One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  Other papers took up the cry; on Sunday, 20 June the Era called the Thames a sewer and noted that the Commission of Sewers would meet every so often, have ‘a little discussion’ about who is to ‘pay the piper’, then adjourn without coming to a decision. It noticed that the press had been full during this past week – the hottest – of letters complaining of the ‘filthy state of the Thames’, and told the authorities that they should be ashamed of themselves.13 One such letter was sent to The Times on 17 June by ‘T.S.’, a lawyer living in chambers in the Temple, right by the river:

  I am one of those unfortunate lawyers who ‘hug the festering shore’, and festering it is, indeed, with a vengeance. The stench of the Temple to-day is sickening and nauseous in the extreme; we are enveloped in the foul miasma which spreads on either side of this repository of the filth of nigh three millions of human beings … I am being killed by inches … I beg, therefore, most emphatically to protest against being poisoned, and I beg further to ask those whose business it is, and who are highly paid to see that I am not poisoned, why it is that I am being poisoned … Let the Government bring in a Bill … and they will earn for themselves a renown that will not be ephemeral, and upon the next occasion that the present Chancellor addresses the electors of Slough he will be able with good reason to boast that Lord Derby’s Government have done good service to the country.14

  The writer, referring to Disraeli’s crowing at the dinner given in his honour in Slough on 26 May after the failure of Palmerston’s ‘plot’ to oust the government over the Oudh proclamation, makes a prophetic point. Derby and Disraeli were indeed to be praised for finally doing something about the Thames. ‘T.S.’ subscribes, rather luridly, to the common miasmic theory of disease. He was not alone in fearing an epidemic of cholera or some other contagious disease as a direct result of the state of the Thames. The Illustrated London News raised the prospect of ‘Cholera Morbus’, Lord Brougham said in parliament that he feared cholera, and stories went round of people who lived near the river dying in numbers, and of the stench striking men and women down where they stood.15 In fact, when the statisticians got to work on the numbers, they found that there was no appreciable rise in disease in the summer of 1858; certainly there was no cholera outbreak, a fact which might have convinced people that fetid air was not the cause of the disease.16 It is to be presumed that people stopped drinking Thames water, not because they connected drinking it directly with disease, but because it was so disgusting. At the end of the year the Annual Register looked back at the heat, the smell, the ‘deep blackish-green’ colour of the ‘once sweet and silver Thames’, and marvelled that the health of the population of London had not been seriously affected.17

  On Monday, 21 June Thomas Carlyle was preparing to escape to cool Scotland in two days’ time; he told a friend that he and Jane had more or less given up eating dinner ‘in this frightful roasting weather’.18 Two days later Edward Blanchard noted that his evening walk home to his rooms in Southampton Street, leading from the Thames to the Strand, was unpleasant; he had experienced ‘the frightful effects of the black and beastly Thames, about which everyone is now talking’.19 John Ruskin wrote on 25 June from Bellinzona in Switzerland to his father in south London, congratulating him on living far enough away from the river – ‘out of the way of all docks and bridges’ – to be spared the suffering of many Londoners. ‘I am better off’, he wrote, ‘even within five miles of the marshes of Ticino.’20 The American historian John Motley, fitting in as many sociable breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with famous politicians, society ladies, and literary folk as he could during his visit to London, alluded to St Lawrence on his gridiron when attempting to give his wife an idea of the heat in a letter of 20 June. On Monday the 14th he had dined with Darwin’s older brother Erasmus on an ‘insufferably hot’ day, even by American standards. For the whole week, he wrote, it had been ‘hotter than any one ever believed it possible to be in England’. ‘There was a sense of suffocation in the air, which was intensified by dining in the inevitable white choker [tight collar] in close rooms. For once in my life I have known the weather too warm for my taste.’21

  On 21 June The Times printed a long letter from ‘L.G.’, who was clearly something of an expert on the matter of the Thames. He realised that part of the problem was the fact of so many interested parties having a role to play and yet being unable to pull in the same direction. ‘Father Thames is polluted’, he wrote, ‘notwithstanding his many sponsors – the City, the Crown, the Metropolitan Board of Works, vested rights, private claims, and a host of technical obstructions.’ The ownership of the Thames had long been a bone of contention:

  For two Centuries have the Crown and the Corporation of the city of London disputed their claim to its bed, and it was only last year that ‘the Thames Conservancy Act’ created a Conservancy Board and regulated the revenues … These revenues, however, as at present appropriated, promise but to maintain the status quo; there is no fund sufficient to remedy the glaring public evil. That must be done by the public at their own expense.22

  ‘L.G.’ implores Mr Kendall, chairman of the House of Commons committee newly formed to look into the state of the Thames, to move quickly to cut through the bureaucratic difficulties, accept that the work will be expensive, and listen to engineers like Bazalgette, who laid out a plan for his system of intercepting sewers soon after the Metropolitan Board of Works was formed at the end of 1855. ‘L.G.’ and the many other voices now clamouring for action were at last heeded, and from mid-June some urgency was brought to the proceedings. Among the most influential voices was that of John Simon, medical officer of the Board of Health, who produced with the help of his medical colleague Edward Greenhow a sanitary report, published in June 1858, entitled Papers Relating to the Sanitary State of the People of England. Simon called for public health to be taken seriously and for sanitary measures to be put in place in order to prevent in the future ‘the present wasteful expenditure of human life in England’.23 (A few years later Simon was one of those who came to accept that the miasmic theory of disease, to which he had formerly subscribed, was wrong and that John Snow and his few followers had been right about the role of contaminated water in spreading disease.24)

  The House of Commons committee which was tasked with deciding how to proceed on the sanitary question was composed of thirteen MPs and four members of the House of Lords; it included the two chief opposition politicians, Palmerston and Lord John Russell. Its members met thirteen times in all during June and July, interviewed a large number of engineers and chemists, and finally reported on 19 July. The parliamentary record of select committees shows that most members attended at least twelve of those meetings.25 Though this was a committee which had clout and clearly meant business, the newspapers continued to keep a close and unforgiving eye on its progress.

  By Saturday, 26 June the temperature was reaching the high 70s or low 80s °F daily, and the law courts in Westminster Hall gave up their sittings, wigs or no wigs, while parliament carried on in the unbearable conditions.26 When Disraeli reported on 24 June to the queen, who was filling her diary every day with comments about the heat (‘most stifling, oppressive day’, she noted on 23 June27), he wrote in high spirits despite the exhaustion of long hours spent in purgatory. He reckoned that the heat was on his side, that ‘the temper of the House, & its sanitary state, will assist’ in passing the bills still being discussed, in particular the India Bill and the bill on the Thames which he was hoping to introduce in the next few days.28 On Friday, 25 June he told the House of Commons that, while the government was not responsible for the state of the Thames, it had a moral duty to protect the public health of Londoners, and he intended that the government should act accordingly.29 The newspapers were filled with remarks, opinions, and statistics about ‘the public health’, especially at the weekend, when the Saturday and Sunday papers – many of them radical or at least suspicious of a Tory government, however uncharacteristically progressive that governmen
t was revealing itself to be – weighed in behind The Times with their colourful details and dire warnings. The Times itself waxed ironically lyrical on Saturday, 26 June, anticipating many a Punch illustration and a host of Thames-themed pantomimes to come at Christmas 1858:

  Rivers are poetically supposed to think and talk, to rise from their oozy beds with warnings or predictions, and to lament over national calamities or the deaths of monarchs. If the river god who rules the stream flowing beneath our London bridges possesses the qualities of his brethren in mythical ages, he must exult at the acknowledgements of his might which are being made on every side. The Thames fever is now at its height. Every power, dignity, and institution confesses its alarm. The City Corporation, which is generally unable to detect a fault in anything connected with or subject to itself, admits that the Thames is not exactly in a state of purity. The civic functionaries who found the aroma of Smithfield [London’s meat market] dainty and delicate allow that the water which splashes up at Billingsgate [the fish market] is not grateful to the human smell. The Courts of Law have been almost stunk out of Westminster-hall … The Common Pleas and the Exchequer have both borne witness to the pestiferous exhalations which creep into their courts. Both Houses of Parliament are full of the subject.30

  The article reports that Goldsworthy Gurney, the engineer appointed to supervise the heating, lighting and ventilation of the new Houses of Parliament recently built by Sir Charles Barry and still undergoing completion and decoration, has written to the speaker of the Commons to say that ‘he can no longer be responsible for the health of the House’. Gurney was one of the men interviewed in the coming days by the committee on the Thames; he put forth his own solution, rejected by the select committee, to put slopes in the river and disperse the sewage in the Thames itself by directing it below the low water mark, and to burn the gases in sewers.31 Surely, says The Times, there are enough engineers in the House of Commons to take the lead. It should not have ‘abandoned’ the matter to a ‘half-powerless’ Board of Works, which has been bedevilled for the last three years by disputes between the board as chaired by John Thwaites and the bogeyman of many commentators, Sir Benjamin Hall.32 Thwaites had been elected chair of the Board of Works in 1855, and would continue in the post until his death in 1870.33 Hall had been chief commissioner of works in Palmerston’s government, bringing in the bill ‘for the better local management of the metropolis’, by which the Board of Works was first established. It was this piece of legislation, passed into law in 1855, on which Disraeli was about to build with his Metropolis Local Management Act Amendment Bill, popularly known as the Thames Purification Bill.

  Though Hall was quarrelsome and divisive, and was one of those who had previously rejected Bazalgette’s plans, he was commemorated in the name ‘Big Ben’ given to the newly cast bell which was to be hung in the clock tower of the new Palace of Westminster.34 On 5 June the People’s Paper had reported the impressive procession as the new Big Ben was transported from the Whitechapel factory where it was cast to its destination in Westminster. ‘It was drawn on a truck by ten horses, and had a union jack hoisted on the top of it’; a large crowd accompanied it on its way.35

  All the weekly newspapers concentrated on the weekend of 26–27 June on the heat, the Thames, and public health. That Saturday Ernest Jones’s Radical People’s Paper carried a short piece entitled ‘No Coat, No Justice’. It reported from the Thames Police Court, located in Stepney in the East End of London, that a man waiting to make an application to the court was ordered by the magistrate, Mr Yardley, to return home and put on a jacket: ‘I will not hear you without your coat. It is most indecent trim for you to come into this court. I will not hear anyone without his jacket or coat if he has one.’ According to the paper, the man left the court without making his application and before he returned the magistrate had left the bench.36 Not for this working man the courtesy shown to the lawyers in Westminster Hall who had asked on the hottest day if they might remove their wigs.

  On the same Saturday, 26 June, The Times printed a letter from the surgeon and chemist Alfred Smee, who wrote of having observed the river from a professional point of view for thirty years and never before seeing it like this, ‘opaque and black as ink’. Stop the ‘twaddling debates’, he urged, and give someone the power to get on with improving things. The Illustrated London News talked of ‘our representatives’ heroically sitting, ‘both night and morning to be poisoned by the stenches from the River Thames’ and yet not being prepared to spend the money to solve the problem. ‘Londoners, Look to Your River! The Thames a Deadly Cesspool’ cried the Era on Sunday, 27 June;37 the Era was one of the papers which raised fears of contagious diseases, stating rather vaguely and without authority that cases of typhus and diarrhoea were increasing among those living near the Thames.38

  One person whose family was affected by contagious disease, though it was not in this case related to the Thames air or water, was Darwin, who wrote from Down to Charles Lyell on 26 June, telling him that ‘3 children have died in the village from Scarlet Fever, & others have been at death’s door, with terrible suffering’.39 He told Lyell that he and Emma were frightened, because a few days earlier their 15-year-old daughter Henrietta, known as Etty, had become seriously ill with something like diphtheria, an illness unknown in Britain until an outbreak in 1857. By 25 June the youngest Darwin child, eighteen-month-old Charles Waring, was showing symptoms of what Darwin thought might be scarlet fever.40

  Queen Victoria groaned almost every day about the heat, but she was impressively active, going to a concert of Beethoven and Mendelssohn music at the Philharmonic Hall on 21 June, to another concert at the Royal Academy the following day, to the Crystal Palace in Sydenham by train with some guests on 25 June, when she suffered from ‘a bad headache’, so could not stay very long. During the hottest two weeks there were royal visits to ballets and operas, including Donizetti’s melodramatic opera Lucrezia Borgia, and to a performance of the French comic opera Fra Diavolo by Daniel Auber at the newly opened Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in the splendid building (which still stands today) designed by Sir Charles Barry’s son Edward.41 She also hosted dinners which were attended by foreign royalty, Derby, Disraeli, Lord John Russell, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, and other public figures.

  Queen Victoria, Cruiser, and the Great Eastern

  On Saturday, 26 June Victoria and Albert went, not for the first time that year, to see the famous American horse tamer, James Rarey, perform his show. Like thousands of others who attended his performances, Victoria marvelled at his ability to tame in front of her eyes various wild horses and other animals. On this occasion, as she recorded in her journal,

  he first showed us a very wild zebra from the Zoological Gardens, – very wicked & spiteful, which is not yet by any means vanquished but already follows him about, then ‘Cruizer’ [actually Cruiser], a most vicious stallion, whom no one could go near, & who was, in consequence half starved & shockingly ill used; it has now become like a lamb, & has been taught to do all sorts of tricks. We patted it. After this, Mr Rarey went through the whole process with ‘Snipe’, one of Albert’s horses which furiously resisted, but with which he was also perfectly successful.42

  Rarey’s show, along with his book The Art of Taming Wild Horses, was one of the entertainment sensations of the year. Cruiser was a stallion owned by Lord Dorchester, who was one of a number of horse-loving aristocrats from whom Rarey raised subscriptions for his book. The queen, Prince Albert, the prince of Wales, Baron de Rothschild, and Sir Alexander Cockburn of the Divorce Court also subscribed.43 Rarey provided thrills for the masses and the aristocracy alike, and was also a rich source to be mined by illustrated magazines and by the pantomime writers in the 1858–9 season. In the volume of Punch covering January to June 1858 Mr Punch dreams that he is Rarey and can tame all the world’s political leaders. The ever-alert Sala jumped on the bandwagon too with his comic story in November 1858, How I Tamed Mrs Cruiser, an update for the 1850s of
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.44

  Despite the weather and the stink on the Thames, Victoria braved it all to see another of the popular sights of the summer. She stepped on board Brunel’s Great Eastern, though she still used the ship’s baptismal name, the Leviathan. As she told Vicky on 29 June:

  We went by land to Deptford yesterday[,] got into boats and rowed along to the Leviathan which is lying there and went on board her; but they can’t proceed for want of funds! … we were half poisoned by the dreadful smell of the Thames – which is such that I felt quite sick when I came home, and people cannot live in their houses; the House of Commons can hardly sit – and the session will close soon in consequence.45

  In her journal she described the ship as ‘stupendous; 600 ft long, 83 wide, & 58 in depth’.46

  Punch soon printed a poem commemorating the queen’s visit:

  What sight was that which loyal eyes

  Beheld with horror – not surprise –

  On Thames’s filthy tide,

  Which bore Victoria, England’s Queen,

  Who, down the River having been,

  Back to her Palace hied …

  The Sovereign, as she neared Dog’s Isle,

  Was fain to hold – nay do not smile –

  A bouquet to her nose!47

  The great ship was moored at Deptford on the south side of the river, opposite the Isle of Dogs, where she had been launched initially, and had been open for viewing by the public since the beginning of June. The papers had welcomed the initiative to raise money to fit out this extraordinary ship; they were full of her record-breaking measurements and potential feats. The Weekly Chronicle described what readers might see for the cost of half a crown (two shillings and sixpence, or an eighth of a pound): ‘Although the mammoth ship is still so far from a state of completion that it is calculated it would take a thousand men five months’ unceasing toil day and night to fit her out entirely – there is still, in all conscience, quite enough of her visible to enable any reasonable mortal to arrive at some adequate notion of her matchless magnitude.’48 There were 30,000 wrought-iron plates, 3,000,000 iron rivets, the shell of the ship weighed 10,000 tons, and she was 700 feet long and 83 feet wide, said the Chronicle, adding, ‘without her paddle-boxes, she would stick in passing through one of the broadest streets of London – Pall Mall’. ‘Supposing the Leviathan to be now upon the eve of her first voyage, she might, in a month, take an army of 10,000 men out to the shores of Hindostan’, or carry 4,000 passengers and 18,000 tons of coal and cargo.