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hearing of the summons, or the order of the magistrate was
obtained and then the work was completed later. A flagrant
case was found out by the Inspector Mr. Lyon of the botching
builder, who had so repaired a drain that it allowed the sewer
gas to enter the house and so became a danger to the occupants.
It appears that the owner, a woman had given the man carte
blanche to do what was necessary, and he had scamped the work,
and I regret to say that two cases of Typhoid Fever occurred in
the house a short time after. The Public Health Act expressly
provides by section 42 that any watercloset or drain so repaired
in such a manner as to be a nuisance the person who executed
the work shall be liable to a fine not exceeding £20. The
matter was reported to the Vestry and proceedings ordered to be
taken, this was done and after several adjournments the man
was fined £5 or fourteen days imprisonment. I have no doubt
this prosecution will have a salutary effect amongst this class of
persons, as it is men like these who style themselves anything
between a builder and sanitary engineer that cause so much
trouble to the sanitary officers, and such needless and useless
expense to the inexperienced houseowner.
OVERCROWDING.
We have and always shall have, a certain amount of overcrowding
in our thickly populated district, and it is one of those
evils we find very difficult to remedy; in that part of our
Hamlet known as the West Ward it is supposed to exist in an
acute form, a large number of the population consisting of
foreign Jews who have but little regard for sanitation. In order
to make an attempt to grapple with this matter in July last the
Sanitary Inspector Mr. Twaits applied for and obtained a
number of Warrants to enter the houses we most suspected,
between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., it being useless to visit
these houses in the daytime for the purpose of detecting overcrowding.
On July 27th, accompanied by the Inspector I visited
a number of houses about midnight in Plumbers Row and
Yalford Street; before an entry could be made into all the rooms
the assistance of the police had to be obtained; although we
found nearly every room in these houses occupied as sleeping
rooms, in a very few was overcrowding apparent, after allowing
300 cubic feet for each person according to the standard adopted
by the Local Government Board. It was only in a very small
proportion of the houses visited, that it was necessary to serve
abatement orders; it therefore seems to me that we had overestimated
the amount of overcrowding in this locality, and if it
does not occur here to any extent, we can be quite sure that this
evil does not exist in other parts of the Hamlet to any
appreciable degree. We frequently have complaints sent to us
from various sources of supposed overcrowding, but on measuring
the rooms we generally find they have sufficient cubical air space.