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18
the Tottenham surveyors to become the parish's highway authority. By
the Public Health Act of 1858 parish lighting was snatched from the Local
Lighting Inspectors and added to the Board's business, which was still
further extended in the following year by the inclusion of the fire brigade.
Under the same Act the Board's control over streets and buildings and its
bye-law powers generally were also substantially strengthed. So that
in one way and another it was becoming an increasingly difficult matter
for a Board which had not learnt the merits of the "committee system" to
know how to order the priorities of its interests over such a wide field;
and a useful function performed by the local press was to remind the Board
occasionally that it was primarily a Board of Health.
Such, then, was the setting when the Local Board of 1858 - the new
style Board it might well be called, bearing in mind the complete change
in the character of the membership at this date - took up its duties And
since the pattern of membership of the Board was to conform steadily and
distinctively to the new style for more than a decade and because they
were grimly significant years in Tottenham's sanitary history it is again
worthwhile to try to discern what kind of men were at the helm and how
they differed from their predecessors Consider the membership in 1858
The nine comprised two local brewers (one of whom was chairman), two doctors
in the parish, a linen draper from the High Road, the manager of the
india rubber factory, a local insurance and house agent, a retired Army
officer and a City banker Recall the predominately wealthy city merchant
and landowning membership of the Board of 1850, comprising a high
proportion of men of distinction in the world at large, and the shift in
power to a new social group is plain enough The preponderance of influence
now lay with the erstwhile "trades" class: local professional
and business men who both lived and worked in Tottenham, with names and
reputations mostly unknown beyond the parish boundary The old Board of
"gentry" saw Tottenham as a pleasant, respectable, healthy, accessible
dormitory; a place to be improved but also preserved in its quiet exclusiveness
The new Board of local men had in mind Tottenham's "bread and
butter" attributes: its progress and prosperity - along with that of the
great majority of the members themselves it may be observed— was inextricably
linked with popularising the parish. For a decade the Board's
policy was to bear the mark of this attitude, and in its fulfilment it
was to be ably abetted by speculative builders and the promoters of the
several railway companies which were shortly to ring and cross the parish
with such a lavish network of communications with the metropolis.
This Board of 1858 may, for all practical purposes, be looked on as
the prototype of successive Boards right up to 1871, when the ratepayers
for very good reasons once again showed a determination to bring about a
wholesome transfusion of "new-blood" into their representative body.
Regular comings and goings of individual members at the elections left
unchanged the broad picture of a Board heavily weighted with "local" men.
Without entering on a wearisome analysis of the membership during these
years we may note one or two curious features. Local doctors, for