Parched City (14 page)

Before that could happen, the ownership and governance of water supply radically altered. As the sun set on London’s nineteenth century water questions, the era of private water was also fading fast.

Chapter Five

Sir Alexander Cruikshank Houston (undated). Photograph by
Whitlock ¦ Sons. Wellcome Library, London.

Google ‘Alexander Houston’ and the results lead with the Wikipedia entry for the American heavyweight boxer, followed by his Facebook profile.
²
In the next page of results, a restaurant
review for J. Alexander’s in Houston (Texas) appears. Add ‘Dr’ before the name and a mere five results appear. Of those five, only one relates to Britain’s leading exponent of modern drinking water analysis and treatment of the twentieth century. Insert ‘Cruikshank’ between Alexander and Houston, and the bacteriologist does surface. However, these results only list his own books, or contributions he made to seminal water treatment texts of the early twentieth century. Little is written about him by other authors of popular history and his mention in the academic sphere is also scant.
³
Even a search in the online archival catalogue of Britain’s national Science Museum draws a blank.
⁴
Fortunately, records of his work during the early twentieth century are held at the London Metropolitan Archives — courtesy of Thames Water’s deposits for its predecessors — and the opening quote from his obituary is preserved in the library of the Wellcome Trust.

In this chapter, these existing wisps of evidence about the work of Alexander Cruikshank Houston are thickened up with fresh archival research to resurrect a scientist who should be a household name, at least anywhere in the world where citizens enjoy a safe supply of drinking water on tap.

Wanted: A Director of Water Examination

1902’s Metropolis Water Act changed the ownership and governance of London’s water supply to a municipal body. The Act included a critical clause that instituted the principle of public health in water’s management for the first time. ‘Chemical and bacteriological examinations of and experiments as to the condition of the water supplied’ had to be conducted by the new Metropolitan Water Board.
⁵
‘Buildings, apparatus and plant’ to conduct these examinations and experiments were to be supplied by the Board.
⁶
Periodical reports about water quality also had to be published for the water examiner of the Water Board who had to be hosted by the Metropolitan Water Board, at the drop of an
Edwardian bowler hat.
⁷

Essentially, the 1902 Act legislated for institutions to monitor water quality, overhauling the shortcomings of its legal predecessors (the Metropolis Water Acts of 1852 and 1871).
⁸
Now, water quality would be systematically investigated
within
and
without
the water supplier. This transformation did not happen overnight. There was a period of transition when the London water company directors were paid off, their brands dissolved and assets transferred to the Metropolitan Water Board.

The Board started its operations in 1903. Two years later, the structure for the examination of water quality was still being moulded. And in 1905, a stark reminder of the havoc caused by undetected pathogens in urban water supplies was provided by another English city.

Lincoln, the cathedral city in the north east of England, was hit by a typhoid epidemic. On 9th February 1905, the
Daily Mirror
reported that the death toll was already 500. As the newspaper’s correspondent wrote: ‘A general feeling of alarm pervades the city. Restaurant-keepers and mineral-water manufacturers endeavour to reassure their patrons by advertising that they are not using corporation water.’
⁹
The report reveals how far lay understanding of waterborne disease had progressed, and also that mineral water was still fashionable amongst some consumers. The arrival of an ‘eminent bacteriologist’ in Lincoln the previous day was also announced; one Dr Houston.

Alexander Cruikshank Houston was born in 1865, in the colonial city of Mysore, India, where his father was the Surgeon-General. He returned to Britain to study medicine at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1892 with a doctorate in Public Health and Forensic Medicine.
¹⁰
From the outset of his career in water research, his interest in the subject was entirely related to its role in public health, namely drinking water. Houston’s first assignment was in the north of England, where he spent several
years refining his water analysis skills by testing samples in moorland bogs. In the late 1890s Dr Houston joined the water science elite in London. He worked as a researcher in the Local Government Board’s laboratory at St Bartholomew’s Hospital alongside the internationally acclaimed bacteriologist Dr E.E. Klein. There he realised the scale of research needed to progress his discipline’s relationship with sewage and water analysis for safeguarding public health.
¹¹

In 1898 Houston researched the waste end of the water spectrum when he was enlisted by the London County Council to study an experimental treatment of sewage in bacteria beds at Barking and Crossness, where Bazalgette’s pipes deposited their cargoes. Houston must have had a strong stomach. He later reflected on this period: ‘At the time when this enquiry was commenced, hardly anything was known of the biological composition of effluents from bacteria beds.’
¹²
By 1903 he concluded that bacterial sewage treatment should eventually replace chemical treatments for effluents entering the Thames; only on the grounds that the lower portion of the river was not used for abstracting any water destined for drinking. Characteristically, Houston qualified his recommendation with a caution that years of research were still needed by many ‘competent workers’ before a full understanding of the process of bacterial sewage treatment could be reached.
¹³
As a personality as well as a scientist, he was notoriously cautious about making grand claims about positive experimental outcomes. During the late 1890s, the Doctor. was also a consultant to some of London’s water companies and in this period he perfected a method for measuring levels of sewage pollution (technically the presence of bacterial coliforms, known as b.coli), in water.
¹⁴
The standard he established for determining whether water was bacteriologically pure or not was the absence or presence of b.coli per one hundred cubic centimetres of water. His technique was well advanced by the time his services were called on to address
Lincoln’s typhoid crisis.

Dr Houston made a rapid analysis of the city’s water supply and issued a prescription.
The Times
announced that the bacteriologist and his colleague, Dr MacGowan, ‘recommended treatment with hypochlorite of soda’.
¹⁵
Retrospectively, Dr Houston recalled how the pair tensely observed ‘the behaviour of a certain goldfish in a tank to which a specimen of the chlorinated water was admitted before it passed on to the town’.
¹⁶
Evidently the goldfish thrived, because the hypochlorite of soda proceeded until further notice. Following Maidstone’s lead in using chloride of lime to sterilise its mains pipes after 1897’s typhoid epidemic, this was credited as ‘the first systematic use of chlorine in water disinfection’ by the water scientist Joseph Race when he penned a history of the radical chemical in 1918.
¹⁷
This procedure’s distinction from Sims-Woodhead’s trial in Maidstone was twofold. The chemical compound had advanced and it was applied as a continuous measure, not just one-off sterilisation.

Chlorine was ‘discovered’ in the eighteenth century. Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele identified an obstinately persistent substance whilst tinkering with magnesium in 1774 but it was only in 1810 that the highly toxic gas joined the periodic table.
¹⁸
As an industrial product, the chemical was patented as ‘chloride of lime’ at the turn of the eighteenth century.
¹⁹
In this form, chlorine’s toxicity was muted within the substance of slaked lime. Cream of lime’s seemingly miraculous power of draining the colour out of any material it came in contact with was of great interest to the Scottish linen industry for instance.
²⁰

Prior to chloride of lime’s use in sewage treatment in the mid-nineteenth century, one prescient observation about chlorine’s biomedical effect appeared in the Lancet medical journal. A Bristol-based doctor, Mr Lansdown, wrote to the Lancet in 1834. He was having some success treating cholera with a medicine called calomel. The doctor shared the confusion he had experienced when he realised that his administration of calomel for its
‘purgative’ properties was causing a ‘remedial’ impact.
²¹
Reflecting on this medical puzzle, the doctor wrote: ‘I then thought of the chlorine which it contained, upon which I determined to try the chlorine with another base.’
²²
Cholera also abated with this brew. What Mr Lansdown had deduced, pre-bacteriology, was chlorine’s bactericidal properties. Some seventy years later, Dr Houston understood precisely why a medicine with significant chlorine content had successfully extinguished cholera. The chemical killed the cholera vibrio bacterium. The concentration of chemical in Lincoln’s water had to be precise to balance the need to purge typhoid bacteria and for the water to be drinkable as a new ingredient of the daily municipal supply.

The Times’
Special Correspondent in Lincoln, who must have sampled the treated water relayed that it had a ‘marked mineral taste and smell’.
²³
His scepticism about the merits of the chemical’s use was supported by the view of a health professional who believed that it was responsible for causing an increase in colic, irritation of the skin, mucous membrane and eczema, in Lincoln’s population. The journalist concluded his article uneasily: ‘…no one can say what may be the effect of chlorinated water, however dilute, as an article of diet.’
²⁴
When
The Times’
reporter returned to Lincoln city a month later, he remained sceptical about the efficacy of chlorination. He claimed that drinking water was being brought into the town from elsewhere because nobody would drink what was on tap. Apparently the tea made from the public water supply was ‘excessively strong and bitter, as if stewed’.
²⁵
He did not dispute the fact that there were no new cases of typhoid, apart from secondary infections. All bacteria, including the offensive typhoid bacillus, in Lincoln’s water supply were extinguished at the hands of Drs. Houston and MacGowan. Back in London, the Metropolitan Water Board could not risk a public health disaster like Lincoln’s befalling the capital.

In spring 1905, the Board advertised for its first Director of
Water Examination. Dr Alexander Cruikshank Houston applied for the post. He defeated competitors and was unanimously appointed on the 21
^st
of July, 1905.
²⁶
At the age of 39 the bacteriologist was responsible for ensuring that the safety of London’s entire drinking water supply, to 6,700,000 people could be successfully proclaimed and attained.
²⁷

Time and Space

Though critical headway in water analysis had been made by the Frankland family there was still no system in place for the bacteriological and chemical examination of London’s water. In fact, the Metropolitan Water Board’s Department of Water Examination was the first of its kind in the world. As a public health advocate, Houston’s profession fitted with the shift in water supply from private customers to municipal consumers. Health ideals at the laboratory were pursued with pragmatic scientific rigour. Time, patience, and therefore human resources, were needed.

Britain’s first metropolitan water examination laboratory was staffed by two chemists, two bacteriologists, two laboratory assistants, six sample collectors and three laboratory boys; all under Houston’s direction.
²⁸
The team worked in a four-storey building equipped for the ‘Chemical and Bacteriological Examination of Water’ on Nottingham Place, just south of Regent’s Park.

In the first of Houston’s monthly reports, he recorded that his team had examined one thousand samples of London’s water chemically and bacteriologically.
²⁹
In this and all subsequent reports he would remind his readership that his work was entirely dependent on his team of experts. As if to underscore why the testing regime was so critical, at the end of the report he included the Registrar-General’s tally of monthly deaths, in London, from typhoid fever (23) and diarrhoea (72).
³⁰
The latter was a notoriously common cause of death for the under-fives, at
almost ten percent of the total death rates for this age bracket; in 1909, for instance, the annual figure for diarrhoeal-related deaths of under-fives in England and Wales was 5485 children.
³¹
This goes some way to explaining how important bacteriological research on water was in transforming future public health statistics, in partnership with improving sanitation and hygiene education, such as hand-washing after defecation. Although the sanitary revolution was well in motion, those on the lowest rungs of London’s economic ladder may have been using an outdoor privy rather than a private, flushing water closet.
³²
Consequently, toileting arrangements in some backstreets were likely to have remained pretty rudimentary and possibly knowledge of dangerous germs.