View report page

3
constables. A few years later the most onerous of local responsibilities,
the relief of the poor, had passed by the Poor Law Amendment Act from the
Tottenham Select Vestry-with, according to a "Times" report, "the hearty
approvalof that body" - to the united Board of Guardians which served for
both Tottenham and Edmonton; to which new body the ratepayers of the
parish elected their representatives without reference to the Vestry.
With the adoption of the Turnpike Lighting Act in 1841 another body independent
of the Vestry had been created - the Lighting Inspectors; and
Mr. Dean could record . that "the principal thoroughfare is well lighted
and so are the other highways" by means of gas from the Imperial Gas Company's
works. Similar in its independence of Vestry rule, a Local Board
of Surveyors - to whom Mr, Dean gave credit for "the highways and public
walks being in the best condition" - had been set up in 1835 under the
General Highways Act.
The developments were piecemeal; but within a decade a minor revolution
in the parish's administration had been effected. The old allFurpose
Vestry rule had been left with little more than the maintenance
of the Church and the trusteeship of the common lands and endowed charities
as its sphere, and with the quarterly Vestry meetings as a crude device
for ventilating opinion on public affairs - a function filched from it,
too, in due course by the correspondence columns of the press, when local
newspapers made their appearance.
But despite these 'improvements' and despite the modernity and greater
efficiency of the new arrangements Kr. Dean had to record a serious weakness
in this model parish. "There is, I lament to say, one drawback in the
character of this otherwise exemplary parish and a very serious drawback
it is:-the want of powers to compel the cleansing of the open sewers and
drains which so materially affect the health of those who inhabit between
the Turnpike road and the river Lea in the precincts of the marshes.
There is generally a malaria floating over the low wet lands; when the
stench of neglected drains mixes with it, fever and bowel complaints
follow, especially among the poor."
Kr. Dean had discovered Tottenham's Achilles' heel. But if its
sanitary condition was Tottenham's weakness, the same was true of all
England. In the previous year (1842) there had appeared the first thorough
exposure of the filthiness of the English towns: an official report of
the Poor Law Commissioners entitled "The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring
Classes, " written by their secretary, Edwin Chadwick, the foundergenius
of the English sanitary reform movement. The phraseology used
by Mr. Dean in describing Tottenham's nuisances was Chadwick's and there
can be no doubt that it was his report which had pricked Mr. Dean into
an awareness of local evils which were, in fact, of long standing. They
had been there in 1832 when under the shadow of the first great epidemic of
Asiatic cholera, Tottenham, in common with so many other parishes, had
been forced to take notice of its stagnating sewers and fouled water supPlies.
Vestry administration was not geared for speedy action, and the