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between the owner of the largest brickfield in the parish and the Board
in regard to certain labourers' cottages which without their consent he
had erected hard by the brickfields. On another occasion the proprietor
of Tottenham's principal brewery had fought the Board in the courts over
the question of their power to close as a nuisance the urinal of a beer
shop on the High Road which he owned. But given a general satisfaction
among the ratepayers in regard to the water and sewerage which it provided
the Board could easily withstand the attacks of one or two disaffected
individuals.
Tottenham, however, had been growing and the demand for the Board's
main services rising by yearly increments of about four hundred to five
hundred inhabitants and eighty or so houses. Wells, pumps and a reservoir,
designed in 1850 for 1,500 houses were being overstretched to supply
nearly 2,000 in 1855. A drought that year precipitated a water shortage:
instead of the much vaunted constant supply of water all consumers found
themselves cut down to an intermittent service of a few hours daily. It
was soon evident that this was not just a temporary failure but was bound
up with misassessments of the level of the underground supply. The
parish would have to face the burden of major and costly extensions to
the water works. Public opinion moved sharply against the Board and its
surveyor, upon whose plans the scheme had been based. There was an embarrassing
epidemic of refusals to pay the water rate on the grounds that
the Board could not expect payment for services not rendered. The evident
determination of the Board to proceed by summons against defaulters checked
the epidemic, though at one stage the Board only escaped financial
paralysis through the ability and willingness of individual members to
place substantial sums to the Board's credit as loans free of interest.
But far more significant than the financial defections and indicative of
how badly the ratepayers' confidence in the Board had been shaken was the
result of the next, the 1855, annual election for membership of the Board.
For the first time a retiring member who was standing for re-election was
rejected at the polls and, adding insult to injury, his successful opponent
was none other than the aforementioned local brewer. It was a fateful
development, for by his contrariness and quarrelsomeness at meetings
of the Board the new member soon brought to an end the harmony which had
been such a feature of the proceedings in earlier years and the key to
its remarkable capacity for effecting developments rapidly.
In due course the surveyor produced and the Board accepted a scheme
for extensions to the waterworks, at an estimated cost of £6,000. A
ratepayers' defence committee was immediately set up to challenge the discretion
of the Board in blindly accepting the scheme of a surveyor in whom
the parish had lost confidence and to demand that no action should be
taken without consultation with the ratepayers. The Board, characteristically
independent, autocratic and contemptuous of public opinion and
convinced that there was no alternative to its own proposals (a point on
which it was ultimately proved right) showed no disposition to conciliate
its opponents.