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88
A telegram was sent in reply by your Medical Officer to the following effect:—
" School should be closed at once. Defects are most grave. Must request
immediate attention.''
This telegram was preceded by the letter already alluded to, and which was as
follows:—
Vestry Hall,
Upper Street, N.,
28th September, 1892.
Dear Sir,
Yerbury Road Board School.
Without entering into very full details I desire to say in reply to your
communication of yesterday that the following are the more serious defects in
the drainage of the School.
1. There is no sufficient disconnection between the sewer and the drains,
the result being that sewer gas can pass freely from the former to the
latter.
2. Sewer gas can pass into the school through the drain pipes that
are laid within the school to carry away the rain from the stackpipes
which are situated within the building.
3. There are gully traps within the building in connection with these
drains from the stackpipes, which in dry weather will become
unsealed, and which at all times are dangerous. Gullies should never
be placed inside a building.
4. The drains are not ventilated.
6. All the drains leak very much, so that water discharged into them
finds its way very freely into the ground.
6. There is no proper ventilation to the school drainage system as a
whole.
Yours faithfully,
(Signed) ALFRED E. HARRIS.
G. H. Croad, Esq.,
Secretary,
London School Board.
Your Medical Officer also wrote on the same day to J. W. Sharp, Esq., the
Chairman of Managers of the School, calling his attention to its sanitary condition,
and in this communication he said—"If a meeting of my sanitary authority were to
"be held immediately, I would have had to call on it to issue an order for its (i.e., the
"school's) closing, but unfortunately there will be no such meeting for some days.
"I now, as Medical Officer of Health for this parish, give you notice that in its
"present condition this school is dangerous to the health of the scholars and of the
" teachers."