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Nuisances and community in mid-Victorian England: the attractions of inspection

2013; Routledge; Volume: 38; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03071022.2013.817061

1470-1200

Christopher Hamlin,

Historical Economic and Social Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Christopher Hamlin, 'Sanitary policing and the local state, 1873–74: a statistical study of English and Welsh towns', Social History of Medicine, xviii, 1 (2005), 39–61. *The author thanks Tom Crook, Bill Luckin and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin for their excellent suggestions. 2 Per capita the changes are less striking. During Tripe's tenure, Hackney's population more than doubled to 230,000. During the inquiries of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes of 1884–5, Hackney stood out as an exemplary district. See Bill Luckin, '"A Once Rural Community": Society, Environment, and Health in Hackney, 1860–1920' (unpublished Ms); Anthony Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (Montreal, 1977), 18. Total nuisance numbers may undercount inspectors' activities. The Hackney reports, for example, did not routinely include nuisance-free dwellings; routine inspections of slaughterhouses are not necessarily included. Also, inspectors there and elsewhere sometimes list contiguous houses on a single street as a single nuisance if they have identical problems and the party responsible is the same. See London Metropolitan Archives [subsequently LMA] 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, 'Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Hackney for 1861', 11; for 1864, 6; for 1865, 14. 3 Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 194–5. Thus in some cases, where inspections are attributed to medical officers, inspectors are actually doing the inspecting (of structures and bodies). Cf. Martin Daunton, 'Introduction' in Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 111: 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000) [to be cited as CUH III], 1–56, at 8. On strong metropolitan officers see Bill Luckin, 'The metropolitan and the municipal: the politics of health and environment in London, 1860–1920' in Robert Colls and Richard Rodger (eds), Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain, 1800–2000. Essays in Honour of David Reeder (Aldershot, 2004), 46–66. 4 Robert Woods and John Woodward (eds), Urban Disease and Mortality in Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1984); Frances Bell and Robert Millward, 'Public health expenditures and mortality in England and Wales, 1870–1914', Continuity and Change, xiii, 2 (1998), 221–49; Simon Szreter, 'Rethinking McKeown: the relationship between public health and social change', American Journal of Public Health, XCII (2002), 722–25; James Colgrove, 'The McKeown Thesis: a historical controversy and its enduring influence', ibid., 725–9; Bruce Link and Jo Phelan, 'McKeown and the idea that social conditions are fundamental causes of disease', ibid., 730–32. 5 Edmund Garrett, The Law of Nuisances (London, 1890), 118, 146–7; Bill Luckin, 'Pollution in the city', CUH III, 207–28, at 208–10; Martin Daunton, 'Taxation and representation in the Victorian city' in Colls and Rodger, op. cit., 24–31. 6 For a thoughtful review see Anthony Sutcliffe, 'The growth of public intervention in the British urban environment during the nineteenth century: a structural approach' in James Johnson and Colin G. Pooley (eds), The Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cities (London, 1982), 107–24. 7 LMA 88 (St.M.) Isaac Young, 'Vestry of St Mary Battersea. Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector. For the Year 1899', Vestry Annual Reports, Appendix 6, 5–7, 14. 8 E. L. Hasluck, Local Government in England (Cambridge, 1936), 38–9. 9 T. Crook, 'Sanitary inspection and the public sphere in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: a case study in liberal governance', Social History, xxxii, 4 (2007), 369–93. 10 One may argue, following Andrew Abbott, that the pre-professionalized inspectors, with control over the abstraction of 'nuisance', were in fact more professionalized. See Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988), 8–9; also Martin Laffin, Local Government Officers: Professionalism, Power, and Accountability (SSRC/Urban History/Politics Seminar, LSE, 1980). 11 See, for example, V. A. C. Gatrell, 'Crime, authority, and the policeman-state' in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, vol. III: Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990), 243–310; Robert Storch, 'The policeman as domestic missionary: urban discipline and popular culture in northern England, 1850–1880' in R. J. Morris and Richard Rodger (eds), The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History, 1820–1914 (London, 1993), 281–306 (original article, 1976); F. M. Dodsworth, 'The idea of police in eighteenth-century England: discipline, reformation, superintendence, c.1780–1800', Journal of the History of Ideas, lxix, 4 (2008), 583–604. 12 'Philosophical issues to do with liberty and constraint were not confined to political tracts. In the business of drains, dirt, and disease they involve political choices and practical limitations on liberty' note Colls and Rodger, op. cit., 6. Using factory acts or poor laws as the model, inspection has been seen to imply surveillance, centralization, discipline and control: see Daunton, 'Introduction', CUH III, op. cit., 14–21. 13 Henry Julian Hunter, 'Report on the Housing of the Poorer Parts of the Population in Towns, Particularly As Regards the Existence of Dangerous Degrees of Overcrowding and the Use of Dwellings Unfit for Human Habitation' in BPP, Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council for 1865, 1866 [3645], XXXIII, Appendix II, 50–194), 169, 178; W. Hamish Fraser and Irene Maver, 'Tackling the problems' in W. Hamish Fraser and Irene Maver (eds), Glasgow, vol. II: 1830–1912 (Manchester, 1996), 394–440, at 413. 14 Concern about pervasive malfeasance was one rationale to professionalize the inspectors. 'A scientific education has a wonderful influence in weaning the mind from anything like corrupt views of professional duty' noted Dr Julian Hunter, John Simon's investigator of housing conditions (and nuisances inspection) in 1865 (Hunter, op. cit., 78). Cf. Joshua Toulmin Smith, Practical Proceedings for the Removal of Nuisances to Health and Safety: and for the Execution of Sewerage Works, in Towns and in Rural Parishes, under the Common Law and Under Recent Statutes, 4th edn (London, 1867), 35, contrasting a tradition 'founded on a trusting faith in the intelligence and honesty of the average of men' with the modern approach 'founded on – at least it can rest on nothing else than – the assumption that all men, except central functionaries, are dishonest, and that none but such functionaries have any intelligence'. Also see Wohl, Eternal Slum, op. cit., 113, 124–7; BPP, Report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, 1884–85 [C.4402–I], XXX, Minutes of Evidence, Qs 3290–94, 3364–66, 4232, 4666, 17722, 17767. Presumably, medical officers who testified would have been subject to the same pressures. 15 LMA 74.901 (St M), Tidy, 'Report on Scarlatina', 1872, 45. 16 Crook, op. cit., 391–2, alludes to imputations of bribery. He presents no specific cases. Aside from the Westminster case mentioned below, I have found no imputations of bribery; and only one case of dismissal where the probable cause is unprofessionalism (drunkenness on duty). Many inspectors worked until retirement or death; others moved on to other positions. The American Albert Shaw was struck by the absence of patronage-based appointment; see Shaw, Municipal Government in Great Britain (New York, 1895), 65. Opportunities for large payoffs will have been less lucrative for inspectors than for surveyors who contracted for large purchases. See John Garrard, 'Scandals: a tentative overview' in James Moore and John Smith (eds), Corruption in Urban Politics and Society, Britain 1780–1950 (Aldershot, 2007), 23–40; also James Moore and John Smith in ibid., 'Corruption and urban governance', 1–19. In a Punch send-up, an inspector conveniently has a contractor friend who can put all to right and fix too the nuisances that will come to be recognized in future ('More happy thoughts', Punch, 9 October 1869, 141). Inspector–contractor relations would certainly warrant further study. 17 'Civil society and British cities' in Colls and Rodger, op. cit., 1–20, at 11; see also Daunton, 'Introduction', CUH III, 24. I explored nuisances inspection in 'public sphere' terms in C. Hamlin, 'Public sphere to public health: the transformation of "nuisance" ' in Steve Sturdy (ed.), Medicine, Health, and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600–2000 (London, 2002), 190–204. 18 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations Translated by Edmund Jephcott With Some Notes and Corrections by the Author, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (Oxford, 2000). 19 Bill Luckin, 'The metropolitan and the municipal' in Colls and Rodger, op. cit., 63; Barry Doyle, 'The changing functions of urban government: councillors, officials and pressure groups' in CUH III, 287–313, at 295–8. A remarkable exception is G. C. Clifton, 'The Staff of the Metropolitan Board of Works: 1855–1889: The Development of a Professional Local Government Bureaucracy' (Ph.D., London School of Economics, 1986). 20 Issues of potential source bias need to be acknowledged. My conclusion of significant and responsible activity may rest on the fact that inactive administration will either not have generated records, or they will be less likely to have survived. Thus E. C. Midwinter, focusing on individual Lancashire towns rather than inspectors and their records, paints a less rosy picture in Social Administration in Lancashire: Poor Law, Public Health, and Police (Manchester, 1969), 90–1. 21 Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism in the Modern City (New York, 2003). In recent decades, the balance has changed. At one time municipal leeway signified unmet state responsibility; it has come to signify pragmatic and perhaps even appropriate distribution of responsibility. Thus the 1848–55 General Board of Health, once seen as a tragic vanguard, is more recently viewed as 'a prescriptive and rather bossy central body in an area where central coercion was probably less necessary than the sanitary lobby claimed', according to John Davis, 'Central government and the towns', CUH III, 261–86, at 267. Cf. E. P. Hennock, 'Central/local government relations in England, an outline', Urban History Yearbook (1982), 38–47. I have explored these issues in C. Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain 1800–1854 (Cambridge, 1998) and 'Muddling in Bumbledom: local governments and large sanitary improvements: the cases of four British towns, 1855–1885', Victorian Studies, xxxii, 1 (1988), 55–83. 22 See Hunter, op. cit., 99, 104, 135, 143, 157–8, 194; W. Glen and A. Glen, The Public Health Act, 1875, 9th edn (London, 1878), 176fn; Fraser and Maver, op. cit., 414. 23 Chris Williams, 'The Sheffield Democrats' critique of criminal justice in the 1850s' in Colls and Rodger, op. cit., 96–120, at 106–7. For these issues in Oldham, see Michael Winstanley, 'Preventive policing in Oldham, c.1826–1856', Trans. Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, xcvi (1990), 17–35. 24 Mansion House Council on the Dwellings of the Poor, The London Health Laws. A Manual of the Law Affecting the Housing and Sanitary Condition of Londoners With Special Attention to the Dwellings of the Poor (London, 1897), 4, 8. 25 Shaw, op. cit., 81. Shaw presents the chief inspector, Peter Fyfe, as the CEO, with the MOH more a chairman of the board. In many ways Glasgow was both structurally and governmentally unique. See Daunton, 'Introduction', CUH III, 23, 32; Fraser and Maver, op. cit. By 1914, the staff was 400, though it is not clear whether the responsibilities had changed. 26 The sample is more opportunistic than systematic. Wales and Scotland are unrepresented, as are the south of England, Yorkshire and the West Midlands. Port towns are under-represented. We should not expect absence of regional variations; quite the reverse. But I am interested here more in generic issues than comparison. The archival findings are consistent with the 1865 'Survey of inspection in 42 towns' by Henry Julian Hunter for the Privy Council in 1866, op. cit. 27 Space precludes focused attention on two relatively specialized classes of nuisances: industrial (particularly smoke and gas nuisances) and food inspection. Both deserve concerted attention. 28 The inspectors I have studied are all men. Particularly in large places, there are women inspectors by the end of the century. In Glasgow they focused on domestic matters. As Colls and Rodger note, 'Drains and building by-laws were part of a "man's world" ' – 'Civil society and British cities' in Colls and Rodger, op. cit., 15. 29 James Hamilton Muir, Glasgow in 1901 (1901, reprinted Oxford, 2001), 66–7. 30 Bury Archives, ABP/12/2/2, Bury Improvement Commission, Nuisances and Lighting Committee, Minutes, 6 January 1852. 31 Richard Burns, Burn's Justice of the Peace, 29th edn (London, 1845) 7 vols, sv. 'Nuisance, Public', v, 236. Despite absence of any law requiring notification, it remained a nuisance to endanger the public by exposure of a person with smallpox. Cf. Hasluck, op. cit., 278; Herman Finer, English Local Government (London, 1933), 11. 32 Toulmin Smith, op. cit., 5, notes the use by Bacon, 5. For examples of transitional usage see The Coventry Leet Book: or Mayor's Register, containing the records of the Court Leet or View of Frankpledge, A.D. 1420–1555, with other matters, Parts III and IV (reprinted London, 1971): 'ffawtes and noiysoonces as be withyn there office' (III, 609); and 'poiar to enquer of all maner annusauncez…' (IV, xvii–xviii). The term was also related to 'noisome'. See Burns, op. cit.,v, 234. 33 J. R. Spencer, 'Public nuisance – a critical examination', Cambridge Law Journal, xlviii, 1 (1989), 55–84. 34 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, adapted to the present state of the law by Robert Malcolm Kerr, 4 vols. Vol. IV: Of Public Wrongs, 3rd edn (London, 1862), 167–8. 35 The Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester from the Year 1552 to the Year 1686, and from the Year 1731 to the Year 1846, ed. J. P. Earwaker, 12 vols (Manchester, 1886—), vol. IX (5 October 1820). Cf. Burns, op. cit., 242. 36 For origins see James G. Hanley, 'Parliament, physicians, and nuisances: the demedicalization of nuisance law, 1831–1855', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, lxxx, 4 (2006), 702–32, at 730–2. There was much discussion. Some note that while the law does not require harm to health, it will be best to use presumptive harm to health as a guide. It is likely that availability of a public health mandate for redressing a wide range of grievances helped sustain a broad environmentalist conception of disease aetiology well into the twentieth century. Hasluck, op. cit., 253, noted the ambiguity: 'Public health … [had been] an almost unconscious factor in an amenities campaign; to-day the provision of amenities has become a mere adjunct to a gigantic organization of Public Health'. 37 Unacceptable behaviours may remain unacceptable, but are no longer classified as nuisances. They are apt to come under supervision by general police rather than inspectors of nuisances. See M. J. Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing 1850–1914 (London, 1983), 267. 38 Hanley, op. cit., notes that the call for summary identification of nuisances came from towns in improvement commission bills, and was generally resisted by the state before mid-century. A standard job description came in the Towns Improvement Clauses Act of 1847, a collection of approved clauses for inclusion in the private bills by which many larger towns governed themselves. 39 Toulmin Smith, op. cit., 3. Long regarded as reactionary or just bizarre, Smith's image of an accidental organic state built on local problem-solving has gained renewed respect with emergent interest in civil society–public sphere, and recognition that his views, seminal in the Webbs' works on local government, represent perhaps an error in early twentieth-century Labour policy, or at least a viable socialist road not taken. See Hamish Fraser, 'Municipal socialism and social policy' in Morris and Rodger, op. cit., 258–80, at 259; Ben Weinstein, '"Local self-government is true socialism": Joshua Toulmin Smith, the state and character formation', English Historical Review, cxxiii, 504 (2008), 193–228. For Smith the 1855 Act was largely redundant: common law already supplied powers to act against nuisances. 40 Smith, op. cit., 22, 95, wishes to emphasize constitutional if not historical continuity. On other medieval models see Rosemary Sweet, 'Corrupt and corporate bodies: attitudes to corruption in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century towns' in Moore and Smith, op. cit., 41–56, at 48. On courts Leet, see Brian Keith-Lucas, The Unreformed Local Government System (London, 1980), 29–30; Walter J. King, 'Leet jurors and the search for law and order in seventeenth-century England: "galling prosecution" or reasonable justice', Histoire Sociale: Social History, xiii (1980), 304–23; idem., 'Early Stuart courts leet still needful and useful', Histoire Sociale: Social History, xxiii (1990), 271–99. Reliance on specialized and then paid municipal officials evolved gradually and outside legal mandates: see Hasluck, op. cit., 59–61. 41 Hamlin, 'Public sphere', op. cit.; Lancashire Records Office [subsequently LRO] CNP 4/6, Preston Improvement Commissioners, Minutes of the Nuisances Committee, 1844, 23 September 1844. For passages see Anthony Hewitson (ed.), Preston Court Leet Records. Extracts and Notes (Preston, 1905), xxi–xxiii, 1651, no. 9, 1654, nos 27, 39. 42 LRO UDTu 2/3, Vestry Minutes on Nuisances Removal, 9, 16 November and 7 December 1855. 43 Dawson was still inspecting in 1866; not in 1878. See ibid., 21 March 1866; cf. 31 October 1878. 44 Gloucestershire RO, P 244 SP 1/1, Painswick Board of Health Minutes. 45 Whether they were adapting currently viable administrative structures or looser traditions of civic involvement is less clear. Many historians note a relative failure of urban government during the second quarter of the century, or, roughly between the era of Georgian improvements and improvement acts and the emergence of sanitary/local government legislation/obligation beginning with the Public Health Act of 1848. In many towns, of course, these were shock years of the industrial revolution. See Daunton, 'Introduction', CUH III, op. cit., at 22. They were also years of infilling in more spacious urban layouts. See Daunton, House and Home, op. cit., chap. 1; C. W. Chalkin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study in the Building Process, 1740–1820 (Montreal, 1974), 66–7; P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982), 168–85. 46 Westminster Archives, C1003, St George's Hanover Square Paving Committee Minute Book, 1813–19, 55, 58, 60, 67, 72. The title is also used in Bristol in 1794; see M. C. Buer, Health, Wealth, and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1926), 86. On the great age of paving and improvement acts, see ibid., 83; and Keith-Lucas, op. cit.; also F. H. Spencer, Municipal Origins: An Account of English Private Bill Legislation Relating to Local Government, 1740–1835; With a Chapter on Private Bill Procedure (London, 1911); E. D. Jones and M. E. Falkus, 'Urban improvement and the English economy in the 17th and 18th centuries', Research in Economic History, iv (1979), 193–233; John Prest, Liberty and Locality: Parliament, Permissive Legislation, and Ratepayers' Democracies in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1990). 47 Westminster Archives, C 1004, St George's Hanover Square Paving Committee Minute Book, 21 May 1819, 16. On such leadership see Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991). 48 Westminster Archives, C 1004, St George's Hanover Square Paving Committee Minute Book, 19 February 1819. 49 The result is that action against nuisances will be under-reflected in summary proceedings. See Gatrell, op. cit., 269. 50 Gloucestershire RO, LCBR A1/4/1/6, Petitions to Commissioners to Remove Nuisances, 1840–1. 51 Gloucestershire RO, CBR A3/3/6/1–3. While this is not the place to explore it, another of Williams's enforcement concerns is cruel use of draught animals. 52 Mansion House Council, op. cit., 30. 53 Hunter, op. cit., 175, 183–4. See M. Sigsworth and M. Worboys, 'The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain', Urban History, xxi, 2 (1994), 237–50. 54 R. Paget, Vestry clerk, Clerkenwell, Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, op. cit., ev. Q. 17682.1 55 Gloucestershire RO, CBR B1/5/8, Applications with Testimonials 1874. 56 ibid., CBR B1/5/10, Testimonials and Applications 1875. 58 Bancroft Library, STE 132, St George's in the East, Complaint Book, 136; LMA 74.901 (St M), Tidy, 'Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Parish of St Mary Islington, 1874', 31–2; LMA 70.901 (Pad), J. Burdon Sanderson, 'Report on the Health of Paddington for quarter ending Midsummer 1862', 1. 57 The position of surveyor is also under-studied and subject to many of the same issues. Surveyors were responsible for the physical fabric of a town, but the state of the public's physical plant of roads and sewers intersected with the private. In some cases, as with the Lancaster RSA in the 1880s, inspector and surveyor were the same person, but the duties were still understood as separate. 59 LRO CBBl 152 Acc 8399, Blackpool Borough Council, Sanitary Inspector's Journals, 10 April 1890. Dog-related issues are common in the records of the Manchester Court Leet, whose appointed officers included several for 'Muzzelling Mastiff Dogs and Bitches' (Court Leet Records, v. 8, 4). 60 Hasluck, op. cit., 10–16. Its late emergence reflects the central state's benign neglect of municipalities. 61 Hunter, op. cit., 52, 158, 182, 189, 193. 'No resistance to inspection had been experienced, the poor here not knowing their power, or having confidence in the medical office that he would not abuse inspection.' 62 Gloucestershire RO, CBR B2/7/1/1, Chelthenham Improvement Commissioners, Minutes, Nuisances and Fire Brigades Committee. 63 Hunter, op. cit., 78–9. 64 ibid., 71, 159, notes direct education of schoolchildren in closet use. 65 William Carter, Sanitary Condition of West Derby of 1874 (Liverpool, 1875), 15; LMA 78.901 (ME), Mile End Old Town, T. Taylor, Medical Officer's Report, 1887, 95–6; LMA 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, Sanitary Condition of Hackney, 1864, 6; 1865, 20; 1883, 6–7. 66 LMA 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, Sanitary Condition of Hackney, 1864, 6; 1865, 4–5. For landlords' views of these issues and their legal risks see Daunton, House and Home, op. cit., 130–52; Anne Hardy, The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine (Oxford, 1993), 170–1. 67 Dorothy Watkin [Porter], 'The English Revolution in Social Medicine, 1889–1911' (Ph.D., University of London, 1984), 61–87. 68 In 1873–4, 263 of 511 towns in my survey of nuisances regulation had appointed medical officers of health – see Hamlin, 'Sanitary policing', op. cit. 69 In Cheltenham, Inspector Morgan is finally made to make an annual report in early 1875. He reports 1200 actions, only to be dismissed. Gloucestershire RO, CBR B1/5/10. 70 LMA 76.901 (St L), Henry Sutton, 'St Leonard Shoreditch. Report of the MOH on the Duties of Sanitary Inspectors', 4–13. The occasion is consideration of a second assistant. Sutton concludes that one is not needed. The number of inspectors per person varied greatly. See 'Sanitary inspection', Medical Times and Gazette, 6 July 1867, 13. 71 Bancroft Library, TH 8652, Petitions, Robert Carter to Tower Hamlets Board of Works, 2 April 1870. 72 LRO CBBu 6/1, Thomas Dean, Annual report of the MOH for Burnley, 1876, 8. 73 LMA 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, Annual Report of the Medical Officer for Hackney, 1868, 8–9. 74 LMA 76.901 (St L), Sutton, 'Report of the MOH on the Duties of Sanitary Inspectors', 4–13. 75 ibid., 10; LMA 78.901 (ME), J. H. Freeman, Mile End Old Town, Medical Officer's Report, 1859, 19–20. See also Carter, Sanitary Condition of West Derby for 1884, 14. 76 LMA 70.901 (Pad), J. Burdon Sanderson, Paddington Vestry, Sanitary Report for 1856, 21; LMA 70.901 (Pad), J. H. Hardwicke, 'Report of the Health of Paddington for the quarter ending Michaelmas 1867'; LMA 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, Annual Report for 1887, 29–30. 77 LMA 76.901 (St L), Sutton, 'Report of the MOH on the Duties of Sanitary Inspectors', 4–13. 78 LMA 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, Annual Report for 1864, 17. Fourteen years later (Annual Report for 1878, 28), Tripe was reflecting on the continuing existence of drain problems: 'It is to be hoped that as many of the old and defective drains have for several years past been re-constructed, that the number of choked drains in the future will be somewhat diminished; but as a large proportion of… these nuisances result from the carelessness of servants and other occupiers of houses, especially amongst the poor, we must expect the number from the cause to remain nearly the same.' 79 LMA 78.901 (ME), Freeman, Mile End Old Town, Medical Officer's Report for 1859, 19–20. 80 Hardy, op. cit., 163–8. 81 Adoption of germ theoretic explanations of disease enhanced rather than lessened worries about sewer gas: rising gas might be the vehicle for microbe movement. LMA 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, Annual Report of the Medical Officer for Hackney for 1879, 3. 82 Carter, Report on the Health of West Derby for the Year 1874, 8–9. 83 Graham Mooney, 'Public health vs private practice: the contested development of contagious diseases notification in late-nineteenth century Britain', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, lxxiii (1999), 238–67; Anne Hardy, 'Public health and the expert: the London Medical Officers of Health, 1856–1900' in Roy McLeod (ed.), Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919 (Oxford, 1988), 128–42. 84 LMA 4048/02/01, Hendon Local Board, Complaint Book, 1879–85. 85 Muir, op. cit., 66. 86 Shaw, op. cit., 85. 87 LRO CBBl 152 Acc 8399, Blackpool, Registers of Premises inspected. 88 ibid., box 69. Blackpool, Sanitary Inspector's Journals, 1889, 1890. 89 Tameside Archives PCA/HYD 7/1, Hyde Nuisances and Lighting Committee Minute Book, 1863–74, 1 January 1872. 90 Bassetlaw Museum, 2004.3258, Inspector's Diary, Worksop, 20 November 1882. 91 LRO CBBl 152 Acc 8399, Box, 69, Box 80, Blackpool, Sanitary Inspector's Journals, 1889, 1902–3. 92 ibid., 9 January 1890. 93 LMA 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, Annual Report for 1871, 32; for 1875, 22. 94 Bury Archives, APB 12/2/4, Nuisances and Lighting Committee Minutes, 14 November 1866. Rector Hornby does use fever to argue that overcrowding is public business, but he is not writing to appeal for medical help for the fevered children. 95 See also Hunter, op. cit., 78–9. 96 Shaw, op. cit., 86. 97 Compare LMA 70.901 (Pad), Hardwicke, 'Report of the Health of Paddington for the quarter ending Michelmas, 1867', 5; Lady Day, 1868, 7; Christmas 1871, 7. An exception is Glasgow. There a system of ticketing acceptable occupation density was enforced with discretion, yet inspectors complained that magistrates gave landlords favourable treatment. See Fraser and Maver, op. cit., 426. 98 Leicestershire RO, DE 5614/3, John Ward, Quorndon Sanitary Inspector, Memorandum Book, October 1866, no. 35. 99 In 1877 an inspector from nearby Prestwich reports 'that the overcrowding of a house at Rooden Lane … had been remedied by the removal of a portion of the occupants' (right thighs, perhaps)? Bury Archives, MbPr 2/2, Prestwich Local Board, Nuisances Committee Minutes, 19 January 1877. 100 We should keep in mind as a very large class of 'nuisances' the shared spaces, ranging from privies to the stairs in tenements, resources which all may use but which none has full responsibility for maintaining. Dennis calls these the 'threshold between public and private space'. See Richard Dennis, 'Modern London' in CUH III, 95–131, at 117; cf. Daunton, House and Home, op. cit., 34. Inspectors might be involved in such negotiations. 101 Bury Archives, ABP/12/2/2, Bury Improvement Commission, Nuisances Committee Minutes, 3 February 1852. Hasluck saw 'accumulations' as the essential concern of nuisances inspection in op. cit., 273. 102 ibid., 20 April 1852. See also Deborah Brunton, 'Evil necessaries and abominable erections: public conveniences and private interests in the Scottish city, 1830–1870', Social History of Medicine, xviii, 2 (2005), 187–202. 103 To the American observer Shaw, English towns had already recognized that urban existence implied socialism. He saw socialism primarily as the adaptation to environment through the use of science: 'In the jostling throngs of the city, a careless or vicious member of society has a hundredfold more opportunities to disturb the comfort and endanger the health and well-being of his fellows than in the country. How many of the new activities of municipal government – the activities often regarded as socialistic – are but the application to changed conditions of the venerable principles of the individualists?' (op. cit., 3, 7). 104 Leicestershire RO, DE 55/197, Blaby RSA, 'Letters and Papers', nos 9–10, 13, 15, 17–24. Quote from Stone, Billson, to RSA, 2 January 1884, no. 20. 105 Hunter, op. cit., 100 (Birkenhead), 136 (Hull), 141 (Merthyr), 145 (Newcastle on Tyne). 106 Bury Archives, MbPr 2/2, Prestwich Local Board, Nuisances Committee Minutes, 23 February 1877. 107 For their struggle for professional independence see National Archives MH 26/1. Inspection fees were significant; the preparation/examination process was initially London centred. 108 LMA 76.901 (Hac), Tripe, Annual Report for 1890, 5–6. 109 Thus, in 1873 Radford orders pads of notices requiring drain construction, drain cleaning, pigstye cleaning, plus 100 general nuisances forms. Nottinghamshire RO, DC/RD 1/1/4, Radford Local Board, Local Board Correspondence. See also use of Knight forms 94F, 94C in Leicestershire RO, DE 1387/319, Market Harborough, Great and Little Bowden LB. General Letters, 1893–5, 5 December 1895, 1 August 1895. 110 The Clayton-Le-Moors Inspector could be accused of hiding behind national legislation. LRO UDCI 50/1, Clayton-Le-Moors UDC, Inspector's Letter book, 1907. 111 Gerry Kearns, 'Private property and public health reform in England, 1830–1870', Social Science and Medicine, xxvi, 1 (1988), 187–99. 112 Hasluck, op. cit., 89, 189–91, 329–33; Finer, op. cit., 222–5. 113 Nor, à la Joyce, can we unambiguously call these rules of freedom; one might as well call them compromises of community. 114 Hunter, op. cit., 131. 115 Just as inspectors moved into the territory of social workers, Hill, dubbed 'inquisitrix general', may be seen as an inspector. See Daunton, House and Home, op. cit., 140. 116 Sanitary and criminal policing may be seen to go together in a carrot–stick fashion. See A. P. Donajgrodzki, '"Social police" and the bureaucratic elite: a vision of order in the Age of Reform' in A. P. Donajgrodzki (ed.), Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1977), 51–76; Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995). 117 Saki, 'Toys of peace' in Incredible Tales (New York, 1966), 42–8. 118 Hasluck, op. cit., 19, 323. Others have confirmed a falling off of talent and commitment in local government after 1900. See Daunton, 'Introduction', CUH III, op. cit., 53. 119 On the culture of complaint, see Hasluck, op. cit., passim.