The Great Stink of London E-Book

Stephen Halliday

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2001

Seitenzahl: 419

Beschreibung

'An extraordinary history' PETER ACKROYD, The Times 'A lively account of (Bazalgette's) magnificent achievements. . . graphically illustrated' HERMIONE HOBHOUSE 'Halliday is good on sanitary engineering and even better on cloaca, crud and putrefaction . . . (he) writes with the relish of one who savours his subject and has deeply researched it. . . splendidly illustrated' RUTH RENDELL In the sweltering summer of 1858, sewage generated by over two million Londoners was pouring into the Thames, producing a stink so offensive that it drove Members of Parliament from the chamber of the House of Commons. The Times called the crisis 'The Great Stink'. Parliament had to act – drastic measures were required to clean the Thames and to improve London's primitive system of sanitation. The great engineer entrusted with this enormous task was Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who rose to the challenge and built the system of intercepting sewers, pumping stations and treatment works that serves London to this day. In the process, he cleansed the Thames and helped banish cholera. The Great Stink of London offers a vivid insight into Bazalgette's achievements and the era in which he worked and lived, including his heroic battles with politicians and bureaucrats that would transform the face and health of the world's then largest city.

Leseprobe

Cover illustrations, from left: Etching by William Heath, 1828. (Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/qqcx38hr); Abbey Mills pumping station, 1868. (Illustrated London News)

First published in 1999 by Sutton Publishing.

This edition published in 2023 by

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Stephen Halliday, 1999, 2023

The right of Stephen Halliday to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75249 378 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

Chronology

Introduction: who was Joseph Bazalgette?

1   London’s Sanitation before 1850

2   The Water-closet: ‘No filth in the sewers, all in the river’

3   A Government for London

4   ‘The most extensive and wonderful work of modern times’

5   Where there’s Muck there’s Brass?

6   Cholera

7   Building the Embankments

8   Thoroughfares, Housing and Open Spaces

9   Conclusion

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Sir Joseph Bazalgette, about 1880; from a picture in the possession of Rear-Admiral Derek Bazalgette, CB. (Derek Bazalgette)

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been, for me, a labour of love but in the process I have incurred many debts. First, my family: my wife Jane, my daughter Faye and son Simon have tolerated, without complaint, my frequent references to Victorian waste disposal arrangements, often in front of their friends. The same is true of my colleagues, particularly the two who share my office, Jane Fletcher and Christiane Hermann-Duthie, who for over a year allowed me to decorate the walls with pictures of Victorian sewers and their contents. Christiane also found for me, and translated, information about the life and work of Justus von Liebig and Robert Koch which would otherwise have been inaccessible to me. Joyce Speller typed up the notes from which the book was written, learning more than she ever expected or wanted to learn about Victorian sewage.

My employers, Buckinghamshire Business School, allowed me the time to do the research and the staff at Guildhall Library, the Metropolitan Archives, the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, the Wellcome Trust and the Institution of Civil Engineers demonstrated the tact and patience which is a necessary quality of librarians who are required to deal with hapless and technologically incompetent academics. One hardly ever learns the names of librarians but two that I came to know well were Michael Chrimes and Carol Arrowsmith at the Institution of Civil Engineers, where they take good care of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s archive material. Regrettably this does not include a diary or other personal papers, a fact which may be attributable to the sheer volume of professional work that left him, in the words of his great-grandson Rear Admiral Derek Bazalgette, ‘time only to produce children and work on London’.* Professor Roderick Floud and Dr John Sheldrake, of London Guildhall University, who supervised the PhD which was the pretext for the research, often pointed me in directions which would not have occurred to me if I had been left to my own devices. I have been privileged to meet many of Sir Joseph’s descendants who have given me all the help and encouragement I could have wished in completing this work, particularly his great-grandson Paul Bazalgette, whose exertions have been well beyond the call of duty. Thames Water PLC, who now operate the system that Sir Joseph built, have a fine collection of contemporary illustrations which they kindly made available to me and it is through the generosity of the company chairman, Sir Robert Clarke, that the colour illustrations have been included. I am especially indebted to Robin Winters who spent many hours on my behalf searching the company’s archives at Abbey Mills.

Finally, I acknowledge the help and encouragement given to me in the early stages of the research by my good friend the distinguished engineer Dr Edmund Hambly. In 1994 he was elected President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, an office that Sir Joseph Bazalgette himself held in 1883–4. Edmund’s unexpected and untimely death in March 1995, only four months into his Presidency, deprived the world of an individual whose distinction as an engineer was outweighed only by his qualities as a man. He is greatly missed by his family and by his many friends.

To his memory this work is dedicated.

Stephen Halliday, 1998

*   Sir Joseph and Lady Bazalgette had ten children. Derek Bazalgette’s comment was recorded in the Newcomen Society’s Transactions, vol. 58, 1986–7.

Foreword

by Adam Hart-Davis

Throughout human history, the number one cause of death has been contamination of water supplies. During the 1830s the infant mortality rate in British towns was close to 50 per cent; that is, of all the babies who were born, only half reached their fifth birthdays. The unlucky ones died of diarrhoea, dysentery, typhoid, and the newly imported and horrifying disease cholera – but basically they died because the sewage was not separated from the drinking water, so that one person infected with cholera could easily start an epidemic. This is still a major cause of death in some parts of the developing world, but in England we no longer have a problem. Why? Because of the sewers built against much political and other resistance by Joseph Bazalgette.

By 1850 the rapidly expanding population of London had reached two million. As Stephen Halliday describes in graphic detail, the sewage overflowed and leaked from the limited number of cesspools, and seeped through inadequate sewers into the Thames, where it slopped up and down with the tides, slowly decomposing on the gently sloping mud banks. Matters came to a head in the long hot summer of 1858, when the great stink resulting from this rotting sewage was debated in Parliament, where it got right up the noses of the Members, who could no longer ignore the pestilent filth.

After a careful account of the labyrinthine complexities of the political red tape that had to be cut, this book tells the dramatic intertwined stories of the Great Stink, the dreaded cholera and the arguments about what caused it, the construction of the Victoria, Albert, and Chelsea embankments, and above all how the sewers were built and cholera epidemics eliminated from London.

For thirty-three years Joseph Bazalgette was Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works. His primary and most important task was to design and build the great system of intercepting sewers which have ever since taken London’s sewage away from the city, but in order to do this he also had to construct the vast embankments, which reclaimed more than 50 acres of land from the river and provided accommodation not only for his low-level sewers but also for underground trains and other services, and roads and parks on the surface. Bazalgette built or restored several of the major bridges across the river, and also laid out some of the great roads in the metropolis, including Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, not to mention Battersea Park, Clapham Common, and various other parks. The shape of London as we know it today owes much to his design and foresight.

I enjoyed all the technical information, and was particularly intrigued to find out how Bazalgette championed the use of the new-fangled Portland Cement, set up rigorous tests for quality control, and eventually used it without bricks for miles of sewers.

While reading the epic stories in this book I was delighted by the little boxes with potted biographies, which helped to paint many of the characters into the scene; such people as Marc Brunel and W.H. Smith surprised me when they turned up, and I was glad to have a succinct account of their lives and work. And the main narrative of the book is dotted with such delightful little stories as the restoration of Leicester Square, and the meanness of Gladstone, which, coupled with the wonderful pictures, provide a vivid picture of Victorian London.

Adam Hart-Davis

March 1999

Preface

What a pity it is that the thermometer fell ten degrees yesterday. Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench. The intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings which overlook the river. A few members, indeed, bent upon investigating the matter to its very depth, ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose. We are heartily glad of it. (The Times, 18 June 1858)

The condition of the River Thames described in The Times during the hot summer of 1858 was echoed both in the Chamber of the House of Commons itself and in the columns of other publications. Punch, the Illustrated London News and the Observer carried columns of indignant correspondence on the subject and editorial theories on what should be done about it. The sober, scholarly Journal of Public Health and Sanitary Review reported ‘stories flying of men struck down with the stench, and of all kinds of fatal diseases, upspringing on the river’s banks’. Benjamin Disraeli was seen fleeing from the Chamber, handkerchief to nose, complaining loudly about the ‘Stygian Pool’ that the Thames had become, as an ever-increasing volume of metropolitan sewage flowed into the river through underground rivers and proceeded to be borne endlessly up and down the tidal stretch of the river as far as Teddington. Since much of the capital’s drinking water was drawn from the river the citizens of the metropolis were literally drinking one another’s sewage but this was of less immediate concern than were the foul smells that arose from the tide of sewage that swirled around the most heavily populated areas near the river.

Michael Faraday presenting his card to Father Thames; Punch, July, 1855; the picture followed Faraday’s letter to The Times describing the horrors of a journey by boat along the stinking river. (Punch)

This was not the first occasion that the state of the river had aroused concern among men of influence. The problem reached one of its many climaxes in 1855 when The Times published the following letter from the distinguished and celebrated scientist, Michael Faraday:

Sir, I traversed this day, by steam boat, the space between London and Hungerford Bridges, between half past one and two o’clock; it was low water and I think the tide must have been near the turn. The appearance and the smell of the water forced themselves at once upon my attention. The whole of the river was an opaque, pale brown fluid. In order to test the degree of opacity, I tore up some white card into pieces, moistened them so as to make them sink easily below the surface and then dropped some of these pieces into the water at every pier the boat came to; before they had sunk an inch below the surface they were indistinguishable, though the sun shone brightly at the time, and when the pieces fell edgeways the lower part was hidden from sight before the upper was under water. This happened at St Paul’s Wharf, Blackfriars Bridge, Temple Wharf, Southwark Bridge and Hungerford Bridge; and I have no doubt would have occurred further up and down the river. Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind.

The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gulley holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer. Having just returned from out of the country air, I was, perhaps, more affected by it than others; but I do not think I could have gone on to Lambeth or Chelsea, and I was glad to enter the streets for an atmosphere which, except near the sink holes, I found much sweeter than that on the river. I have thought it a duty to record these facts that they may be brought to the attention of those who exercise power or have responsibility in relation to the condition of our river; there is nothing figurative in the words I have employed or any approach to exaggeration: they are the simple truth. If there be sufficient authority to remove a putrescent pond from the neighbourhood of a few simple dwellings, surely the river which flows so many miles through London, ought not to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer.

The condition in which I saw the Thames may, perhaps, be considered as exceptional but it ought to be an impossible state, instead of which, I fear, it is rapidly becoming the general condition. If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity, nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a hot season gives us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.

I am sir, your obedient servant

M. Faraday, Royal Institution July 7th, 18551

In 1855 the condition of the Thames appalled the eminent scientist but three years later, in 1858, the hottest summer on record reduced it to a state in which it offended a more influential body: the politicians whose recently rebuilt Houses of Parliament stood upon its banks. This proximity to the source of the stench concentrated their attention on its causes in a way that many years of argument and campaigning had failed to do and prompted them to authorise actions which they had previously shunned. In particular, it gave to the great Victorian engineer whose achievements are the subject of this book the authority to create a sanitation system of unprecedented scale and complexity which changed London forever and turned the Thames from the filthiest to the cleanest metropolitan river in the world, which it remains. He was Sir Joseph Bazalgette and at his death in 1891 he bequeathed to London a sanitation system which remains in use to this day. Bazalgette has many other achievements to his name. He created many of London’s best-known thoroughfares, its embankments and major bridges as well as parks and open spaces which changed the Victorian metropolis above as well as below ground, and place him, with Sir Christopher Wren, in the front rank of the creators of London. His twentieth-century successor, Dr Steve Walker, Engineering Director of Thames Water, has recorded that he is ‘in awe of the vision and scale of engineering achievement which Bazalgette conceived and managed’.2 This book is an account of that achievement, of its consequences for nineteenth-century London and of the benefits which remain with the capital as it approaches the twenty-first century.

Chronology

1750

Jean-Louis Bazalgette born in Ispagnac, France

1778

Joseph Bramah patents a new design for the WC, produced in large numbers

1779

Jean-Louis in England; marries Katherine Metivier

1783

His son, Joseph born

1792

Jean-Louis becomes a British citizen

1796

Joseph enters the Royal Navy

1809

Joseph wounded in action against the French

1815

Connection of cesspools and house drains to sewers permitted for the first time

1819

28 March: Joseph William Bazalgette born at Enfield

1831–2

first cholera epidemic: 6,536 die in London

1836

Joseph William articled as a civil engineer to Sir John MacNeill; works on land drainage and reclamation in Northern Ireland

1838

Joins the Institution of Civil Engineers

1842

Sets up an engineering practice in Great George Street; works on railway projects.

Publication of Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain.

1847

Bazalgette suffers breakdown through overwork

1848

Metropolitan Sewers Commission established; connection of house drains and cesspools to sewers required for the first time

1848–9

second cholera epidemic: 14,137 die in London; John Snow publishes On the Mode of Communication of Cholera arguing that cholera is water-borne

1849

Bazalgette appointed Assistant Surveyor to the Metropolitan Sewers Commission

1852

Frank Forster, engineer to the Commission, dies from ‘harassing fatigues and anxieties of official duties’; Bazalgette appointed as his successor

1853–4

third cholera epidemic: 10,738 die in London; Committee for Scientific Enquiry rejects Snow’s theory that cholera is water-borne

1855

Faraday writes to The Times about the condition of the Thames; the Metropolis Management Act creates the Metropolitan Board of Works

1856

Metropolitan Board of Works takes office; appoints Bazalgette as Chief Engineer (January); Bazalgette submits his plan (June) and protracted dispute with Sir Benjamin Hall follows; Board invites entrepreneurs to propose schemes for the utilisation of Metropolitan sewage

1858

July: The Great Stink: Disraeli’s Metropolis Management Amendment Act allows Bazalgette to begin work; Bazalgette also proposes comprehensive programme of street improvements

1859

Work begins on the system; Bazalgette specifies Portland cement; draconian quality control system introduced

1864

Metropolitan Board accepts the Hope-Napier scheme to convey London’s sewage to Maplin sands

1865

MP proposes that £6,000 bonus be paid to Bazalgette for his work; Crossness pumping station opened by Prince of Wales (April); Southern system in operation; construction of Hope-Napier scheme begins

1866

Cholera epidemic ravages the East End of London which is not yet connected to Bazalgette’s system; remainder of the Metropolis escapes; the theory that cholera is water-borne starts to become more widely accepted as a result of the East End epidemic

1867

Hope-Napier scheme in abeyance; never to be revived

1868

Abbey Mills pumping station opens; Northern system in operation

1869

Albert Embankment opens; Bazalgette designs drainage system for Budapest and Port Louis, Mauritius

1870

Victoria Embankment opens

1871

Native Guano Company starts to manufacture manure at Crossness

1873

Native Guano Company’s process pronounced a failure

1874

Chelsea Embankment opens; Bazalgette knighted; newly landscaped Leicester Square opens

1875

Western drainage system in operation

1876

Northumberland Avenue opens

1878

Bazalgette installs London’s first electric light on the Victoria Embankment; Princess Alice disaster; pollution of Thames estuary criticised; Waterloo bridge freed from tolls; Bazalgette proposes a new bridge at the Tower, a tunnel at Blackwall and a ferry at Woolwich

1879

Lambeth, Battersea, Chelsea, Albert and Vauxhall bridges freed from tolls

1880

Wandsworth, Putney and Hammersmith bridges freed from tolls; (Hammersmith later substantially rebuilt by Bazalgette)

1883

Robert Koch discovers the cholera bacillus in polluted water in India

1884

Bazalgette President of the Institution of Civil Engineers; Royal Commission criticises pollution of Thames Estuary

1886

Bazalgette’s new Putney bridge opened

1887

Discharge of sewage to Thames ceases; practice of dumping at sea begins

1889

Metropolitan Board of Works replaced by London County Council; Bazalgette retires

1890

Bazalgette’s new Battersea bridge opened

1891

15 March: death of Sir Joseph Bazalgette

1892

Hamburg ravaged by cholera; London escapes owing to Bazalgette’s system

1998

Dumping of sewage at sea ends; incineration of sewage begins

Introduction: who was Joseph Bazalgette?

‘The engineers have always been the real sanitary reformers, as the originators of all onward movement; all their labours tend to the amelioration of their fellow men’.

(Sir William Cubitt, January 1850).1

In 1997 the Highways Agency announced that Hammersmith flyover, at the London end of the M4 motorway, would be closed for urgent repairs. Thirty years of traffic had worn out some of its concrete supports and the closure was likely to be for a long period. At the same time it was announced that the nearby Hammersmith suspension bridge, reopened in 1887 after it had been strengthened to convey horses, carts and pedestrians across the Thames, long before the days of heavy goods vehicles, would also have to be closed for repairs. The Victorian engineer’s design had lasted almost four times as long as had that of his twentieth-century successor, bearing traffic whose weight and volume he could not possibly have imagined. In the same year, 1997, Thames Water PLC started to commission a huge incinerator at the company’s Barking sewage treatment works, the largest in Europe. The treatment works was built by the same engineer who designed Hammersmith bridge. The new incinerator would, in 1998, finally replace the sewage treatment system bequeathed to London County Council when that engineer retired over a century before, in 1889.

To find a monument to this distinguished Victorian you will have to make a thorough search of the Victoria Embankment, another of his great works, which runs beside the Thames between Westminster Bridge and Blackfriars. The monument lies in a hidden corner beneath the railway bridge at Charing Cross, at the foot of Northumberland Avenue, which the same engineer created after a long dispute with the Duke of Northumberland whose London home was demolished to make way for it. The engineer was Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91), Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works which was London’s first Metropolitan government between 1856 and 1889, when it was replaced by the London County Council. Bazalgette’s monument is to be found in the Embankment wall and takes the form of a bust unveiled in 1901 showing a bewhiskered figure, framed in a circle. Underneath is the Latin text Flumini Vincula Posuit (‘He placed chains on the river’).

Somerset House in 1820; before Bazalgette built the Victoria Embankment this prominent London landmark stood in the Thames.(By courtesy of the Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

The inscription and the circle in which the monument is framed modestly represent the achievement for which his fellow citizens were most grateful. The circle symbolises the sewers which he designed and built and which lie beneath the feet of the few who stop to look at the monument and wonder who Bazalgette was. The Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments, on each side of the river, were built to house a small part of the system of intercepting sewers which he designed to prevent London’s sewage from running into and polluting the Thames: hence the Latin reference on his monument to ‘the chain on the river’. His numerous other responsibilities included over twelve million pounds worth of London street improvements, of which the best known are Garrick Street, Queen Victoria Street, Northumberland Avenue, Shaftesbury Avenue, Southwark Street and Charing Cross Road. Twelve bridges across the Thames were acquired and freed from tolls; all were strengthened under Bazalgette’s supervision and three were rebuilt to his designs: Putney, Hammersmith and Battersea. He instituted the Woolwich Free Ferry and in October 1878 he persuaded the Metropolitan Board to experiment with electric lighting on the Victoria Embankment. He even submitted a design for Tower Bridge, though not the one that was chosen.2 In addition to his responsibilities for London Bazalgette found time to design or advise on sanitation systems for numerous other British cities as well as for foreign and colonial communities including Budapest and Port Louis, Mauritius.

The opening of the Victoria Embankment, July 1870; Somerset House is to the left of the picture, now firmly situated on dry land. (Illustrated London News)

In his book The Living Thames: the Restoration of a Great Tidal River, the author John Doxat described Bazalgette in these terms: ‘Though perhaps less remembered than his contemporary, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, this superb and far sighted engineer probably did more good, and saved more lives, than any single Victorian public official.’3 That Bazalgette is less well remembered than Brunel, his friend and colleague, is uncontroversial. Brunel is perhaps the most celebrated of all engineers, the subject of many biographies, his name associated with railways, bridges, tunnels, stations, steamships and numerous other achievements of the early Victorian period. Brunel’s statue is a prominent feature of Paddington Station, the London terminus of the Great Western Railway which he designed, and he even has a university named after him. Paradoxically, a further statue of Brunel is a prominent feature of the Victoria Embankment, close to Somerset House. The Embankment was designed and built by Joseph Bazalgette, yet Bazalgette’s own monument nearby is easily overlooked. A more recent historian of London has also noted Bazalgette’s contribution to its fabric in appreciative terms. In writing of Wren’s work in the reconstruction of London after the fire of 1666 Roy Porter writes that ‘thanks to Wren the reborn City was left more attractive. Alongside Nash and Bazalgette, he stands as one of London’s noblest builders.’4 Brunel and Wren are celebrated. By contrast, no biography of Bazalgette has ever been written though the infrastructure that he built for London has long outlived Brunel’s broad-gauge railway, and the streets, bridges and embankments that he designed for the capital are certainly of the same magnitude as Wren’s works.

Although he is now sometimes forgotten, Bazalgette was celebrated in his lifetime. While the system of intercepting sewers was being constructed he was a major public figure and there are numerous references to him and his work in The Times, the Illustrated London News, The Builder and other contemporary publications. Another indication of his stature may be gained by examining biographical dictionaries of the period. From 1865 until his death in 1891 Bazalgette has a regular entry in George Routledge’s Men of the Time. The entry ranges in length from about one to one-and-a-half columns. This is comparable with the entries for Matthew Arnold and Cardinals Manning and Newman, rather longer than that of W.S. Gilbert and a little shorter than the entries for Florence Nightingale and Charles Babbage. The entry for Charles Dickens ran to three columns while Gladstone, at the height of his power, qualified for seven.

Bazalgette’s contemporaries might well have agreed with Doxat’s flattering assessment that he ‘saved more lives than any single Victorian public official’. In August 1890, less than a year before his death in March 1891, Bazalgette was interviewed at his home in Wimbledon for Cassell’s Saturday Journal, one of a series of sketches of ‘Representative Men at Home’. The writer of the profile began his article by referring to the fact that the construction of London’s system of main intercepting sewers had ended the scourges of cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases which had carried off tens of thousands of citizens during the terrible epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century. The opening sentence of the article reads: ‘If the malignant spirits whom we moderns call cholera, typhus and smallpox, were one day to set out in quest of the man who had been, within the past thirty or forty years their deadliest foe in all London, they would probably make their way to St Mary’s, Wimbledon.’5 In the same interview, Bazalgette himself described the problem which his employers, the Metropolitan Board of Works, had been called upon to solve forty years earlier:

At that time, the river at Westminster was in such an abominable condition that they were obliged to close the windows of the Houses of Parliament and there was a talk of Parliament having to shift to other quarters altogether. What was the cause of it? The drains of London were pouring down their filth into the river at low water. There was no outflow from them at high water. The tide kept the sewage up the drains then; but when the tide had been running out for hours and the water in the river began to run low, then the drains began to pour out their sewage and of course when the tide came in again it was all swept up by the stream. When the tide ebbed it all came down and so it kept oscillating up and down the river, while more filth was continuously adding to it until the Thames became absolutely pestilential.6

Bazalgette’s death was widely reported both in the national press and in engineering publications. The Illustrated London News in March 1891 began its obituary notice:

Londoners who can remember the state of London and of the Thames about thirty-five years ago, before those vast undertakings of the Metropolitan Board of Works, the system of main drainage and the magnificent Thames Embankment, which have contributed so much to sanitary improvement and to the convenience and stateliness of this immense City, will regret the death of the able official chief engineer, Sir Joseph Bazalgette.

The Institution of Civil Engineers, of which Bazalgette had been President, entered a resolution in the Minutes of Proceedings7 which recorded that: ‘His life had been given to considerations affecting public health and welfare in all the large cities of the world, and his works, as the engineer for many years of the Metropolitan Board of Works, will ever remain as monuments of his skill and professional ability.’

Celebrated and honoured in his own lifetime, almost forgotten since: Doxat’s claim that Bazalgette was ‘Perhaps less remembered’ than Brunel is an understatement. The qualified claim that he ‘Probably did more good, and saved more lives, than any single Victorian public official’ is more controversial. Indeed the claim is astounding when one reflects that the category of public official certainly includes Florence Nightingale, Lord Shaftesbury and Edwin Chadwick. It may not be possible to quantify with any precision the right of these and others to qualify for such a title. Nevertheless the claim that Bazalgette’s work was of this order of importance in improving the health and welfare of his fellow citizens is a useful starting point from which to begin an examination of the significance of the great projects he executed on behalf of the Metropolitan Board: a significance reflected in the quotation which opens this chapter, from William Cubitt’s presidential address to the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Who was Joseph Bazalgette?

Joseph Bazalgette, like several other prominent Victorian figures, including Marc Brunel and his son Isambard, was of French extraction. His grandfather, Jean-Louis Bazalgette, was born in the small town of Ispagnac, Lozère, near Mende, on 5 October 1750.8 Lozère, at the heart of France in the Massif Central, is the most sparsely inhabited of France’s Departments. A village on the moorland nearby, now desolate, is called La Bazalgette, its existence being recorded as early as 1270 in an official document held at the departmental archives in Mende.9 The name is unusual even in France and several explanations have been offered of its origins, none of which has been proved beyond doubt. One account claims that the name derives from the Sultan Bajazet who defeated the last crusaders at Nicopolis in 1396. Another suggests that the name was brought to France in the late eighth century by a Spaniard fighting in the army of Charlemagne and that this ancestor settled in the Gévaudan area at this time, just north-west of Ispagnac. By the thirteenth century the family had acquired a coat of arms, Pierre Bazalgette being appointed a judge in Ispagnac by King Philip the Fair in 1298 while another member of the family was commemorated in the church of Aigues Mortes, in the Camargue, as having accompanied Louis IX (Saint Louis) on crusade in 1270. In 1604 a Martin de Bazalgette is found further east in the Vivarais, near Montélimar, on the patrimony of his new wife. They lived in the château de Charnève, near the town of Bourg St Andéol, on the Rhône just south of Montélimar, where a substantial residence L’Hôtel de Bazalgette de Charnève is still to be found. Raymond Bazalgette de Charnève was among the noblemen nominated to the Estates-General which precipitated the French Revolution in 1789. Other members of the family remained in the Ispagnac area where the name is still found. One of them, Antoine Bazalgette, was appointed to the office of consul (magistrate) in 166310 and in about 1770 his great-grandson, Jean-Louis, aged twenty, left France for the Americas, an act which may, according to an account in the local chronicle, the Almanach Cévenol, have been prompted by a desire to escape conscription into the French Army. What is certain is that he acquired property in Jamaica.11

SIR MARC BRUNEL, 1769–1849

The father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Marc was taught by the French mathematician Gaspard Monge who became secretary to the French navy under Napoleon. Marc joined the French navy but his royalist sympathies prompted him to flee to New York in 1793 where he became the city engineer. He came to England in 1799 and invented a process for making ships’ blocks, thousands of which were required to guide the ropes which hoisted the sails on a man o’ war. The process was adopted by the Admiralty as it expanded the Royal Navy to meet the threat from Napoleon and in this way Marc contributed to Nelson’s destruction of the service for which his former tutor, Monge, was responsible. Marc also invented an early typewriter, a cotton winding machine, a knitting machine and a boot-making machine. He built the floating docks at Liverpool. He showed little commercial acumen in exploiting his inventions and in 1821 spent several months in a debtors’ prison from which he was rescued by a £5,000 payment from a belatedly grateful government. His greatest achievement was the Thames Tunnel, the first tunnel ever constructed beneath a river. For this he invented the tunnelling shield whose design still underpins tunnelling methods. Work began in 1825 and, following many vicissitudes, was completed in 1843. It was designed as a foot tunnel but now carries the London underground railway from Wapping to Rotherhithe.

Marc Brunel: father of Isambard and designer of the Thames tunnel; like Jean-Louis Bazalgette he was born in France. (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

Jean-Louis later claimed to have arrived in England in 1775 though the first definite record of his presence is his marriage to Katherine Metivier on 14 August 1779 at St George’s, Hanover Square. At this time, according to contemporary rate books, he was living in South Moulton Street. Jean-Louis prospered. By 1789 he had established himself as a merchant in Little Grosvenor Street (now Grosvenor Street) in an area where there had been a substantial number of French émigré merchants, including many tailors, for almost a century.12 By this time he was a very wealthy man. His ability to accumulate a substantial fortune was matched only by the imprudence with which he advanced loans to some very doubtful debtors, possibly in an attempt to secure social acceptance in his new country. On 11 May 1787 the Prince of Wales (later George IV), writing to William Pitt about his debts, disclosed that he owed £16,744 3s 2d to Bazalgette, whom he described as a tailor.13 The debt was paid off by May 1788. Jean-Louis did not learn much from his experience of granting credit to the Prince. An examination of the archives of Coutts Bank, of which Jean-Louis had become a client, reveals that from 1794 onwards he continued to advance substantial loans to prominent members of the royal family including the Prince of Wales and the Prince’s brothers the Dukes of York, Clarence14 and Kent, the last being the father of the future Queen Victoria.15 He also loaned money to friends of the Prince, including the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose capacity for spending other people’s money almost matched that of the Prince himself.

The Prince Regent, later George IV, to whom Jean Louis Bazalgette unwisely loaned over £22,000. (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

In 1795 Parliamentary Commissioners were appointed by George III with the task of examining the Prince of Wales’s financial affairs and ‘for the payment of any debts that may be due from His Royal Highness and for preventing the accumulation of debts in future’.16 Jean-Louis, one of the larger creditors among a host of clockmakers, horsedealers and other unwise tradesmen informed the Commissioners that he had made loans to the value of £22,134. He later returned to the Commissioners to inform that there was also a tailor’s bill outstanding for £3,086 7s 6d. Presumably, in his anxiety to recover the loan, he had overlooked the trifling matter of a three-thousand-pound tailor’s bill.17 The bill was largely settled by the Commissioners but some portion of the debt remained outstanding according to a plaintive letter written by Jean-Louis twenty-eight years later. In May 1823 he wrote to Sir William Knighton, the private secretary of his debtor (who was by now George IV), complaining that:18

When the Commissioners, under the direction of Parliament (in the year 1795) took arrangements for paying the Debts of his present Majesty, then Prince of Wales, my Bill was examined and found to be a just one but I was told that ten per cent must be reduced from every Creditor’s Bill and that I must submit to share the same fate with all the other creditors . . . During more than thirty-two years that I served his present Majesty I never made application to His Majesty for the debt he owed me. I do therefore solicit you Sir, to represent to His Majesty the facts above stated and I humbly hope that he will take my case into consideration, and give orders that I may be paid.

Your ever humble servant

Louis Bazalgette

On 18 October 1792 Jean-Louis had been ‘denizened’ (acquired British citizenship)19 and in 1809 he purchased the estate of Eastwick Park near Great Bookham in Surrey, later adding the Lordship of the Manor of Great Bookham. Eastwick Park was a substantial, sixteen-room property which became a school before being demolished in the 1950s to make way for a housing estate. In Jean-Louis’ lifetime it was the home of the Surrey Union Foxhounds and, in addition to the parkland surrounding the house itself, exercised rights over 2,280 acres of cultivated land and 785 acres of Bookham and Ranmore Commons.20 When Jean-Louis died in 1830 his will bequeathed not only these estates but ‘also the manors and other hereditaments and real estate whatsoever and wheresoever situate in Great Britain, Ireland, Jamaica and elsewhere’.21

By his first marriage Jean-Louis had three children. One of them was a son, Joseph William, born in 1783. He entered the Royal Navy in 1796 and was promoted to sub-lieutenant on 15 October 1805, six days before the battle of Trafalgar. He attended Nelson’s funeral. In March 1809 he was wounded and lamed for life in an engagement off the Spanish coast, for which misfortune Parliament granted him a lifetime pension of £150. He retired from the Navy in July 1814 with the rank of commander, went on to work for the Naval and Military Bible Society and died in 1849.22 This Joseph William was the father of the engineer, his only son, who was born on 28 March 1819 at Enfield and privately educated. At the age of seventeen Joseph the younger became an articled pupil of (later Sir) John MacNeill, formerly one of Telford’s principal assistants in road and bridge building. He was employed by MacNeill as a resident engineer on land drainage and reclamation works in Northern Ireland, for which purpose he visited Holland,23 and these works were the subject of his first paper to the Institution of Civil Engineers24 of which he had become a graduate member on 6 March 1838, MacNeill acting as his proposer.25 He became a full member of the Institution on 17 February 1846 when he had, according to his membership certificate, ‘Served a regular period of pupillage under Sir J. MacNeill, was for 2 years Resident Engineer on works in Ireland, 1 year laying out lines for the Railway Commissioners and has been upwards of 2 years in business for himself as a civil engineer’.26 He was to become President of the Institution in 1884.

In 1842, aged twenty-three, Joseph had set up his own civil engineering practice and by 1845, the year in which he married Maria Kough of Wexford, he was leasing an office for the purpose at 24 Great George Street, close to the headquarters of the Institution of Civil Engineers itself. This part of London was the ‘Harley Street’ of the engineering profession and Bazalgette’s office had itself previously been occupied both by the Stephensons and by George Hudson, the railway entrepreneur whose disastrous bankruptcy shortly afterwards caused a temporary slump in the railway construction boom. Indeed in 1847 Bazalgette suffered a complete breakdown in his health which was attributed in a short account written during his lifetime to his involvement in the ‘railway mania’ of the previous two years:

In November of the year in which the railway mania began [1845] he found himself at the head of a large staff of engineering assistants, designing and laying out schemes for railways, ship canals and other engineering works in various parts of the United Kingdom and preparing the surveys and plans for Parliamentary deposit, which had to be accomplished by the last day of November. While his remarkable success was most encouraging, its effects soon began to tell upon his health, which completely gave way in 1847; he was compelled to retire from business and go into the country, where a year of perfect rest restored him to health.27

The experience that he gained in preparing plans under the pressure of deadlines and in dealing with Parliamentary requirements during this testing period was to be invaluable in his later work as Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works. He was certainly well connected within the engineering profession and apparently well regarded by some of its most distinguished practitioners. His applications for employment were supported by referees whose names include the most distinguished engineers of the nineteenth century: Robert Stephenson, Member of Parliament, co-designer with his father George of The Rocket and builder of the London to Birmingham railway; Sir William Cubitt, consulting engineer to the Great Northern Railway, and builder of the South-Eastern Railway; and Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself.28

Very little is known about the personality of the man who was to have such a decisive influence on the sanitation of Victorian London and the health of its inhabitants. One of his pupils, H.P. Boulnois, who became Bazalgette’s pupil at the Metropolitan Board on 1 January 1865, gives the impression in his few references to Bazalgette that he was, above all, meticulous, with a sharp eye for detail. Bazalgette had specified the use of Portland cement in the construction of the intercepting sewers, the first large-scale public work in which it was used. He adopted it because it was stronger than other kinds of cement owing to the vitrification process that occurred during manufacture but, if over-heated, it was liable to fail.29 Bazalgette, though adventurous in the use of the new material, was aware of these dangers and was a cautious man so he instituted an elaborate quality control procedure which ensured that defective batches were rejected. Boulnois was required, with other engineers and pupils, to carry out tests on each delivery of Portland cement to ensure that it was sufficiently strong. Boulnois also records that Bazalgette complimented him on a drawing he had prepared but criticised its lettering on the grounds that ‘an engineer should be able to do his own lettering and printing in a neat manner, even if it were only block printing’.30 It was commonplace at this time for established engineers to take as articled pupils young men who wished to gain entry to the profession by working under the guidance of an experienced master. Bazalgette had learned his trade in the same way as a pupil of MacNeill and seven of Bazalgette’s pupils eventually passed into the service of the Metropolitan Board of Works, two of them being graduates and one of them being Bazalgette’s son, Edward. Each articled pupil paid a fee of several hundred pounds, Boulnois paying £420.31 Bazalgette’s salary upon appointment was £1,000 (later increased to £2,000) so the fees thus received represented a significant source of additional income. As he became a celebrated public figure Bazalgette’s income from consultancy in Britain and abroad rose rapidly and after his death his estate was valued at £184,431, a colossal sum at the time.32

Photographs of Bazalgette show that he was a small man, and his great-grandson, Rear-Admiral Derek Bazalgette, recorded that he suffered from asthma.33 His published correspondence on the main drainage, notably in The Times, and the doggedness with which he confronted the numerous interest groups and other obstacles that stood in the way of the completion of the intercepting sewers suggest that he was a man of heroic patience and exemplary persistence in the face of frustrations and opposition which many would have found daunting and which had in fact brought about the early death of one of his predecessors, Frank Forster.34 He certainly made a strong impression on a young man who joined the Board of Works in 1882 and later became Comptroller of the Board’s successor, the London County Council. In an account written after his retirement Sir Harry Haward, commenting on the people working at the Board in the year he joined, wrote that: ‘The most prominent figure among the officers of the Board was the distinguished Chief Engineer, Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the designer of the main drainage system of London and of the Victoria Embankment – two monumental works entitling him to a niche in the temple of fame.’35

Bazalgette as Consultant

Besides his work in London Bazalgette was active as an engineer in other spheres and his reputation ensured that his services were frequently called upon by other communities in Britain and overseas. The Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers record over one hundred contributions by Bazalgette either in the form of his own papers or in discussions of papers given by others.36 The former include a paper printed in the first volume of the Institution’s Proceedings37 on the subject of land reclamation from the sea, based upon his early experience in Northern Ireland, as well as his paper on London’s intercepting system and his presidential address on the same subject.38 His contributions to discussions on papers given by others range from familiar territory such as sewage treatment processes (fifteen contributions) to comments on the water supply to the fountains in Trafalgar Square, the adoption of novel mechanical devices for dredging and the geological problems of constructing a tunnel between Dover and Calais.39 However, an examination of the archives of the Institution of Civil Engineers suggests that he was most frequently engaged either as an expert witness in a dispute involving proposed construction work or as a consultant in the preparation of drainage plans for towns and cities outside the metropolis. Sometimes Bazalgette himself prepared the plans and sometimes he was called in for a second opinion on plans devised by others.

Bazalgette’s Plans for Cambridge, Norwich, Budapest and Mauritius

On 6 February 1866 the town surveyor for Cambridge invited Bazalgette to visit the town and advise on a scheme to divert sewage from the River Cam.40 This followed a resolution by the town council’s Cam Purification Committee that ‘to discharge sewage matter into the Cam between Mill Lane and Jesus Green is to convert the River into an elongated cesspool’, words which echoed the ordeals of London in the previous decade. Bazalgette visited Cambridge on 16 March, charging the substantial fee of one hundred guineas, and prepared a scheme which involved intercepting the sewage before it reached the river and conducting it to a point 2 miles downstream where it would be stored and pumped out to irrigate an 800 acre field at Chesterton. He estimated the cost as £27,059. The council was evidently reluctant to spend this sum, and twelve years later Bazalgette’s advice was again sought, the explanation being given that the Public Health Act of 1875 now allowed the council greater powers to implement such a scheme than they had possessed at the earlier date.41 Bazalgette, together with a firm of engineers called Law and Chatterton, devised a modified scheme which extended the drainage area to Newnham. The drawings, signed by Bazalgette, and somewhat battered after more than a century of use, remain in the city engineer’s department to this day.42 He devised a similar scheme for Norwich in 1865, also involving sewage irrigation downstream of the City.

More surprisingly, in the midst of all his other responsibilities, Bazalgette found time in 1869 to visit Budapest43 in response to a request from the Burgomeister and Sir Samuel Morton Peto whose civil engineering and contracting firm had been advising the City Council on how to clean up the River Danube.44 Bazalgette recommended a system of three intercepting sewers and one outfall to the river downstream of the City and estimated the cost as £204,646 if executed by Morton Peto. He emphasised the beneficial effects of the scheme on the health of the inhabitants of the City, then numbering two hundred thousand:

SIR SAMUEL MORTON PETO, 1809–89

Morton Peto was an apprentice bricklayer before he inherited his uncle’s building business and turned it into one of Britain’s largest contractors. He built many of London’s clubs, including the Reform Club and the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall; parts of the Great Western, Great Eastern and South Western railways; much of London’s docks; railways in Argentina, Australia, Russia, Algeria, Canada and Norway; part of the new Houses of Parliament; and, most notably, Nelson’s column. He became a Member of Parliament in 1847 and served on many Parliamentary committees.

Samuel Morton Peto. (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

Having carefully examined the city and studied the levels and other data connected with the drainage of Pest which have been placed in my hands, I have now the honour to submit for your consideration a plan, section and estimate of a scheme which I have prepared for its improved drainage . . . No-one can calculate how great the saving of life may be in case the city should be visited by Cholera and Fever.45

Pest City Council seem to have been unwilling to spend the money required, and five years later they consulted Bazalgette again who replied, on 18 May 1874, that, before offering further advice, he would like them to pay him the £1,208 fee due ‘in payment for my time and thought in preparing the plans . . . after the use that has been made of my ideas by the city authorities, and their recognition of the soundness of the principles laid down by me’.