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20
A list of the Vestrymen and Auditors of Accounts will be
found on pages 7 and 8.
DEATH OF MR. JAMES BEAL.
The Vestry do not usually chronicle in their Annual
Report the names of Vestrymen dying during the year but
Mr. Beal occupied so exceptional a position in connection
with the Local Government of London that his death
demands some notice in a Report relating to a public body
of which he was a valued member for upwards of thirty
years.
•
Mr. Beal was an active politician who placed social questions
in the front rank. With his political opinions the
Vestry have no concern, party politics happily not entering
into their deliberations in the slightest degree. Nor are
they in any way identified with the development of Land
and Building Societies to which Mr. Beal vigorously applied
himself in his earlier days. But the Vestry have been
largely concerned in two questions of paramount importance
to Londoners, gas and water, with which the name of
Mr. Beal is intimately associated. The agitation with
regard to gas commenced in 1857, and may be said to have
continued until 1876, when the present sliding scale, to
which some reference is made on page 60, was adopted.
Another useful outcome of the agitation on the question of
gas was the acceptance by Parliament of the principle
(since extended to the Water Companies) that new issues of
capital should be put up to auction or tender instead of
being allotted at par to the existing shareholders.