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course of his various official duties. His retirement followed disillusionment
through the steady drift of the Board to ineffectiveness,
and as was said at the time "petty jealousies, the bickering,the selfseeking
among many members and their interminable talk grieved him and
constrained him to retire from such inglorious work."
Mr. Edward Clarke was a man of a very different stamp. As a progressive
young builder in Tottenham he found it inconvenient seemingly to comply
with the new building bye-laws of 1858; for during the first few
years that they were in force the Board's minutes show that he was being
repeatedly warned for having erected houses without first submitting plans
to the surveyor. In 1862 Mr. Clarke had a more unfortunate contact with
the Board: for while standing as a candidate at the Board election that
year he was found "to have altered certain voting papers and to have acted
falsely for persons entitled to vote." He only escaped prosecution by
agreeing to publicly advertise his apology to the Board and the fact that
he had rendered himself liable to three months' imprisonment with hard labour
in the common gaol. In 1865, nevertheless, the Board appointed him to fill
an interim vacancy in the membership and he was then described as "one of the
largest owners of rateable property in the parish" and as a keen business
man whose advice would be invaluable to the Board. From this date his
member snip was continuous until 1878. Open voting was still the rule
and when Mr. Clarke was standing for re-election there were nearly always
ominous references in the press to his "lavish election expenses" and to
his having "a large number of votes in his pocket." If Dr. Hall was the
champion of the poor Mr. Clarke was the accepted champion of the smaller
ratepayers, guarding them he said, "against needless and ill considered
expenditure by the Board": and even the press allowed that he was "something
of a watchdog over other members and useful". Forceful and irrepressible
he was for a short time in 1870 almost a local dictator. In
the election of 1877 he headed the polls "with more votes than were ever
previously cast for a member". Yet within a few months he had disappeared
suddenly from public life having been found guilty of defrauding the Board
of Guardians by false contracts and committed to a term of five years
penal servitude.
We must now turn from these random sidelights on the character of the
Board's membership to examine the work devolving on it. It will be recalled
that very shortly after the new Board had taken control of affairs
both the substantial branches of its public services, the water supply
and the sewage works, had got onto a footing which to all appearances
placed Tottenham in a very favourable position vis a vis its neighbours.
It was a view the Board itself adopted. In 1859 when a proposal, strongly
backed by the Advertiser, was again made for appointing a medical officer
it was dismissed by the Board, on the grounds that "it was un-ecessary
under the present excellent sanitary state of the parish " In point
of fact the Board had become so absorbed in the "housing mania" that it
had lost interest in the purely sanitary side of its business. Houses
were now springing up in the parish at the rate of three hundred a year
and though Mr, Edward Clarke was defying the bye-laws and not troubling