Parched City (16 page)

Post-war, Houston was wholly convinced about the merits of chlorination. However, he acknowledged negative public opinion about the use of chemicals in water in his 1921 report when he wrote: ’…there is no doubt that the addition of chemicals to drinking water is repugnant to many persons. It is not desirable to ride rough-shod over sentiment in this matter. Far better it is to admit that there are two sides to every question, and to express the hope that time and experience will modify the opinion of the present-day opponent.’
⁶⁹
Houston defended chlorination on aesthetic grounds, arguing that any trace of its taste was extinguished before drinking, but it was primarily from a public health perspective that he believed in the use of the bactericide: ’…the treatment confers absolute, not merely relative, protection against epidemic water-borne disease.’
⁷⁰
As the Metropolitan Water Board’s Director of Water Examination, he was not about to reverse his decision to chlorinate London’s supplies. The holy grail of epidemiological sterility had been discovered.

In 1922, Houston further expounded on the merits of chlorination. Countering claims that chlorinated water was “doped”, Houston’s rejoinder was not gentle. ‘Logically, these people should drink only deep well water and water from virgin
moorland, or upland, sources of supply …There is absolutely no convincing evidence that a properly chlorinated water is in any way injurious to health.’
⁷¹
His view was pragmatically situated in the reality of the complex urban environment, where nature was inevitably corrupted. Environmental protection legislation was no guarantee that polluting accidents would not occur accidentally, or even covertly.
⁷²

Chlorination had started as a lifesaving principle in 1905; it had become an economic necessity in 1916 and by the early 1920s the treatment was accepted as an indispensable aspect of modern water supply in industrialised societies. Public health officials from Cuba, Germany, Norway, Russia and the U.S.A. were sent to the Water Examiner in 1924, as representatives of the League of Nations.
⁷³
Mentioning those visitors in his annual report that year, Dr Houston stressed that ‘all year round, engineers, chemists and bacteriologists from home and all the four corners of the globe are constantly visiting the Board’s Works and Laboratories, and are given every facility for pursuing their investigations. We certainly learn much from their visits by interchange of ideas, exchanges of reports and so forth…’
⁷⁴
London was evidently at the epicentre of disseminating intelligence about public drinking water quality standards.

Reportedly a very modest man, as a scientist Alexander Cruikshank Houston was clearly something of a celebrity in his field in the inter-war period. In the latter years of his career, more clues about Houston as a person outside the laboratory filtered through his reports, when he indulged in a quirky addition to their scientific subject matter.

Diaries of rambles he took through London’s watery hinterlands formed an appendix to these official reports, with hand-sketched maps to illustrate his rambles.
⁷⁵
The diarist’s literary style was unpretentious and freely mixed local history references with contemporary observations. In one ramble he paid tribute to Hugh Myddleton’s legacy as he traced the New River from
Hertfordshire to Islington, pausing mid-route to contemplate his surroundings over a pint of ale at a public house.
⁷⁶
One irreverent recollection he relayed in these diaries was an unusual working day he spent with his colleagues in 1905, when a vast quantity of fluorescein was added to the New River. In order to determine if water being pumped out of adjacent spring wells into the river might have already naturally seeped into it in the first place, they collected samples from the wells along its course, examining them for any sign of a green hue. The results were negative but Houston remembered ‘no more fascinating sight than the New River presented on that occasion — like a glorious wide ribbon of shimmering green extending for miles and miles towards London’.
⁷⁷
He noted public reactions to be ‘impressed’, ‘startled’ and ‘puzzled’, with a child even exclaiming, ‘“Doesn’t the river look lovely mummy?”‘
⁷⁸
The tale concluded on this cliff-hanger: ’…the writer was beginning to wonder if his calculations, that the colour could not reach as far as London, were based on sound premises.’
⁷⁹
If domestic taps in Islington momentarily flowed green, Houston did not disclose.

The Royal Society1933 obituary that opened this chapter paid appropriate homage to the achievements of Alexander Houston. Since then, his name has sunken into obscurity as surely as the public drinking water revolution he masterminded has become taken for granted. One, perhaps unconscious, tribute to his legacy was the birth of the bubble jet fountain, in the decade of his death. The trust in a safe public water supply that this modernist design celebrates was only possible because of the research Alexander Houston masterminded. By the end of the 1930s, the innocent civic pleasure of sipping from the watery arc of a bubble jet fountain was under threat in London.

Chapter Six

‘Those‘, in the above quote, referred to air raid shelters. George Billingham’s memories of working as a water engineer before, and during, World War Two are recorded in a rare interview about London’s water supply during the war. During civil defence preparations, the engineer personally studied hundreds of proposals from local authorities suggesting air raid shelter locations. As underground buildings, water engineers needed to advise local authorities about the proximity of mains pipes to suggested sites. Billingham maintained that some of his department’s recommendations for relocating sites for proposed shelters were dismissed: ‘I didn’t like the look of where many of these were going, to be quite candid.’
²
He imagined scenarios of shelters flooding with water. For the duration of the Blitz, the engineer refused to enter an air raid shelter despite the subterranean nature of his profession. As Billingham’s recollection confirmed, the nightmare he imagined was realised in one air raid shelter in Stoke Newington in northeast London. He does not elaborate on the scale of the tragedy in the interview but, fortunately, he also does not mention any other similar events.

This chapter reveals how imagining the worst was critically important for the defence of London’s drinking water supply during the crisis of war. Preparation for the imagined war and its lived experience are filtered through records revealing the efforts to both protect and maintain a constant flow of potable water to the city during the conflict.

Imagining the Blitz

Air Raid Precautions were drawn up at the Metropolitan Water Board long before war was declared. By the end of 1937 conflict was highly likely, if not imminent, and that London would be targeted as the administrative and economic capital of Britain was inevitable.

Commander Blackwell, the Board’s Air Raid Precautions Officer, issued a secret document in December 1937 about his plans. In the document, he acknowledged to its select readership the monumental challenge of defending infrastructure that lay below every street and building likely to be bombed. To focus his strategy, Blackwell identified what would cause the most ‘serious dislocation of the system of water supply’.
³
Logically, the mains pipes were his primary concern because of their centrality to the supply network that fed all of London’s homes and businesses. The Commander was confident, he declared, that sections of mains pipes could be dug out and replaced in forty-eight hours. ‘Fouled mains’ also had to be considered.
⁴
Colonel MacKenzie — the Director of Water Examination who replaced Alexander Houston — had been consulted on this point and proposed that portable gas chlorination units were needed for swift responses to mains pipe casualties. The Board’s strategists could not ignore the fact that if clean water pipes could be ruptured, sewage pipes were equally vulnerable to damage and, consequently, sanitary mayhem. At that point, sewerage was under the management of the London County Council.
⁵
To defend London’s potable water supply from external and internal threats, the Board mounted its wartime strategy on two main fronts: engineering and examination.

The Chief Engineer issued an outline of his plans to protect the Metropolitan Water Board’s infrastructure in 1938. He was concerned about how the source of the supply itself might be damaged. What would happen if aerial assaults contaminated the main waterworks or stopped their supplies flowing? To
reduce the possibility of the plants becoming sitting ducks, the windows of Engine Houses were to be fitted with blackout blinds and wire netting.
⁶
For East London, the mains pipe visibly crossing the River Lee was noted as being particularly ‘open to sabotage‘, so it was proposed that members of the Home Guard patrolled that area in the event of emergency.
⁷
As the Board’s staff did not usually linger in that vicinity, the Chief Engineer pointed out a practical, and somewhat ironic point: ‘There is no water laid on at these works for sanitary purposes.’
⁸
A temporary convenience would be installed. Later in the war, kits for detecting poison in reservoirs were also doled out to each waterworks for the possibility of deliberate acts of contamination.
⁹

Before the war broke out, in June 1939 the Metropolitan Water Board issued warnings about how domestic water supplies might be affected in a bulletin issued to householders.
Air Raid Precautions: Advice to Consumers
writ large the reminder that all indoor pipes were the responsibility of householders.
¹⁰
The Board would only deal with outdoor, public pipes i.e. those in the sphere of municipal water. Consumers were advised to familiarise themselves with the stopcock’s location to turn off supply when necessary to prevent flooding amongst other damage. Domestic cisterns were to be kept clean for reserve supplies in the event of the loss of mains water. Water from cisterns was to be boiled before use. The document contained a recurrent wartime water theme. ‘Consumers should do their utmost to economise in the use of water as large quantities will probably be required for fire fighting.’ Water’s social and economic value was being reassessed.

Phoney War

On 31
^st
August 1939, the Board’s Emergency Committee met to plan for the imminent state of emergency. Key men who were on annual leave, such as the Director of Water Examination, were recalled to their posts.
¹¹
Just three days later on 3
^rd
September,
the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcast live from Downing Street declaring that Britain was at war with Germany.
¹²

For some time the so-called ‘phoney war’ ensued before London saw any bombing raids, but social upheavals were already in motion. The prospect of the Board losing its youngest and fittest men prompted a representation to the Ministry for Health and Labour about the consequences of a severely depleted workforce.
¹³
Employee representatives, the National Union of Water Works, offered to come to the Board’s staffing rescue, but another solution was soon ratified to redress the imminent labour shortage, for a complement of temporary assistants.

Those assistants were only to ‘be women, or men not liable to be called up for service with H.M. Forces’.
¹⁴
The move was as novel in the water industry as for the many professional spheres where women replaced men for the first time. These female recruits included Mrs Gardiner, who took up an unspecified senior post in the laboratories, and Miss E.A. Flint (MSc), who became a ‘temporary technical assistant in the Water Examination Department at a salary of £400 per annum’.
¹⁵
Such opportunities for women in the water workforce presented themselves because of the extreme conditions of the war. However, over its course, seven thousand volunteers were also trained to assist core staff, though the gender of these recruits is not mentioned in the records. Another human resources precaution the Board took in 1939 was compulsory blood testing. Any employees testing positively for pathogenic bacteria were removed from direct contact with the water supply. This ban extended to employees ‘suffering from any intestinal upset associated with looseness of the bowels’.
¹⁶
Civil defence was also, therefore, mounted on a biomedical front.

As the likelihood of air raids on London increased, Finsbury Borough Council (now Islington) requested that the Board open
its air raid shelters and basement to the public.
¹⁷
Permission was granted, at least temporarily. Such arrangements, and their use, show how boundaries between work and home life, private and public space blurred, as unprecedented levels of social cooperation was required.

By August 1940, the war’s phoney phase was drawing to a close. Mobilising defence operations, Colonel MacKenzie performed a radio broadcast on the 13
^th
of August to teach Londoners about sterilising their water at home. If supplies were pronounced to be unsafe following an air raid, the sterilising method he described was to be used immediately. MacKenzie encouraged listeners to transcribe his instructions: ‘Keep in your house a bottle of chlorinated soda solution. Your chemist can supply you with it…Add ten drops of chlorine disinfectant — I will spell that — CHLORINE — to one pint of water. Stir and allow to stand for five minutes or longer. Then add a crystal of Hypo — HYPO. Dissolve this and you may then drink the water.’
¹⁸
The last ingredient was intended to neutralise the flavour of chlorine. Hopefully householders faithfully transcribed MacKenzie’s lecture and stuck his sterilisation lesson up in their kitchens or bathrooms. The Colonel claimed that only two brands of disinfectants would safely do the job. Those brands were Milton or Chlor-San. London’s chemists must have stocked up to the gills after his high-profile announcement. Milton promptly launched its own advertising campaign, for this essential wartime household accessory.

In MacKenzie’s message to Londoners and numerous other drinking water missives that would follow over the next couple of years, the same brands were advocated. Milton and Chlor-san cornered a lucrative market, so anybody with shares in the companies was assured of an undiluted stream of profit with bottles going from between six pence to eight-pence (the equivalent of seventy-five pence to a pound in modern currency).
¹⁹
For four and a half pence, a slim-line ‘emergency flask’ of Milton
could also be purchased, for slipping into one’s pocket or handbag.
²⁰
Handsome sales of Hypo were also guaranteed assuming that the Colonel’s safe drinking water drill was obeyed. It was to be enacted when a notice printed in red ink, was delivered through one’s letterbox.
²¹
When the threat was deemed to have passed, a second notice, printed in green ink, gave the all clear. A leap of faith was required to view the tap’s contents as dangerous one moment and innocuous the next. Even those who might have been partial to Schweppes’ ‘table water’ before the war, could not have reverted to that option (unless they had a secret stash), as the product was suspended under the Ministry of Food’s rationing protocol.
²²
Schweppes brand of soda water was still being produced, so perhaps some who could afford it kept a few bottles of that tucked away for emergencies. This seems to be a petty concern in the wake of what followed.

Advertisement for Milton, 1940. Wellcome Library, London.
Reproduced with kind permission from Milton Pharmaceutical
Company.

The Blitz

Blitzkrieg, as the German army’s lightning bombing policy was named, was launched on 7
^th
September 1940 over London, in daylight.
²³
Fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing followed.
²⁴
On the ground, the Board’s operations were directed from a control room in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
²⁵
Regular shift patterns were replaced by emergency responses. For staff like George Billingham and his fellow engineer Arthur Durling, there were three-day stretches without sleep as they attempted to repair and restore mains pipes.
²⁶
Billingham acknowledged the Board’s preparedness for the Blitz in terms of infrastructure but the chaos unleashed by the bombing of London presented an equal crisis in managing scarce human resources. As he reflected: ‘The notion that everything could be controlled centrally at the height of the Blitz wasn’t possible.’
²⁷
Districts had to focus on local crises.

Effective communication was decimated by the air raids. The telephone system was often down, or inaccessible. For instance
the all-important turncocks, who had the equipment and knowhow for switching off supplies to mains pipes had to take shelter from the air raids, just like other civilians. Alternative communications came in the form of a 130-person strong fleet of human messengers on bicycles. They worked in shifts around the clock relaying messages between district foremen and turncocks. A mid-war report from the Board recorded the organisation’s delight with the usefulness of the 350 pedal cycles that it had purchased before the war.
²⁸
Arthur Durling, Billingham’s colleague, remembered travelling to Plaistow on one of those bicycles after a particularly heavy air raid to determine why the pressure gauges in his district had plummeted to zero.
²⁹
He detoured past areas where unexploded bombs were cordoned off, stopping to peer into open fire hydrants. When he saw that air was being sucked into the mains through the hydrants, part of the reason for pressure loss was explained. As he approached Plaistow high street, Durling saw the other reason. A large bomb crater in the middle of the road was filled with water. The engineer vividly remembered that scene: ‘The main had been fractured and there were women with kettles from the houses that hadn’t been bombed coming out and they were getting their water from out of the crater, and I suggested to them that they’d better not do this because it was probably contaminated.’
³⁰
It follows that the supply these households had lost, or would imminently lose, made any water precious whether it came from a polluted crater or not. For Durling, the contamination of most concern was effluent from sewer pipes also punctured by the bomb.