One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 by Rosemary Ashton

Author:Rosemary Ashton [Ashton, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Science & Technology, History, Europe, Great Britain, Victorian Era (1837-1901)
ISBN: 9780300227260
Google: S2ssDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300227264
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:41:02.303000+00:00

Disraeli tames the Thames

Now that a parliamentary committee had been formed to inquire into the state of the Thames and to come up with a plan to improve it, the papers, led by The Times, kept the committee itself under constant review. With its influential members, including Sir Benjamin Hall and Alderman William Cubitt (a member of the great Cubitt architectural and building firm), and various representatives of vestries, not to mention Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston, it carried a great deal of weight. It also came in for a lot of suspicion and scepticism, since Hall and others had been kicking the topic of metropolitan drainage to and fro for several years. Now, with parliamentary committees fleeing the Houses of Parliament with handkerchiefs to their noses on 30 June, and with Disraeli driving things forward, the committee got to work in earnest. On Thursday, 1 July The Times reported in some detail the committee’s meeting the previous day.

Parliament’s own heating engineer, Goldsworthy Gurney, had been called to give evidence and advice. He outlined his plan to form ‘two channels 30 yards wide and three yards deep’ in the river, with ‘a slope of 1 in 12’, by which means he considered ‘that the mud which is now cast upon the banks of the river will be removed, and so get rid of the nuisance’ within the Thames itself. George Bidder, a civil engineer, followed and made objections to Gurney’s plan: the formation of the two channels would be an inconvenience to shipping, he thought, and in any case he did not believe that a slope of 1 in 12 would prevent the deposit of mud in the river. ‘I agree with Mr Bazalgette’, he said, ‘that the sewage lodging on the mud banks is the cause of great evil.’ Another expert, James Lawes, gave his opinion that Gurney’s plan to send the sewage into the river itself would not work. ‘As long as we have a mass of floating sewage in the Thames, Mr Gurney’s plan will not remove it. In warm weather there is a great escape of the noxious gases.’ But he also thought that if the sewage were to be discharged at Barking Creek (Bazalgette’s plan), it would return to London on the tide. The committee more or less agreed that throwing lime into the river to deodorise it would only work in the short term, and would be expensive.77 More experts were called, and more disagreements among them emerged, over the next week or so, as the committee reconvened again and again.

In its editorial on 1 July The Times showed impatience:

Committee after Committee, Commission after Commission, has sat on the question, collecting facts enough to build on them a hundred different systems of drainage … They are now doing nothing but throwing a few boatloads of lime into the river, in the vain hope of sweetening the classic shores of Lambeth and Millbank, or pottering somewhere or other with the mouths of the sewers. All that will make mighty little difference this time next year.

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