View report page

17
project, a protracted correspondence ensued before the loans were authorised:
during this time the proposals were methodically scrutinised and amended
in their technical bearing under, we may suspect, the watchful and critical
eye of Edwin Chadwick himself. But with the disappearance from the
scene in 1855 of Chadwick and the strong central department of which he
was the heart and soul and the substitution by Parliament of an enfeebled
and shadowy General Board of Health we find that Tottenhams applications,
as in the case of the £10,000 for the ill-judged water supply, came to be
granted almost by return and without question. Nor was the position improved
after 1858 when the General Board was abolished and its functions
split between two departments, the Home Office for the legal and financial
side of local government business and the Privy Council for medical
and scientific matters. As a consequence sanctions for loans were liable to
be rubber stamped by the Home Of Office without the sanitary experts of the Privy
Council being brought into the picture - witness Tottenham's application
in 1858 in connection with the altered scheme for sewage disposal, which
entailed the frank pollution of the Lea and so ran counter to the declared
policy of the government's medical department. Certainly, much damage
had been done in Tottenham, and we may strongly suspect in many another
area, before the liaison between the two central departments improved as
it did in 1871 when they became fused into a single body, the Local Government
Board: and we may feel that Palmerston's government in yielding
to popular demands for complete local independence in sanitary administration
and permitting first the enfeeblement and then the disintegration
of central control of public health must bear a heavy share of the blame
for Tottenham's sanitary indiscretions.
But we have been guilty both of digressing and anticipating. For,
though perpetrated in the late 'fifties, Tottenham's blunders were the
delayed action sort In the general contemporary view we must remember
Tottenham, sanitarily, was held to be an exceptionally progressive parish
and this reputation it retained until about the mid 'sixties. As one of
the Standard's correspondents remarked with justification: "Tottenham
has made a remarkably spirited outlay on sanitary works for a small parish.
" Its water and sewage works were recognised show pieces constantly
visited - save during the confusion following Mr Higgs' death when the
sewage works were tactfully closed to visitors, - try representatives from
parishes near and far about to embark on sanitary schemes on their own
account. Many a comparable parish was to know no sanitary administration,
other than some fitful nuisance removal activities of a Board of Guardians,
until 1872. Of Tottenham's neighbours two, Edmonton and Enfield,
were only just beginning to adopt sanitary powers and to establish Local
Boards in 1858, while Hornsey and the rest were still later entrants to
the field. Even the great Metropolitan parishes, apart from the City
of London, had to concede Tottenham a full five years start in sanitary
administration. Moreover, in Tottenham the Local Board had always tended
to spill over its authority into public responsibility for matters outside
the strict field of public health, and it was continuing to expand
its administrative empire Early in its history the Board had superseded