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27
of the heavy items of expenditure on litigation: £1310, for example, had
been spent in an unavailing legal battle with the Lea Trustees. Mr.
Heath was in an uncomfortably vulnerable position when it came to a question
of justifying the Board's proneness to litigation, for he was being
paid a percentage on all the Board's legal costs; and shortly he resigned.
All these various unhappy developments were putting a great strain
on the ratepayers. Apart from the inconveniences they were being hit both
in their health and their pocket. Take the hypothetical case of a man
who, in 1861, decided to settle in the healthy suburb of Tottenham and
took a house there; he found it relatively highly rated at 3/- in the
pound but was compensated by a quite exceptional range of "main services."
But by 1871 he had probably had to go to the expense at some time of having
his plumbing rearranged and a cistern fitted to catch the Board's
intermittent water and then later, when the failure became chronic and
his water closet useless, to share with neighbours the expense of sinking
a private well and a cesspool; his rates had risen to 4/9: if he tried
to sell his house he found it difficult to do so (the census that year
recorded 600 uninhabited houses in the parish) and learnt that he must
expect to drop money, for "the depreciation of property in Tottenham in
consequence of its evil reputation," to quote a correspondent of the Advertiser,
"is at least ten per cent." He was unlikely, perhaps, to have
thought of looking up the Registrar General's, Annual Reports, but had he
done so he would almost certainly have decided to cut his losses on his
house and move out of the parish, for he would have seen that Tottenham's
death rate for the decade preceding his taking up residence there has averaged
16.3 per thousand of the population, while the average for the decade of
his residence had risen to 18.3 and had climbed sharply during the last
three years to a record figure of 21.4 for the year 1871 itself. If he
had gone into the London figures he would have found that, latterly,
he could have been living at appreciably less risk anywhere in London,
apart from the worst East London districts, than in Tottenham.
It will be recalled that when the ratepayers got at loggerheads with
the Board in 1855, over its autocratic handling of a water shortage, they
reacted violently at the polls and quickly gave themselves an entirely
new Board. Why, it may be asked, was there no similar revolution ten
years later when aggravation was so much greater and more prolonged.
The situation was much more complex than it had been during an earlier
phase in the parish's local government history. For one thing, since
the ratepayers had become more widely dispersed over the parish and more
socially heterogeneous they were less effective as a collective political
force. Instead of the old single concentration of 1,500 or so ratepayers
all living in the vicinity of the High Road with a strong community of
interest there were now more than 3,000 scattered in several separate
groups corresponding to the different new districts; each had its own
special grounds for discontent, - Wood Green, destitute of sewers: Page
Green, suffering the smells from the sewage works: the High Road, plagued
by the Moselle nuisance, - each had its own Ratepayers' Defence Association