View report page

15
votes were recorded) and the absence of any serious competition for places
on the Board (in five of the next twelve years the candidates were unopposed)
were to be the rule for a long time to come, despite - so characteristically
of English local government - circumstances which often enough
seemed to demand the very opposite attitude.
A main outcome of the troubled years had been to put Tottenham under
entirely new management. Something of a social revolution had taken
place within the parish. Men of a very different stamp from those who
had steered Tottenham through its earlier sanitary developments now controlled
the Board, Social historians seeking the early signs and symptoms
of the rising political consciousness of the bourgeoisie would find Tottenham
of this period a fruitful field for study. Presently, we too must
look a little closer at the nature of the social changes and relate them
to developments in the field of public health But before doing so it
is necessary to consider a number of events which belong chronologically
to the late fifties and which materially affected the course of Tottenham's
sanitary progress for a generation.
The problem of water shortage which had come to a head in 1855 had
been resolved and once again the Board was providing an ample, constant
service. But the solution had been costly. Instead of £6,000, the sum
which had so alarmed the ratepayers in the original estimate, the Board
had found it necessary in 1857 to obtain from the General Board of Health
powers to borrow up to £10,000 to pay for the new works. On the other
hand it appeared that the supply had been rendered capable of meeting all
possible contingencies in the way of droughts or any further increase in
the population Under the new arrangements the normal daily output was
600,000 gallons, but it was calculated that by working the pumps through
twenty-four hours the prodigious figure of three million gallons could be
supplied. The original bore-hole in the Hale (where there was also a
reservoir) had been connected by a pipe-line across the marshy lands near
the river with a larger and deeper well at Northumberland Park. Moreover,
it had seemed to the surveyor a pity while works were in hand not
to make use of the extensive area of ground water overlying the new main
and this too had been tapped by a shallow system of perforated pipes.
Here was an immense and incredible error of judgment, for it was the poor
quality riverside lands in particular which, under improving agricultural
practices, were being systematically enriched by the by-products from the
local sewage works. In the old days of cesspools and private wells a
sewage contaminated waters supply had been the lot of perhaps a moiety of
the inhabitants. The Board had now unwittingly made the misfortune universal,
Almost twenty years later when the mischief was at last exposed
in 1873 by a medical inspector from the Local Government Board, he caustically
reported, "Had we wished to make an experiment concerning the production
of enteric fever and diarrhoea we could scarcely have arranged
things better than they have existed in Tottenham since the local water
works were extended in 1856."