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23
stances and the Board's reactions will help to put the whole extraordinary
affair in perspective.
Whatever failings the individual members may have had they lacked
none of the grit, toughness and pertinacity which were so characteristic
of the Victorians; for it is a remarkable fact that though members were
mercilessly pilloried by the press and at public meetings the number of
resignations from the Board during its difficult years was negligible and
the attendances at the meetings higher than they had ever been; a case
in point being 1869, when more than half the eighty meetings were attended
by seven or more of the nine members. The Board misjudged and mismanaged
its responsibilities, but it could not be accused of neglecting them.
In all fairness to the members it must be observed, too, that their misjudgments
stemmed largely from an unbounded faith in the inevitability of
material progress which they shared in common with their generation.
New knowledge and technical achievements of only a few years standingsteam
pumps, wrought iron and glazed stoneware pipes, gas lighting, asphalt,
chemicals for the precipitating of sewage - had made all the Board's
remarkable public utility services possible; it was natural to cling to
the optimistic belief that given a little patience every difficulty encountered
would similarly be resolved by some new invention. No Board
it is quite certain, no matter how excellent the quality of its membership,
could under the circumstances of the day have done much to lessen
the trouble which lay ahead of Tottenham. What we shall find as the
story develops is that by procrastinating in every difficulty, by refusing
obstinately to have the membership increased and by riding roughshod over
the ratepayers the Board made disaster certain.
The simple truth was that the parish had doubled its population since
the establishment of the Board thirteen years earlier and no adequate
measures had been taken to buffer it against such an impossible assault
on its parochial resources as the increase represented. In fact parochialism,
the extreme nineteenth century form of it, was at the root of the
mischief which was to dog Tottenham for the next few years.
The Local Board, it has to be remembered, was operating in a framework
of contemporary thought which still expected a parish to be locally
independent and self-contained for all purposes. From time immemorial
Tottenham, by well and cesspool, had drawn its water and disposed of its
excreta within its own boundaries With the establishment of a Local Board
the techniques had been altered but the same self-contained pattern had
inevitably been followed and the new water supply and sewage disposal
schemes had remained concentrated and confined within its own 4,000 acres.
While the population numbered only a few thousands all had been well.
When it rose to 20,009 the system was bound to break down. The irony
of the situation was that there was water galore in the Lea and New River
and a fine potential outlet for sewage through the great main North London
Sewer, all near at hand but under the control of other public authorities,
and parochialism forbade Tottenham to yield any of its local independence
and go seriously in search of these facilities.