzie pointed out that one could often smell sewage in craters even if it was not visible. He suspected that the more silent culprits were minor stoneware drains from houses. Materially, they were more vulnerable to the effects of bombardment and even small leakages might prove fatal for the spread of pathogenic bacteria.³² MacKenzie’s policy for sterilising all damaged mains pipes after their repair was enacted, albeit in a mode compromised by the conditions of the war.

Arthur Durling recalled how staff worked from charts instructing them on the ratio of chlorine powder to water needed for the diameter of a given pipe.³³ The correct proportions were mixed into a paste and simply poured from a bucket into the hydrants beside the valves where pipes were reconnected to the main water supply. When Durling recounted the procedure, Billingham laughed on the radio recording at the mention of the familiar bleach product — Stabichlor — which was apparently used rather more lavishly than the charts dictated. ‘Usually the fellows who were doing it would err on the side of putting rather more in than perhaps the charts said’, confided Durling.³⁴ Humour aside, the engineer proudly concluded: ‘We got away with it and there were no cases of typhoid in London during the Blitz and I think that’s quite a record because it was a serious problem…if there had been any waterborne disease in London, well it could have done more damage than the whole of the Blitz had done. At least to people.’³⁵ According to the bacteriological tests, the staff were achieving outstanding results, but the Director of Water Examination was worried about a solution he perceived to be expedient rather than efficient.³⁶

When it came to the decontamination of trunk mains (major arterial pipes) mobile chlorinators were dispatched on lorries. Under MacKenzie’s instruction ‘a fleet of vehicles and drivers for the sole purpose of towing the chlorinators was on stand by’.³⁷ Chlorination Supervisors were allocated two mobile chlorinators apiece, each with their own Chlorine Attendant. The supervisors saw that the cargo of gas was pumped into pipes at a high dosage of ten-parts-per-million. Though the plan was to flush any trace of the intense chemical dose out of a pipe before putting it back into service, this did not always happen. On this matter of chlorine lingering in public supplies, Colonel MacKenzie reassured the Board: ‘There is widespread realisation that a chlorinous taste spells safety, and complaints have been few.’³⁸ Success rates were convincing. From seven hundred water samples taken from repaired mains after mobile chlorination, only three were found to have traces of faecal contamination. During periods of heavy bombardment, such essential work was hampered by a lack of available vehicles (and presumably sometimes roads) to tow the trailers into position. The possibility of chlorination failing to counter the effects of sewage contamination may have given the Director of Water Examination sleepless nights, even in air raid shelters. By 1941, chlorination philosophy inside the treatment works had also changed. Pre-chlorination was introduced as a ‘fourth line of defence’, in addition to ‘storage, filtration and terminal chlorination’.³⁹ As the term suggests, pre-chlorination was a process in which stored water was flooded with chlorine before, rather than after, filtration. The measure was a bacteriological insurance policy. Reinforced buildings were constructed to shield the specialist chlorination technology.⁴⁰

When mains supplies were lost, once the bottles of tap water householders had been advised to stash away had been drained and the contents of cisterns emptied, two potential water sources were left.⁴¹ Standpipes were one source. These devices were a form of temporary plumbing, which involved makeshift vertical pipes poking out of the mains onto the street and fitted with taps. Mobile tanks were the second source, complete with a plumbing system that created a row of queue-reducing taps. In both cases, water access reverted to the pre-modern mode of carting supplies from source to the point of use.

Unsanitary City

On the matter of mobile tanks, the Board stated: ‘Attempts have been made to distribute both drinking water and “not drinking water”, ‘the latter being untreated water stored in former oil tanks to be used for sanitary purposes’ (effectively, a grey water solution to sustaining water supplies).⁴² It was found, though, that drinking water was favoured because people struggled to find sufficient containers to store separate supplies. ‘Sanitary purposes’ was simply a euphemism for toilet flushing. London’s much lauded, internationally replicated, sewerage system was highly dependent on one thing: a constant supply of water. Without it, the civilised City of London was fast becoming an unsanitary place. No alternative sewage disposal system could be mounted without running water. That fact was evident to tenants and office workers in the City of London during May 1941.

Between the 10^th and 11^th of May, the most widespread damage to London’s water infrastructure occurred, during the final stage of the Blitzkrieg bombing campaign. 605 mains pipes were damaged alongside the dreadful human casualties and deaths.⁴³ Other water authorities were drafted in to help, from as far afield as Glasgow. Almost three weeks later, the effects were still being felt in the City of London where the water pipes were bone dry. Gerald G. Caney, a solicitor, pleaded that ‘the question of lavatories is getting very serious’ in his letter to the local Medical Officer of Health.⁴⁴ Another City tenant, the director of Oriental Carpet Importers, was also pining for running water to return to his offices, ‘particularly for toilet purposes’.⁴⁵ The City’s Medical Officer offered his reassurance that standpipes would be erected near their premises, although on the proviso that property owners supplied buckets to transport the supply. Given that a period of three weeks after the serious bomb damage had elapsed since Caney’s letter and almost two months by the time the carpet importer wrote, the Metropolitan Water Board was evidently under severe strain.

Obviously desperate to secure alternative supplies, City workers persuaded the fire brigade to pump water from its storage tanks into buildings for toilet flushing.⁴⁶ Huge containers of water were located in particular streets for fire fighting. One building that received the fire brigade water was the Avenue Telephone Exchange, just north of the Thames in the City. Staff symptoms soon indicated that the untreated water was being used for drinking as well as toilet flushing. In June, the Ministry of Health enquired about reports of an outbreak of gastroenteritis at the Telephone Exchange, potentially caused by contaminated water. Dr Charles F. White, a City doctor, verified ‘seventy cases of diarrhoea and vomiting amongst the telephone girls but added that he was disinclined to discourage altogether the practice of using the firemen’s water from static water dams in the streets’ because of the equally serious health consequences of leaving toilets unflushed.⁴⁷ This case shows the difficult balancing act of maintaining safe water for drinking and sufficient water for sanitation, each critical for the protection of public health.

Following the outfall from the May bombings, the national War Emergency Water Committee re-evaluated policy. In future attacks on a similar scale, public announcements were to be made via vehicle-mounted loudspeakers to advertise the loss of supplies and dangers of impure water consumption. Stock requests were to be broadcast, such as ‘please use as little as possible and help one another’ or ‘the water in this district is impure. Until further notice it should not be used for drinking or in the kitchen unless boiled or sterilised’.⁴⁸

As the Metropolitan Water Board stepped up its plans for alternative methods of supply to the mains, other water sources also had to be considered in the event of chemical attack. If mustard gas, for instance, was unleashed close to rivers or reservoirs, they could not be used. Planning for this scenario led to a secret census of private wells to elicit the support of their owners for back up supplies.⁴⁹ Any doubt about this water’s purity would be extinguished by dosing it with chlorine gas whilst private supplies were sucked from underground and transferred to tanks mounted on vehicles. In 1941, The Board’s Chief Engineer Mr Cronin was concerned about the cost of these private resources: ‘Arrangements for paying the private well owners are still very nebulous and it would be well if this matter were settled before the event…’⁵⁰ One problem was that most of these private wells relied on modern electrical pumps; they would be useless if power went down.

Water for Feeding

London County Council was also interested in the results of the well census remaining covert. Its Londoners’ Meals Service was set up a year after the war broke out to feed those whose kitchens had been destroyed in the Blitz, or for whom cooking had become unmanageable.⁵¹ Meals were heavily subsidised, or free, to those who met the conditions. The papers of Mr L.J. Dillon, an employee of the Meals Service show how reliant the operation was on a pure water supply. The Council worked with schools and charities to mount the programme of 170 meal centres, including Mrs Franklin’s War Time Kitchen in Paddington for Air Raid Precautions personnel and Post Office workers, unemployed women and refugees. Older unemployed people could opt for the Over Thirty Association, located on Shaftesbury Avenue.⁵² Blitz Stew was one meal the communal kitchens offered. A vat of 120 portions required eight and a half gallons of drinking water to combine its other ingredients, which were as follows:

‘42lbs root vegetables, preferably half to be carrots, cut small 12lbs of potatoes
4lbs medium or coarse oatmeal
5oz. Plantox or Marmite
8 oz. salt
4 teaspoonfuls pepper
2 tbsp mixed herbs
Gravy browning to colour
6 tins of evaporated milk
9lbs pulse vegetables
10lbs fresh meat’⁵³

One could not be too choosy about the distinctive flavour of Marmite or the sweetness of evaporated milk, and vegetarians were in trouble, but the stew sounded nourishing. Superintendents were instructed by the London County Council ‘to make it routine before leaving the centres in the evenings to fill all suitable receptacles with water and cover the vessels to keep the water from contamination’ i.e. gas attack.⁵⁴ Additionally, superintendents were reminded not to use any water ‘for drinking purposes (including cleaning of teeth) unless a) it has been well boiled or b) effectively chlorinated’.⁵⁵ A consistent demand for this service precipitated a conference in July 1941 about Emergency Water Supplies for Meals Services. The Council reported that the Metropolitan Water Board’s Chief Engineer had ‘prepared for us a list of private wells’.⁵⁶ As an essential food supplier, this service was given priority for well water. The conference report also noted that large cisterns were salvaged from debris clearance dumps and sterilised for water storage at Meals Service centres. One such salvage centre was Hyde Park. Footage of the park in Rosie Newman’s documentary film Britain at War shows cisterns stacked high beside orderly piles of household doors and rows of baths.⁵⁷

Imagining Invasion

Although the Blitz ceased after May 1941, the desire to secure access to private groundwater sources was further bolstered in 1942 by preparations for invasion.⁵⁸ The Metropolitan Water Board issued permits to ensure that only a limited number of authorised personnel entered water works plants. Quantities of barbed wire on perimeter fences increased and steel doors were fitted at the mouths of tunnels leading to the mains.⁵⁹ The Invasion Defence Scheme for London instructed that emergency water supplies must be established, in the event that municipal control of water sources and distribution was lost. Strategists envisaged parachute troops descending into waterworks and sabotaging plant machinery. Imagined simultaneously with an air offensive, sparking demand for fire-fighting supplies, the scenarios were pretty apocalyptic.

In the event of land invasion ‘water points’ were to be set up with an allocation of drinking water ‘on the basis of two gallons per head per day’.⁶⁰ At these points, well water would be pumped into a tanker, promptly sterilised and doled out in a similar way to the existing emergency tanker drill.⁶¹ Given the deluge of people anticipated at these points, if mains water was lost across London, a test was carried out at John Barker and Company’s well source on 28^th November 1942, just off Kensington High Street.⁶² An orderly diagram recorded how the flow of people, and water, could be managed. These well-served water points were never needed, as land invasion did not occur, but some Londoners possibly accessed water from neighbours’ wells when supplies were scarce.

‘O For the Water They Waste in Britain’⁶³

The above statement was emblazoned across a poster featuring a lone soldier marching through deserted terrain. A giant domestic tap floated surreally in the foreground of the poster, juxtaposing domestic comfort with the harsh reality of life on the front line. Conserving water for both unknown emergencies and the unknown duration of the war was a recurrent theme of the Metropolitan Water Board’s public relations campaign during the war. Remnants of the Board’s campaign point to a sustained volley of reminders to Londoners about their duty to value water. The sight of untold quantities of water being used to fight fires during the Blitz created a dangerous perception that supplies were bottomless. The Board’s Chairman Henry Berry issued a New Year greeting in 1942, suggesting Londoners resolve ‘not to fill the hand basin when washing but to make it a point of honour to reduce my consumption of water to the absolute minimum in this period of national emergency’.⁶⁴ Like Dr Houston in the previous war, Berry’s wanted to conserve the coal that kept the water pumping into filtration systems and supply pipes.

A sustained possibility of invasion precipitated a national plan to ration the personal use of water to two gallons a day ‘for all purposes’.⁶⁵ Toilet flushing with freshwater was to be supplanted by the use of wastewater. Successfully instilling such behaviour change presented another challenge.

Emergency Supplies, Edward Street, Canning Town, E16, 4th December
1944. City of London, London Metropolitan Archives. Reproduced with kind permission from Thames Water.

Ironically, it was a natural rather than a manmade emergency that caused water rations to be imposed in 1944. A severe lack of rainfall the year before in the London region had affected reserves and sparked fears of shortages. Food could be neatly rationed into packets, tins and weighed in pounds by the Ministry for Food but measuring free-flowing water was more challenging. Commercial water users, such as breweries, had meters but domestic consumers were still charged on the rateable basis calculated by property value (no doubt a value grossly altered by the war and poverty for many Londoners). Between January and May 1944, reports in the national press increasingly highlighted the seriousness of the drought as the summer drew closer.⁶⁶ All defects in fittings and leaky taps were to be reported to the Metropolitan Water Board’s distribution engineer and the use of hosepipes to water gardens or cars was banned. The need for a Minister for Water was even mooted. The period of water scarcity, amidst the existing wartime austerity was prolonged. In August 1944 London’s water scarcity only made a minor news item, despite the fact that the flow of the Thames was ‘still one of the lowest on record’.⁶⁷

Some emergency need was still evident from the effects of war and the natural drought in December 1944. A photograph of a mobile emergency drinking water tanker serving Canning Town in East London documented an apparently uncommon sight (mains repair was on the whole reportedly swift and successful).⁶⁸ The photograph poignantly conveys the disruption of convenience and comfort through the strange sight of domestic taps relocation outdoors, juxtaposed with gutted buildings and a rubble-strewn landscape.

It is incredible that no waterborne health epidemic erupted in London between 1939–45, despite damage to over 6000 pipes in London’s water distribution network.⁶⁹ Colonel MacKenzie published an essay in 1945 about his department’s measures to safeguard water purity. He proudly quoted a statement from the British Medical Journal, penned in January of that year: ‘One of the outstanding public health achievements of the war had been the protection of London’s water supply.’⁷⁰ MacKenzie’s pride about the prevention of waterborne disease was understandable in the context of a city scarred by the loss of 29,890 people during the war.⁷¹ Over 50,000 people were also left with disabling injuries caused by the bombing campaign.⁷²

Patriotic pride in London’s municipal water protection during the Blitz may have been one factor stoking the controversy that broke out in the 1950s, when a novel new water treatment philosophy from America made its way across the Atlantic.