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temporary Board of Health which was quickly established to avert a panic
owed more to the initiative of a few of the leading inhabitants than to
any effort on the part of the local authority. There had been twenty
deaths from cholera in the parish before the subsidence of the epidemic
and the disbandment of the Board; but they had occurred mainly among
paupers in the workhouse and Tottenham, it was said, "had escaped the
pest with comparative immunity." Certainly nothing permanent had been
done by the Board to abate the sanitary nuisances, for a few years later
they were being regularly represented to the Board of Guardians by Mr.
William Hall - a young surgeon recently settled in the area - whom they
had appointed in 1838 as their first parish medical off icer Fever cases, he
kept reiterating, were constantly cropping up in the cottages which lay
alongside the Moselle and the Carbuncle: once clean and natural streams
they had been allowed to degenerate into nothing more or less than filthy
open sewers. The Guardians' minutes for the same period also record
many complaints of annoyances attributed to the sewers from private individuals.
The Board had usually acted on the information by issuing warnings
to the parties said to be responsible, but it was powerless to go
beyond remonstrances for it was never quite clear where the real responsibility
for remedying the nuisance lay.
Mr. Dean, however, once he was alive to the situation, was bent on
action. After carrying out a survey of the streams in conjunction with
one of the local surgeons, he personally took out a summons against the
local Board of Surveyors (a procedure so little precedented that the case
was reported in "The Times") in an attempt to compel the surveyors to
clean up the sewers by exercising certain optional powers given them by
the Highways Act for "clearing ditches and water courses" The magistrates
though sympathetic, had felt bound to dismiss the case for the law on the
point was weak and confused.
In recounting this experience Mr. Dean concludes:- "Sincerely must
every sympathiser with suffering humanity desire that the Bill introduced
into Parliament in the last session with a view to improve the drainage
of land and the sewerage of cities, towns and other populous places, may
soon pass into law; then will Tottenham again become that healthy pleasant
village for which it has long been esteemed over most other places in the
vicinity of the Metropolis."
The Bill of 1843 to which Mr. Dean made reference was, in fact,
stillborn. But his efforts were not entirely wasted Shortly afterwards
he was himself elected by the Vestry to membership of the Board of
Surveyors and soon afterwards there are hints in the Vestry minutes that
the Surveyors had become almost alarmingly zealous and inclined to embark
on legal proceedings in fulfilling their responsibilities, From 1846,
too, the Board of Guardians, having been vested with greater powers by
the Nuisance Removal and Disease Preventive Act of that year, became, so
its minutes show, more effective as a nuisance removal authority: summonses
in increasing numbers being taken out for "overflowing cesspools ,