Which version of the breed should we prefer? Waugh’s pipe-smoking Englishman, or his twenty-first-century, Big Brother-style grandson? Personally, I’m not in too much doubt. In crisis, of course, there’s nothing to beat that stiff-upper-lip imperturbability. All the rest of the time, we ought to prefer its modern replacement: the occasional wobbling lip and a newfound capacity for honest, direct emotional expression.
* This passage was written by Peter Fleming, the brother of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. The two brothers offer a good case study in contrasts. Just as older brother Peter had a fondness for the old, restrained stereotype, younger brother Ian was developing a new model for a new era: unruffled for sure, but also ruthless, cynical, self-interested, sadistic.
YOBS
The word yob—a lame nineteenth-century joke, boy backwards—has a comfortable feel to it, suggesting the back row of the classroom, flicked ink pellets and the occasional surreptitious whack with a ruler. But the reality of British yobbishness is much uglier than this. It’s binge drinking, fights after pub closing, knives in schools, teenagers mugging each other for their mobile phones. It’s football hooliganism, louts urinating in public, casual vandalism, road rage.
And though certain newspapers would have us believe that there was a happier age, a time when crime involved cheerful cockneys ’alf-inching a wallet at the racetrack, or Just Williamish schoolboys swiping apples from an orchard, the truth is quite different. Our society has always been violent—usually much more so. Football hooliganism is probably only a few minutes younger than the sport itself. Victorian and Edwardian football witnessed crowds of ‘roughs’ fighting not just each other, but players and match officials too. In 1909, a riot broke out after officials refused extra time to settle a draw between Glasgow and Celtic. The riot involved six thousand spectators, injured more than fifty policemen, wrecked the ground and led to the smashing of every street light in the area.
Nor is the shocked foreign reaction to British ways anything new. A French visitor to eighteenth-century London, César de Saussure, commented that it was verging on the dangerous for ‘an honest man, and more particularly for a foreigner, if at all well dressed, to walk in the streets’. Such a person might be spattered with mud, called a ‘French dog’ or even pelted with dead dogs or cats. When a Portuguese visitor got into a fight with an English sailor, the mob nailed the Portuguese to a wall by his ear. When he broke away, leaving part of his ear still fixed to the wall, the mob raced after him, attacked him with knives and left him to die. As far back as the fifteenth century, a Venetian diplomat said, ‘there is no country in the world where there are so many thieves and robbers as in England; insomuch, that few venture to go alone in the country, excepting in the middle of the day, and fewer still in the towns at night, and least of all in London’.
If all this sounds familiar, then so does the diagnosis. We like to blame our yobbishness on social disintegration: a sorry tale of decaying family structures, insecure employment, the loss of religion and a shared morality, and more. Louis Simond, a Swiss-American who came to Britain in the early nineteenth century, spent plenty of time noting the awfulness of English manners, before adding:
Nobody is provincial in this country. You meet nowhere with those persons who were never out of their native place, and whose habits are wholly local—nobody above poverty who has not visited London once in his life; and most of those who can do so visit it once a year. To go up to town from 100 or 200 miles distance is a thing done on a sudden, and without any previous deliberation. In France, the people of the provinces used to make their will before they undertook such an expedition.
That last detail is perhaps the significant one. Restless, capitalist, internationalist Britain has long been a society more mobile than its neighbours, both literally and in social, familial and religious ways. That has its upside, of course, but the downside is yobbishness, violence, an undercurrent of disorder.
That sounds like a good conclusion. It was the conclusion I’d expected to come to as I researched this piece, and yet it’s much more wrong than right. On the one hand, it certainly seems true that we Brits are characterized by a certain violent yobbishness. As regards de Saussure’s comment that ‘the lower populace is of brutal and insolent nature, and very quarrelsome’, it would be hard to stand in a British town centre on a Friday night and find anything to disagree with. But the trouble with working from anecdotal evidence is that anecdotes are all you end up with. What’s really needed are facts.
And where better to start than murder? Although murder statistics record only the very pinnacle of crime, they are strongly correlated with serious crime in general. Murder rates in Britain have tallied pretty well with the broader crime rate. Murder rates between countries tally pretty well with differences in overall criminality. In other words, if you want a broad gauge of British violence over time and compared with other nations, then the murder rate is the place to look. When criminologist Manuel Eisner did just that (excluding violent deaths from war) the results he came up with were these:
Murder rate per 100,000 people per year
Century England Netherlands Scandinavia Germany & Switzerland Italy
13th & 14th 23.0 47.0 — 37.0 56.0
15th — 45.0 46.0 16.0 73.0
16th 7.0 25.0 21.0 11.0 47.0
17th 5.0 7.5 18.0 7.0 32.0
18th 1.5 5.5 1.9 7.5 10.5
19th 1.7 1.6 1.1 2.8 12.6
1900-49 0.8 1.5 0.7 1.7 3.2
1950-94 0.9 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.5
These results are stunning. England was by far the least violent society in Europe as far back as we can see. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, English homicide rates were at a level that wouldn’t be seen elsewhere until about the sixteenth century. The sixteenth-century English homicide rate would have been the best in Europe one hundred years later. Only in the nineteenth century did northwest Europe (Scandinavia and the Low Countries) catch up with England. If we turn our attention to serious crime, rather than just the loutish behaviour of quarrelsome drunks, then it is Britain which has led the way towards a politer, more civilized, less violent society.
What made England so strikingly peaceful? Why did the quarrelling British become so much less likely to reach for the sword, pistol, knife or fist? The answer surely revolves around our systems of law and order. Not only were the courts available to sort out any quarrel, they were also there to punish those who chose to go about it through other means. That sounds obvious, but on the Continent a legal approach to resolving disputes was much slower to take hold, with family-mediated resolution common, and honour killings widely seen as appropriate. In contrast, English courts were seen as legitimate, the laws ancient, the trials fair, the verdicts final. When even the king needed to tiptoe around the laws of the land, the authority of the law received its highest possible endorsement. The strength of social infrastructure, from parish poor relief to the strength of parliament, must have encouraged people to gather behind the socially approved institutions for resolving disputes.
In the end, it just isn’t true that modern Britain has gone to the dogs. What has happened, however, is that other Western societies have finally caught up with Britain’s lead. Certainly we are more yobbish in certain sorts of behaviour: binge drinking and mobile phone theft. But we don’t do vandalism like the Dutch, car-burning like the French, organized crime like the Italians, or thuggish right-wingery like (a small minority of) the Germans. Perhaps if there’s one truly British characteristic in all this, it’s the most ancient one of all: having a good old moan about the way we are now.
CLOUDS OF FECULENCE
In July 1855, the great physicist Michael Faraday conducted a simple but striking experiment, which he reported to The Times in the following words:
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 th
e smell of the water forced themselves at once on 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 cards 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 part was under water…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 whole river was for the time a real sewer.
So indeed it was. In previous generations, sewage in London had drained into cesspools, which were emptied by ‘night-soil men’ who would take the solid waste to sell to farmers based around the capital. Although there was a system of underground sewers, these were designed to drain surface water into the Thames or one of its tributaries.* Drinking water came either direct from one of these rivers, or from one of London’s many wells (remembered now as Clerkenwell, Holywell, Well Court, and so forth). These old arrangements had been overwhelmed by the speed and scale of London’s nineteenth-century expansion. Sewage was increasingly being dumped straight into the Thames, even as water companies continued to draw from it. The effect of such arrangements was inevitable. Infectious disease was rampant. In 1848/49, cholera killed over 14,000 people in London alone, and would kill over 10,000 in another outbreak five years later. Prior to 1830, the disease had been unknown in Britain.
Threats on this scale were a new phenomenon for the English.† The country had long been one of the longest-lived nations on earth. In 1800, the life expectancy of the average English baby was over thirty-five years, more or less in line with the average of the previous 250 years. The high point came in 1581, where life expectancy reached almost forty-two years, the low point twenty years earlier when it fell to just under twenty-eight.
Dismal as such stats may sound to us, they were astonishingly good. Few societies since the Neolithic revolution could have boasted such a strong and consistent record. As for the global average life expectancy in 1800, it was certainly under thirty, and quite likely less than twenty-five. Even in prosperous western Europe, few countries matched the English. In France, in the fifty years ending in 1790, the average life expectancy for boy babies varied between twenty-four and twenty-eight; girls lived about two years longer. Rampaging infant mortality was the main cause of the huge disparity with modern life expectancies, but adults too lived less long then than adults of today.
Good as English life expectancies may have been, they had been achieved in the context of a largely rural society, where the few large cities that existed had evolved water and sewerage arrangements that worked, at least approximately. All that stood to be overturned, as traditional methods of supplying clean water and removing waste started to collapse under the strain of a fast-rising population. To make matters worse, doctors and scientists had no clear idea about the process of disease transmission. The germ theory of medicine wouldn’t become finally accepted until the work of Pasteur and Koch towards the end of the Victorian era. Much more widespread was belief in the miasm theory: the notion that foul air spread disease and (depending on who you listened to) quite likely immorality too. This theory led to some dangerous conclusions. Florence Nightingale argued against laying drains under houses, in case foul airs escaped. Social reformer Edwin Chadwick, coining the slogan ‘all smell is disease’, thought it more important to make houses smell better than to remove sewage from the capital’s major source of drinking water, the River Thames. Unsurprisingly, there were parts of London where the average expectation of life was just sixteen years. Michael Faraday didn’t know it, but those clouds of feculence threatened a catastrophic reversal of all those hard-won gains in British health and mortality.
That catastrophe never happened. In fact, British life expectancies grew to around forty-one years by the 1820s, marked time for a while, then—from 1860 onwards—began to grow. By 1900, English life expectancies were around forty-seven years, just about as high as anywhere in the world. Still more impressive, Britain achieved this position despite being by far the world’s most urbanized nation. Those other countries, such as Sweden, that were as long lived as England had the benefit of being largely rural societies. The trick of creating a healthy city was invented here first.
What worked the magic? Not doctors, that’s clear. In 1976, a researcher named Thomas McKeown shocked the medical establishment by demonstrating categorically that the major killer diseases of early Victorian England had all but disappeared long before antibiotics, immunizations or chemotherapies appeared on the scene. Take, for instance, scarlet fever. Mid-Victorian children were dying of this disease at the rate of almost 2,500 per million. By the time the disease-causing organism was discovered in the 1880s, the death rate was already down to under a thousand and falling fast. By the time the first semi-effective drugs had come along in the 1930s, and the first properly effective antibiotics had come along in the 1940s, the disease was killing only a few tens of children per million. If you look at a graph of scarlet fever mortality over time, you can’t identify any impact from the introduction of drugs whatsoever. As for scarlet fever, so too for measles, whooping cough and others. In short, whatever caused the precipitous modern decline in mortality, it had nothing to do with the curative powers of doctors.
McKeown’s own conclusion was a simple one. If doctors weren’t responsible, then rising living standards must be. According to McKeown, higher wages meant better food meant better disease resistance. On this view, it was capitalists not doctors who had won the battle with death. There is certainly some truth in this argument. Past English longevity had been won on the back of productive agriculture, effective markets and high living standards. But more detailed examination of the data threw McKeown’s claims into question. Although living standards rose in the first half of the nineteenth century, the average height achieved by English children began shrinking: a sure sign that higher economic living standards weren’t translating into stronger, healthier, more disease-resistant kids. In effect, the deadly conditions in Britain’s cities were more than balancing out any gains from higher wage levels.
So what happened? The emerging consensus today pushes a third breed of hero to the fore: the engineers, social reformers, municipal councillors and medical officers of health, who together constituted the public health revolution. London led the way, in part because the Houses of Parliament were situated on the river. With their Honourable Members appalled by the sheer stink coming from the river of sewage beyond their windows, it became clear that Something Had to Be Done. The man doing it would be Joseph Bazalgette,* not the most famous of Victorian engineers, but surely the most influential.
Bazalgette’s brief was awe-inspiringly daunting: to remove all sewage from the River Thames. By the time he was finished, he had not simply met his brief, he had made the Thames the cleanest metropolitan river in the world, a distinction that it still possesses today. Bazalgette’s design involved building a series of massive intercepting sewers running broadly west to east across London. The ones in the northern half of the city run roughly: Kentish Town-Stamford Hill-Hackney; Bayswater-Oxford Street-Bethnal Green; Hammersmith-Chelsea-Victoria Embankment-Limehouse. Those three huge thoroughfares of sewage come together between Bow and West Ham, and have outfalls in the Isle of Dogs and Beckton. A similar system was built south of the river too.
These sewers still exist; they are still the main way in which London’s waste is removed. When you walk along the Victoria Embankment, you are walking beside one river, the Thames, but over another one, and one carrying a very different sort of fluid. The whole embankment called for fifty-two new acres of land to be reclaimed from the Thames, and brilliantly succeeded in engineering a honeycomb of rail, water, sewer and other services within spitting distance of a huge, powerful a
nd tidal river.
The effects of Bazalgette’s masterpiece were plain to see. Once his sewers had been commissioned, there were no further outbreaks of cholera in London. None. Nor typhoid. Deaths from diarrhoea and dysentery declined sharply too. In 1872, the annual death rate in London had fallen to just 21.5 per 100,000 people. That was a death rate lower than that of any major city in Europe or America—despite the fact that London was by far the largest city in the world, and therefore the one facing by far the biggest public health challenge.
Where London led, other cities followed. The Public Health Act of 1872 made more cash available to municipalities; it forced all councils to take sanitation measures seriously and appointed qualified officials to lead the charge. A steady decline in British mortality was the result. The country that had long been one of the leaders in life expectancy during the Age of Agriculture had proved—by a considerable distance—to lead the way during the Age of Industry too.
Historians spend a considerable time rehearsing the mantra that ‘nothing in history is inevitable’. They’re right to do so. Things could always have been otherwise. If Harold hadn’t taken an arrow in the eye at Hastings? If Catherine of Aragon had produced a string of bonny baby boys for her husband, Henry VIII? If William of Orange had faced the expected equinoctial gales in autumn 1688? Everything always could have been other than it was.
This Little Britain Page 24