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30
The truth was that with being so often collectively under fire from
the ratepayers and the press the members had got into the habit of presenting
a common front to the enemy: they had become bound together into
"a family compact," as the Herald called it. The Board had grown to be
a single clique: the considerable personal influence of the members was
being thrown into the scales at elections to ensure the return to the
"family compact" of retiring members or, if a new member was required, the
admission to it of candidates whom they supported. Tottenham's government,
in fact, had drifted into the hands of virtually a self - electing
oligarchy which had lost control of the situation and was yet unwilling
to relinquish one iota of its authority.
So long as it preserved its solid front Tottenham's oligarchy was
protected from external attack by either the ratepayers or, short of a
marked change in government policy, by any government department. The
Board's only weakness lay in internal stresses and strains which rendered
the "family compact" relatively unstable. By 1868 the Herald was making
ominous references to the members bickering over which of the many outstanding
accounts were to be settled out of the limited funds available
in the Board's cash account and which were to be left unpaid; members
were said "to be each trying to secure payment of his own friends' bills,"
A little later the editor remarked that the old tolerance at the meetings
had all gone and "recriminations and virtuperations are constant accompaniments
of the Board's business." The constant strain of struggling with
one emergency after another was beginning to tell on the members and was
causing them to stretch the "family compact" to near breaking point.
What remains to be described in this study is the sequence of events which
exacerbated internal frictions to a point at which they caused the Board
to break down completely.
Of the many problems which confronted the Board at this time none
was more troublesome or controversial than the great sewage question.
In the nature of things it was a particularly distasteful vexatious
yet impelling subject which members could never escape for long. It is
scarcely surprising therefore that it was the primary cause of the anticipated
rift in the "family compact". What is rather surprising, however,
is the almost melodramatic way in which events actually unfolded
themselves to arrive at this result. The astonishing complexity of the
local situation between 1869 and 1872 makes it difficult to merge the
significant incidents into a clear and balanced picture, but even at the
risk of a little discursiveness the salient points must be put on record.
For nearly three years under the benefit of repeated suspensions of
the Court of Chancery's injunction the roughly limed sewage had continued
to pour into the Lea. But the patience of Vice-Chancellor Wood of the
Chancery Court was now exhausted: he refused to extend the suspension and
threatened the parish with heavy fines until the sewage was either diverted
from the river or adequately deodorised. It made 1869 an anxious and
hectic year for the Board. A number of "miraculous and secret" methods
of deodorising sewage (the Board had exhausted all orthodox ones) were