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25
to call it by such a name. In the streets of the Whitehall District
women and children may be seen daily carrying heavy pails of water from
the stand pipes or some neighbour's well." It was a description which
tallied closely with the one Inspector Ranger had included in his report
in 1850 and a sharp reversion from the high standards of 1860.
The water supply was not the only way in which the parish was being
stripped of its modernity: the disposal of its sewage was suffering a
similar relapse. Reference has already been made to an overload on the
Board's sewage works being one of the side effects of the population increase.
Instead of an extension to the works - a remedy which the Board
was not prepared to contemplate on the grounds of cost - the additional
sewage was being allowed in part to pass without treatment to the Lea and
in part to dissipate itself on land quite unsuitable for the purpose at
the door of the works. It was undoubtedly rumours of cholera creeping
across Europe in 1865 which almost simultaneously, lowered the tolerance
of the two parties most affected by these dilatory practices, the River
Lea Trustees on the one hand and the inhabitants of the area around Page
Green works on the other hand. The latter expressed their protests in public
meetings, followed by representations to both the Secretary of State and
the Privy Council, whose intervention secured from the Board soon-to-be
-forgotten assurances that the sewage would be confined to the works in
future. The Lea Trustees, more wisely, appealed to the law and secured
an injunction in the Court of Chancery prohibiting the Local Board from,
passing any sewage into the river which had not been adequately treated.
Under the circumstances the injunction could not possibly be strictly enforced
and was suspended, but only after the Board had agreed to make no
fresh connections with its main sewers, under penalty of sequestration of
the rates; a restriction which entailed all new houses in the parish being
drained to cesspools or the ditches and which, by 1872, had reduced more
than a quarter of the total houses to this plight. Writing at this date
of Wood Green where the damage was greatest an Advertiser leader referred
to "the hosts of cesspools which owners of property had been compelled to
make at great expense but which by their overflow poisoned the air and
water round about and created such illness that the residents abandoned
what was once one of the healthiest spots for miles outside London".
This was a sorry retreat from the statement which the Board's clerk had
proudly issued to the press fifteen years earlier "that every cesspool in
the Parish had been filled in and suitable water closets are provided for
even the poorest inhabitants."
ihere was yet another way in which the physical discomfort of the
inhabitants was being steadily intensified; by "the stinking ditches"as
they were called. Tottenham was the focal point of a drainage area which
fanned out into the neighbouring districts of Hornsey, Muswell Hill, Colney
Hatch and Edmonton. There, too, the populations had increased without
compensatory amendments to the sewerage arrangements and consequently,
before they even entered the parish, Tottenham's streams were more heavily
fouled than they had ever been before, especially the Moselle. In 1866