History of the London County Council, 1889-1939 8336h197h

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HISTORY OF THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL 1889 — 1989

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“ Pa pesiaine Bes a a é Fn — Pe fe Tue First MEETING oF THE LONDON CouNnTy CoUNCIL

(From a painting by H. Jamyn Brooks in the possession of the Council)

Lord Rosebery is in the Chair, Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) on his right and Mr. J. B. Firth on his left.

HISTORY OF THE

LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL 1889 — 1939

SIR GWILYM GIBBON

REGINALD W. BELL

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1939

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH

DEDICATED TO THE PEOPLE OF LONDON

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION , , . . . . . Xvu PAGE

PART I LONDON GOVERNMENT BEFORE 1889 CHAPTER 1

LONDON BEFORE 1856 . . . . . : 5) The face of London — social conditions — the local government medley —- Sir Benjamin Hall—the Metropolis Management Act, 1855.

CHAPTER 2

1889 . . . . . . . . 27

LONDON UNDER THE METROPOLIS MANAGEMENT AcT: 1856-

The Metropolitan Board of Works — drainage, embankments, improvements, housing — open spaces, fire brigade, flood prevention, control of streets and buildings — finance — the decline and end of the Board — the Vestries and District Boards — constitution, functions and achievements.

CHAPTER 3

THe ComInG OF THE LONDON CouNnTy COUNCIL , . 62 The reform movement and Mill’s theories — the London Municipal Reform League — Harcourt’s bill, 1884-— the Local Government Bill, 1888 (Ritchie) — the first elections — initial influences on the Council.

PART II THE COUNCIL CHAPTER 4

PARTIES AND POLICIES ; ; ; ; . 88 Introduction of the party system — Organisation of the parties — Party policies and contests— the Progressives, 1889-1907 — the Municipal Reformers, 1907-34 — Labour, 1934-39.

CHAPTER 5

ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE . , , ; . 118 The Council — council meetings — methods of business — ‘‘ the Dais ” —-The Committees — terms of reference — procedure — The Departments — the clerk of the Council. Vii

Vill CONTENTS CHAPTER 6 PAGE

FINANCE: POWERS AND PROCEDURE . , ; . 157 The Finance Committee —estimates and budget — capital

expenditure — borrowing powers—- methods of borrowing — redemption of debt — sinking funds — capital works out of revenue — borrowing by other London authorities — revenue — audit.

CHAPTER 7

FINANCE : EXPENDITURE AND REVENUE ; ; . 181 Revenue expenditure and income — rateable value — rates — grants — metropolitan boroughs — capital expenditure.

CHAPTER 8

STAFF . , , , ; , , ; . 202 Number of staff — recruitment — promotion — training — management of staff — conditions of service — superannuation.

CHAPTER 9

SUPPLIES ; AND THE WorKS DEPARTMENT , , . 223 The Supplies Department — manufacture and purchase of goods — examination of goods — distribution — The Works Department.

PART III THE COUNCIL'S SERVICES (i) EXECUTIVE SERVICES

CHAPTER 10

Lonpon EDUCATION BEFORE 1904 , ; , . 241 The London School Board — higher education — the ‘“‘ whisky money ’’ — the Technical Education Board — the council becomes education authority for London.

CHAPTER 11

THE CounciIL AS Lonpon EpucaTION AUTHORITY . . 258 Elementary and Secondary Education — the means of progress —

teaching power — equality of treatment for schools elementary with other education — educational “* plant— ’’ linking — care

of handicapped and delinquent children — triennial programmes — Continued Education — polytechnics — day trade schools — day continuation schools and evening schools — The Cost of Education — Development summarised.

CONTENTS ix CHAPTER 12 PAGE

Pusitic HeattH: PowERs AND MEDICAL SERVICES . . 288 London Public Health Authorities and their Powers — Preventive Services — common lodging houses — cleansing — midwives —

lying-in homes and nursing homes— infant life protection —

maternity and child welfare— food protection — milk — the School

Medical Service — Tuberculosis — Venereal Disease — Welfare of the Blind.

CHAPTER 13 Pusiic HeattH: HospPiraLs AND ANCILLARY SERVICES . 3820 General Hospitals — poor-law hospitals — the transfer to the Council — medical education—the domiciliary medical service — Special Hospitals — the work of the Metropolitan Asylums Board — special hospitals under the Council — Ambulances.

CHAPTER 14

Mental HEALTH SERVICES , . . . . 344 Mental treatment before 1889-— development of powers for

mental treatment — improvement of mental hospitals — administration and diet —- treatment, occupation and after-care — training the mentally defective — the incidence of mental disease — voluntary treatment — research.

CHAPTER 15

HovusIne ; , ; . . , . . 363 General Survey —1889 to 1919— unhealthy areas and slum clearance — additional housing—1919 and after — additional housing — slum clearance and overcrowding — Estates and their Management — large housing estates — management — rents — transport — summary tables.

CHAPTER 16

Pusiic ASSISTANCE . . . , . . 403 The poor law in London — transfer to the Council —- administration of relief — indoor relief — relief of the able-bodied — training and employment — the casual poor — expenditure — poor relief since 1850.

CHAPTER 17

Main DRAINAGE AND FLOOD PREVENTION , . . 428 Main Drainage — system of sewers — pumping stations — treatment of sewage — Flood Prevention.

x CONTENTS CHAPTER 18 PAGE

STREET IMPROVEMENTS AND BRIDGES . , , . 44] General survey of past record — Street Improvements — Kingsway and Aldwych — routes through and round London and radial roads — relief of congestion in central area and docks — Bridges — the cross river traffic problem — Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross bridge proposals — ferry and tunnels.

CHAPTER 19

Pusiic BUILDINGS . ; ; ; ; . . 469 The architect's department — the County Hall and lbrary —

educational buildings — housing — fire brigade and other buildings — preservation and marking of buildings.

CHAPTER 20

Tue Fire BricapeE . ; ; , , . 486 Fire alarms — appliances — fire organisation — the firemen — water supply — special services — the cost of protection from fire.

CHAPTER 21

PARKS AND OPEN SPACES . , , ; , . 601 Open spaces in London — the Council’s open spaces — the green belt scheme — the London squares.

(ii) REGULATIVE SERVICES

CHAPTER 22 ConTROL OF LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING _. . 519 The London Building Acts and Byelaws — construction of buildings — planning and amenities — administration of the Building Acts — Town Planning — early measures in London — resolutions before 1934 — the general scheme — mode of preparing schemes — provisional principles — control of interim development — admini-

stration — Regional Planning — first and second regional committees — Specialised Work — structure of places of entertainment

—— means of escape in case of fire — buildings in relation to traffic —

naming streets and numbering houses.

CHAPTER 23 PuBLIc CONTROL AND ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE . . 551 Explosives, petroleum and celluloid —tests of weights and measures, gas and electricity — smoke abatement — shop hours,

employment agencies and theatrical performers — massage establishments — charities — diseases of animals — collection of revenue — Licensing of entertainments — Administration of justice — coroners.

CONTENTS xl PART IV THE COUNCIL’S EXTERNAL RELATIONS CHAPTER 24 PAGE

THE COUNCIL AND PARLIAMENT . . . . . oO8l Party contrasts — bills in Parliament — money bills — pioneer legislation — relations with government departments.

CHAPTER 25

THE COUNCIL AND OTHER LocaL AUTHORITIES , . 591 The City of London — the metropolitan borough councils — the

Metropolitan Boroughs’ Standing Joint Committee — Greater London — local government associations.

CHAPTER 26 THE COUNCIL AND THE PuBLic Utitiry UNDERTAKINGS . 608 Transport — cheap travel— Thames steamboats — tramways — Water — Electricity — Gas — Markets — Telephones — River Conservancy—The Docks.

CHAPTER 27

THE CouNcIL AND THE PUBLIC . . , , . 645 Publications — reports and statistics — handbooks — publicity.

CONCLUSION . , , . ; , . 658 APPENDICES I. CHAIRMEN OF THE LONDON CouNntTy CounciL, Party

LEADERS AND CHIEF OFFICERS . . . . 667

II. POPULATION . . , . . . . 673

III. Lonpon County ELECTORATE . . . . 675 IV. Parry REPRESENTATION ON THE LONDON County CounciL 677 V. ANALYSIS OF THE Gross EXPENDITURE OF LoNDON LOCAL AUTHORITIES (EXCLUDING EXPENDITURE OUT OF LoANs),

1935-36 . . . . . . . 678

INDEX . . . , , . . . 681

LIST OF PLATES The First Meeting of the London County Council (from a paznt-

ng by H. Jamyn Brooks) . . . Frontisprece

Local Government Bill, 1884:

FACING PAGE

The Cloud Ahead Grows Blacker ; , ; . 68

A Midsummer Pantomime , ; , , . 68 The Old and New Council Chambers — Spring Gardens and

Westminster Bridge. ; , . . . 120

The County Hall. , , . ; , . 130 Chaucer School, Southwark: Boys of 1890; Boys of 1930 . 260

Girls’ Physical Training : 1908; 1936. , , . 264 Oratory School, Chelsea, Infants’ Class: 1905; 1926 . . 274 Paddington Technical Institute : Engineering Workshop . 280 Barrett Street Trade School: Manicure and face massage . 280

Personal Hygiene Inspection, 1911 ; . , . 3800

Medical Inspection, 1937 __.. , ; . ; . 300 Open-Air Schools: A group of children on entry; and five

months later. ; ; ; ; , . 3806

Lewisham Hospital: New wing . , ; , . 3822

St. Olave’s Hospital: New sun balcony . ; . . 322 Lambeth Hospital: Old type of ward ; reconstructed ward . 326

North-Eastern Hospital : New ward , , . . 338 Heatherwood Hospital: New block , . . . 338 Mental Treatment: Instruments of restraint, 1830; Villa

day-room, 1938 . ; ; , , . . 348

Boundary Street Area: Before clearance —a court; general

view of completed scheme _.. ; ol . 370

St. Helier . ; . . ; . . 376

Cottage Estates: Pre-war — Totterdown Fields ; Post-war —

Block Dwellings: Pre-war — Union Buildings Estate; Post-

war — China Walk HKstate . . . . . 384

Plan of Becontree . , . , . , . 392 X1ll

XIV LIST OF PLATES FACING PAGE

St. Marylebone Institution: Women’s day-room; Nursery . 416

ment . , . ; , ; . . 424 Abbey Mills Pumping Station , , ; , . 434 Woolwich Institution, North Yard: Before and after improve-

The Fleet Sewer. , ; , ; ; . 438

Lambeth Bridge: Old and new . , ; ; . 458 The New Chelsea Bridge, 1935 ; Waterloo Bridge (as projected). 464

The Old County Hall, Spring Gardens. ; ; . 472 Pedlar’s Acre, 1906 — the site of the present County Hall . 472 Wornington Road School, North Kensington :

Under the School Board, 1874; Under the Council, 1938 . 478

way . , . ; ; . ; . 482 The New Fire Brigade Headquarters ; ; ; . 482 Poplar School of Engineering and Navigation ; Principal door-

Fire Brigade: MHorse-drawn steamer, 1910; Dual-purpose

appliance, 1938 . , ; ; , ; . 494

Hackney Marshes: Football , ; ; ; . 506

Victoria Park: Lido and Boating Lake . . ; . 510 Holiday Entertainment in the Parks, 1938 ; ; . 614 A Midnight Raid: Testing the street scales ; ; . 556 A Daylight Raid ! Testing the shop scales ; ; . 556 One of the Thames Steamboats; “ A Suggestion to the L.C.C.” 614

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Reaction , . . , , . ; . 45 In Memoriam: Metropolitan Board of Works . , . 82 Landed ! ; , ; . . ; , . 1 The Marquis and the Municipal Monster . , ; . 97 PAGE

Scene in the L. C. Circus. . , . ; . 98

Putting the Cat back in the Bag . ; ; ; . 99

The Progressive Snowball . ; ; , ; . 101

A Nominal Change . ; . ; , ; . 102 The Second-of-March Hare ; . ; ; . 103

ILLUSTRATIONS XV

Beaten on Points. ; . , . . . 106 PAGE

Up-hill Work , , . . . . . 134 The Seal of the Council , . . . . 156 The Municipal Road to Ruin . . . . . 165

Our Village Sign . . . . . . 189 The Two Demand Notes . . . . , . 195

Expenditure and Receipts of the Council . . 198-199

Cooking the Accounts , . , , , . 235 The Three Religions ! , . , . . . 268 Incidence of Mental Disorder , . , . . 357 The Great London Sweep . 7 ; ; . . 387 The Kingsway and Aldwych Improvement, 1905 ; . 453

The London Atlas. ; , ; ; . . 464

A Popular Pleasure-Ground : Cyclists in Battersea Park . 515

Wanted — an Open-Air Minister . . , . . 531 County of London Town Planning . . . . 533 Ready-made Coat (-of-Arms) for the London County Council . 578

Putting 1t Pleasantly , , . . . . 594 The Cruel Child . . . . . . . 597 The Wasted Waterway , . . . . 612 The Lord High Obstructionist . , , . . 618 ‘Hercules (County) Concilians” . ; , . . 622

Kast London Water Supply . , , , . 625 Map: Growth of Greater London since 1800 ._ at end of volume

INTRODUCTION

Tus book has been written at the instance of the London County Council to commemorate its jubilee, but it 1s

in no sense an official history. The authors alone are responsible for what it contains. In the main it is devoted

to the narration of facts, but we have not hesitated to make comments, though naturally with less freedom than if the book had been .a wholly private venture. Every great public body, apart from its record of activities, has an indefinable ‘‘ character ’’, which is felt by the

man in the street but often misinterpreted by him. The Council is no exception from this rule and it has been one of our aims to dislodge the mask of inscrutability which still screens from so many a true understanding of the Council and its work. Allowance is seldom made

for the real difficulties which beset its path and for the peculiar setting in which its labours are carried on ; and the early influences which shaped its career and so

long left their impress on some aspects of its public policy are generally forgotten, if they have been at all

known. Even to-day the Council is for many rather an aloof body, inducing much less of the feeling of familiar intimacy than is present in most of the large provincial towns, although the impression of aloofness 1s less widely given now than formerly, owing to the close

contact which has developed between the Council and individuals and families, especially through the school and medical services.

We have tried to give a faithful picture of the work of the Council and its development, and of the forces which have determined its course at various periods,

and, without hiding faults, to do justice to its great

achievements. The history of the Council has many points of special

interest, quite apart from its position as the governing body of the capital city and as one of the most

xv

XVI INTRODUCTION instructive examples of development in local government

during the last half-century. It was the first county council in which business was conducted on party lines. In its early years it was largely ruled by an ardent group of reformers who raised many questions of far-reaching

importance. London 1s in this country the only large city (for it is a city in fact, though a county in form) with two tiers of local authorities, and its history is particularly instructive as an experiment in the government

of a huge urban agglomeration. Again, the Council’s otowth repays study from the point of view of business management alone, for it is one of the largest business concerns in the country, outstanding not only because of

the great volume of its work but also because of the many different kinds of services which it performs. To these are added the further complication of management

by an elected representative body. We have devoted particular attention to matters of this kind. The general plan of the volume is first, in compliance with a request made to us, to give a sketch of the local government of London in the nineteenth century up to

1889; this is done in the two opening chapters. This sketch is followed by an account of the influences which

led to the establishment of county councils, more particularly of that for London. Then we explain how the Council itself works — how its policy is settled with the

aid of a party system, and how the Council, its committees and its departments are organised and perform

their many duties. In this we have tried to shew how business is actually carried on, which often would not be gathered from the mere form of procedure. To complete the picture, a description is given of what may be called

the general or domestic services which apply to the whole of the Council’s work — finance, staff and supplies. The part of the book which then follows sets forth a fairly

full account of the several executive services — education, public health, housing and many others — and of the regulative services, such as building regulation and town planning. Finally, we try to give a picture of, so

INTRODUCTION X1X to speak, the Council’s “ foreign policy ’’ — its relations

with its neighbours, both inside and outside London, and its dealings with Parliament and the government

departments and with the ordinary Londoner. Our

concluding chapter is devoted largely to some general problems of local government which emerge from the

consideration of the Council’s history. In treating of

these matters we have done our best to avoid repetition, but some has been inevitable in order to preserve continuity of narrative. There will be some who are sure to miss from this

book the names and work of many men and women,

officials as well as members, whose devoted service to the Council has enriched the public life of London and

bettered the lot of so many of their fellow-citizens.

Reluctantly we have had to forego, owing to the limits of space and time, saying as much about them as the merits of their labours would justify, restricting ourselves to the incidental mention of a few of the many who have notably contributed to the good government of London. We have had room for only a brief account of the local government of the metropolis up to 1889. It is surprising

that, among the many books written on London, there has not been an adequate comprehensive record of its

municipal affairs during these years. Much detailed information about the early decades is to be found in the monumental works of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and there is information in fair quantity about individual parishes and some aspects of government,’ in addition to plenty of miscellaneous material scattered about in many publications. Here is a promising field for anyone seeking a good historical subject of interest, and, one might say, of entertainment.

The time within which this book had to be written was very short, bearing in mind the large number of records to be consulted and other investigations to be made, and to compress fifty years of so full and varied a 1 Such as The Sanitary Evolution of London, 1907, by Henry Jephson, a former member of the Council.

xx INTRODUCTION life as that of the Council into the compass of a single

volume has proved no easy task. The work has had to be done under great pressure and could not have been finished in the time allotted, but for generous assistance from the stafi of the Council, to whom we owe

a deep debt of gratitude. From the clerk of the Council

and the heads of all departments and their stafis we have had help cordially given under heavy stress of

other work. Material for our researches has been abundantly produced, often after special endeavours to present it to us in the most useful form for our purpose. On two members of the clerk of the Council’s staff we have had to make exceptional demands — Mr. P. KE. Braun, the Council’s principal officer in charge of the library and

records, and Mr. D. J. Rowley, whose services the Council was good enough to place at our disposal. The assistance that they have given us in their several ways it is quite beyond the capacity of this slender acknow-

ledgement to describe; we can only express to them our warmest thanks for their unfailing help. Former members and officers of the Council have also given us abundant assistance, particularly Lord Dickinson, who held the office of Deputy-Chairman (and later Chairman) of the Council in some of its earlier years and

who placed at our disposal the whole of his records accumulated during his membership; and Mr. John Burns who has also placed his papers at our disposal and fortified our narrative with material from his well-stored memory. Sir William Collins, too (“‘ one of the best of

chairmen ”’, as he has been described to us) and Sir

George Humphreys, who served the Council as manager of the works department and later as chief engineer, have put us in their debt by supplementing our knowledge of

the Council in bygone days. We should like also to mention specially the kindness shewn to us by Mrs.

Sidney Webb, who not only allowed us the stimulating privilege of reading in manuscript some chapters of her as yet unpublished biography Our Partnership, but con-

sented to our quoting the two passages from it which enliven our chapter on parties and policies.

INTRODUCTION XX There are so many publications bearing on the Council and its work that it is impossible to pay adequate tribute

to all who have ploughed the ground before us; but we ought to say how valuable we have found The London County Council from Within (published in 1932) by Sir

Harry Haward, whose half-century of public service began with the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1882 and included twenty-seven years as comptroller of the Council.

Of the many persons outside the Council from whom

we have received information our gratitude is due especially to Mr. Parker Morris, the honorary clerk to the Metropolitan Boroughs’ Standing Joint Committee and Mr. R. B. Webb, his chief assistant in the work of that committee ; and, for information about the political parties, to Major Brown of the London Municipal Society

and Mr. Daines of the London Labour Party headquarters.

Lastly, we desire to thank the proprietors of pub-

lications and others who have helped us to trace cartoons relating to the Council and kindly allowed us to reproduce them, and to others who have permitted the

reproduction of some of the pictures in this book. In particular we are grateful to the proprietors of Punch, from whose pages of contemporary comment we have freely drawn.

PART I LONDON GOVERNMENT BEFORE 1889

B

CHAPTER |

LONDON BEFORE 1856

‘“LONDRES n’est plus une ville: c’est une province couverte de maisons”’ —so said M. Say, the French economist, of London in the reign of George the Fourth.

The aphorism has remained true on an increasingly majestic scale. The rapid expansion of London during

the first half of the nineteenth century had its origin in the prosperity of the country. At the end of the war with France, England found herself in a position of com-

manding supremacy in the markets of the world, a position which steadily enriched London with wealth and activity. The face of London at the beginning of the ‘fifties boldly revealed her vigour. Above Westminster Bridge

the river was still bordered largely by green fields,

but below, it was flanked by wharves and commercial

buildings, which grew in density lower down. At low tide vast expanses of mud made the river seem a mere trickle between them. The pool of London, though not ennobled by handsome quays, held shipping

whose forest of masts and spars almost screened the banks from sight of each other. St. Paul’s Cathedral still dominated the murky sky-line, but lofty riverside warehouses were beginning to hide some of the closest views.

Nash’s fine regency buildings were a comparative novelty, in which pride was taken — significant of the exodus of the wealthy from the inner parts of London, as workers crowded in and dwellings became oppressed

by the intrusion of commercial buildings. The new Houses of Parliament, gleaming in their fresh stone and criticised by some for the elaboration imposed on Barry’s

less ornate design, were nearing completion. Soane’s 3

4, LONDON BEFORE 1856 plain building for the Treasury in Whitehall had just been redesigned by Barry in its present form, and Somer-

set House was as yet “a large unfinished pile occupied by public offices”. In Gower Street Wilkins’ buildings

for University College were rising, and the Victoria Docks were finished in 1850. Temple Bar still stood in the Strand. The great railway termini which we know

to-day were for the most part incomplete; Waterloo station was an almost ramshackle affair of sheds and sidings.

North and east, the building boom was endowing London (as building booms have always done) with future problems. Line upon line of yellow brick houses

were being monotonously constructed, and there is a modern ring about the cry “ from the astonishing quickness with which the suburbs of London are becoming

filled up with streets and houses . . . every attempt to snatch a clear piece of country from the general fate, and to provide a belt of pure air or the means of obtaining it entirely around the crowded seats of business, should be delightedly hailed and strenuously fostered ’’.1. Many

of the tenements were ill-designed, short of light and air; and, as the gardens behind former houses were often pressed into service to accommodate them, a warren of foul courts, alleys and yards was soon the result. There were still to be found, here and there, vestiges

of the once rural villages which had been surrounded by the tide of metropolitan building. Such a one was Palmer’s Village, Westminster, through the site of which

Victoria Street now runs. This retained its village green, with an old-fashioned wayside inn, “ The Prince of Orange ’’, which was a model of a village inn as then

found in country districts. Next to the inn, the most remarkable feature was the shop. It was a true village shop — grocer and tea-dealer, stationer and bookseller, draper and haberdasher, chemist and druggist, jeweller and ironmonger,. seedsman and toyman, egg-merchant and butter-man. On the site of the village shop, as near 1 Weale, London Exhibited, 1851, p. 465.

THE FACE OF LONDON 5 as may be, there stands to-day its natural successor — the Army and Navy Stores.? For open spaces London depended chiefly on the royal parks — rougher then, and almost unadorned with flowers — the squares, the commons and the few other

public spaces, such as Victoria and Battersea parks, which had been provided from government funds. Indoor recreation was to be found in the theatre, the various places where panoramas or dioramas were shewn,

the public houses and the saloons (forerunners of the lesser music halls and “ gin palaces ’’) of which we are told that they “ are appropriated for lower purposes and

the stranger should be cautious as to the character of such doubtful places previous to entermg them ”’.® There were, too, the gardens, such as Vauxhall Gardens and Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea, whither the public flocked for concerts, dancing and vaudeville shows.

The heart of London was the ancient City, with a population of about 128,000 which varied hardly at all

between 1800 and 1850. Around it, the metropolis shewed astonishing growth. Compared with the less than 15,000 houses in the City, the metropolis comprised over 305,000, occupying more than a hundred times the

City’s area.2 In 1801 the population of what is now the county of London outside the City was 831,000; in 1831, 1,533,000; and in 1851, 2,236,000. Within the same period the populations of the areas covered by the present boroughs of Bethnal Green, Hackney and Lewisham increased nearly five-fold, those of Chelsea, Islington,

Kensington, Lambeth, Poplar and St. Pancras nearly six-fold. In Camberwell there was an eight-fold increase ;

but Paddington surpassed them all with an expansion of its population from 1,900 to 46,300 — more than a twenty-four-fold increase in half a century. Sir Laurence Gomme, speaking of 1837, tells us —

‘London consisted of practically six divisions. The

1 Further details of Palmer’s Village are to be found in the special and annual report of the Vestry of St. Margaret’s Westminster, 1889, pp. 218-20. 2 Weale, p. 820. 3 In 1855 the City covered 723 acres, the metropolis 78,000 acres (about 11 miles by 154), see p. 23.

6 LONDON BEFORE 1856 City, the chief centre of trade and commerce; Spitalfields, the chief seat of the silk manufacturers ; Whitechapel, of sugar refiners; Southwark, extending along the Thames to Vauxhall, the seat of manufactures of various kinds, tanneries, iron-foundries, glass-works, dye-works, shoe and hat manufactories, breweries, and distilleries ; the eastern division, devoted to shipbuilding,

and the docks and warehouses for import and export purposes ; the western division, extending from Temple Bar to Knightsbridge, contained the royal palaces, the residences of some of the nobility, the Houses of Parlia-

ment, courts of justice, government offices, etc.; the north-western division, which with its newly built squares

and streets was the most fashionable part of London ; the northern division, extending to the recently erected districts of Pentonville and Somers Town, constituted the middle-class residential portion.

‘These divisions had on their borders the more or less rural parishes of Chelsea, Fulham, Hammersmith and Kensington on the west; Paddington, St. Marylebone, Hampstead, St. Pancras and Islington on the north ; Stoke Newington and Hackney on the northeast ; Bow and Bromley on the east ; Plumstead, Wool-

wich, Kidbrooke, Eltham and Charlton on the southeast ; Lewisham, Camberwell, Penge and Lambeth on

the south; and Clapham, Wandsworth, Tooting, Streatham and Battersea on the south-west.”’

If the face of London was diversified, her social condi-

tions matched it in quality. Here we shall attempt only to outline the chief aspects of London life which to-day are associated with local government authorities.

Education was much confined. The Council for Education, in their minutes for 1854-55, returned the

total number of schools in London under governmental inspection as only two hundred and fifty-eight, with an average attendance of 57,000 — 124 per cent of the total

child population between the ages of five and fifteen years. According to a census made by the Registrar1 Gomme, London 1837-1897, pp. 4-5.

LONDON SCHOOLS 7 General in 1851 the children on the books of public

schools in London numbered 167,000, and on those of private schools 87,000 ; the average attendance at public schools was little more than a quarter of the child population, and at public and private schools combined, well under one-half. The majority left school at the age of twelve or earlier, and Sidney Webb speaks of “‘ two-thirds of the whole child population growing up, not only practically without schooling or religious influences of any kind,

but also indescribably brutal and immoral’’.t Perhaps equally as serious as the insufficiency of elementary instruction was the lack of any means of progress such as there is to-day from the elementary schools to the secondary schools and universities. Children left school as soon as possible and entered industrial or commercial life: they ran into an educational desert, and there was

next to nothing to help them to further knowledge. Later in life, workers who desired further opportunities

of learning could, if able to afford the time and cost, attend literary or mechanics’ institutions. Of these there were less than half a dozen, including the London Mechanics’ Institution, on the foundation of which by Dr. Birkbeck in 1823 nearly thirteen hundred workmen

are said to have enrolled, paying £1 each. The comparable arrangements to-day are the two hundred and thirty-six institutes of the London County Council, with courses at fees as low as a few shillings. The education of girls was even more neglected and such private schooling as existed was for the most part both expensive and bad. The principal highways of London were managed by turnpike trusts, of which those north of the Thames had, since 1826, been amalgamated into a single body, and the main roads of London had undergone notable improvement under the ‘‘ Surveyor General of the Metropolitan Roads ”’, James MacAdam, by sound management and the application of the road-surfacing process associated with hisname. Apart from the turnpikes, the highways

of London were the responsiblity of the vestries and 1 Sidney Webb, London Education, p. 4.

8 LONDON BEFORE 1856 small paving boards, of which more will be said later, and were for the most part in adeplorable state. Rotherhithe tunnel, a new mode of crossing the Thames, was opened to pedestrian traffic in 1843. It was regarded as one of the outstanding engineering achievements of the day, having been under construction since 1825 by Brunel, with the aid of the mining shield invented by him, it is said, as an inspiration from his observation of

the ship-worm (teredo). For lack of funds the road

approaches to the tunnel were never completed: later it was sold to the East London Railway Company and now carries the metropolitan line to New Cross. Protection against fire was afforded by the London

fire engine establishment, which had been founded by ten of the leading fire insurance companies in 1833 and was maintained by them. Apart from it, the parochial fire brigades were, with few exceptions, ill-equipped and

inefficient; and to supplement their endeavours a erowing number of energetic and able voluntary fire brigades were springing up in London. [Fire escapes

were maintained by the Royal Society for the Protection of Life from Fire. The great Act of 1834 had reformed the admuinis-

tration of the poor law and had provided for the appointment of a central authority, the Poor Law Commissioners, and local boards of guardians. The Act extended to the metropolis as to the rest of the country, but applied only in limited measure to poor-law authorities (incorporations) which had previously been established under special Acts, and there were many of these

in London.? In the decades succeeding the passing of the Act there were many improvements in London, but grave faults remained. Out-relief continued to be freely given, despite the declared policy of restricting it, indeed altogether stopping it for the able-bodied where practicable; the order prohibiting it for that class was never

applied to London or the large towns. The out-relief 1 Dickens’ portrait of the working of a parish fire brigade in Sketches by Boz is said to be typical.

2 Adequate powers to deal with these bodies in London were not

provided until 1867.

POOR LAW 9 given was generally inadequate, partly because investigation and supervision were insufficient and undisclosed means were suspected, but also because standards were

low. For those receiving indoor relief there was the general workhouse and, though substantial advances had been made by providing new buildings and improving

old ones, there was far too much indiscriminate and harmful mixture of different sorts and conditions of inmates — the bad with the well-behaved; the young with the adult and aged (notwithstanding the general practice in London of providing for children, except the

very young, away from the workhouse); the healthy with the infirm and the chronically sick; the sane with the mentally unsound.

For the sick on out-relief there was the “ parish

doctor’, with a bottle of medicine as the usual remedy. For those needing institutional care, there were the sick or infirmary wards of the general workhouses with usually

a poorly paid part-time doctor and little in the way of nursing, nearly all of 1t by inmates. Even as late as 1850, the Poor Law Board, the successor of the Commissioners, had discouraged the employment of paid nurses (an attitude difficult to understand unless the conditions of the time are considered, as illustrated, for instance, by the story of Florence Nightingale), though

in the next decade it was busily pressing for their appointment.! The poor-law authorities in general were held in low

repute. It has been said of them that “many... 1 Dr. Rogers relates his appointment, in 1856, as medical officer of the Strand workhouse (with over 500 inmates) at a salary of £50 a year, with occasional fees, out of which he had to provide drugs; the terms were later improved. There were no paid nurses. (Joseph Rogers, Reminiscences of a Workhouse Medical Officer, edited by Professor Thorold Rogers, 1889, p. 2 et seg.) Detailed reports were made in 1866 (House of Commons Papers 372 and 387 of that year) on the infirmaries and sick wards of the metropolitan workhouses by Mr. H. B. Farnall, a poor-law inspector, and Dr. E. Smith, the first medical officer of the Poor Law

Board. By that time paid nurses were employed at all except a few

workhouses, but much of the nursing was still done by inmates, of whom Mr. Farnall records that a good many could not read the printed or written labels on bottles of medicine, that they were as a rule feeble old women who knew nothing of nursing and that addiction to drink at times even led to robbing the sick of stimulants provided for them (p. 6 of his report).

10 LONDON BEFORE 1856 were hopelessly corrupt, disreputable and incompetent bodies” 1 Charles Villiers told of an interview (when

president of the Poor Law Board) with a “ most

respectable body of guardians in Bloomsbury which though professing the most admirable sentiments, had allowed the most abominable abuses to flourish under their very noses”’.? Nevertheless, strange as it may seem, the administration does not appear to have been as shocking to the opinion of the day as might be supposed, as is indicated by the report of a powerfully manned committee a few years after the close of our period, when conditions had changed very little. The

winter of 1860-1861 was very severe (the Thames was frozen over), the poor-law authorities were sorely pressed and grave accusations were made against them, especially against those in London. A select committee was appointed by the House of Commons in 1861, with the President of the Poor Law Board (Charles Villiers) as chairman and, among its members, Lord Robert Cecil (Marquis of Salisbury) and other prominent men of the

day. It reported in 1864,5 and, although recommend-

ing several important changes, gave the boards of guardians what almost amounted to a certificate of good administration, even saying that in general medical relief was satisfactory (though it added that expensive medicines, such as cod liver oil, quinine, opium and the like should be supplied by the guardians, not at the cost of the medical officer), and that the education of pauper children was on the whole satisfactory — surprising con1 Thomas Mackay, History of the English Poor Law, vol. iii, p. 486.

2 Idem, p. 487. See also, on the general administration of the poor

law, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law History: Part L£ I, The Last Hundred Years, 1929. ’ Report from the Select Committee on Poor Relief, House of Commons Papers 349 of 1864. The fact that the head of the government department responsible for the poor law was appointed chairman of a committee to

inquire into poor-law administration is an interesting illustration of the changed place and functions of government departments in local affairs. ‘The recommendations included better classification of inmates and

the consideration of measures for reducing inequalities of the poor rate in London. The Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867, the most important poor law measure for London between 1834 and 1929, was the outcome of the recommendations.

HOSPITALS 11 clusions if it be not remembered how different from those of the present were the standards of those days. The complacency of the committee, however, was soon to receive a rude shock from reformers who were already

busily at work on the treatment of the sick poor and whose efforts within the same decade brought about a radical change of outlook, especially in London.

The great voluntary hospitals of London were the main repositories of medical aid. At their out-patient departments all and sundry might apply for free, or almost free, treatment. For cases of acute illness and surgical cases, the voluntary hospital ward was the one place where the highest medical skill could be obtained. The original foundations of St. Bartholomew’s (A.D. 1123)

and St. Thomas’ (4.D. 1200), whose mediaeval glories had been destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries, had been refounded on a smaller scale ; they were supplemented by five further foundations (Westminster, Guy’s,

St. George’s, London and Middlesex) during the first half of the eighteenth century, and between 1818 and 1856 others were founded — Charing Cross, Royal Free, University College, King’s College, St. Mary’s and Great

Northern (afterwards Royal Northern). (Generous and industrious as they were, these hospitals could not meet the needs of all, and their efforts were supplemented by those of voluntary dispensaries. Tending the sick was one of the chief objects of private charity and there were

in London and its immediate neighbourhood about

thirty-five general dispensaries for relieving the sick and infirm in their own houses. In addition there were some

thirty special hospitals in London limited either to particular classes of patients, such as the Seamen’s Hospital and the German Hospital, or to specific diseases or groups of disease such as the London Fever Hospital

and the ophthalmic hospitals. These had available nearly three thousand beds. The insane were mainly under the care of the county justices, but there were two long-established charitable asylums, Bethlem (“‘ Bedlam ’’) in Lambeth Road, formerly at Moorfields, where, until 1770, maniacs had been

12 LONDON BEFORE 1856 a public show, for admission to which a fee was charged, and St. Luke’s, im Old Street, of which it was written,

even in 1851 — “ A system of non-restraint upon the

unfortunate inmates is professed, but not properly observed, and the details of the management do not appear to be recommended to our notice by any distinguishing feature of improvement or success”’.1. By

contrast to this unhappy picture, the new Middlesex

county lunatic asylum had been opened at Hanwell in 1831, and there the beneficent administration of Dr. Conolly was introducing the humane advances in treatment of the insane which are described later.’ Housing of the working classes was passing through

one of its worst phases. There was a fury of house building for the growing population. Many of the

immigrants to London, those from Ireland especially, were accustomed to and content with a low standard of accommodation. Large improvements were carried out

in the inner parts of the metropolis which displaced many of the poor: the construction of New Oxford Street in the ’forties was said to have evicted five thousand persons, who crowded into other areas.* As though there were not mischief enough, the window tax,

imposed towards the end of the eighteenth century, was not repealed until 1851 — an ironical coincidence

with the building of the Crystal Palace — so that for more than fifty years an indirect encouragement was given by Parliament to the construction of houses with

the least possible enjoyment of light and air.* Some voluntary efforts were made to improve the lot of the working man: such associations as the “Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes ”’ and the “‘ Metropolitan Association for improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes ” were constructing model tenement buildings which were avidly occupied by those

1 Weale, p. 600. 2 See chapter 14.

8 For an account of ‘‘ the famous rookery of St. Giles,” through which New Oxford Street was driven, see Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, p. 27. 4 For some details of the operation of the window tax see report of the Royal Commission on the Health of Large Towns, 1844, vol. ii, pp. 238-40.

HOUSING 13 fortunate enough to obtain accommodation in them. In

1851 Lord Shaftesbury obtained the passing of the

Labouring Class Lodging Houses Act, for the provision of working-class dwellings, which could be adopted by the vestries, but, owing to the lack of pressure of public opinion, it remained a dead letter. For the all too many who were below even the poorest grade of workmen, or had fallen thither by sickness, there were the common lodging houses. In 1839 there were about two hundred and twenty of these lodging houses in London, with an estimated population of 2,500, and the problem to which they gave rise became even more

acute ten years later when, as a result of the famine of 1847-48 in Ireland, thousands of poverty-stricken Irish (160,000 landed at Liverpool alone) swelled the total of those for whom the “ doss-house ”’ was a home. Mayhew gives a picture of the conditions — “ It is by

no means unusual to find eighteen or twenty in one small room, the heat and horrid smell from which are insufferable. . . . If they have linen, they take it off to escape vermin. . . . The amiable and deservedly popular minister of a district church, built among lodging houses, has stated that he has found twenty-nine human beings in one apartment ; and that, having with difficulty knelt down between two beds to pray with a dying woman, his legs became so jammed that he could hardly get up again.””!

Most deplorable of all were the sanitary conditions

and water supply. Within the City conditions were somewhat better than outside, but Dr. (Sir) John Simon, appointed in 1848 by the City Corporation as medical officer (the second appointment of its kind in the country)

found, even there, abundant material for vigorous critical reports. The metropolis was honeycombed with cesspools of which some were so large that they were

described more aptly as cess-lakes. It was not until 1848 that power was obtained to compel owners to connect house drainage with sewers. 1 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. i, p. 249 (published in 1851, the year in which registration of common lodginghouses was first made compulsory).

14 LONDON BEFORE 1856 Such sewers as existed were for the most part sadly defective, some being themselves mere elongated cesspools and some so constructed that the sewage would have to flow uphill in order to find a way out: so much of the contents as did not lie in them for years was dis-

charged untreated into the Thames, its tributaries or

into ditches. The sewers could flow into the river only

at low water, and there were flaps over their mouths which closed under pressure of the tide. Gruesome stories are told of down-at-heel pickers, called ‘“ toshers ”’,

who used to enter the sewers to look for oddments, mostly scraps of metal, and were sometimes trapped when the tide rose. Each district had its own sewerlevels, there was no general survey for London, and as

late as 1847 the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission stated that the report which they had obtained from the

head of the Ordnance Survey was “‘ in effect a condemnation as worthless of the whole of the materials shown to

him in the several offices for any general survey ”.? In a report to the Poor Law Commissioners the system of metropolitan sewerage was described as “‘ a vast monument of defective administration, of lavish expenditure

and extremely defective execution’’.* For this state of affairs stupidity and negligence were not solely to blame ; ignorance of how to construct sewers was in part the root of the trouble, and a large section of the first report of the Sanitary Commission was devoted to this subject. Refuse and garbage were indiscriminately flung into

the streets, into rivers and into streams, or left to

moulder around the dwellings. There was no system of refuse collection or disposal, save the dust contractors, who made handsome profits by undertaking for local bodies the collection from houses of such ashes and refuse

as might prove worth the trouble, sifting it in the dustyards and selling the sorted residue.

Gross overcrowding was general in the poorer

1 See Quennell, Victorian Panorama, pp. 27-30. 2 First report, p. 76. § Report to the Poor Law Commissioners on the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain, 1842, p. 54.

SANITARY CONDITIONS 15 quarters. Simon stated — “ It is no uncommon thing, in a room twelve feet square or less, to find three or four families styed together (perhaps with infectious disease among them), fillimg the same space night and day — men, women and children, in the promiscuous intimacy of cattle ’’.t The Earl of Shaftesbury, before the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1884, speaking of these earlier years, described a low cellar which he visited, adding — ‘‘ There were a woman and two children there, but the striking part of it 1s this, from a hole in the ceiling there came a long open wooden

tube supported by props, and from that flowed all the filth of the house above, right through the place where this woman was living, into the common sewer. Nobody paid the least attention to it.” ? Slaughter-houses, pig-sties and noxious trades such as bone-boilers and manure manufacturers were allowed cheek by jowl with houses, their stenches polluting the

air and their effluents the soil and drains. The dead were buried in already overcrowded grounds surrounded

by houses. ‘‘ How extensive this evil was may be realised from figures given by Mr. Chadwick in a report to the Government —‘ In the metropolis, on spaces of ground which do not exceed 203 acres, closely surrounded by the abodes of the living, layer upon layer, each consisting of a population numerically equivalent to a large

army of 20,000 adults and nearly 30,000 youths and children, is every year imperfectly interred. Within the period of the existence of the present generation, upwards

of a million of dead must have been interred in those

same spaces.’ ”’ ®

The water supply of London was chiefly in the hands of a number of companies with areas which Parliament had deliberately allowed to overlap, in order that there

should be competition, on the theory that the public would thus be protected from exploitation. Two or more companies could be found touting for business in

p. 87. 2 Question 37.

1 Report on the sanitary condition of the City of London, 1849-50,

8 Jephson, The Sanitary Evolution of London, pp. 35-36.

16 LONDON BEFORE 1856 the same street, and at times there were battles, with picks and shovels, between rival workmen digging trenches. Many of them drew their supplies from parts of the Thames within the metropolis, and it was delivered

without purification, although the river and its banks had become foul with sewage and filth. Only in 1852 was Parliament induced to place an obligation on these companies to take water solely from above Teddington Lock and to filter it, and even then a long time elapsed

before this was done. Thousands of houses were not supplied at all, their occupants having to wait wearily for their turn at public pumps, which had usually only an intermittent flow ; it was then stored in all manner of utensils in overcrowded and ill-ventilated dwellings. In some places no water was delivered on Sundays. To eke out these wretched supplies, water was taken from

wells and ditches. The wells were called “ slaughter

wells ”’ with good reason, for they drained the cesspools and graveyards of London and in low-lying areas near

the river were tidal. In a report of the General Board

of Health in 1850 it was stated that “in this island [Jacob’s Island, Bermondsey] may be seen at any time of the day women dipping water . . . from a foul, foetid ditch, its banks coated with a compound of mud and filth and strewed with offal and carrion — the water to be used for every purpose, culinary ones not excepted ”.? Such pure water as there was came mainly from private artesian wells, which some of the wealthier houses, public institutions and model dwellings for artisans enjoyed.”

Such being the general condition of a large part of the poorer quarters of London, it is little wonder that 1 Report on the supply of water to the metropolis, 1850, p. 15. 2 The foregoing description of sanitary conditions in London is restrained : it could readily be enlarged upon, and indeed other writers have done so. The horror and disgust with which the modern reader contemplates human beings existing in such conditions should be tempered by the realisation that feelings were much less sensitive then than now, and that vast numbers of the sufferers neither knew nor strongly desired any better

circumstances. It has to be remembered, too, that London was by no means exceptional in its sanitary shortcomings ; on the contrary it had

long been one of the wonder cities of the world, not only for its size and wealth but for its public services.

WATER SUPPLY AND GENERAL HEALTH 17

the death rates were high. The general mortality rate in the metropolis in 1851 was 33, the infantile mortality rate 154; the corresponding figures for 1937 were 12-5 and 60. Periodically, too, London was swept by waves

of cholera—ain 1832-33, in 1848-49 and again in

1853-54 — each time with appalling deadliness, 6,700, 14,600 and 10,600! dying in each outbreak respectively. Close connection was traced between the deaths from cholera and the impurity of the water, for it was shewn that in south London, where attacks had been heaviest,

the death rate from cholera in 1848-49 had borne direct ratio to the foulness of the water supply.2. We have no records of morbidity — sickness which, though not deadly, robbed men and women of weeks of activity and sapped their vigour, sometimes for life — but the

wastage from this cause must have been great. The marvel is that the death rates were not even higher ; but the human body is more resilient and adaptable than is often supposed. In the face of such a general situation no Parliament

ought to have remained inactive, but it was not then regarded so seriously as it would be to-day. It was to the Poor Law Commissioners, under the inspiration of Edwin Chadwick,’ that London had to look for the first step. The close connection between disease and poverty had impressed itself on his mind, and in 1838 the Commissioners ordered the famous investigation into London sanitary conditions by Drs. Arnott, Southwood-Smith

and Kay. When these reports, revealing the situation in its grimness, were brought before Parliament in 1840, feeling was genuinely stirred and there began that series of parliamentary investigations in which Chadwick’s own 1 These figures should be regarded as approximate. 2 Simon, Hnglish Sanitary Institutions, p. 262.

§ The most vigorous among the sanitary reformers of the first half of

the century: born, 24th January, 1800; died, 5th July, 1890: com-

missioner of inquiry into working of poor laws, 1833: secretary of Poor Law Commissioners, 1834: wrote General report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain, 1842 : and Report on the practice of interments in towns, 1843: principal adviser of Royal Commission on

Health of Large Towns, 1843-45: member of the General Board of

Health, 1848-54: K.C.B., 1889.

C

18 LONDON BEFORE 1856 reports played so large a part, culminating in the Royal Commission on the Health of Large Towns of 1843-44.

There followed a spate of legislation, including the adoptive acts such as the Town Improvement, Waterworks, Cemeteries, Town Police, and other ‘“‘Clauses”’

Acts of 1847. Most notable were the Public Health Act and the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Act, both of 1848, but, astonishingly enough, the area of the metropolitan commissioners of sewers, which comprised most of the present county, was excluded from the Public Health Act. An immediate consequence of the legislation of 1848

was the setting-up of the General Board of Health, Chadwick being made one of its three members. This

body at first was constituted without any medical

member, but one was added after two years under (a nice touch) the Metropolitan Interments Act, 1850.1 For six years the Board shewed vigour, almost intransigeance, in pressing much needed reforms on local authorities. Some of its finest work was done during the cholera epidemics of 1848-49 and 1853-54. It also produced energetically worded reports on the reform of burial practices, water supply and sanitation. Through all its proceedings, however, ran Chadwick’s bias towards

centralisation, and by the end of its first term of office

in 1854 such a storm of unpopularity and opposition

broke over it that the Government was defeated on the bill for renewing its appointment.? The Board had been in advance of its day, had foundered on the rock of its own uncompromising zeal, and was succeeded by a new General Board of Health, differently composed, under the presidency of Sir Benjamin Hall. So far as London was concerned, Sir Benjamin Hall 1 Dr. Rumsey, in the preface to Essays on State Medicine, refers to “the whimsical experiment . . . of appointing three non-medical authorities — two lords and a barrister — to preserve the health of the living ; and then, after a year or so of doubtful success, calling in a physician to bury me A fais account and assessment of the Board and its work is to be found in Simon’s English Sanitary Institutions.

SIR BENJAMIN HALL 19 realised that no real progress in social conditions could

be made until the medley of petty authorities which then muddled the public services of the metropolis was swept away in favour of an organised system. For his work in achieving this alone, his name will always stand

high in London history, yet it was part only of his remarkably energetic campaign: in 1855 he not only introduced the bill for the Metropolis Management Act,

but two other important measures for amending the Public Health Act, 1848, and the Nuisances Removal and Prevention of Diseases Acts of 1848 and 1849. All this was taking place coincidently with the concluding stages

of the cholera epidemic of 1853-54, and with the commission on army sanitary organisation whose recom-

mendations, as the result of Florence Nightingale’s experiences and advice, alleviated the heavy death-roll from sickness among soldiers in the Crimea.

In his speech to the House of Commons on the bill for the Metropolis Management Act, Sir Benjamin Hall

gave a portrait of London local government, as it then existed, for which the historian may always be

orateful.

The foremost authority in London was the City

Corporation, a body much as it is at present in its main

framework, constituting a remarkable monument of stability, shielded by prestige, power and influence. Its sanitary functions were from 1848 onwards delegated to

its own commissioners of sewers, who seem to have been somewhat more progressive than other sanitary authorities of the day. As recently as 1837 the City Corporation had been threatened with reconstitution,

as the result of a report of the very commission which had brought about the reform of municipal

corporations elsewhere. Yet, by wielding its influence and raising vigorous protests, it had averted any

change.

Outside the ancient walls was confusion almost

indescribable. There were, in the first place, the seventy-

eight vestries, with powers as to sanitary nuisances,

roads and other matters which were similar to those of

20 LONDON BEFORE 1856 the other vestries throughout the country.1. A few were open vestries, with officers or variously elected governing bodies to do their work, some were elected vestries, their members chosen on diverse franchises, and others were close (select) vestries, with members usually elected for

life, vacancies being filled by co-option. Hach class contained some of the best and some of the worst vestries.

Secondly, the justices of Kent, Middlesex and Surrey exercised powers, principally in regard to lunatic asylums,

county bridges and main highways, other than the turn-

pikes. Thirdly, there were the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers, with general powers over sewers in an area approximately equivalent to the present-day

county of London, excepting Woolwich. In addition there were the chartered liberties, with their own government, of the Inner and Middle Temples, Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, New, Staple and Furnival’s Inns, Charterhouse, and the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and of

these the first two remain independent to-day. Overlapping with all these there was, for various functions — sewers, paving, lighting, surveying buildings — a crowd of different authorities, in all no less than three hundred bodies comprising about 10,500 members, mostly self-

elected and with no responsibility to the ratepayers. They operated under about two hundred and fifty separate statutes, raised rates and loans according to

their own fancy and had numerous unqualified and overpaid functionaries.’

A few vivid illustrations tell more than pages of description.? In St. Pancras there were sixteen paving boards, yet “‘a great portion of the parish was without paving” and part of it was under no jurisdiction whatsoever: they had accumulated a debt of £135,000. In Finsbury, Ely Place, 326 yards long, cost £156 for super1 For information about these bodies, and English local government generally from the latter part of the seventeenth to the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, the leading sources are the detailed volumes by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. 2 Hansard, 1855, vol. 137, cols. 711-712.

’ The information which follows is taken from Sir Benjamin Hall’s speech reported in Hansard, 1855, vol. 137, cols. 699-722.

THE MEDLEY OF LOCAL BODIES 21 vision — equivalent to over £840 per mile.t The Strand between Northumberland House and Temple Bar was divided among seven different paving boards, some of them with only a few yards of the thoroughfare under

their jurisdiction, and that for only part of its width: of the surveyors of these boards one was a tailor and another a law stationer. In Westminster nearly all the boundaries between paving authorities were in the middle of the street, and two of the boards had quarrelled, “ one

of them saying ‘ we will have the watering done in the morning ’ and the other saying ‘ we will have the watering

done in the evening’... so that both sides were in fact covered with dust during the whole of the day, but the neighbours had of course to pay the rate ”’.

For sewers London was, up to 1847, divided into seven districts, each with its own commission, the total membership being 1,065. In 1848 a single commission was appointed to replace them. The record of successive commissions since that date was that they had increased the debt of £63,500 taken over from the old commissioners

to £587,000 in 1854, their management expenses had varied from 23 to 284 per cent of their expenditure, and they had attempted only one large work, the Victoria sewer, still incomplete, for which the estimate had been nearly £29,000 and the expenditure to date over £41,000.

The surveying of London buildings, for which a registrar, official referees and fifty-two district surveyors were appointed under the Metropolitan Buildings Act, 1844, cost the ratepayers £30,000 a year, and as a result

of inquiries in connection with the cholera outbreak it was established that they had greatly neglected their duty. Lest it should be imagined that no attempt at reform

had been made and no protest registered, let it be recorded that the ratepayers of St. Pancras, through their vestry, had brought two bills forward in Parliament

with the object of remedying the abuses of the paving boards. Each bill was defeated by the opposition of the 1 Even at the end of the century the paving of Ely Place was still under a separate board.

22 LONDON BEFORE 1856 boards: the bills cost the ratepayers £4,000 to promote,

“and the paving boards, over which they had no control, spent nearly £3,000 in defeating the ratepayers, which the ratepayers had likewise to pay’. Endeavours even of this kind, were hard to make when there were vestries elected in such a manner as that for Paddington, in Maryleboneat (Sir Benjamin Hall’s own constituency) where 607 repayers (one eleventh of the total) had 3,642 votes — more than the number possessed by 3,582 other ratepayers in the same parish. Before recommending to Parliament a new scheme of government for the metropolis, Sir Benjamin Hall had

some difficult preliminary decisions to reach. First, what was to be the size of the metropolis? Second, what was the part to be played by the City Corporation ?

Third, how much centralisation of local government

functions could be carried out for London ; and, if there were to be both central and local authorities, how were they and their relations to be defined ? These were not easy problems ; many proposals had failed in the past

and the search for a solution for the management of London had constantly been put off through fear of its size and complexity. As to the area of the metropolis, no time was wasted in argument. ‘Some gentlemen thought it was advis-

able to determine that the metropolis should be that

area over which the coal tax was levied, and which had

a diameter of no less than forty miles, of which St. Paul’s was the centre. There were others who thought that the metropolis would be more properly defined by taking that area which was under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police Commissioners — thirty miles area!

—of which Charing Cross was the centre, and which included all those parishes parts of which were embraced in that area. Others were of opinion that the metropolis was better defined in a schedule attached to the Metro-

politan Interments Act of 1852; while others, again, thought that the Registrar-General’s district should 1 He no doubt meant “ diameter ”’.

DEFINING THE METROPOLIS 23 more properly be regarded as the metropolis. Now, without referring to any of the arguments used in support of those different propositions, he would simply say that he proposed to take the Registrar-General’s district, and call that the metropolis for the purposes of the bill he would now introduce.” ? The Registrar-General’s district had its origin in the bills of mortality which since the sixteenth century had

been kept for parishes in the City and neighbouring populous areas, largely so that the Court and others might be warned of the coming of the plague and seek

a safer retreat. As London grew, the bills had been extended to more and more parishes, and when the

Registrar-General was appointed he continued the practice, using the area covered by the bills as the basis of

his metropolitan district. London, for the 1855 Act, comprised the thirty-six registration districts used for

the census of 1851, and so substantially it remains, despite all the great developments in the meantime. London as a governmental unit began, therefore, as a statistical area, which may afford some solace to the neglected body of statisticians. When it came to considering the position of the City, there was more difficulty. The City had always opposed

expansion of its boundaries or, indeed, even internal reform. Recommendations were not lacking, but they were conflicting. The Royal Commission of 1835 had declared — * we do not find any argument on which the

course pursued with regard to other towns could be justified which would not apply with the same force to London, unless the magnitude of the change in this case should be considered as converting this, which would otherwise be only a practical difficulty, into an objection of principle’, which was clearly not their view. They

had added — “we hardly anticipate that it will be suggested . . . that the other quarters [than the City] of the town should be formed into independent and isolated communities. . . . This plan would, as it seems to us, in getting rid of an anomaly tend to multiply and 1 Hansard, 1855, vol. 137, col. 701.

24 LONDON BEFORE 1856 perpetuate an evil”? This policy of expanding the City had, however, been doomed to failure in the face of the implacable opposition of the Corporation, and

there was at hand the freshly delivered report of the Royal Commission which in 1853 had been set up to inquire into the existing state of the City. This Commission considered that the size of the metropolis and the diversity of its local interests were “ decisive against the expediency of placing the whole of the metropolis under a single municipal corporation ”’.? It was this last commission which, undeterred by the

fact that they were exceeding their terms of reference, suggested the solution to the problem of London government which Sir Benjamin Hall thought it best in substance to adopt, knowing “ the difficulties with which such a subject must be surrounded and the opposition that would be raised by interested parties against any measure framed for the benefit of the community ”’. It was a solution which would not involve antagonising the City Corporation, for whose reform it was his intention to bring in later a separate bill.‘

The essence of the commission’s proposal was

municipal government for London, not by the agency of borough corporations, but by division of the metropolis

into districts each governed by a municipal assembly

of a type which was not specified.» The grant of

charters to the seven parliamentary boroughs was a possibility dismissed on account of their uneven and unwieldy size and the costliness of maintaining mayor and corporation.® Central control for these municipal districts does not seem to have been fully contemplated 1 Second report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Municipal Corporations in England and Wales, 1837: London and Southwark—London Companies, p. 4. 2 Report of the Royal Commission on the existing state of the Corporation of the City of London, 1854, p. xiv. 3 Hansard, 1855, vol. 137, col. 700. « Idem, col. 718.

5 “ We see no reason why the benefit of municipal institutions should not be extended to the rest of the metropolis by its division into municipal districts, each possessing a municipal government of its own” (Report of the Royal Commission on the City Corporation. 1854, p. xxxv). 6 Hansard, 1855, vol. 137, col. 717.

THE NEW LONDON GOVERNMENT 25 by the commission ; but, for the execution of large works affecting London as a whole, they suggested a Metropolitan Board of Works, indirectly elected by the City Corporation and the metropolitan municipalities. Thesomewhat

mundane title of the new body was no doubt due to a

restricted view of its duties: it was to be a sort of glorified works contractor for London at large, and obliged to submit plans of works beforehand to the Privy

Council for consent.t. The major portion of the coal

duty, hitherto enjoyed by the City Corporation, was to be handed over to the Board as revenue for its operations, to be supplemented, and in due course superseded, if the

duty was not continued after 1862, by the general rate which it was to be given power to levy. This scheme — improved, filled out in detail and with

the position of the Board of Works dignified by the addition of limited supervisory powers over the district authorities and mitigation of the central control over it — was the leading feature of the Act of 1855. The new municipal bodies were to be styled vestries and district boards, the latter being indirectly elected by clusters of vestries whose parishes were not of sufficient account to

be on their own. The vestries were to be elected on a relatively popular franchise, and the cleansing stream

of public accountability was set to scour some of the channels of London’s municipal affairs. With these proposals Sir Benjamin Hall revealed to

his hearers a cheering vista of the future of London government. Improvement of general conditions appealed to philanthropic instincts, and the new Board of

Works held hopes of great achievements at a period when awe for works of engineering had established a firm

hold upon the popular mind. To entrust the management of London to representatives of the ratepayers met with general approval, despite the gloomy forebodings of a few reactionary doubters.2 The Times hailed the new Act as “a bold and original attempt to 1 Report of the Royal Commission on the City Corporation, 1854, p- XXXVI.

2 See Hansard, 1855, vol. 137, cols. 723-724.

26 LONDON BEFORE 1856 supply a great practical want and to give to two millions

and a half of people, closely packed together, that organisation of which, by some inexplicable oversight, they have hitherto been deprived ’’’.t With such great

expectations animating the hearts and minds of those with whom the future lay, we may take leave of this epoch of London history, and turn to study the operations

of the new form of government during the thirty-three years which were to compass its zenith and decline. 1 The Times, 14th August, 1855.

Note—Further information about the growth of population

in London and Greater London is given in appendix II. The spread of building development in London and Greater London is shewn in a map at the end of this book. So far as we know,

this is the first time that a map of this kind, based on exact information, has been prepared.

CHAPTER 2

LONDON UNDER THE METROPOLIS MANAGEMENT ACT: 1856-1889 THE third of a century which followed the passing of Sir

Benjamin Hall’s great Act for the metropolis forms a period of transition from the chaos of the ’fifties to the more exacting standards of the ’eighties. The Act was the most important single measure passed for the govern-

ment of London, and for the first time introduced an

ordered system. Nevertheless, the muddle, the jobbery and the indifference which the last chapter attempted to describe could not be swept away by any single Act of

Parliament. Institutions can be changed in a day, but not the characters of the men who serve them. Yet the

period from the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of Works to the coming of the County Council

was a time of great creative effort. The difference between 1855 and 1888 is in some ways more startling even than that between 1888 and the present day. The legacy which the London County Council was to receive from the Board of Works was a distinguished array of

improvements which had altered the face of London and brought light and cleanness into many of the foulest

haunts of disease. For sheer constructive effort it is hard to think of any later achievements which match those works. In their lesser way many of the vestries profoundly changed the physical and social state of their

districts ; sewering, paving and lighting were in most districts well provided, and the work of medical officers

and sanitary inspectors began to elevate standards of life. In other areas less was done —a contrast which threw into relief the attainments of the more progressive

bodies.

The new local government authorities absorbed the 27

28 LONDON, 1856-1889 multitude of small special bodies for paving, lighting,

sewerage and street maintenance; in this respect the usually lagging metropolis was, for once, ahead of the provinces. Yet some special bodies continued, and indeed others were established, after 1855 — burial boards, library commissioners and commissioners of baths and washhouses — for functions not yet fully brought within

the orbit of general local government. Up to the very end of the nineteenth century, and even later, London government was cumbered by many authorities: Gomme dubbed it vehemently “a disgrace to a civilized city ”’, and cited — apart from the London County Council — the Metropolitan Asylums Board, the School Board, the City Corporation and the forty-one vestries and district

boards, thirty-eight poor law authorities, fifty special boards of various kinds and a host of “* authorities ”’,

some of them with practically no civil functions, but some, such as the overseers, responsible for the collection

of rates and the registration of electors.

In this chapter we shall give first an outline of the constitution and achievements of the Metropolitan Board of Works, then a description of the work accom-

plished by the vestries and district boards. To give even a summary of the social services and public utilities in the hands of other authorities between 1855 and 1888 is beyond the scope of this volume. So far as their story need be told, it will be found in later chapters dealing with specific services of the Council — for example the

chapters on education, public health, mental services and public assistance, and in the chapter on the public

utilities of London.’

I. THe METROPOLITAN BoaRD OF WoRKS

The Board consisted at first of a chairman and fortyfive members. The chairman received a salary (limits, 1 Gomme, London 1837-1897, p. 189 et seq. 2 See chapters 10 to 14, 16 and 26.

METROPOLITAN BOARD OF WORKS — 29

£1,500 to £2,000 a year). The Board had two chairmen

only throughout its career —Sir John Thwaites from 1855 to 1870 and Sir James M‘Garel-Hogg (later Lord Magheramorne) from 1870 to 1889. Of the members, the City Corporation elected three and the Woolwich Local Board of Health one; the remainder were elected by the vestries and district boards — six of the vestries sent two members each and fifteen sent one each; the district boards each sent two, except the Lewisham and Plumstead district boards, which combined to elect one representative, and the Saint Olave district board, which shared a representative with the vestry of Rotherhithe. In 1885 the number of vestries was increased and the number of members of the Board was raised to fifty-nine.

This system of indirect election, unpopular with democratic reformers, was to prove a source of growing

criticism. It was ingeniously calculated that it might take twelve years for the electors to change a single member of the Board ! — a prospect somewhat alarming to many who regarded extensive financial powers in the hands of such a body as a dangerous innovation.

Originally the Board was entrusted with, among other functions, the provision and maintenance of main

sewers and .sewage disposal works; the making and widening of important streets ; the control of buildings under the Metropolitan Building Acts; the naming of streets and the numbering of houses; and the making of byelaws on a number of matters. Main drainage and street improvement schemes had to be approved by the Office of Works if over £50,000 in cost, and as regards street improvements, by Parliament if over £100,000, but this control was removed in 1858. The Board could borrow money on mortgage (until 1869 without limit), and its accounts were to be audited by a person appointed

by the Home Secretary (later by the Treasury). To these original functions were added in later years powers in respect of flood prevention, cross-river communications, parks and open spaces, housing and overcrowding, 1 J. T. Dexter, The Government of London, pp. 12 and 13; quoted in Firth, Municipal London, p. 230.

30 LONDON, 1856-1889 control of the fire brigade and various other protective

services.

Parliament gave no right of general supervision over the district authorities (the vestries and district boards), but the Board had some power of control in individual

matters. Thus, it could require a district authority to construct a new local sewer or to carry out works for the

better drainage of a street; it could lay down that a road partly in two parishes or districts should be maintained by one of them, and determine the shares of cost ;

and it decided appeals from the decisions of district

authorities on some matters. Not least, a district authority could not borrow except with the consent of the Board. Main drainage and sewage disposal The Board energetically set about the first big work

expected of it —to provide means of dealing with the

huge quantities of metropolitan sewage without the nuisances which had fouled London for so long. A scheme was promptly prepared, but the Commissioners

of Works refused to approve it on the ground that the outfall should be further down the river, instead of at Barking on the one side and Crossness on the other. After much negotiation the problem was referred to

three independent engineers, who recommended a scheme of their own, and this, in turn, was condemned

by three other engineers consulted by the Board as ‘needlessly large, excessively costly and, as a work of construction, all but impracticable’. The issue was settled, not by reason or compromise, but by a change of Government and by the very hot summer of 1858,

the polluted state of the river causing an intolerable stench in the Houses of Parliament. In a leading article The Times said that “‘ a few members, indeed, bent upon

investigating the subject to its very depth, ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven into

retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose’’.1 1 The Times, 18th June, 1858.

MAIN DRAINAGE 31 An Act was hurried through, removing the need for approval of the Commissioners of Works and giving the Board power to borrow the necessary money, with a Treasury guarantee. The works were then put in hand. They were huge.

Kighty-two miles of main intercepting sewers, four great pumping stations, outfall works north and south of the river, and two large reservoirs, together covering

sixteen acres, were constructed: these works were supplemented by laborious reconstruction and repairs to make good the one hundred and sixty-five miles of

sewers transferred to the Board from the old sewers commission. The complete works were capable of dealing with four hundred million gallons of sewage per day and were then thought to be ample for the

future needs of London. In all, they cost over £4,500,000.1 At last, in 1865, was completed a system of

sanitation long and urgently required, and ranking as one of the wonders of the sanitary world. The work was carried out under Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the Board’s

engineer, and the fact that London owes to him the design of its first main drainage system and of the

river embankments is recorded on his memorial in the embankment wall near Charing Cross.

Yet the troubles of the Board were by no means

ended. The Thames Conservators protested that mud-

banks were formed by the discharged sewage. The matter was referred to arbitration, a comprehensive inquiry held and a decision found in favour of the Board.2. Then, in 1882, the City Corporation, as port sanitary authority, and the inhabitants of Erith complained of nuisance, and a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the system of sewage disposal.

After two years it reported against the discharge of crude sewage into the river, and the Board provided, at

sreat cost, works for separating the solid matter in 1 Report of the Metropolitan Board of Works, 1888, pp. 15 and 16.

2 The report issued by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in 1938 on the “ effect of discharge of crude sewage into the estuary of the river Mersey on the amount and hardness of the deposit in

the estuary ”’ is interesting in this connection.

32 LONDON, 1856-1889 the sewage and sending it in barges out to sea, the

liquid only being discharged into the river after treatment when necessary.

It was widely believed that sewage could be profitably used for fertilising agricultural land, and in 1860 and 1863 Parliament appointed select committees

to investigate the question, both of which presented favourable reports. Definite schemes were put forward

by private venturers, and in two cases powers were obtained from Parliament and works were put in hand. Hope of high profit was held out, of which the Board was to receive a share, but nothing came of it: the only money the Board received out of the whole business was a sum of £25,000 forfeited by one company because they did not go on with their scheme !

Knormous as the main sewers were, it was plainly uneconomic to make them big enough to take all the rain that might fall on London during storms. The Board received complaints of flooding, and in its later years put in hand extensive works to relieve the sewers in times of excessive rain. Including these works, from first to last, the Board spent more than £6,000,000 on the main drainage of London. Embankments

Much of the foulness that resulted from the pollution of the Thames was the consequence of the wide expanses of mud which were exposed at low water, and, in order to reduce their area, many suggestions were put forward

for embanking the river. An embankment was part of Wren’s famous plan for the redevelopment of London

after the Great Fire, and other proposals had been brought forward during the early part of the nineteenth century. With its customary maternal, but rather belated, care the House of Commons appointed a select committee in 1860 and a Royal Commission in the following year. Both supported the suggestion for

embanking the Thames from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge on the Middlesex side, but, while

THAMES EMBANKMENTS 33 the committee recommended that the Metropolitan

Board of Works should construct the embankment, the commission considered that the work should be carried

out by a special body of commissioners. The Board pointed out that it had been appointed to render exactly this class of service, and the Government, convinced by

its arguments, passed an Act in 1862 authorising the making of the embankment. The embankment was not completed until 1870, the

delay being largely due to the construction of the

District Railway, authorised in 1864. The difficulty of taking the embankment past the Whitefriars Dock and an important gasworks at Blackfriars was overcome by

negotiation. When at last it was completed at a net cost of nearly £1,200,000, it was named the Victoria Kmbankment, after the Queen, who would have opened it in person but for indisposition. Nearly forty acres of mudbanks had been reclaimed, of which about nineteen

acres were taken up by the road, ten acres laid out as ornamental grounds and the residue became the property of the Crown, the Inner and Middle Temples and other riparian owners.

In 1863 the Board obtained power to construct the Albert Embankment, which was completed by 1869 at a net cost of over £1,000,000. This work put an end to the periodic inundation of a large part of Lambeth, and St. Thomas’s Hospital was erected on part of the surplus

land, having had to remove from Southwark to make way for railway works at London Bridge. The Chelsea

Embankment, from Chelsea Hospital to Battersea

Bridge, was finished in 1874, and thus was completed a group of imposing and useful London improvements, greatly benefiting the river, not only in appearance but in purity and flow, and involving a capital expenditure of well over £2,000,000. Street umprovements, bridges and tunnels

There is no part of the Board’s work of which it had more reason to be proud than its street improvements. D

34 LONDON, 1856-1889 It inherited the negligence of generations. The population, the business and the traffic of London had grown enormously, but the old maze of winding and narrow streets remained : there had been a few improvements,

but no systematic effort had been made to provide adequate communications. The Board had to obtain powers from Parliament for the compulsory purchase of

land for each scheme. New ways for improvements had often to be cut through warrens of human habitations, and the Board was required to ensure the rehousing

of those whom it disturbed before it could start to pull

down their houses. In the beginning the conditions were so onerous that progress was delayed, and modifica-

tions had to be obtained from Parliament. The procedure for acquiring land was not expeditious, and com-

pensation gave rise to difficulties which obstructed progress.

The Board spent over £12,000,000 on this work, reduced to under £7,500,000 by recoupment, chiefly from the sale of surplus land. These figures exclude the expenditure on the embankments (over £2,000,000)

and contributions of more than £1,500,000 made by the Board to the district authorities for smaller street improvements carried out by them. The memories of Londoners for past benefits are proverbially bad, and it may not be amiss to remind them of a few of the great

street changes which they owe to the Board. Apart from the embankments, the following is a list of the principal new streets made and old streets widened : new streets — Queen Victoria Street, Shaftesbury Avenue,

Clerkenwell Road, Charing Cross Road, Northumberland Avenue,? Southwark Street, Great Eastern Street,} Commercial Road (Whitechapel), Hamilton Place (Park Lane), Garrick Street, Hyde Park Corner (Piccadilly — Grosvenor Place) ; widenings — Camberwell and Church

Roads and Peckham High Street, Theobald’s Road,} Gray’s Inn Road, Tooley Street, Upper Street (Islington), 1 Part of a complete scheme of about two miles connecting Shoreditch with Bloomsbury and costing nearly £1,500,000 net. 4 Recoupment provided a profit on expenditure on this improvement.

STREETS AND BRIDGES 35 Wapping High Street and Lower East Smithfield, and

Kensington High Street. In addition, parliamentary powers had been obtained for making Rosebery Avenue, which was completed by the Council in 1890 and named in honour of its first Chairman.

In 1855 there were only three bridges in London

over the Thames which were free from tolls — London and Blackfriars Bridges, both owned by the City Corporation, and Westminster Bridge, then in charge of the Office of Works but handed over to the Board in 1887. Later the City Corporation acquired Southwark Bridge and freed it of tolls. Between 1878 and 1880 the other eleven bridges were made public highways free of tolls by the Board, at a cost of nearly £1,400,000, the bridges

being — Albert, Battersea, Chelsea, Deptford Creek, Hammersmith, Hungerford, Lambeth, Putney, Vauxhall,

Wandsworth and Waterloo; Hungerford Bridge remained the property of the railway company which had

built 1t, but the perpetual right of foot passage was acquired for the public. Much money was spent in putting the bridges into good condition : the old wooden bridges at Putney and Battersea were replaced, the one

by a stone, the other by a cast-iron bridge; more than £62,000 was spent on deepening and securing the founda-

tions of Waterloo Bridge ; and a new bridge was built at Hammersmith which remains to-day a striking architectural relic of the Board. There was a strong demand for means of communication below London Bridge, especially as the east end of

London had to pay its share of the cost of freeing from tolls the bridges higher up the river. In 1879, therefore, the Board brought forward a bill for a high-level bridge at Little Tower Hull, but strong opposition developed

and it was rejected. The Board negotiated with the City Corporation, who were among the opponents, but

1 In 1877 bridges over the Thames at Hampton Court, Kew, Kingston, Staines and Walton, and over the Lee at Chingford Mills and Tottenham (all outside the metropolis), were freed from tolls by the joint action of the Board and the City Corporation, by mortgaging in advance the proceeds of the coal and wine duties for 1888-89.

36 LONDON, 1856-1889 without success. This left the Board dissatisfied, for it contemplated a bridge near the Tower and two tunnels, one at Shadwell and another at Blackwall, at an estimated

cost of at least £5,000,000. Such a dream had to be allowed to fade, for no assurance was forthcoming that the coal duties would be continued beyond 1889, and the Board contented itself with promoting in 1883, again un-

successfully, a bill for a tunnel between Nightingale Lane and Tooley Street. This time the House of Commons committee said that a low-level swing bridge was necessary at Little Tower Hill and a subway at or near Shadwell, and that the former should be undertaken by the City from the funds of the Bridge House Estates and

the latter by the Board. The City built the now familiar London landmark, Tower Bridge, but the Board found that there were difficulties about con-

structing the subway and instead, in 1885, presented a bill for free ferries at Greenwich and Woolwich. The Greenwich proposal was opposed, big claims were put

forward for compensation, and it was dropped. The Woolwich proposal was passed, approach works were put in hand and two boats ordered, but it was left to the Council to inaugurate the service. Two years later the Board obtained power to construct a tunnel at Blackwall, and we shall have to record later the unfortunate differences between the expiring Board and the nascent Council over the letting of a contract for the works. Housing

Such was the general indifference to the deplorable housing conditions of the metropolis that the Board was not at first endowed with any powers to deal with them : the operation of Lord Shaftesbury’s Act of 1851 was a matter for the vestries and district boards. In 1868 the Act which bears the name of W. M. Torrens, one of the

members for Finsbury, gave power to the district authorities in London to require unfit houses to be made

fit or to be demolished. It was not until 1875 that powers were given to the Board, by the passing of the

HOUSING 37 Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act

(the Cross Act). This Act required the Board, as

authority for the metropolis outside the City, to acquire and demolish dwellings in areas declared to be insanitary and to let or sell the cleared areas for rehousing at least as many persons as had been displaced ; 1t had no power itself to provide the rehousing. To a body growing uneasy because of the increased overcrowding and insanitary conditions the Act was welcome, for the growing population and its compression in some parts of London owing to the demolition of dwellings for railways, new business

premises and other works, were creating an anxious

state of affairs. :

The Board later reported that “for several years

after the passing of the Act a considerable share of the

Board’s time and attention, and a very large amount of money, were expended in giving effect to the provisions of the statute ’’;1 but the procedure of the Act was slow and the terms of compensation onerous. Owners of unfit dwellings were sometimes awarded as

much compensation as if they had been fit; and the

condition that the cleared site had to be used for

rehousing resulted in heavy losses, for the Board had to pay the full market value for the site, which might be high where land had commercial value, and received only the rehousing value, which was small. The Board wished to be enabled to sell cleared land for commercial

use, where expedient, and to provide rehousing on other suitable areas. A new Act was passed in 1879, but it did not make

a material difference. Later a select committee was appointed and on its recommendations another Act was passed, in 1882, which enabled the Home Secretary

to reduce the obligation to provide rehousing on the site, but not beyond one-half. It also simplified procedure and somewhat altered the provisions for compensation. A still further Act in 1885, the Housing of the Working Classes Act, gave additional powers to the Board, and enlarged the sanitary powers of the 1 Report of the Metropolitan Board of Works, 1888, p. 46.

38 LONDON, 1856-1889 district authorities, but the real effect of the renowned

Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes which reported in that year was not felt for some years. During its period of office the Board made twentytwo housing improvement schemes, including six which

were in hand when the Council took over its duties ; and 7,400 insanitary dwellings, accommodating 29,000

persons, were demolished. Two hundred and sixtythree blocks of dwellings, for more than 27,500 persons, were erected according to the Board’s requirements by the various individuals, companies and charitable trusts

to whom the Board sold its land, and over £1,500,000 was spent. In addition, sixty-one blocks of dwellings with accommodation for over 10,000 were put up for those displaced by street improvements. Open spaces

It is also significant of the public opinion of the day that the Board had to promote a bill in its first year to remove doubts whether it had even the right to apply to Parliament for powers to acquire particular areas of land for open spaces, much less to acquire them without further ado. The powers were obtained, and Finsbury Park and, afterwards, Southwark Park were bought, both at the time amid almost open land. Later came, among others, Ravenscourt Park, towards which the

Hammersmith vestry contributed half the cost, and Dulwich Park, given by the governors of Dulwich College. The Board also liberally aided the acquisition of open spaces by the district authorities. The most notable service of the Board in the cause

of open spaces was its successful fight to save the commons. Although there was public access to the commons by custom, Londoners had no rights in them,

for they were vested in the lords of the manors; they were, moreover, specially vulnerable, bemg cheap compared with other land. Railways had already been

cut across Tooting and Wandsworth Commons, and

OPEN SPACES 39 parts of others had been appropriated for commercial

purposes. Through the efforts of the Board and a group of men and women who later formed the Commons

Preservation Society, the Metropolitan Commons Act

was passed in 1866, and the Board acquired for the benefit of the public all the commons and similar open spaces in the outer parts of London. The circumstances

of acquisition were various, but two instances mentioned in the last report of the Board may be given: Blackheath, comprising nearly two hundred and seventy

acres, was transferred without any claim or payment for manorial rights or any other interest ; whereas for the acquisition of Hackney Commons, comprising in all about a hundred and fifty acres, £90,000 had to be paid, and that after much effort and litigation, although the

Board pointed out that before acquisition the lands, ‘beyond the grazing of a few animals ’”’, yielded “ no profit to anyone ”’.?

Excluding Parliament Fields and Clissold Park and some other lands of which the acquisition had not been completed, in 1888 there were 2,600 acres of open space under the Board’s control, 1,100 acres north, and 1,500 acres south of the Thames. This was not nearly enough,

even when open spaces in other hands are taken into account, but at least it was a far better state of affairs than when the Board began its work. Fre brigade

In the’ previous chapter we have described the founding, by ten of the leading fire insurance companies,

of the London fire engine establishment, which came into being with nineteen fire stations and eighty men. Under James Braidwood, who, in 1824, had formed at Edinburgh the first professional brigade in Great Britain,

the establishment did fine work for many years. At last, however, came a crushing blow. In 1861 occurred one of the worst fire disasters in the history of London, the great fire at Tooley Street. Several men were killed, 1 Report of the Metropolitan Board of Works, 1888, p. 60.

40 LONDON, 1856-1889 including Braidwood himself, and nearly £2,000,000

of loss had to be borne by the insurance companies. This so utterly discouraged them that they

decided to relinquish the maintenance of the London fire engine establishment. The House of Commons thereupon appointed a select committee, which in due course recommended that a fire brigade for London should be formed for the area under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Board of Works; and on Ist January, 1866, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade Act, 1865, came

into operation, entrusting to the Board the duty of extinguishing fires and protecting life and property in

London from fire. A year later the Board also took over the eighty-five escapes and the majority of the attendants (about a hundred) employed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Life from Fire.

The cost of the brigade was to be met from a contribution of £10,000 a year from the Government and £35 a year from insurance companies for each million pounds worth of property insured, and the balance from the produce of not more than a halfpenny rate. The limit of a halfpenny rate later proved insufficient, and the Board sought to raise it to a pennyrate and also to increase to£40 per million the contributions of the insurance companies.

Largely owing to the strong opposition of the insurance

companies to any increase in their contributions, the Board never succeeded, though it made four applications

to Parlament in the years 1884 to 1888 and obtained some concessions as to the amount it might expend on the brigade. The increased efficiency of the fire brigade under the Board 1s indicated by the fact that between 1866 and

1888 the percentage of fires which became serious

dropped from twenty-five to six a year. The fire brigade, when the Board took it over, had 130 officers

and men; in 1888 it had 674, with immensely better equipment. During the whole of this time the chief officer of the brigade was Captain (Sir Eyre Massey) Shaw, a man of fine presence, great energy and marked

organising ability, who, in addition to bringing the

FIRE BRIGADE 4] brigade up to a high standard of efficiency, made it generally popular and himself found a niche in the Gilbert

and Sullivan opera, Jolanthe. He retired from the

brigade in 1891, adding to his last report a paragraph which will surely bring a wry smile of envy to the face of any present-day head of a department of the Council — ““T have completed every reference made to me from

committees and answered every letter which I have

received, and there are no arrears of work in my department ”’.

In 1871 occurred an incident which 1s of interest

both as illustrating the personality of Captain Shaw and as an exceptional example of a proposal for direct international co-operation in fire extinction. In May of that

year Paris was in the throes of civil war. Much of the city was ablaze, largely through continuous artillery fire

and the activities of les fuséens, organised bands of incendiaries. On 25th May, 1871, Captain Shaw wrote a private letter to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville,

offering assistance and saying— “I could with one day’s notice organise a temporary force which would

make everything safe for them within about twenty-four,

or at the outside forty-eight, hours from the time of

commencing work on the spot ’”’. Lord Granville com-

municated at once with the French Government, and on the following day the Board was informed by its chairman that the French Government had made urgent

application to Lord Granville that the Board should assist in extinguishing the fires in Paris. The Board promptly instructed Captain Shaw to go at once to Paris with as large a force of men and engines as could possibly be spared from the metropolis, and voted the necessary

money; but soon afterwards a message was received that the fires had been mastered. In the meantime, Captain Shaw had already gone over to Paris, taken part in the fight as an ordinary fireman, and won the plaudits of the Parisians, a body of firemen escorting him to the station on his departure and speeding it with shouts of — “* Vive le Capitaine Shaw ! ”’

The Board received “ the acknowledgments of Her

42 LONDON, 1856-1889 Majesty’s Government for the prompt and cordial assent given by the Metropolitan Board of Works to the despatch

of the fire brigade to Paris’; but they were not pleased with Captain Shaw, particularly because he had not communicated with the Board before writing to the Foreign

Secretary, as he should certainly have done. He felt

justified by the fact that his offer had merely been, as he explained, to raise a private fire force, and added charac-

teristically “it is unnecessary for me to say that no

such time as twenty-four hours 1s required for starting a section, or the whole, of the Metropolitan fire brigade to-any place in which their services might be required ”’. There was some sharp discussion, but in time the matter blew over. Prevention of floods

Sir Benjamin Hall’s Act had placed on the vestries and district boards the duty of seeing that the river flood defences were in good order. This the district authorities confessed that they were unable to do with their existing powers, and after serious floods had taken place in 1874, 1875 and 1877 the select committee on a bill promoted

by the Board of Works to increase the powers of the vestries, declared its opinion that the responsibility for flood defence should be placed on the Board, and the expense of the works fall on the ratepayers of London generally. Financial hability had formerly rested with riparian owners, and the Board did not think it fair to shift this responsibility from their shoulders : it therefore withdrew its bill and introduced another which became the Thames River Prevention of Floods Act, 1879, giving

the Board power to require the construction and maintenance of proper defences, and itself to carry them out

in default of the owners, who should be liable for the whole or such part of the cost as the Board might think

just. After a careful survey and the service of notices of instruction on the riparian owners, the Board reported ‘‘ that the banks of the river Thames in its course through

London are now fenced and protected, and that there

FLOOD PREVENTION : BUILDING CONTROL 43 has not been, nor is there now likely to be, any repetition of the disastrous inundations to which some of the low-

lying districts by the riverside were formerly subject ’.1 This expectation was not falsified until the disastrous flood of 1928.

Control of streets, buildings and places of entertainment The control of buildings in London was still exercised

under a tangle of powers which was yet further complicated by the passing of amending legislation. The Acts imposed a multitude of powers and duties upon the Board — such as determining the width of streets, dealing

with building lines and the projection of buildings or parts of buildings beyond them, giving consent to special or temporary buildings, dealing with dangerous or neglected buildings, naming streets and numbering houses.

In total there was a large volume of this work, though not so much as now falls on the London County Council. The regulation of theatres and music-halls involved

the Board in some of the acutest controversy of its career. A select committee on the metropolitan fire brigade recommended in 1877 that no new theatre or music-hall should be licensed until the Board had certi-

fied that there was adequate protection against fire, and that the Board should be able to require alterations for this purpose in existing establishments, with the consent of the Lord Chamberlain or the Home Secretary, where the building was under their control,? and with a

right of arbitration in disputed cases. Powers to this effect, limited to places above a specified size, were conferred in an Act of the following year promoted by the Board, but with the right to require only such alterations

in existing establishments as involved “ moderate expenditure’. A shoal of complaints followed even

the circumspect manner in which the Board administered the new Act, but its hand was strengthened three years

later by a terrible fire at a theatre in Vienna, at which 1 Report of the Metropolitan Board of Works, 1888, p. 36. 2 See chapter 23.

44 LONDON, 1856-1889 hundreds of lives were lost. After that, on the request of the Home Secretary, the Board made reports on all the theatres, shewing what in its view was necessary to make them safe, whether within or beyond the limit of

“moderate expenditure’. Most of the theatres and

music-halls were very different from the palatial places of to-day, and the work of the Board added greatly to the safety of the public.

The foregoing narrative gives an account of the principal services of the Board. Other duties of importance were entrusted to it, including the administration of powers relating to cattle diseases (much more prevalent in London then than now), dairies, cowsheds and milk stores ; slaughter-houses and offensive businesses ; the manufacture, storage and conveyance of explosives ;

the storage and sale of petroleum; and infant life protection. The Board vigorously exercised its powers

and pressed Governments and Parliament for wider

jurisdiction in the public interest when its experience shewed that the existing powers were inadequate. We have seen how the Board took active measures to protect

the interest of Londoners in the case of the commons. It did the same in other matters, notably in the supply of water and gas ; indeed, so far as water was concerned, the Board had twice to seek an indemnity from Parliament because it had been declared to have exceeded its powers to incur expenditure, one of the occasions being the promotion of bills to provide a public supply and to buy the undertakings of the water companies. Finance

The Board derived its means from two sources — rates and part of the proceeds of the coal and wine duties. These latter had for long been applied to improvements

in London, mostly in or near the City. The rebuilding of St. Paul’s and other churches after the Great Fire, the construction of Blackfriars Bridge and the making 1 See chapter 23.

COAL AND WINE DUES 45 of Cannon Street had been carried out with their aid. In 1862 the Board was given the lion’s share — the whole

of the wine duties (which by 1888 had dwindled to no more than £8,000) and 9d. of the 13d. coal duty, the other 4d. remaining with the City Corporation for such works as might be sanctioned by Parliament. In 1888 the total

amount received was about ; ae

£325,000, as compared Nant 4 | Ie NN yl sig

rates. ; Bt yee wae The dutieswere granted ™ | gee / ee with about £1,075,000from WH MHT os Been

and were due toendin 1889 7% a1 gS ae pee if not renewed. Both the Z| ily z ae | Mee ;

Board and the City Cor- 2: Gace (IVWNae sore

poration wanted them pro- ‘TUUUUNTITIUNNAWNa ez longed, especially because '/717)|/ BRM NANG /faeates

large public improvements _ |i PN ON ee

had been carried out in ex- | NIT Se oN Peg pectation of their con- —4——55 5 Ns ’ gg tinuance. Representations — ===" Ne e were made and deputations Mh rr 2 sent to successive Govern- en ments, only to receive REACTION discouraging indications _,,!%%oxaxs Crmzsy (whe had expected

which left them unhappy after the extinction of the Metropolitan

but, until the last, without tier sul dusr soccives an. applica. a definite ‘‘no’’. Gladstone, ‘on for rates, amounting to 2s. 83d. in the

: Punch June, 1889

in not unfamiliar fashion, ” ound) SDT DHE Dl

deprecated continuance,

without definite refusal, and hinted at a possible compensation... When Randolph Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer the hopes of the Board

may have risen, but he rubbed in the objections to the duties, criticised the Board’s expenditure, gave more

bite to his reply by remarks about the indirect election of the Board and indicated that the only chance 1 A hint which was interpreted as a promise, the non-fulfilment of which gave rise to complaint by Rosebery in 1890 (see the Marquess of Crewe, Lord Rosebery, p. 336).

46 LONDON, 1856-1889 was a strong majority of the inhabitants of the metropolis

in favour of maintaining the duties. The Board took up the challenge and introduced bills in 1887 and in 1888, but neither made progress. The third bill of which

it gave notice was dropped by the London County Council when it came into power, and the duties came to an end in July, 1889.1

From 2d. at the opening of the Board’s career its rate rose to 10d. in 1888. In early years the Board had hardly got into its stride, but by 1867 its rate was nearly 7d. despite the money received from the duties. From 1871 to 1873 there was a fall owing to changes in the use which the Board was allowed to make of the duties and in arrangements for repayment of debt. After 1885 the rate rose rapidly with the growth of services. Rates were then, as now, levied on occupiers, on the annual value of property occupied by them. The great public improvements which the Board were carrying out increased the permanent values of neighbouring property, and it seemed to it fair that owners should pay some part

of the cost. A select committee of the House of Commons, appointed in 1866, reported that “‘ so heavy has the charge of local taxation become in the less wealthy districts that the Metropolitan Board is of opinion that direct taxation on the occupiers of property there has

reached its utmost limits’ —a strange statement to modern eyes, even though the total rates at this time in, for instance, Whitechapel ranged from 5s. 6d. to 6s. 9d. inthe £. The committee recommended that “ a portion of the charge for permanent improvements and works

should be borne by the owners of property within the metropolis” ;? and added, rather quaintly as it seems to-day, that, if owners were so charged, they should be represented on the Board by some metropolitan justices selected by their own colleagues. The Board applied in 1867 to Parliament for power to levy

1 It was the Board’s keeness in fighting for the continuance of the duties as a relief of the rates, combined with its indirect method of election, that largely contributed to its unpopularity during the later days of its career. 2 See report of the Select Committee on Metropolitan Local Government, 1866, pp. xi-xii.

RATES AND LOANS 47 an improvement rate, to a limit of 4d. in the £, half to

be charged on owners. The bill was opposed by the City Corporation and some of the vestries, and the Board

did not proceed with it, partly because its financial position was eased by other measures.

The story of the Board’s loan transactions is of special interest to the student of local government,

because it was the pioneer of methods now generally adopted among large local authorities. At first no legal limit was placed on the amount which the Board might borrow on the credit of the rates, but in 1869, when its

outstanding loans had risen to about £8,000,000, the Metropolitan Board of Works (Loans) Act was passed imposing a limit of £10,000,000 on its total net debt. This condition was modified when, in 1875, the first of

the Board’s annual money bills was introduced —a series that is continued to-day by the annual money bills

of the Council.1 The preamble of each annual Act stated that it was “‘ expedient that provision be made

requiring that the borrowing powers granted to the Board by Parliament should for the future be limited both in time and amount” and gave the Board power to borrow up to certain amounts within a fixed period

for purposes named in the Act, the general limit of £10,000,000 being removed for these purposes.

In the early years money was borrowed from in-

surance companies and other bodies, except for the main drainage scheme, for which £3,000,000, later increased to £4,200,000, was obtained from the Bank of England,

with a Treasury guarantee. In 1869 power was given to raise money by the issue of stock on the security of the properties and revenues of the Board. This power was soundly exercised, and the Board’s stocks always stood high in the market: its credit was excellent, and from 1871 onwards metropolitan stock was recognised by statute as a trustee security. Commendably, the Board adopted from the outset 1 For later developments of the annual money bills see chapter 6, pp.

166-168.

48 LONDON, 1856-1889 the more thrifty way of repaying borrowed money. Broadly, there are two ways open to local authorities — the annuity system, by which principal and interest are ageregated and the same sum is provided in every year

for repayment of capital and interest combined ; and the equal instalment system, under which an equal amount of capital is repaid each year, with interest on the outstanding balance. Under the second scheme a much larger sum has to be found in earlier years for repayment of capital and for interest than under the annuity system, but the amounts for interest steadily diminish and the total sum which has to be provided from

revenue 1s substantially less. Lord Lingen emphasised this in a speech in December, 1891, when, as chairman of the Finance Committee of the Council, he said — ‘“ Supposing that in 1869 a loan of one million sterling had ‘been taken up, the amount repaid to the present

time under the instalment system would have been £366,000, but had it been on the annuity principle the amount repaid would only have been £165,000 ”’.1

In 1882 power was given to the Board to invest the money in its sinking fund in loans made to other metro-

politan authorities, and, later, in loans to itself. This appears to be the first time that this latter practice was allowed, though it has now become common.

From 1869 onwards the Board acted as a central loan-

raising authority for the metropolitan authorities other than the City Corporation, being required by statute to lend half a million pounds to the Metropolitan Asylums Board and, later empowered to lend money to the vestries and district boards, the London School Board, boards of

guardians and other metropolitan authorities, and, in 1886, to the Receiver of the Metropolitan Police District for police stations and other capital works.

It is of interest to record that for the first ten years of its existence the Board had as its treasurer and banker

the Bank of London. That bank collapsed in the financial disturbance of 1866, but the Board was secured

1 Saunders, History of the First London County Council, p. 596. See also chapter 6, p. 174.

GROWING CRITICISM 49 against loss. Thereafter the Board’s account was put

in the hands of the London and Westminster Bank. The Board considered taking the orthodox course of depositing its funds with the Bank of England, but joint-stock banks had the advantage that they would allow interest on balances, whereas the Bank of England allowed none. Such, however, was the misgiving in those days about their stability, that the London and Westminster bank deposited £1,000,000 of government stock in the joint names of the chairman and a member of the Board and one of the bank directors, by way of security.? The decline and end of the Board The Metropolitan Board of Works began all too early

in its career to be dogged by accusations of corruption and inefficiency. Even in 1859 The Times, which had

hailed the new scheme of London government so delightedly only four years before, was saying — “ The

fact 1s, the constitution of this Board has turned out a failure. The Government has shuffled off its own responsibility upon a body which is at once incompetent and irresponsible. The system of double election

has never yet produced anything but cliques and job-

bing. Unhappily, the Board spends our money and rates our property, and we cannot afford to let them alone to their own devices.”* The great works of improvement which have already been recorded had been vigorously put in hand, but there were recurring rumours that members and officers of the Board were personally interested in the letting of contracts, that work was being scamped, and that penalties for delay

and other matters were not being enforced. It was James Beal, a Westminster vestryman, later christened *

‘the father of municipal reform in London”, who in 1865 presented a petition to the Board setting out a series of charges relating to the contract for the northern 1 Report of the Metropolitan Board of Works, 1888, p. 147. 2 The Times, Ist December, 1859. 3 By Firth, in the preface to Municipal London. E

50 LONDON, 1856-1889 outfall sewer. The Board unwisely dealt with the

petition by referring it to its own main drainage committee, whose findings were looked on with grave suspicion by the accusers. Other charges followed, and gradually there accumulated a feeling of shaken confidence in the Board, of grudging admission of its good works coupled with fear of corruption in the way they had been carried out. So strongly did this feeling take hold on some minds that we find, for example, J. B. Firth, himself a man of exceptional public spirit, apparently implying that the very diligence of the members of the Board in attending its meetings could not be explained by mere sense of public duty.1. Those who could take so extreme a view could hardly be expected to credit the Board with good faith.

The accusations made in the ‘sixties were never

truly laid to rest and the various associations advocating

reform of London government were always ready to stoke up the embers and fortify their oratory with dark

insinuations against the Board. It must be admitted that they made the most of any small smoke there was, but it was not until the later ’eighties that anything of real substance was exposed.

In 1887 there were strong rumours of improper

dealings with some of the Board’s land, more especially over the letting of the site of the London Pavilion. An

investigation by a committee of the Board failed to elicit anything more than that the conduct of one officer had been injudicious, and he was censured and

his appointment later determined. Allegations persisted nevertheless, and a Royal Commission of inquiry,

consisting of Lord Herschell (chairman), Mr. F. A. Bosanquet, Q.C., and Mr. H. R. Grenfell, was appointed with the concurrence of the Board, and received every 1 ** During the year 1874 there were 44 meetings of the whole Board, with

an average attendance of 37 members, being a percentage of about 82, or an actual attendance of 1,628 out of a possible attendance of 1,980... . When we remember that the various representatives at the Metropolitan Board have to travel from forty different and widely separated parts in the metropolis, and that the object for which they come together is simply the performance of public duty, this result is indeed most remarkable.” See passage in full in Firth, Municipal London, p. 278 et seq.

A COMMISSION OF INQUIRY 51 assistance from it. The commission found that two members of the Board and some of its officers had been

guilty of malpractices resulting in personal profit to themselves. Of the Board the commission said —* It has had a multitude of duties to perform, and very great

works have been constructed by it, which have transformed the face of some of the most important thorough-

fares of the metropolis, and there has hitherto been no evidence that corruption or malpractice has affected or marred the greater part of the work which it has accomplished. We have received very numerous communications . . . impugning the action of the Board and certain of its members, but against the vast majority of them not even a suspicion of corruption or misconduct has been breathed.”’ ?

Nevertheless, the Board was gravely at fault ; there

were other indications that in some sections of its service a low standard prevailed: but, for those who know its work, there is pathos in the concluding passage

of its last report — “ It has been a source of pain and sorrow to the Board that, at the close of thirty-three years’ administration of the local affairs of London, which has been attended with at least some measure of success and in the course of which the Board has carried out some of the greatest works of public utility of which

any city can boast, its good name has, during the last year of its existence, been sullied by iniquitous proceedings of which, though carried on in its midst, its members as a body were entirely without knowledge ’’.* Public feeling in London against the Board became very strong in consequence of the inquiry, which gave yet

keener edge to the sharp attacks already being made against it on account of its indirect method of election and its advocacy of the continuance of the coal and wine 1 Interim report of the Royal Commissioners appointed to inquire into the working of the Metropolitan Board of Works, 1888, p. 39. In 1884 it had been written— ‘‘ Diligent, persevering and ambitious, it [the Metropolitan Board of Works] has gained a position amongst us more influential

undoubtedly than any other institution of our time.’’ Torrens, The Government of London, 1884, p. 14.

2 Report of the Metropolitan Board of Works, 1888, pp. 173-4.

—1889

52 tt ich the ice of . re : m m e LONDON, edings of 1887 hat1856 the proc Governmen is nowelco dou eforward of whichthe : ple device duties. The ublic s don an ado inforced the p it brought fo king Lon ty and

reinto d when 1 man tiveit county was assure 7 ministra within the Al including hent billAct, for the >i\. :Vky 21 WN \\; \LS aiiope of t Scop ernme ;d Local Gov stablishe

Pa "3 J & i( ye 1888, councils The

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|MN °and t ally nearer l |re] ITS T \\A\tbactu UANSHES 1 a10na, provis

Obiit, fit, March Mar 21, Y OF 1889. beling g .as ting “4:Only for ED OY WORKS. l, ELANCHOLY RD OF WORKS. ouncl,wal d by the

Mernopotinas Boat ANSTITOTT ITS th date (fixe nt Act THE N UNFOR LIER YE MBITION € nme IT Was ANS ME HARLIE] ABLE AMBITION Gover . 889,

eeCOMMAND seer a SeTHE ao KMENT the IstTO ofTApril, 1888, TO as ified by GAVE AN AON ED WED Tite ID TO THE unless modifi hen the

r aaY ear aa eerneoen Rae How SO aE END, OF SP Ss on x, Fauna 7 Ay TeneanEancn nm Board tre and pass re

It DRAIN SHOWED 7B ATED T 0 rder) WwW n THEN, f TO NOR THAN LABOURS W its scep , to a2 mo

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Sere BaeER FY eRasTe OF ae MORE MAY THE IN THAT Tsem. HADbeing 1s .me ht AV RATEPAY WELL, FOR I T° mig BE Mustorrat, Ho EMERGED March, 1889 mosphere, Id be content

would nch Board of Wor ess ks which at least Ited

thougit that te © te oblegay waxed pact played pe ‘end its oe the of 1867, Unfortunately, at the

: the a . 1887. ish con

would roceedings from hands of its c One by foolish mto sepoe

THE END OF THE BOARD 53 very close of its career. It had obtained power to construct a tunnel at Blackwall, a substantial new undertaking involving more than £1,500,000, and early in 1889 was ready to decide on the tenders received for the first

section of the work. The Board was asked to leave the placing of the contract to the London County Council, but, in spite of an appeal from Lord Rosebery, declared its intention of reaching a decision at its final meeting

on the 22nd of March, 1889. This was too much for the new representatives of London. The Government was approached and an order issued dissolving the Board and clothing the new Council with, its full powers on the 21st of March instead of the 1st of April, 1889.

Thus did it come about that, just fifty years ago, a

body which, judged by deeds alone, deserved the grateful memory of Londoners was summarily hurried

to an undignified and unregretted end. Within a few years its good works were all but forgotten, and we find even so informed a critic as Gomme speaking of the “imposition ” on London of “ the ugly and useless machinery of the Board of Works ”’,? a criticism which is a travesty of the fact. Its successor was soon sweeping with fresh brooms the chambers and corridors of Spring Gardens, anxious to prove quickly its superior energy

and mettle, and with neither time nor inclination to look back. We, however, in the more judicial atmosphere which the passage of half a century brings, can make up for the impatience of the new London County

Council by sparing a grateful backward glance, and

acknowledging gladly how much London owes to those three and thirty years of unappreciated labour. IJ. Toe VEsTRIES AND DistrRicT BoARDs

We have seen that the Royal Commission of 18531854 had suggested the formation of district authorities 1 The Board published in 1888 an excellent report of its work which makes good reading even to-day. The most comprehensive account of metropolitan government during this period is contained in Munictpal

London, by J. B. Firth, published in 1876. * Gomme, p. 38.

54 LONDON, 1856-1889 with large areas, but the Act of 1855 did not adopt this course. The district authorities constituted under it were the vestries of twenty-two of the larger parishes, fifteen district boards of works covering the other fiftysix parishes, and the local board of health for Woolwich which was the sole anomalous offspring in London of the Public Health Act, 1848. This gave a total of thirtyeight local authorities in addition to the City Corporation. The Act of 1855 also scheduled certain places as extra-parochial — the close of the collegiate church of

St. Peter,? the Charter House, the Inner and Middle

Temples, Lincoln’s, Gray’s, Staple and Furnival’s Inns, which were later regarded as coming for some purposes under the purview of adjoining districts.

At the time of the 1861 census, the population of the vestry areas ranged from a lowest of a little over 19,000 to a highest of nearly 199,000, and of the board areas from some 19,000 to under 86,000. As the population of the outer areas grew, some of the vestries were removed from the jurisdiction of the district boards and

made authorities on their own account. At the close

of the last century there were twenty-nine vestries and twelve boards. The numbers of members of the vestries varied from

eighteen to a hundred and twenty, according to the number of rated householders in the parish, and where there were more than two thousand householders the parish was divided into wards. Voting for the vestries

was on a reformed franchise. Anyone who had been rated to the relief of the poor in a parish for a year before the election was entitled to vote in

respect of that parish, provided that he had paid all rates due from him up to six months before. Voting

was by show of hands, but five ratepayers could demand a poll, which was to be by ballot on the follow-

ing day; if there were an equality of votes between candidates in a ballot, the matter was to be decided by lot. 1 See chapter 1, p. 25. ® J.e. the precincts of Westminster Abbey.

VESTRIES AND DISTRICT BOARDS 55 Bearing in mind that the Act was dealing with highly

urbanised areas, these voting provisions were archaic for 1855, but two others were, for town government, even more startling anachronisms. The incumbent and churchwardens were “ to constitute a part of the vestry ”’

as well as “every district rector now constituting . . . a part of the vestry ’’, and a chairman was to be elected at each meeting, but only “in the absence of the persons authorised by law or custom to take the chair’. Further, the accounts were to be audited by three persons elected by ballot — an amazing provision for that time, because there was by then sufficient experience of the importance of audit mm local government: its folly was illustrated by instances of the election as auditors of men who could neither read nor write ! } Members of the district boards were elected by the vestries of the constituent parishes, but the local board for Woolwich was directly elected by the ratepayers and

owners, with votes up to a maximum of six. It is

noteworthy that this system of plural voting was not applied in the Act of 1855, though it prevailed for local boards of health and for boards of guardians until 1894. The total local government electorate of the metropolis

in 1855 (all householders rated to the relief of the poor) was approximately 195,000, being about 30 per cent of the total male population aged twenty or over, but the total electorate did not mean much in practice. There was generally little public interest in the elections and many of them remained mere formalities. The district authorities were given a broad range of

duties, for to the functions set out in the Act of 1855

were added the enforcement of the Nuisances Removal Acts. In the main, the functions included — 1. paving, lighting, watering and cleansing streets ; 2. constructing and maintaining local sewers ;

3. requiring owners of houses, old and new, to make

drains into the sewers and to keep them in 1 Firth, p. 311.

56 LONDON, 1856-1889 order; cleansing, filling and covering any open ditches, sewers and drains which were offensive ; 4, appointing scavengers to remove refuse ;

5. preventing the sale of unfit food; preventing and abating nuisances from premises injurious to health, slaughter-houses and offensive businesses ; and

6. dealing with overcrowding where more than one family lived in a dwelling, and preventing the habitation of cellars which did not reach the standard required by law. To help them in the discharge of these duties they were obliged by statute to appoint medical officers of health

and inspectors of nuisances. The range of duties was expanded in the course of years, particularly by the Sanitary Act, 1866. In brief, the gate was open to the new authorities to

discharge an inspiring task, on a local scale, in three wide fields where there was ample work to be done for

the elevation of standards of life m London — street maintenance, sanitation, housing. The powers were sufficient to enable them to change the environment of the inhabitants committed to their care: they were the local complement of the larger powers entrusted to the

Metropolitan Board of Works. Vigorous energy by

both the Board and the district authorities might have achieved wonders within a generation ; 1n some areas

wonders were worked. The Board, certainly, did its share; but we shall have to record that too many of the district authorities fell short of their great opportunity, indeed of their plain duty. Taking first street maintenance, although there was an immediate marked improvement in some areas in the state of the streets, in others there was little or it was slow in coming. Much of the work was let out to contractors, and they were not always subjected to a proper degree of control. Although a visitor from New York in the ’seventies declared that by comparison with the

streets of American cities ‘the condition of those of

STREETS AND SANITATION 57 London and its suburbs is excellent ’’,} there were enormous variations, not merely in the state of the roads in different parts of London, but in the amount expended upon them.

When we come to sanitation, we find a notable

difference between the work done in sewering and that done for nuisance prevention. The sewering record of

the vestries is by no means unworthy. Between 1856 and 1874, about 650 miles of new local sewers were constructed at a cost of nearly £1,750,000. Camberwell

and Wandsworth, which had hardly a drain except offensive open ditches, were during this period given an

excellent drainage system. Even as early as 1876,

Firth records that “‘ whilst there is not now one-tenth of the London houses which are not drained into the main sewer, there probably was not in 1856 one-tenth that had the advantage of sewer drainage. ... . Nearly the whole of London was drained into cesspools and one of the most useful works performed by these vestries

has been the entire abolition and filling up of these nests of typhoid. . . . Hackney has filled up something like 6,000, Whitechapel 4,000, Camberwell 5,000, Poplar

6,000 ; and other districts in like proportion.” ? Nevertheless, we find the Royal Commission on the Housing

of the Working Classes, which reckoned among its members the Prince of Wales, Cardinal Manning, Lord Salisbury, Goschen and Cross, stating in 1885 that “ the work of house-drainage is imperfectly done, frequently in consequence of there being little supervision on the

part of the local authorities. The connection with the sewers is faulty’’; but they also recognised “the great change for the better ”’.®

Of nuisance prevention there is much less effective

activity to record. Thirty years after the vestries were created we find the same Royal Commission declaring in its first report—‘ the remedies which legislation has provided for sanitary evils have been

1 Firth, p. 324. 2 Firth, p. 330.

3 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes ; first report, 1885, p. 9.

58 LONDON, 1856-1889 imperfectly applied in the metropolis, and this failure has been due to the negligence, in many cases, of the existing local authorities. It does not appear that more satisfactory action on their part can be secured without reform in the local administration of London.” ? Success in the task of sanitation was, as Parliament had recognised, attainable only by the aid of vigorous

and expert officials. Many of the district authorities neglected to provide the motive power for the instrument which would have put great achievements within their reach — an able band of medical officers and sanitary inspectors, supported and encouraged by enlightened local bodies. No special qualifications were required of the medical

officers ; indeed there wag in those days no express training for the work. They devoted only part-time to the service, were usually poorly paid, and their appointments could be determined at any time by the authorities.

They varied much in quality, but, considering the conditions and the kind of bodies they had to serve,

one marvels at the bold candour with which many of them wrote in their reports of what needed to be done

and of what was left undone —a candour which is probably partly due to the splendid example set by Simon? in this respect. London owes gratitude to many of those early medical officers, who laboured often with little support from their employers or from public opinion, whose efforts often bore little fruit at

the time, but who prepared the ground for others to harvest under happier conditions. The sanitary inspectors or inspectors of nuisances were

in like case, and far less able than medical officers to resist pressure from their masters. These masters had to comply with the law by making appointments, but most of them complied with the letter only, by making one appointment for the parish or district, and long held out against doing more. The quality of the men 1 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes; first report, 1885, p. 34. 2 First medical officer of the City of London. See chapter 1, p. 13.

NUISANCES AND INSPECTION 59 appointed was often lamentable; a medical officer, writing of the late ‘sixties, said — “‘ The sanitary

inspector .. . was an unskilled workman .. . an official recruited . . . from the ranks of ex-sailors, ex-policemen or army pensioners. A knowledge upon sanitary matters acquired from a course of technical traming was not

expected from him” !—and no wonder, because he was generally poorly paid. It was said in 1876 that ‘the best of the vestries seem to think £2 a week an ample salary, and some parishes only pay 25s.” ?

Jephson states, with much truth although there were deeper reasons, “the main breakdown of the vestry administration in London was their antipathy

to mspection, and their refusal to appoint a sufficient number of mspectors’’.® Even as late as 1885 there were only a hundred and three inspectors of nuisances in the whole metropolis, an average of about one to every forty thousand persons. Mile End Old Town, Newington and Greenwich, with populations ranging from over 110,000 to nearly 150,000, had still only one

each. Even when zealous, the inspectors were set an impossible task; but many were not zealous and in some areas bribery was known. The credit is all the greater to those, of whom unfortunately there is less record, who laboured hard to do their duty. Under the Sanitary Act of 1866 the district authorities were empowered to make regulations for controlling the

number of persons who could occupy tenements, 1.e. houses let in lodgings or occupied by members of more than one family ; for registration and inspection of the

tenements; and for their equipment with sanitary appliances. The Royal Commission of 1885 com-

mented that “only two of the local authorities in the metropolis have been energetically acting upon such regulations, some of the other bodies having almost

forgotten that they had made regulations”. They added — “that only two authorities out of thirty-eight

have in the past been energetically taking action. . . 1 Jephson, The Sanitary Evolution of London, p. 189.

2 Firth, p. 312. 8 Jephson, p. 380.

60 LONDON, 1856-1889 may be fairly taken as presumptive proof of the supine-

ness on the part of many of the metropolitan local authorities in sanitary matters, at all events as regards parishes which contain large numbers of such houses as would come under the Act. The proportion of inspectoral staff which is considered adequate to the population in

various parts of the metropolis may also be taken as evidence of similar laxity in administration on the part of some of the local authorities.” }

The record of the vestries and district boards as a whole, even allowing for the improvements in the later

years, earns only lukewarm praise. They had some excuse : bodies directly elected for local duties cannot march ahead of public opinion without receiving a swift

set-back.2 The times were cautious of invading the rights of property — one vestry excused itself because

of “the novelty of applying compulsory powers to landlords’. Not only was the pressure of public opinion

lacking, but there was another factor, more important than often realised — the absence of adequate central machinery to provide stimulus and guidance and to check abuses. The Local Government Board was not formed until 1871 and even then went its way with modesty, forewarned by the fate of the General Board of Health against the dangers of too much zeal.® Yet, even when these influences have been given due weight, the conclusion forces itself upon the mind that

the composition of the vestries — the type of member they attracted — had much to do with their lethargy

and lack of vigour. The Royal Commission of 1885

gave the following particulars of the vestry of Clerken-

well — seventy-two members; average attendance, twenty-five to thirty; thirteen or fourteen members ‘are interested in bad or doubtful property ”; ten of 1 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes ; first report, 1885, p. 22.

2 There is the well-known story of the election appeal of a parish

councillor—‘* Us was elected to spend no money; and us ’ain’t spent not one penny ”’. 3 See chapter 1, p. 18.

THE RECORD ASSESSED 61 the members were publicans ‘“‘ who, with the exception

of one or two, have in this parish the reputation of working with the party who trade in insanitary property.

. . . Laking the house farmers alone . . . they preponderate in very undue proportion on the most important committees of the vestry. . .. It is not surprising to find that the sanitary inspectors whose tenure of office

and salary is subject to such a body should shew

indisposition to activity.” “‘ Clerkenwell ’’, they con-

tinued, ‘‘does not stand alone; from various parts of London the same complaints are heard of insanitary property being owned by members of the vestries and

district boards, and of sanitary inspection being inefficiently done, because many of the persons whose duty it is to see that a better state of things should exist are those who are interested in keeping things as they

are.’ Commenting on the “little interest ... as a

rule taken” in elections, the commission referred to ‘instances having been known of vestrymen in populous

parishes being returned by two votes on a show of

hands ”’.?

A poor quality of government was almost inevitable,

but, when full allowance for shortcomings has been made, the local conditions were much better than in the period which went before. Even so stern a critic as J. B. Firth, who was no friend of the vestries, said in 1876 — “ With all their faults and defects — and they

are many — the vestries have done much for London. Any comparison drawn between our condition to-day and our condition twenty years ago in any single matter

under vestry control abundantly proves this; but the benefits have been very unequal.”? Finally the vestries and district boards came to an end with the passing of the London Government Act, 1899, which created the metropolitan borough councils. 1 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes ; first report, 1885, pp. 22-23. 2 Firth, p. 338.

CHAPTER 3

THE COMING OF THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL

Ir seems singular at first sight that so many decades passed before the government of counties was placed on a democratic footing, despite the waves of reform

which from time to time passed over the country.

In the ’thirties Parliament reformed the admuinistration of the poor law and the municipal corporations ; in the ‘forties it laid the foundations of local government for other areas; in the ‘fifties, as we have seen, came the reform of London government, with (for the times) a broad franchise for the election of the vestries;

later still, means of sanitary administration had been established for the rural areas. Yet, all through these years the old form of county government by the justices of the peace persisted, though since the beginning of the century they had been shorn of many of their powers. While time was passing, the democratic leaven had been steadily at work within the community ; and although it manifested itself chiefly in the parliamentary franchise, we must bear its influence constantly in mind if we are to understand the generative forces which called county councils into being, for London as well as for the shires. The prelude to the reforms of the ‘thirties had been

violence and disturbance. That of 1867 was achieved without them. As early as 1864 Gladstone had recognised the need for extension of the franchise, declaring that “every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the

constitution ”. Pointing out that only a fiftieth of the working class was represented in Parliament, he had added — “It 1s on those who say it is necessary to exclude forty-nine fiftieths that the burden of proof 62

THE REFORM MOVEMENT 63 rests ’.1 When receiving a deputation from the working classes of London in favour of extending the suffrage, he had taxed them with their indifference and inactivity : he received the sober reply — “‘ It is true that since the

abolition of the corn laws we have given up political agitation. We have begun from that time to feel that we might place confidence in Parliament, that we might look to Parliament to pass beneficial measures without

agitation. We were told then to abandon those habits of political action which had so much interfered with the ordinary occupations of our lives and we have endeavoured to substitute for them the employment of our evenings in the improvement of our minds.” ? The very quietness of the demand seemed a danger signal and, as the extension of the suffrage was by this time recognised by both political parties as inevitable, each was in effect

hoping to achieve the credit with the electors of conferring it upon them. Such indeed was the situation, that the Reform Act of 1867, which, in addition to removing many anomalies, conferred almost general household suffrage in the towns, was passed by Disraeli’s

government only a year after a similar bill, introduced by Gladstone, had been rejected.

The Reform Act, 1867, did not help the country labourer, but its passage was followed by a lull. Agita-

tion died down, and gathered strength for the next struggle: the reforming doctrines were all the time

pointing forward to self-government in local as well as national affairs. The philosophical inspiration of these doctrines was an oracle which had much to say affecting local government. Indeed, if we seek not only for the doctrinal origin of the London County Council but also for some guidance as to the causes of those distinctions which in the early years marked off its proceedings from those of other county councils, we are led back to that expression of the democratic reform movement and its theories which is to be found in its most cogent form in the writings of John Stuart Mull. 1 Hansard, 1864, vol. 175, cols. 324 and 316. 2 Idem, col. 318.

64 COMING OF THE COUNCIL Mill’s Representatwe Government gave the reformers

a clear goal at which to aim —the reform of county government on the two-tier system, county councils with district councils subordinate to them, both elected

on a popular franchise. The county councils were to be “representative sub-parliaments for local affairs ”’, elected by the ratepayers and with a provision for repre-

sentation of minorities. Revenue was to come from rates ; there were to be no indirect subsidies, such as the coal and wine duties which, as we have seen, the Metropolitan Board of Works enjoyed in London. The whole state of local government in London and the suggestions which had been already put forward for dividing it into half-a-dozen or more areas were castigated in a highlycoloured passage — “‘ The subdivision of London into six

or seven independent districts, each with its separate arrangements for local business (several of them without unity of administration even within themselves), prevents

the possibility of consecutive or well-regulated cooperation for common objects, precludes any uniform principle for the discharge of local duties, compels the general government to take things on itself which would best be left to local authorities, if there were any whose authority extended to the entire metropolis, and answers no purpose but to keep up the fantastical trappings of that union of modern jobbing and antiquated foppery — the Corporation of the City of London.” ? It is essential to remember the principles and opinions which Mill so strenuously advocated, if the reform move-

ment is to be understood, for they formed its creed.? The yeast of these doctrines permeated widely, and in 1870 they had their first application in Forster’s Education Act, under which school boards were set up through-

out the country. The establishment for London of a school board elected on the vote of every ratepayer, both

men and women, marks an important advance of the democratic principle. It was the first directly elected 1 Mill, Representative Government, chap. xv. 2 For a fuller account of the influence of Mill’s theories see Redlich and Hirst, Local Government in England (1903), vol. I, chap. iv.

MILL’S THEORIES 65 authority for the whole metropolis. The ingenious device of the cumulative vote (each voter had as many votes as there were candidates and could “ plump ” for

one candidate by giving all the votes to him) was a successful — some thought too successful — method of safeguarding religious and other minorities. London had been for some time a veritable cock-pit for the reformers. Many were the endeavours to recast its government. Associations for reform sprang up and

faded away. As promised by Sir Benjamin Hall, bills had been introduced by the Government between 1856 and 1860 to modify the administration of the City, but

did not pass. From 1867 onwards several bills were presented by private members of Parliament, the first being brought forward by Mill himself. The gist of all of them was a central municipal council for the metro-

polis, with or without a comparatively few district authorities. The select committee of 1866-67 on the local government and taxation of London recommended that the Metropolitan Board of Works should be called

the “ Municipal Council of London” with enlarged powers, that each district authority should be called the ‘* Common Council ”’ of the district, and that the Govern-

ment should inquire how the metropolis could best be divided into appropriate districts. None of these proposals bore any legislative fruit. The opposition came not from political parties but from powerful interests.

In 1877 a countryman in middle life, John Lloyd, after twenty years of managing estates and taking his share as a justice of the peace in the county administration of Breconshire, came to London to read for the Bar.

He was struck by the lack of cohesion in the local management of the metropolis, and three years later advertised, as a venture, that a league was being formed to promote a measure conferring municipal government

on the whole of London. This brief anonymous announcement brought an answer from James Beal, whose Metropolitan Municipal Association had been in existence for many years with the general purpose of reform, F

66 COMING OF THE COUNCIL but was then of little influence. Contact followed with

Firth, Corrie Grant and other reformers. They encouraged the new recruit, and together founded the London Municipal Reform League in 1881, creating thus an association which was to play a great part in moulding public opinion in London during the next eight years. From small beginnings the new body gained influence: well-known men were drawn into sympathy, Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Arthur (Lord) Hobhouse, Lord Shuttle-

worth and Sydney Buxton, who with Thomas Hughes

had introduced a bill in 1870 for making London a separate county and setting up a Metropolitan Corporation with the City and nine municipal boroughs under it. For three years they worked, seeking sympathy and funds and holding meetings, preparing for a change of government which might favour their objects. Gladstone formed his second administration in 1880 and brought hope to the reformers, not only in London

but throughout the land. It soon became clear, however, that there were many obstacles to achievement. Constantly Ireland “ blocked the way ” and there were

other preoccupations both at home and abroad. The prime minister was continually being faced with the growing discontent of his Radical supporters, who saw the years slip by with nothing done to reward them for their votes. Chamberlain began to express himself with violent force and a first-class measure was at last brought in, to deal with franchise reform. The bill for introducing democracy to the countryside — the enfranchisement of county electors — was introduced in March, 1884, recognising the reformers’ principle of identity of suffrage between country and town. There was no real opposition

in the Commons; but some Conservatives took the ‘hedging ” course of suggesting that the bill should not proceed until a redistribution of seats bill had first been passed. Chamberlain in a scornful speech likened them to guests at a Lord Mayor’s banquet who refused to say

what they thought of the turtle soup until they had

tasted the venison, and went on to quote, as typical of the opponents to the measure, a speech of Randolph

FRANCHISE REFORM 67 Churchill’s in which he had said — “‘ If I saw them [the agricultural labourers] holding vast meetings, collecting

together from all parts, tearing down the railings of Hyde Park, engaging the police and even the military —on these grounds and on these grounds only would

I consent to equalise the position of the agricultural

labourer and the town artisan ”’.1 The opposition was taken up mainly by Salisbury in the House of Lords, but this produced so strong a public feeling in the country (the “ peers against the people ”

agitation) that ultimately both the county electors bill and a redistribution of seats bill were passed as agreed compromise measures. This placed the reformers’ feet firmly on the ladder and contributed to the recasting of county government ; for the expectation was that the emancipated electors in the rural areas would press for that control of their own local affairs which their towndwelling brothers enjoyed.

There had been so much activity on the stage of national and international politics, that it looked as if

London would be crowded out from notice.2? A vocal minority, however, drew constant attention to the need

for London government reform, and measures were promised in 1882 and 1883. These promises did not mature until April, 1884, when Sir William Harcourt launched the vessel of London municipal reform upon a sea “ strewn with many wrecks and whose shores are whitened with the bones of many previous adventurers ”’.? The bill proposed the expansion of the City Corporation

into a large central authority for London, consisting of two hundred and forty directly elected members, and for local administration the setting up of district councils.

Describing London as the place “where wealth

accumulates and men decay”, Harcourt dwelt on the importance of a single central municipality with subordinate district councils, rather than petty corporations 1 Hansard, 1884, vol. 286, col. 951. 2 This was the theme of bitter complaint among London reformers. $ Hansard, 1884, vol. 287, col. 41. See plate, p. 68.

68 COMING OF THE COUNCIL who “would not rise to the dignity of turtle soup— they would hardly rise to the dignity of conger’’. The functions of the local bodies were to be determined, and

their areas might be adjusted, by the central body. Harcourt went on to explain that the members of the central council elected from each constituency would be ex officoo members of the district council of that area,

forming thus connecting links between the district councils and the central body. There was also to be

an arrangement for the local bodies to precept on the central body for their expenditure, which would be borne by the districts for which it was levied, and not equalised.

The proposals created marked public interest in London ; as John Lloyd puts it, “ meetings now fairly rained throughout London in favour of and against the bill, the papers were filled with articles, and the cari-

catures in Punch, Fun, Funny Folks, St. Stephen’s Gazette and The Hornet made merry over the situation ”’.?

The London Municipal Reform League’s campaign reached its climax. Denunciation of the special position and privileges of the City Corporation was the staple of

much of its oratory, and there were violent clashes

with city interests, ending with charges before Parliament, made against the Corporation three years later by Firth and other members of the League, that city funds had been wrongfully used to hire men to break up their meetings and even, it was said, to produce forged tickets

to enable one of the meetings to be packed with opponents of reform.? A select committee was set up by Parliament to inquire into the charges of malversation of city monies, and although the report found that there was no malversation, because the Corporation was not

accountable for the funds which in fact it had used,

the proceedings established that large sums had

been expended on organising opposition to the proposals of the Government and to the activities of the

1 John Lloyd, History of a Great Reform, 1880-1888, p. 55. Lloyd became a member of the first London County Council. 2 For a full account from the League’s point of view of their contest with the City Corporation, see Lloyd, op. cit.

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UP-HILL WORK

Mr. Puncu (to Mrs. Lonpon County Counciz). ‘Congratulate you, Ma’am, on retaining such a capital Chairman. He’ll get you along, if anyone can.”

man to succeed in the difficult role of ambassador for a public body which is all too often thought of as a vast, costly and impersonal machine, whose very efficiency

makes it less human. In many of its Chairmen the Council has been fortunate, and it 1s not easy to make 1 Saunders, History of the First London County Council, p. iii. The quotation from Rosebery’s Life of Pitt as there given is—" Pitt was

endowed with mental powers of the first order; his readiness, his apprehension, his resources were extraordinary ; the daily parliamentary demand on his brain and nerve power he met with serene and inexhaustible affluence; his industry, administrative activity, and public spirit were unrivalled ; it was, perhaps, impossible to carry the force of sheer ability further ; he was a portent.”

VICE AND DEPUTY CHAIRMEN 135 selections for mention. When the centenary account of the Council comes to be written, the historian may well find it hard to reject, as among pre-eminent Chairmen of the first fifty years, Lord Rosebery and Lord Snell.

On Lord Rosebery’s merits! some light is shed by the many examples of his influence to which this volume refers: Lord Snell’s term of office is so recently concluded

that it is perhaps too soon to record the wealth of his service, not yet widely realised, in elevating the standing of the Council in the minds of the people of London.

Of the Vice-Chairman and Deputy-Chairman it can

be said that the qualities called for in the Chairman should be found in them. In the chamber and outside it they must be ready to deputise for him in case of

need ; indeed the labours of the chair are more than one

man can be expected to bear unaided. The Vice-

Chairman and Deputy-Chairman by their less conspicuous work lighten those labours. The duties call for public spirit and devotion, for these posts do not always prove stepping-stones to the Chairmanship.

The office of Deputy-Chairman has an interesting individual history. It has legal authority, peculiar to the London County Council, in the Local Government

Act, 1888. Unlike the Chairman, and the Vice-

Chairman, the Deputy-Chairman may be paid. The appointment in its early form originated in the Progressives’ distrust of permanent officials, a feeling which strongly gripped such men as Firth and Saunders,? who

advocated personal control of stafi by one of the Council’s members, to be paid a salary to enable him to

devote his whole time to the work. Firth himself was the first holder of the office and brought to it a combina-

tion of ability with devotion to duty which aroused general admiration. Lord Rosebery said of him that, ‘having given up his position as leader of a party to 1 Of his chairmanship his biographer wrote, “it is not too much to call it the truest success of his whole career”. The Marquess of Crewe, Lord Rosebery, p. 338.

2 For the length to which Saunders would go on this subject see his

History of the First London County Council, pp. xiv and xv.

136 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE become the servant of the Council, he had disarmed

every antagonist and shewn absolutely unrivalled capacity for the place he filled ’’.1 While the office remained in its original form, it was

held, after Firth’s death, successively by A. H. Haggis

and W. H. (Lord) Dickinson. It was always attacked on principle by the Moderates, and after the close elec-

tion of 1895,? the Progressives had to give way. The office went out of existence as a salaried post with supervision of staff on the appointment of (Sir) Charles Stewart as clerk of the Council in 1896.8 Since then, the Deputy-

Chairman has helped to relieve the Chairman and

Vice-Chairman, and among other duties is entrusted with the work of affixing the Council’s seal to formal documents. A tradition has developed of appointing a member of the opposition party to the post. Mention of the sealing of documents recalls the circumstances in which the seal received its form. The Council was anxious to secure a dignified and well-conceived design, and John Burns, after consulting William Morris, wrote to Walter Crane, asking him to submit a design

for the seal. This, when it was produced, the Council accepted without hesitation, Rosebery highly commend-

ing it, but suggesting that the inscription should be in English instead of Latin. Save for the replacement of the shield bearing St. George’s cross by the Council’s coat-

of-arms, the original design has remained unaltered. It

shews a figure representing the Council, seated on a throne with the cap of Freedom beside her, receiving the symbols of power from Labour and Science.‘ IJ. THe CoMMITTEES

It has been explained elsewhere how the Council came into being first as a provisional body.’ The pro1 The Marquess of Crewe, Lord Rosebery, p. 334. 2 See chapter 4, pp. 96-97. 3 No member of the Council has since been paid a salary. ‘ A reproduction of the seal in its present form appears at the end of this chapter. 5 See chapter 2, p. 52.

COMMITTEES 137 visional council set up a provisional standing committee of twenty members to report the number, names, duties and powers of standing committees for carrying on the ordinary work of the Council, and to prepare a code of standing orders. The following were the first standing committees—

Asylums Industrial and Reformatory

Bridges Schools Building Act Local Government and Contagious Diseases Taxation

(Animals) Main Drainage

Corporate Property Parks: and Open Spaces

Finance Parliamentary Fire Brigade Sanitary and Special

Highways Purposes Housing of the Working Standing

Classes Theatres and Music Halls

Improvements

to which were added two special committees, on land valuation and water supply respectively, and the Appeal

Committee under the Metropolis Management Act, 1855."

The zeal for personal direction led to great. keenness

on the part of the members to serve on as many committees as possible. Of the selection of committees Lord Rosebery said, at the end of the year—“ At the commencement of that selection I remember there were loud and general complaints from almost every member of the Council that he was not on nearly enough com-

mittees. Those complaints have passed away. I remember that those complaints were so vigorous that we had to fix a minumum of committees which should be attached to the name of every single member.” ? The members were for the most part unknown to

each other, and selection of committees was a haphazard affair. Equally haphazard was the selection of chairmen, but there were many competent candidates. 1 To decide matters on which an appeal against the decision of a

vestry or district board was provided under the Act of 1855.

2 Lord Rosebery, A Review of the First Year's Work of the Council, p. 4.

138 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE Committee chairmen do not seem at first to have been appointed on party lines; on the contrary, the majority of them came from the Moderate side, and the difficulties in which some found themselves at times had to be eased by a standing order enabling a chairman to refrain from moving a recommendation of his committee with which he did not agree. On the question of the tenure of office Lord Rosebery tendered sage advice. He urged that the chairmanship of a committee should not be regarded as a

freehold office, but that there should be a constant succession of chairmen. He laid down a principle on which the Council has substantially acted for the whole

of its fifty years—“ Of course, the Council would be idiotic if, having got the best possible man for a difficult

place, as in the Finance or any other important com-

mittee, it were to part with him; but I cannot help thinking that the members might vary their choice without any reflection on the present chairmen of com-

mittees, and so give the greatest possible number the

greatest possible amount of responsibility and ex-

perience ’.t It is worth noting that, unlike many other

local authorities, the Council, although itself elected as a whole for three years, has always elected all its committees annually. There was no disinclination at the beginning of the Council’s life to set up committees, in addition to the standing committees, for any and every special object. During the first year, no fewer than eight special committees were set up — Contracts, Council chamber and offices, County rate (for Penge), Kew and other bridges,

Transfer of county business, Treatment of insanity,

Valuation of land, Water supply and markets. The task of drafting terms of reference for the various

committees had been entrusted to the provisional

standing committee, who performed it well, in spite

of great pressure of time. Most of the credit lay

with the Deputy-Chairman, J. B. Firth, who played

a great part in establishing the Council’s procedure. In

spite of the variety of duties and the danger of over1 Lord Rosebury, A Review of the First Year’s work of the Council, p. 6.

TERMS OF REFERENCE 139 lapping, smooth working was soon established among the committees within their several spheres.

These first terms of reference bear signs of the

immaturity of the Council; for example, the question of control of staff was variously dealt with for different

committees. To-day the terms of reference to committees are general, but the first terms referred numerous

individual matters specifically to committees, most of them burning topics which had been the principal planks of London government reform. Three of the committees were virtually ad hoc committees for special subjects —

the Local Government and Taxation Committee, to recommend a more complete system of municipal govern-

ment in London and to consider local taxation; the

Land Valuation Committee to report upon valuing land within the metropolitan area ; and the Water Committee to advise upon acquiring the existing water undertakings and to examine new sources of supply. The concern of the Council about the corporate property of London and its hope for union with the City are reflected in the terms

of reference of the Corporate Property, Charities and Endowments Committee, who, in addition to dealing with schemes of the Charity Commissioners, were “ to prepare and keep a register of all the land, buildings and

other property of the Corporation in such form as the Council may from time to time prescribe ’’, and had

also referred to them the report of the City Guilds Commission of 1880 and all other matters affecting metropolitan endowments. The two most important committees were clearly the

Finance Committee and the Standing Committee ; the former were given short and comprehensive terms of

reference covering the regulation and control of the

finances of the county and the preparation of estimates, keeping of accounts and all financial transactions, and were also specially empowered to regulate by sanction the spending committees. The Standing Committee held a position which, in some respects, was analogous to that now occupied by the General Purposes Committee. They

were not a “cabinet ’’, but were especially concerned

140 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE with all matters of general policy and had within their purview the surveillance of the Council’s administrative work generally, the allocation of work to committees and standing orders. Despite the wide terms of the Local Government Act, 1888, under which almost any function, except the power of making a rate or raising money, could be delegated to a committee, there was hardly any delegation in the first terms of reference, except of routine management. Close personal control by the Council itself, under which every decision of a committee, except in routine matters, had

to be submitted as a recommendation to the Council, was one of the reforms most strongly advocated by the

Progressive party and held up by them as a virtuous contrast to the procedure of the Metropolitan Board of Works.

The general number of members of the first committees was fifteen or twenty, except that the Housing of Working Classes Committee, which was one of the most popular, had a membership of thirty ; the Asylums Committee,’ for which it was found most difficult to get recruits, consisted of only twelve, and the Land Valuation

Committee, with a special and technical task, had a membership of nine.

An early contest raged about the question of public or private debate. The secretiveness of the Metropolitan Board of Works had been a sore point with many of the Progressives. As so often occurs when there is a strong

reaction against an undesirable state of affairs, there were several advocates of going to the other extreme and having all meetings, of committees as well as of the Council, open to the public or, at any rate, to the Press, with power to clear the room on occasion. This question was discussed at two meetings of the Council in 1889, at the first of which John Burns spoke strongly in favour of public debate in committees and quoted an epitaph on the Metropolitan Board of Works—* Killed by secrecy ; buried by publicity ’. Wiser arguments prevailed, however, and the Council decided to let committee meetings 1 For the special position of this committee see chapter 14, p. 347.

RELUCTANCE TO DELEGATE 141 be held in private, though the contest was close, the decision being reached by fifty-seven votes to fifty-four.

At the same time it was decided that meetings of the

Council should be open to the public and the Press.’ It has been thought worth while to set out an account of these early proceedings in some detail, as the mould in which the Council’s committee system was originally set has, in the passage of years, been changed but little from its first shape. A rooted dislike of delegation has, throughout its life, hampered the Council’s admuinistrative system. The Council set its face against delegation to committees until the necessity was forced upon it by the growing burden of duties and the mass of work which it became utterly impossible to discharge in detail

at council meetings. If there was anything which the Council regarded with more suspicion than delegation to committees, 1t was delegation to officers. Even to-day the Council, in general, declines to allow decisive power

to be exercised by officers without supervision. The consequences of the excessive rigidity of this attitude in expenditure of staff, time and money are great. To take an extreme example, the Hospitals and Medical Services Committee (though not required by the Council

to do so) themselves consider every year two vast

schedules, of anything up to a hundred pages of type, containing such minutiae as the necessity of replacing

a cracked washbasin in a matron’s bedroom or the

insertion of a pane of fireproof glass in a skylight.

Meticulous management both by the Council and its committees was feasible in early days, but the pressure

of work and, in particular, the taking over of the duties of the London School Board relentlessly thrust upon the Council the obligation of overhauling its procedure. The first overhaul of the committee system was carried out by the Special Committee on Procedure, presided over by Sir George Goldie, to which reference 1 The Local Authorities (Admission of the Press to Meetings) Act, 1908, afterwards applied to meetings of the Council and of the Education Committee.

142 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE has already been made. Even this committee expressed

themselves with the greatest caution. In their preliminary report of July, 1913, they said that “ under the existing system an undue proportion of time is absorbed by relatively small details of current administration to the prejudice of due consideration of important matters and even of large questions of policy. We agreed that a resolute, but circumspect, measure of further delegation of extensive powers to committees would be the soundest and most effective remedy for this defect. Our conclusion was, however, only provisional, as a greatly increased delegation of powers to committees could not be justified unless accompanied by stringent conditions

which would need careful and precise definition.” ? Again, in their report of November, 1913, they stated their conclusion that “in our view further delegation should not be entrusted to any committee consisting of a small number of members only ”’,? and they also excepted special committees from the new provisions for delegation.

The scheme presented in their report was comprehensive. The number of committees was reduced from twenty-seven standing and special committees, with a varying number of members and an unequal quantity of work to perform, to fourteen committees, with fifteen or twenty members and work re-allocated as equally as possible. The provisions for delegation to committees briefly amounted to this: every standing committee of the Council could exercise and perform, on the Council’s

behalf, all its powers and duties relating to matters in the committee’s terms of reference, subject to the ‘“minority clause’, and provided that expenditure over

£500 must have the concurrence of the Finance Committee.

Taken out of this general provision for delegation were a ereat many “‘ matters of principle ” upon which the com-

mittee had to take the directions of the Council. In order to maintain supervision of the work done by com-

mittees, there was a requirement that all action taken 1 Council minutes, July, 1913, p. 249. 2 Council minutes, November, 1913, p. 1125.

OVERHAUL OF PROCEDURE 143 under delegated powers must be reported to the Council quarterly. These revised arrangements carried the Council on

until 1931, when the second Special Committee on Procedure already mentioned was set up, under the

chairmanship of Sir Cecil Levita, to overhaul the Council’s machinery in view of the work added by the Local Govern-

ment Act, 1929. How much this was needed is illus-

trated by the fact that in 1929-30, before the Act came into force, council, committee and sub-committee meetings numbered 1,804 and the attendances at them 19,597; in 1932 these had risen to 9,321 meetings and

65,877 attendances. The outcome was that fresh

statutory powers governing committees were obtained, committee procedure was revised, delegation was extended, and the committees were re-arranged and reduced in number. The fresh statutory powers, obtained in 1934, wete a recast of existing powers with modifications to meet

the pressure of modern needs. Briefly, the Council could appoint a committee for any purpose which, in the Council’s opinion, would be better managed by a com-

mittee, and for the first time persons who were not members of the Council could be co-opted up to one-third

of the total membership of any committee except the Finance Committee. The Council’s functions (with a few statutory exceptions, such as raising a rate and borrowing money) could be delegated to any of the committees. For some years Parliament has shewn a tendency to prescribe what particular committees shall be appointed

for specified duties —for example, education, mental hospitals, public assistance, the blind, tuberculosis, midwives. Such detailed regulation of the domestic arrangements of local authorities may be warranted in some

cases, but as a rule is not to be commended. The

Council has been fettered by legal provisions of this kind, and was even advised that, on the strict letter of the law as it stood before 1934, it was not justified in appointing

an Establishment Committee to deal with all central

144 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE staff, a Supplies Committee for the whole service, or even

a Parliamentary Committee to handle legislation on all subjects, because each statutory committee ought themselves to deal with these matters for their own sphere of work. When the Local Government Act, 1929, was before Parliament, the Council obtained some relaxation so far as the Public Assistance Committee was con-

cerned, but it was not until the passing of the special legislation which it promoted in 1934 that it obtained a proper measure of freedom for allocation of duties between committees.

A full measure of delegation had always been hindered by the statutory requirement that all action taken

by committees must be reported to the Council. By the legislation of 1934 this was repealed and the way was open to meet the desire of the Special Committee for the “fullest possible delegation from the Council to committees ’’ and to obviate their criticism that “in a good many cases unnecessary time and trouble are

taken when sub-committees (without powers) meet regularly and consider in detail matters which are then

submitted to the main committee and practically the whole ground is gone over again. In our opinion, far greater use must be made by committees of the principle

of actual delegation to their sub-committees, so far as it can reasonably be given’. All standing committees were therefore empowered to delegate to sub-committees

minor or routine matters, staff matters, opening of tenders (other than those reserved to the Council), acceptance of lowest tenders, expenditure for stores and

other expenditure within the votes up to £200 for any one item (£500 for sub-committees of the Central Public Health and Education Committees), subject to quarterly

reports on the main items of action taken. In the case of committees, the frequency of reporting to the Council action taken under delegated powers was reduced from

quarterly to half-yearly, and the reports confined to the principal matters, omitting those of comparatively 1 Report of the Special Committee on Procedure: council minutes, December, 1933, p. 848.

OVERHAUL OF PROCEDURE 145 unimportant detail. Finally, the list of matters of principle reserved for the Council’s own decision was

overhauled.

In 1933 there were twenty standing committees of the Council, four permanent special committees and four temporary special committees. The standing committees were, on the recommendation of the Special Committee on Procedure, reduced to seventeen. To-day the number is one more, the two committees which formerly dealt separately with the London Building Act and with town planning having been amalgamated, the Committee on

the Welfare of the Blind having become a standing instead of a special committee and a standing committee having been set up to deal with air-raid precautions.

At present the Council has the following standing

committees—

Air Raid Precautions Housing and Public Health

Education Mental Hospitals Entertainments Parks

Kstablishment Parhamentary

Finance Public Assistance

Fire Brigade and Main Public Control

Drainage Supplies Highways Regulation Hospitals and Medical Welfare of the Blind

General Purposes Town Planning and Building Services

and the following special committees—

Appeal Staff Appeals.

The foregoing sketch gives a picture of the machinery of the committee system and it is now possible to examine

how it works in practice. Even with the measure of delegation for which the Council has now provided, a system so clearly open to the dangers of “ red tape ”’ and undue regard for form at the expense of substance could not be worked without a convention of practical wisdom and common-sense on the part of members and officers

alike, and, in particular, between chairmen of com-

mittees and the officers who advise them. The relation L

1446 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE of a committee chairman to the advising officers, both administrative and technical, is, although nowhere offcially recognised, the key to the success of the system. Occasionally even in official documents a ray of light 1s shed on this important relation: for example, in their report the Special Committee on Procedure of 1931-34 said on a certain point— We have considered the matter but, in the circumstances, we do not propose any alteration, feeling that the question is one of a kind on which a chief officer, although perhaps not strictly bound to do so would naturally consult the committee or chairman concerned ’’.1

When a member receives the documents for a com-

mittee meeting he may be faced, even under the present arrangements, with a formidable array of printed

and type-written papers. He will have the printed agenda paper itself, which will set out all the items for consideration. The first items — minutes and accounts

for payment — call for no comment. The report of action taken by the chairman since the last meeting, and the “‘ Part II” agenda ? (typed separately and con-

taining less important matters) are taken shortly, the chairman mentioning, or other members raising, any items of special interest. Also on the agenda paper will be reports of any sub-committees of the committee, usually divided into two groups, those relating to matters requiring a committee decision and containing recommendations, and those giving an account of some of the more important matters dealt with under delegated powers. Then, either set out on the agenda or separately circulated, will be reports by officers (often substantial treatises, packed with succinct information and judiciously worded advice) and any memoranda from other committees or letters from outside bodies or persons. 1 Report of the Special Committee on Procedure: council minutes, December, 1933, p. 857.

2 The items to be dealt with by committees are divided into ‘‘ Part I” and “‘ Part II”’, those of major and those of minor importance. This useful

practice, worthy of wider adoption, enables matters on which there is unlikely to be discussion to be dealt with quickly en bloc, while preserving

the basic rule that all items ought to be considered by the committee

HOW THE COMMITTEES WORK 147 It is on these last-mentioned items that we find coming into prominence the close relation between the officers and the chairmen. There is complete freedom for officers to present their reports uninfluenced to committees, but the clerk does not include in the agenda any report of an officer on important new subjects or ques-

tions involving policy of which the chairman has not previously had adequate notice. This custom has been embodied in the standing orders and prevents premature and abortive discussion. Before every committee meet-

ing it is usual for the chairman to discuss the agenda

and documents with the officers.. The clerk of the

committee and the technical or executive officers attend,

and advise the chairman on the action to be taken on the matters to be considered. At these deliberations politics have no place. The officers are not concerned with politics, and their advice is based on administrative

considerations. There may be items the decision on which will be influenced by political considerations ; how far this influence is to have play is a matter for the party meetings of members, and the chairman will often have had the opportunity of taking full and clear advice from the officers on the administrative aspects of the question before he attends such a meeting. No officer is allowed to attend any unofficial meeting of members. To gauge the influence of the chairman and the officers upon each

other is a delicate matter. Much depends upon the

personality of the chairman, his willingness to consider advice which may sometimes be unpalatable, and his standing and influence among his fellow members. The

chairmanship of a committee will not cloak a weak personality and this 1s recognised when appointments are made. It has been explained already that, in the earliest days especially, selection of chairmen of committees was

guided by the fitness of the individuals before other considerations ; the selection did not even proceed on strictly party lines. For some years now the chairmanship of every committee has been an appointment of the majority party, but there is a genuine endeavour to put in the most fitting men according to their gifts.

148 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE A committee meeting of the London County Council

has a businesslike aspect. It invariably starts with strict punctuality ; without any attempt to stifle or handicap useful discussion, items are dealt with rapidly.

One consequence of the system of bringing so much detailed work under the direction of the committee themselves is that they are obliged to do their work promptly or fail to perform it at all. Lengthy and vague discussion is unpopular and the manning of committees is sufficiently judicious to ensure that each has several members well versed in the matters with which they deal, so that any member who is incautious enough to intervene without adequate knowledge rapidly finds himself

in an unenviable situation. The chairman guides the

discussion of the committee, and the party in opposition usually appoints one of its members to act, as it were, as leader of the opposition on the committee. The relation between the chairman of a committee and the leader of the opposition on that committee is much closer than is

imagined. Over divergences of party policy they are bound to disagree, but, where the question is simply one of administration, both are equally anxious to obtain a common-sense result and both will be found guiding their supporters towards wise decision and away from

abortive or acrimonious argument. The leader of the opposition on a committee is often the man who, at a turn of fortune at the election, would be chairman of the committee, and it follows naturally, therefore, that he and the chairman regard the work of the committee in a statesmanlike way and have a frank understanding of

each other’s problems. It is rare to find committees wasting time on purely party discussion, except sometimes those which meet in public. Arguments on purely party lines, being better suited to the wider audience of the Press and public gallery, are usually reserved for the council chamber, and discussion in committee con-

sists for the most part of constructive and non-party

contributions.

The share taken by officers in committee deliberations is rather less than is normal in provincial bodies. In

DISCUSSION AND DECISION 149 the committees of many provincial councils the officials

do much of the talking: such a situation has always been strongly discouraged in London. The recognised practice 1s that the official is there to give advice within his particular purview ; discussion is primarily for the committee, and the decision a matter wholly for them. Obviously there are occasions when the committee expect oral guidance as to what they should do, and when their decision will accord with direct advice from an official. It is quite proper, too, for an official to support the views expressed in his report, in order to ensure that

the committee has a full appreciation of the matter under discussion.

Careful as the Council has been to avoid excessive overlapping between committees, disputed points arise in fields common to more than one committee. On the

rare occasions when this occurs and the committees concerned have divergent views, it is a function of the General Purposes Committee to resolve the deadlock, and the matter is referred to them for decision.

Ill. THe DEPARTMENTS

The foregoing explanation of the Council’s committee

system will have made it clear that committees are arranged on the basis of a convenient grouping of functions, with an eye to the amount of work involved, so that there 1s a reasonably even distribution of labours.

The departments, however, cannot follow the same grouping. In a few cases the work of one department is done almost exclusively under one committee — for

example, the mental hospitals department and the

Mental Hospitals Committee. In the majority of cases,

however, departments and committees do not correspond — for instance, the public health department serves more than one committee, including the Hospitals and Medical Services Committee, the Housing and Public Health Committee, and the Education Committee, where-

as the Fire Brigade and Main Drainage Committee

150 ORGANISATION AND PRODECURE covers the activities not only of the fire brigade, but also of that part of the chief engineer’s department which is responsible for the main drainage system. The departments are organised according to services — e.g. finance, law, public health, engineering, architec-

ture, supplies. The head of each department advises on the whole of the service for which he is responsible, irrespective of what committee is concerned. In other words, the chief officers of departments are officers of the Council, not of any particular committee ; every committee is entitled to the advice of any chief officer on a

subject within his purview. Thus, the comptroller of the Council is not peculiarly the officer of the Finance

Committee ; every committee is entitled to, and frequently seeks and obtains, the comptroller’s advice on the financial aspects of its work. So, too, the solicitor advises every committee on any question of law and it

is the duty of the chief officer of supplies to provide materials and a variety of services for all the departments

of the Council. To take another case, if the Hospitals and Medical Services Committee were considering the lay-out of the grounds of a hospital, it would be the chief

officer of the parks department to whom they would turn for advice and probably for execution of the work.

As regards the internal organisation of the depart-

ments, there is division between the technical and administrative sides, as in the government departments. There is this difference, however, that whereas in the

civil service in general the administrative side is the senior, this is not so in the technical departments of the Council. In Whitehall a Minister is usually advised by a lay administrator, who has considered and discussed the question with the technical officer. In the Council’s service, departments such as those of the architect or the medical officer have at their head a professional man, and he and his subordinates are responsible for advising the committees on matters within the purview of the depart-

ment, without the intervention of a lay administrator. This arrangement has the merit of enabling the committees to obtain at first hand the technical officer’s

THE DEPARTMENTS 151 advice, but, on the other hand, co-ordination between the departments 1s less easily achieved, and a committee may not always have fully in mind broad administrative questions.

In the Council’s service the problem of liaison is solved in two ways — by having under the head of each

large department, in addition to his deputy, assistant chief officers whose duty it 1s to keep under surveillance a substantial section of the department and to make sure

that its activities are co-ordinated with those of other departments and of other sections of the same depart-

ment; and by direct contact between individual officers

and those who may be described as their “ opposite numbers ”’ in other departments. The first arrangements for lawson work very well, and it is rare to find departments committing themselves to inconsistent courses. The other type of lzazson is not quite so well performed,

although realisation of the value of direct personal contact between officers — even quite junior officers — has been growing in recent years. In some respects the departments are interdependent. As far as the secretarial side is concerned, all departments except those for education, mental hospitals and public assistance and the hospital committees (which are subcommittees of the Hospitals and Medical Services Committee), depend upon the clerk as a link with the Council

and its committees. He is responsible for seeing that their reports appear on the committee agenda papers, and the resulting instructions are conveyed to them by

him. He exercises general supervision in the staff affairs of all departments, on which his influence pervades the whole service. The comprehensiveness of the functions of the comptroller in financial matters, the solicitor in legal matters and the chief officer of supplies in all matters relating to the provision of materials has already been mentioned. There is central provision for messengers, shorthand-writers and typing.

The departments of the Council have varied in

numbers and functions throughout its life. Seven de-

152 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE partments were taken over from the Metropolitan Board

of Works, and during the fifty years which followed others were added, until the present total number is fourteen. The departments rank in the order of their creation. Those taken over from the Metropolitan Board of Works were the departments of clerk of the Council, comptroller, chief engineer, architect, solicitor and fire

brigade: those subsequently created were the departments of public health, valuer, public control, parks, tramways, education, supplies, mental hospitals and public assistance. The vicissitudes of various departments can be briefly

stated. From the Metropolitan Board of Works a chemist’s department was taken over which is now under

the wing of the medical officer. The separate departments of asylums engineer and housing have been merged

into those of the chief engineer, the architect and the valuer. From 1915 to 1936 there was a separate parliamentary department, originally split off from the clerk’s

department and subsequently absorbed by that of the solicitor. The statistical department, of which Mr. (Sir) Laurence Gomme was for some years the head, was in

1912 divided between the clerk, the valuer and the

comptroller. Tramways were transferred to the London

Passenger Transport Board in 1934, and the works department, of which the story is told elsewhere, existed only from 1892 till 1908. Public control and stores (now supplies) were both created from the clerk’s department,

and the parks department was an offshoot from those of the clerk and the architect. This outline shows how, with the development and fluctuation of functions over half-a-century, the Council has merged or created new departments according to the needs of the situation, so that the administrative machine shall be always adapted to its task. The Clerk of the Council

It is not possible to give in the compass of this volume an adequate account of each of the departments,

THE CLERK OF THE COUNCIL 153 but some account is given of them in the various chapters dealing with particular phases of the Council’s

work. There is no such special place in which to

describe the work of the clerk of the Council, which has a bearing on all the others, and this, therefore, seems the appropriate point at which to say something of his special position.

In their origin the clerk and his department were somewhat humble. The early Progressives, with their fear of officialism, determined to entrust the supervision of administration and staff to a salaried member devoting

his whole time to the work. This arrangement necessarily reduced the importance of the clerk of those times. When the office of paid Deputy-Chairman was abolished,

the holder of the clerkship had to occupy the delicate position of prumus iter pares, many of his colleagues being men of national or even international repute, well

used to a substantial degree of independence. The former humility of the office made the new task supremely

hard, and there followed a difficult time. That the clerk of the Council should take any share in matters of policy has in the London County Council received slow recognition, although established from the outset in the provincial counties, where the first clerks of councils were fortified by being already in office as clerks of the peace. In London, by law, the clerk of the Council and the clerk of the peace have always been different persons. The clerk occupies a special position in relation to the members and his brother chief officers. As he attends all meetings of the Council and, through the nature of his functions, must know each member personally, he is perhaps more closely in contact with the whole body of individual members than any other chief official. As we have mentioned already, with the exception of the Education Committee, the Public Assistance Committee, the Mental Hospitals Committee and the hospital committees, he is the clerk of all the committees, but normally attends only the General Purposes Committee and the

Establishment Committee in person. In other com1 See ante, p. 135.

154 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE

mittees he is represented for questions of major 1mportance by the deputy-clerk or an assistant clerk of the Council, but apart from these special matters his representative is the committee clerk.

The peculiarly heavy burden which rests upon the clerk of the Council seems to have been recognised by the fact that for many years he was the only chief officer for

whom the law expressly contemplated the appointment

of a deputy. The deputy-clerk is more than an understudy ; he may act in his own name, even when the clerk is present, if circumstances so require. In practice he bears a full share of responsibility and should be a person capable of displaying the same qualities which are needed for the successful discharge of the duties of clerk of the Council. The position of the committee clerks deserves par-

ticular mention, for they are the “key ”’ men in the administrative system. In the first place the clerk of a committee has some mechanical duties which he must efficiently carry out : it is he who prepares and sends out

agenda papers, keeps the committee minutes, writes memoranda from his committee to any other committee,

writes the correspondence arising out of committee decisions (signing many of the letters himself in the name

of the clerk of the Council) and issues the committee orders to other departments which form their instructions

for taking action. At the same time he has noteworthy

administrative functions: he is the eyes and ears of the clerk of the Council, whom it is his duty to keep informed of all important matters happening in his com-

mittee or in connection with their work; and it is he

who, in the first instance, acting on general instructions, advises his chairman on questions of administration. He keeps check upon outstanding questions in the hands of other officers and sees that no oversights take place, and, under the guidance of an assistant clerk of the Council, maintains liaison between his committee and other committees and departments. The clerk of the Council personally bears a special relation to the chairmen of committees. It 1s the recog-

THE CLERK’S SPECIAL FUNCTIONS — 155

nised practice for chairmen to consult him on major matters of administrative importance arising in the work of their committees. In particular, this consultation is of value where a committee are examining proposals which may affect other committees. It is not always possible for the chairmen of different committees to see eye-to-eye on every topic, and if differences arise it is part of the unwritten duties of the clerk to help to compose them

and achieve a satisfactory solution. More is done in this way than is generally known, for it is a real ad-

vantage for a chairman to be able to receive unbiassed advice from a permanent official of wide general experience whom he can trust and who can offer him frank suggestions which it might not be possible for him to receive with confidence from other quarters. In his relations with the heads of other departments the clerk is not more than first among equals, save that

under the Council’s standing orders he is designated ‘the chief administrative official of the Council” and ‘the principal adviser of the Chairman of the Council and the chairman of every committee and sub-com-

mittee ’’. That he should, in fact, exercise an influence upon his fellow chief officers is essential. The value of this influence depends upon the personality of the holder of the office, and the respect which he can command : where these factors have been weak, there have been dissension and difficulty in securing co-ordination. Team-

work cannot be achieved without a successful teammanager, and this is one of the parts which the clerk of the Council must play. Here again, where differences arise between chief officers or between any chief officer and a chairman of a committee or a member, the clerk acts as mediator. Much of the advice that any officer gives to a committee must involve questions of admini-

strative policy; where this is so and the matter is

important, the clerk is consulted. Conversely, it 1s for the clerk to make sure that every chief officer has an

opportunity of considering any matter affecting his

department. However well these useful unwritten functions may

156 ORGANISATION AND PROCEDURE be performed, success cannot be achieved among a group

of men who do not themselves possess the spirit of co-operation. In the Council’s service this spirit is in

these days strongly present and does much to account for the smooth working of what is undoubtedly a complex administrative machine.

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CHAPTER 6

FINANCE: POWERS AND PROCEDURE THE estimated expenditure of the County Council on revenue and capital accounts in the year ending March, 1939, amounts to about £53 millions. This huge total sufficiently indicates the magnitude of its work and the great place of finance in its activities. As often said,

the expenditure of the Council exceeds the national budget of several important states. The financial procedure of the Council is necessarily somewhat complicated, not only because of the big sums which have to be dealt with, but also because of the many different services which are undertaken, and therefore 1t may be helpful to the reader to give a brief summary of the outstanding features before proceeding to details of expendi-

ture and revenue.! It is proposed, therefore, in this chapter to deal principally with the powers, procedure and methods of the Council in matters of finance and in the next with information about expenditure and revenue. The Council itself decides what expenditure may be

incurred, within its statutory powers. Estimates of expenditure on revenue and capital accounts are submitted each year to the Council by the Finance Committee after proposals put forward by the spending com-

mittees have been examined. The detail in which the estimates are submitted may be gathered from the fact

that those for the year 1938-39 occupied over 240 printed foolscap pages, mostly of figures. For many years it has been a rare event for any amendment of the estimates to be made in Council, so thoroughly have they 1 An intimate account of the financial history of the County Council is contained in The London County Council from Within, by Sir Harry Haward,

who was comptroller of the County Council from 1893 to 1920, and who thus had a leading part in the financial business of the Council during a long period of its life. 157

158 FINANCE: POWERS AND PROCEDURE

been previously thrashed out. When an estimate has been passed by the Council (the “vote ” as it is called), the

executive committee may then spend money within the limit of, and for the purposes specified in, the vote, but in most cases only with the further concurrence of the Finance Committee for any item exceeding £500. Some

cover, however, for estimated expenditure not yet approved in principle by the Council and also to meet unforeseen contingencies is included in the estimates as “provisional sums”’; but no money can be expended in these cases until a further definite estimate has been submitted by the Finance Committee to the Council and passed. That is, detailed check is assured for all items. The responsibility lies on the spending department to

make sure that any expenditure which is incurred is covered by the votes. Periodical reports have to be made to satisfy the Finance Committee on this head. In addition, there is a system of test audits by a branch of the comptroller’s service of all departments, including

his own; this is called the imternal audit, as distinct from the annual independent audit carried out by the government auditor. In recent years there has been much more devolution in the keeping of accounts from

the finance department to the spending departments, and the internal audit serves as a means of securing that the best methods of account-keeping are practised in the several departments, as well as of financial check. The Council issues some 800,000 cheques or warrants each year, an average of some 15,000 a week, holidays

included. The law requires that all payments out of the county fund shall be made “in pursuance of an order of the council signed by three members of the finance committee present at the meeting of the council and countersigned by the clerk of the council, and the same order may include several payments ’’.1 Obviously if each member of the Council who signs such an order had to satisfy himself of each detailed payment covered

by it, he would find himself a very busy man of little 1 Local Government Act, 1888, s. 80(1). This provision for other county councils is repeated in the Local Government Act, 1933, s. 184.

THE FINANCE COMMITTEE 159 leisure and with little time for attending to the important issues which come before the Council or the committees on which he serves. The members have, of course, to depend chiefly on the officers, and rightly so, under arrangements which amply secure adequate control. Finance Commitiee The Act of 1888 which set up county councils expressly

required each of them to appoint a finance committee, the first time that this requirement was made in a general

Act of this kind. While the practice of laying down detailed provisions in an Act of Parliament as to the manner in which local authorities are to carry on their work is usually to be deprecated, the importance of assuring proper financial control justified it in this mstance. A section in the Act ! laid down what were to be the duties

of the finance committee, but in terms so ambiguous that they have led to a good deal of controversy, among

other places on the London County Council. The

finance committee was to be appointed “ for regulating and controlling the finances of the county ”’, all payments were to be made “ on the recommendation of the finance

committee”, and no lability exceeding £50 was to be incurred ‘‘ except upon an estimate submitted by the committee’. The first chairman of the Finance Committee of the Council was Lord Lingen, a former permanent secretary of the Treasury, described by Sir Harry

Haward as “a man of grim and austere countenance whose financial purism would brook no opposition ”’.*

The leading spirits among the Progressives had big schemes in mind and jibbed at irksome financial restraints.

They passed in principle proposals with financial commitments before any report had been received from the

Finance Committee. Lord Lingen stoutly objected, saying—‘‘ No payment and no liability above £50 could legally be incurred by the Council except on the express 1 §. 80 (3). For the London County Council, the provisions are now contained in the London County Council (General Powers) Act, 1934. * Haward, p. 22.

160 FINANCE: POWERS AND PROCEDURE

recommendation of this committee. ... They could dismiss, he supposed, a finance committee but they could

not legally act without its recommendations, nor could

they prescribe what its recommendations should be.

This was strictly analogous to the position of the

Treasury in Parliament ” 1 — an analogy open to ques-

tion despite his subsequent defence of it in the same speech. Lord Lingen and his supporters, who included some Progressives, were defeated, and the final solution which in time was reached by the Council and embodied in its standing orders was that every proposal involving

a liability exceeding £50 must be brought before the

Finance Committee and an estimate must be submitted by the Committee, with any observations it desires to make on the financial bearings of the proposal, before it

is considered by the Council, but that the Council is free to accept, amend or reject the proposal of the committee — the only sensible course, whatever may have

been in the minds of those who framed this section. The legal position was made clearer by the provision in the Council’s General Powers Act of 1934 (section 20 (1))

which authorises the Council to delegate to the Finance Committee “ with or without restrictions or conditions as they think fit any functions exercisable by the Council”’.

When the Council is in session the Finance Committee meets at least once a week and the chairman in particular has a busy time. He holds a position of first importance in the affairs of the Council and if a man of personality, probably ranks in influence next to the leader

of the Council. Some authorities favour the appoint-

ment of chairmen of spending committees on the Finance Committee on the ground that business 1s thus facilitated, but it is not usually a good practice and is not generally adopted by the Council. Estimates and Budget The amount of expenditure largely depends, of course,

on the policy of the party in power, except that far the 1 Haward, p. 77.

ANNUAL ESTIMATES 161 greater part is necessitated by statutory duties and has

to be incurred year in and year out. In practice each party, whatever its views, has to keep a close eye on the level of the rates, and that requires careful scrutiny of proposed expenditure. This can be done broadly in two ways — by paring the proposals of spending committees or by stating beforehand the limits within which their

expenditure has to be kept. The latter system is the

more sensible where the limit is laid down after full con-

sideration and consultation and not arbitrarily, and is one to which the present practice of the Council tends. It is facilitated by the party system, which simplifies discipline among the committees, each with a majority of the party in power, and provides through the leader ready means of settling differences. Particulars which will later be given indicate that there has been on the whole a tendency to avoid large fluctuations in the rates once a party has settled down, so far as this is practic-

able, though new duties placed on the Council by Parliament and unforeseen circumstances may upset

intentions.

The core of financial control lies in the estimates. The heads of the departments are instructed to begin preparing them in October of each year, in consultation

with the comptroller. It is expected that the estimates shall be prepared within the borders of the policy of the Council, where that is already known. The tussle first lies between the officers of the finance department and

those of the spending departments, and many a lusty battle 1s fought behind the scenes, usually, though not always, in the friendliest of spirit. Ifa point is reached where the heads of two departments cannot agree, then the chairman of the Finance Committee will settle the difference with the chairman of the spending committee or, failing agreement in this way, the difference will be referred to the leader of the party for decision. All this work goes on without publicity and is heavy, far more so than is imagined by those without experience.

This preliminary work secures that, when the formal estimates of a spending committee are in due course M

162 FINANCE: POWERS AND PROCEDURE

submitted to the Finance Committee, discussion is usually reduced to small dimensions. Apart from the fact that this 1s the sensible way of doing business, it is doubtful whether it would otherwise be practicable to get through the work in time in the case of an authority with so wide a range of duties as the Council.

It 1s a further result that the estimates are rarely altered by the Council when they are brought forward

for confirmation. There was one case a few years

ago where an amendment to reduce certain estimates

by £1 was moved by the opposition and to reduce debate this was promptly accepted, with the only material

consequence that the estimates had to be reprinted. Not that there is absence of discussion on the estimates ;

on the contrary, they are the great field days of the opposition for attack on the policy and ways of the party in power. Discussion has to be confined to the services under consideration ; general financial policy cannot be

discussed on these occasions, the opportunity for that occurs on budget day. Four of the weekly meetings of the Council are set aside each year for detailed discussion of the estimates. The meetings are almost always long,

with danger of being too long, for which reason it has been laid down in standing orders since 1934 that the discussion on estimates at any one time must not exceed eight hours, and that at the last of the meetings, when

this limit has been reached, any outstanding items have to be taken in one comprehensive resolution on

which no discussion is allowed. The necessity for using this guillotine has not yet arisen, though in 1936 it was avoided by only a few minutes. The check of the finance department on the proposals of spending departments 1s strict. The figures are compared with those of former years, changes in prices and

the like are considered and estimates are checked by reference to unit costs, such as average weekly cost per patient, cost per head of maintenance in schools, in the ambulance services cost per call and cost per mile run, in certain services cost per inspection. These unit costs

are printed in the estimates and provide a wealth of

ANNUAL ESTIMATES 163 information for those who have patience and do not bogele at figures, though a great deal more would

have to be known about the figures to understand

why, for instance, at some establishments, on paper seemingly similar, cost per patient may be more than twice that at others. It is, however, the business of those who have to handle these figures to know these matters and to weigh how far reasons put forward for

differences are valid. It has always to be borne in

mind, however, that outside control, though essential, is always second best and that the best les mside — in the spending committees and the heads of spending

departments to whom real economy should be as

important as the efficiency of the services which they administer. This is a fact which cannot be too strongly emphasised. There appears to have been a tendency

in the normal practice of the Council to lean too heavily on the Finance Committee for economy. Some are apt to think that most of the discussion on

estimates is mere camouflage and may be inclined to think so still more after reading how matters are really settled. If camouflage there be, it is not in pretence of more control than exists but in not putting in the shop window the immense amount of control exercised in the

background. Nor would it be nght to think that because the majority party can always have its way, the opposition does not count. On the contrary, it counts a great deal. In the first place a large proportion of the business, by far the largest, 1s pure administration without party division, and in the second place even in party matters the criticism of the opposition in committee and Council may bring about changes. Far more influential, however, is the effect of criticism on general party policy, and the knowledge that criticism will be

forthcoming. The opposition may have little part in deciding where the car is to go, but may influence a good deal the steering and the speed. So far as actual resolu-

tions go, the general experience of most persons will probably confirm that of Sir Harry Haward — “ I cannot recall any public discussion on the annual votes in the

164 FINANCE: POWERS AND PROCEDURE London County Council directed to a reduction of expendi-

ture; it was always in the other direction, notwithstanding the lip service paid to economy by individual members ” 1! — but amendments of that kind are often more tactical than serious.

The budget day of the Council comes before the estimates for the several services are considered in detail by the Council. It is the great day of the chairman of the Finance Committee, even though he is deprived by circumstances of the dramatic advantage of the Chancellor of the Exchequer of holding everyone in suspense until the last moment, when he announces what new burdens he proposes to impose, or, in happier days, what relief to afford. He has not even the advantage of announcing for the first time the rate to be levied for the purposes of the Council because this will already have been communicated to the local rating authorities

directly after the meeting of the Finance Committee a few days earlier.

The budget day is when the general finance of the Council for the year is considered, and it affords the opposition an opportunity of finding fault with the party in power on its general financial policy and practice — criticism relieved from being merely factious because some day the opposition may occupy the seats of power, and rash words in days of minority may be brought up against them in the days of their majority.

For the present procedure of budget and estimates the Council owes a great deal to Lord Welby, who entered

the Council in March, 1895, and was chairman of the

Finance Committee until the Progressives lost their majority in 1907, except for two years when he was first

Vice-Chairman and then Chairman of the Council; he thus served as chairman of the Finance Committee for

ten years. Like Lord Lingen, he was a former permanent secretary of the Treasury, and it is notable that the Council in those days obtained the services on its Finance Committee of no less than three former per1 Haward, p. 84.

CAPITAL ESTIMATES 165 manent heads of the department, because Sir Francis Mowatt later joined the committee. Lord Welby saw the need of better financial procedure and carried through

a scheme based on the practice evolved by the central government after long years of experience. His services to the Council as chairman of the Finance Committee

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SCHOOL MEDICAL SERVICE 301 of school children was undertaken as a routine, two years before it became compulsory for the country at large.

Dr. Kerr was able and vigorous, but individual in

his methods. Facilities for treatment were not yet generally available and he used to concentrate the inspecting staff in districts where treatment was within

reach. All the children were rapidly examined and advice cards given to them. Armed with these, throngs of them besieged the hospitals in the neighbourhood, which could not possibly cope with them. An exasper-

ated senior surgeon at one of the great eye hospitals, after pushing his way through hordes of children and their parents each morning, is said to have chalked up regularly on his consulting room wall — “ God damn the L.C.C.!” This could not last, and, with the passing of the Act of 1907, it came within the Council’s power to provide medical treatment for children. Cautiously, the Council set up a committee, including outstanding members of the medical profession, to advise them. The committee reported in favour of using the existing voluntary centres

of treatment, such as the hospitals, as far as possible and that, to supplement these, voluntary school treatment centres should be formed. This policy was the start of personal friction and difficulty. Dr. Kerr did not believe in the voluntary system. (Sir) Cyril Jackson was chairman of the Education Committee, (Sir) Robert Blair was the Council’s education officer, and Sir Shirley Murphy the medical officer of health ; at the Board of

Kducation were Sir Robert Morant as permanent

secretary and (Sir) George Newman as medical officer. These men, forceful in personality and views, reflected the violent clash of opinion on the subject which divided the community and hindered progress at the very time

when it should have been most rapid. Not until 1910 were agreements for treatment made with six voluntary hospitals, and three treatment centres opened by voluntary committees.

The inspection system already established by the

302 PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES Council was at variance with that which the Board of Education wished to see generally in operation. London had the unique and Gilbertian situation of its medical officer directing medical inspection in schools while the education officer directed medical treatment in hospitals.

Dr. Kerr’s method of completing the inspection of children of all ages in one school before passing on to the next resulted in many schools not being visited at all. The Board of Education directed that two groups of children — those entering and those leaving — should be examined in every year, and in 1911 reported to the Council their dissatisfaction with the London system, speaking of “failure without parallel’’, though there were

other views, for Kerr aimed at something far more thorough than the Board of Education had in mind. The deadlock had to be resolved, and that same year the Council decided to place the whole of the school medical work under the new medical officer, Dr. (Sir) William Hamer.

In 1906 had been passed the Education (Feeding of Children) Act, empowering education authorities to feed

children who could not profit from teaching through lack of food. This Act had, in London, to the lasting credit of the teachers, been anticipated by endeavours to

provide food with the help of voluntary funds. Bread and soup at midday, and sometimes breakfasts of bread

and margarine, with hot cocoa, had been supplied to needy children in this way. The London School Board had made special enquiries into the subject in 1889, 1895

and 1898-99. The first enquiry led the Board to form

the London School Dinners Association, to co-ordinate the activities of the many charitable agencies concerned in the work, the second led to the appointment of a subcommittee for each necessitous Board school (249 out of the total of 482). In 1889 and in 1899, it was estimated that there were about 55,000 underfed children, and the

Board concluded that the needs could be met from voluntary sources. The Council took over this organisation in 1904 and

FEEDING SCHOOL CHILDREN 303 appointed sub-committees for non-provided necessitous schools. When the Act of 1906 was passed, the central feeding committee in London feared ill results from the use of the new powers, and the Council, after much con-

sideration, decided to continue the voluntary system, using the rates to meet the cost of such matters as equip-

ment. In 1908 the Chairman of the Council and the Lord Mayor issued a joint appeal for contributions and about £12,000 was received, but before the end of the year the Council decided that county funds would have

to be used. In 1910 the supply of milk to under-

nourished school children was inaugurated, with results so successful that soon milk was given to all needy cases on the school doctor’s advice. The scheme of the Milk Marketing Board was initiated in 1934, and by 1937-38

about 320,000 children were either receiving milk at school at specially low cost or receiving the free milk given to needy cases certified by the school doctor.’ This movement for school feeding had consequences

beyond the primary object of putting an end to malnutrition. The Council had no desire to supersede the voluntary agencies which had done so much good work before the Act of 1906 was passed. Rather, it was the Council’s policy to encourage them and widen their field

of function. To supervise the new work of school feeding there was established, in each of the thousand or

more schools of the London education authority, a voluntary school care committee. Soon these committees

proved their worth in other directions too. For every

school the care committee became the social stimulus for parents and children. The voluntary workers, of whom to-day there are between five and six thousand, guided by salaried organisers on the Council’s staff, were entrusted with responsible powers and duties. In addition to attend1 The average daily number of dinners provided in 1937-38 for children at public elementary schools was over 8,400, of which 6,000 were provided free of charge and the remaining 2,400 for payment, the standard charge

being 4d. a dinner. The total gross expenditure on provision of food for public elementary school children was about £94,000 of which approximately 60 per cent represents the cost of the food. About £8,200 was received in payments, all other expenditure being met in about equal proportions from rates and grants.

304 PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES ing medical inspections, persuading parents to have their

children treated for ailments, and visiting children in their homes, they were empowered to assess the amount which parents should pay towards the cost of treatment

and feeding of their children, and in needy cases to distribute vouchers for free treatment at hospitals, and to authorise free feeding at school. At the same time they undertook after-care work, and helped to find children employment on leaving school in careers best suited to

their ability. This work, tactfully carried on for more than thirty years, has resulted in great benefit to the school children of London: almost equally important, so far from breaking down the independence of parents,

it has enhanced their pride in their children and their self-respect.

On another side the care committees have proved

their worth. The medical treatment of children — diverse as their ailments are diverse, and given in many hospitals and voluntary centres — called for the maintenance of liaison with school and home alike. Through the medium of the care committee worker the efforts of

physician and surgeon to cure ailments of the child’s body are supplemented by those of the social worker to cure defects in the child’s environment at home. This mingling of medical and social endeavour has, in general,

shortened the duration of treatment and ensured the permanence of many cures. Again, with organisations supplying special needs —the Invalid Children’s Aid Association, tuberculosis care committees, the Children’s

Country Holiday Fund and others — and in the broad field covered by the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the care committees have proved themselves a helpful channel for beneficial relations.

The arrangements with voluntary organisations for treatment of school children, of which the difficult early

history has been outlined, made good progress after 1911. Some of the hospitals had proved cautious at the

outset, fearing official control. Medical practitioners and groups of charitable persons were approached in

SCHOOL CARE COMMITTEES 305 various districts and responded readily by banding themselves together to provide, with the aid of grants from the Council, treatment centres to supplement the work of the hospitals. By the end of 1912 arrangements had been made with eleven hospitals, and seventeen school treatment centres had been established, providing for the needs of over fifty-four thousand children a year.

Parliament voted grants for the work, and of the

£60,000 first made available in 1912-13 the greater part came to London. The treatment centres provide a great variety of special services — for example, dental

treatment, treatment for ear, nose and throat, and the prescription of spectacles—and to-day there are eightyone of them at which annually 140,000 children receive

care for their teeth, 13,500 attention to ear, nose and

throat, 25,000 prescriptions for spectacles, and 125,000 treatment for minor ailments. This work is carried out by two hundred and sixty-six doctors giving part-time

service and a staff of skilled nurses.

The school medical service progressed but slowly

during the war. The passing of the Education Act, 1921, making the provision of medical treatment compulsory, kindled a fresh spark, but 1t was immediately

damped by the depression of 1922. The Council’s

economy committee abolished the compulsory day continuation schools established only two years before, and

with them went the newly inaugurated inspection of children on leaving school. This was a great loss, as the usefulness of this medical examination, especially for choice of employment, had quickly proved itself ; continuous agitation for restoring it succeeded in 1925. It was the economy committee which in 1922 restored the part-time system of school doctors which had been

in force before 1911; for the ten years from 1911 to 1921, full-time medical officers had been employed. Whole-time versus part-time has been a thorny controversy and the Council has tried both: in the end the service has remained largely on a part-time basis.

The improvement in health of the children in xX

306 PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES school threw into relief the neglected state of infants at entry: the school medical officer was prompted to exclaim that he was the receiver of damaged goods and

had to expend most of his initial energies on repair. In 1918 the Maternity and Child Welfare Act had entrusted to the metropolitan borough councils the safeguarding of the health of children under school age. The improvement which followed was accelerated by

close liaison between the child welfare services and the school medical service. By supply of health records the child welfare centres were able to furnish a full account to the school doctors of the health of many children on

entering school. In many cases (the number is still growing) child welfare centres and school treatment centres occupied joint premises; and, when the child welfare work is performed by a part-time physician, it has often been possible to appoint the same doctor to both spheres of work — a notable gain in continuity of treatment. On the transfer to the Council in 1930 of the hospitals

of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, there was a great gain to the school medical service. The special children’s hospitals of the Board were recognised for grant by the

Board of Education as hospital schools and became an integral part of the scheme. The scope of the service was broadened and the range of treatment available became yet greater. Some of the developments of recent years are worthy of special mention. First of all, open-air and sight-saving schools have

done much to improve the health of children. The Council was the pioneer of the movement, having opened

at Bostall Woods in 1907 the first open-air school in the country. To-day, not only are there fifteen openair schools educating two thousand children, but there are the King’s Canadian residential open-air school at

Bushy Park, which every year gives some three

thousand London schoolboys a spell of camp life, and other similar schools for girls at St. Leonard’s and elsewhere. The open-air classes in the London parks alone

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GAMES 507 ball-boys, registered and equipped with armlets by the Council in 1893, could be employed and paid by the players. It was not until 1921 that the Council provided nets. The cycling craze of the ‘nineties was echoed in the Council’s minutes, where we find tenders being invited for the hiring of bicycles in Battersea Park for those who wished to exercise the new sport or to learn it.!_ Later, in 1904, the Council endeavoured to prevent ‘ motorcars emitting offensive odours ’”’ from using the parks.

Until 1915 all provision for games made by the Council had to be free of charge, except golf at Hainault Forest and boating, but in that year the Council obtained

power to charge clubs reserving their own pitches an amount sufficient to cover the cost of maintenance. The power to spend money on providing music in the parks was first obtained in 1890; before then, band performances had been given voluntarily by the National

Sunday League and others. The performances of concert parties in the parks date from 1918, but the Council had no power to pay for them. This power was obtained in 1935, the year before the introduction of children’s

entertainments during the afternoons in the summer holidays. For a short time after the war the Council made provision for dances at a charge of 4d. a head, but in a few years the craze for dancing died down and the arrangements were discontinued. There has, however, been a revival of interest, and as recently as the summer of 1938 the Council made, with some success, arrangements at Highbury Fields which enabled the inhabitants of Islington to dance the “ Lambeth Walk ”’. The playing of games on Sundays has been a matter of acute controversy from time to time in the Council, and until 1922 the only recreations allowed on Sundays were boating (at two parks only), bathing, model-yacht

sailing, kite-flying and skating. In that year the

Council decided to allow adults only to play games after one o’clock in the winter and two o’clock in the summer,

and to allow boating throughout the day. This concession was extended in 1929 so as to allow children in 1 See illustration on p. 515.

508 PARKS AND OPEN SPACES charge of responsible adults to play court games on Sundays, and in 1935 to allow golf to be played through-

out the day. The provision of open-air swimming-baths has made notable progress, particularly since the war, and it 1s a far cry from the floatmg swimming-bath moored in the Thames beside the Victoria Embankment?! to the present-

day “lidos ” with purified water, sun-bathing terraces and cafés, which the Council has been providing in recent

years. The modern lidos are intended not only to be places of pleasure resort, but to act in some degree as community centres — social rallying points for the neighbourhood about them.

It would be wrong to assume, however, that the

Council’s endeavours have been directed only towards

making provision for the young and active. The improvement of open spaces for those wishing to enjoy rest and contemplation has never been overlooked. The advance in the art of gardening, a notable feature of the present century, has left its mark on the London parks,

which have been steadily emancipated from the old stereotyped arrangements of dull evergreen shrubbery and formal bedding to the more modern practice of open srouping of flowering trees and shrubs and the designing of informal landscape effects. It 1s in the provision of rest and recreation that some of the smaller open spaces in inner London show their particular value. Even in a space as small as an acre, grass and trees can be introduced which afford a restful contrast to the surrounding buildings and busy streets.

Another change that should be recorded is in the

manner in which London open spaces are managed. In 1889 there were five staff at headquarters and 340 in the parks ; to-day there are fifty-five at headquarters and

1,430 in the parks. Fifty years ago the parks were

1 The Council resolved to ‘‘ accede to the request of Mr. Chandler to be allowed to make an opening in the parapet wall of the Victoria Embankment, and to place an iron gate in the opening to give access to the floating

swimming-bath proposed to be placed in the Thames at the east end of the river police-station opposite Somerset House ’’ — council minutes, Ist April, 1890, p. 286.

LANDSCAPE GARDENING 509 patrolled by officers in constable’s uniform and their duties were confined to patrolling. In 1903 the constable’s uniform was abandoned, the keeper’s uniform, substantially in the style familiar to-day, was adopted, and, in addition to patrol work, keepers were given duties of assisting in maintaining the tidiness and good appearance of the parks. As elsewhere, the war called for special service from the London parks. Some of them were at first used forthe demonstration of model allotments and, later, extensive

areas of grass-land were converted into allotments and let out to the public for cultivation. The grass of playing-grounds which were not in use was left unmown for haymaking. Even the fish in the ornamental ponds were caught, and about a ton of fresh-water fish was sold for food. Several of the parks were also used as anti-aircraft stations. The green-belt scheme

The scheme for securing open spaces, which is now

generally familiar as “the green belt scheme,” is of sufficient importance to justify a special account of it. It is almost certainly the greatest single contribution to the provision of open spaces for Greater London during the whole fifty years. For public advocacy of the underlying idea the credit must be given to the Greater London Regional Planning Committee, but it is the Council which

can rightly claim the distinction of having devised practical means of giving it effect.

The conception of a green girdle of rural land surrounding London is an old one. From Nonsuch Park, near Hatfield, now itself part of the green belt, a proclamation

was issued by Queen Elizabeth in 1580 prohibiting the erection of new buildings within three miles from any of the gates of the City of London — a proclamation which, however, did not deter the builder from risking the penalties which it imposed. Later proclamations had no greater effect, but in spite of continual building during the next two hundred years or more, it would still have

510 PARKS AND OPEN SPACES been possible, as recently as 1800, to secure the preserva-

tion of a continuous belt of open land within about five miles of Charing Cross. By 1914 a similar belt

could have been established within fifteen miles from Charing Cross, but in the twelve years after the war the growth of London was so swift that a continuous belt soon became a dream of the past; by 1930 open land within eleven miles of Charing Cross was being built over at the rate of at least a thousand acres a year. As a result of the survey which made public this serious fact,

the Greater London Regional Planning Committee devoted a large part of their second report to pointing out the need for a green-belt scheme. Practical means were not easy to find, owing to the

vastness of the problem, the great number of local

authorities in the areas concerned and the absence of any central authority with power to take action. The solution devised by the London County Council was simple ; 1t made an offer that, during the period of three years from the beginning of 1935, it would make contributions, up to a maximum in the aggregate of £2,000,000,

towards the expense of county and county borough councils on the borders of London in buying or otherwise preserving open spaces of regional importance to London.

The simplicity of this arrangement, and the realisation that by its means an object which was attractive to the popular imagination could be attained, resulted in warm co-operation on the part of the authorities to whom the

Council’s offer was addressed. To-day, at the end of 1938, we can review what has been accomplished. Proposals have come before the Council under which over 13,000 acres will be preserved, involving an expenditure of about £500,000 by the Council, and there is a prospect of a further 60,000 acres bemg added in

due course to the green belt. The population mainly

benefited 1s that of Greater London and the addition to the open space available for them represents 14 acres per thousand at a cost of only 3s. 3d. per head.

The lands preserved under the scheme present remarkable variety of natural country — farm land, pasture

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PROTECTION OF SQUARES 515 substantially gave effect to the recommendations of the Royal Commission. The bill was passed by Parliament. It may be fairly said that the Council has played an active and honourable part in the preservation of London

squares, a part which has been made easier by public opinion on the subject and the enlightened attitude adopted by the vast majority of London landowners affected by its proposals.

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By Percy Kemp 7 (Copyright A POPULAR PLEASURE-GROUND: CYCLISTS IN BATTERSEA PARK

Daily Chronicle 1594

PART III THE COUNCIL’S SERVICES Gi) REGULATIVE SERVICES

CHAPTER 22

CONTROL OF LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

Lonpon’s local authorities, and the London County Council in particular, are armed with more detailed powers of control over the method of developing land and constructing buildings than are found in the provinces. These powers fall naturally into two parts — control of method of constructing buildings (covering

such things as the use of materials, foundations and

mode of building) and control of planning and amenities

(covering such things as lay-out of streets, height and appearance and space about buildings and, perhaps most

important, use of buildings). Elsewhere these two spheres of power are exercised broadly under building byelaws made by virtue of the Public Health Acts on the one hand, and under the Private Street Works Act and the Town and Country Planning Act on the other. In London the division is not so clear, for the London

Building Acts cover not only such matters as are in the provinces covered by the building byelaws and the Private Street Works Act, but clude provisions about the height and spacing of buildings which overlap the control exercised under town planning powers.

For the sake of clarity this chapter is divided into four parts: the first 1s devoted to the provisions of the London Building Act as to building construction and development of land ; the second tells the story of town planning in London ; the third gives an account of such

endeavours as have been made to carry out regional planning for Greater London ; and the fourth describes some specialised work linked with the control of buildings and streets. 519

520 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING I. Tue Lonpon Buiupine Acts AND BYELAWS In 1855 there were many statutes relating to building in London, dating from an Act in 1667 for rebuilding the

City after the Great Fire. The Metropolitan Building Act of 1855 gave the Metropolitan Board of Works con-

trol over building operations in London, through a superintending architect of metropolitan buildings and

through the district surveyors, who were already in existence. Later Acts gave the Board powers of control over the formation of streets, foundations, new build-

ings, temporary buildings and other matters, and the duties in connection with dangerous structures were transferred to it from the police. When the Council came into being, it found a heterogeneous collection of statutory provisions and embarked

upon unifying them. After a few years of intensive preparation, it promoted a bill for the London Building Act, 1894 —a consolidating and amending Act which repealed many of the early provisions and until 1930, when it was incorporated in a new consolidating Act,

was the most important London statute controlling planning and building development. Construction of buildings

In 1894 the construction of buildings still followed tradition. Brick or stone, or a combination of the two, were the basic materials, combined with wood for floors and roofs. The development of new materials, however, progressed steadily during the next fifteen years, and in 1909 the Council obtained from Parliament statutory provisions to control buildings which were constructed with metal frames or of reinforced concrete. The use of reinforced concrete developed rapidly, and in 1915

the Council first made regulations for it. |

From the very outset, control of buildings in London took the form of express statutory provisions ; in other words, building regulation was put in a strait-waistcoat

which it was extremely difficult to expand as the in-

LONDON BUILDING ACTS 521 dustry grew. In the provinces the control of buildings by means of the less detailed byelaws made under the Public Health Acts enabled new methods to be allowed for, and the mode of control was constantly, though sometimes belatedly, adapted to the needs of construc-

tion. Owing to the rigidity of the statutory form in which they were cast, the building regulations of London

have always been more difficult to change than those of the rest of the country, and undoubtedly the fact that the provisions to be administered were embodied in Acts of Parliament imbued not only the Council but the officials with a sense of sacrosanctity which impeded progress. It was not until 1923 that the Council obtained power to modify or waive some of the provisions relating to the construction of steel-framed buildings which had been settled as far back as 1909, and only in 1926 did it

obtain similar power in respect of the reinforced concrete regulations.

The control of building construction in London was brought under the reviewing eye of an advisory

committee in 1930, to which the Council appointed a strong team of council members and others well versed

in building matters. This committee took four years

to reach their conclusions, which were embodied in a

report presented to the Council in May, 1935. As regards the construction of buildings, they strongly

recommended that the Council should substitute for the system of control by express statutory enactment byelaws which could more easily be brought up to

date from time to time.!. They scheduled to their

report four sets of model byelaws and also suggested

the adoption of a set of general building byelaws.

These recommendations were a fine example of constructive criticism and received general favour among professional bodies and in the building trade. No time was lost by the Council in examining and

acting on the report. In the same year in which it 1 “The regulation of construction down to the smallest detail by rigid statutory provision is, in our view, an anachronism which has already

wrought untold harm on building in London” (Report of the Advisory Committee on the amendment of the London Building Act, 1930, p. 10).

§22 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

was presented the Council obtained from Parliament the London Building Act (Amendment) Act, 1935,

which in effect enabled the Council to replace by suitably framed byelaws all the provisions of the London Building Act, 1930, relating to the construction of buildings. The new byelaws varied somewhat from those recommended by the advisory committee. They

were framed in close conference with professional bodies and the building industry. It was inevitable that, on the industrial side, there should be a battle of interests: steel-framed construction and reinforced concrete construction were rivals, and there were many special interests whose concern it was to convince the

Council that new materials could satisfactorily be employed or that modes of construction embodying novel principles could safely be adopted. Through the clamour of this crowd of claimants, the Council’s Town Planning and Building Regulation Committee, under

the guidance of their chairman, steered a successful

course. In the form finally produced the byelaws aroused hardly any objection.

Looking back over half a century we find a steady

trend of development from the traditional rule-ofthumb method of construction to a mode of building dependent upon accurate and scientific calculation. Fifty years ago, although “jerry building” was by no means unknown,! less regard was paid to economy of material, and buildings were usually of ample solidity

and constructed by methods of which there were centuries of experience. To-day complex mathematical

calculations are involved in verifying the designs of many buildings, in order that the approving authority may be satisfied that the structure will perform what the architect claims for it. Even then, so much depends

on the way the work is done that still greater reliance 1 On 16th April, 1889, the Council resolved “ that it be an instruction to the Building Act Committee to consider and report as to what (if any) additional powers are necessary to prevent the present system of jerry building in the metropolitan area and the use of improper and unsound materials and construction ”’.

CONSTRUCTION OF BUILDINGS 523 than hitherto must be placed upon the skill, knowledge

and vigilance of the district surveyors who supervise the work on the site.

To deal with these growing complications the Council can justly claim that it has done pioneer

work. The London provisions, in statutes and regulations, governing in detail these modern processes, are without parallel in the provinces and to some extent have been used as guides. While acknowledging how far the Council has gone along this road, the thoughtful mind is bound to wonder whether it is the right road — whether such detailed control of construction of buildings

in London is really necessary. It is true that there is hardly any case of constructional work in London failing

through faulty principles of design or improper use of material. Yet the leading provincial cities, where less detailed codes are in force, can shew fine records of building safety and it is at least possible to raise argu-

ments for the view that some day the opportunity should be taken to sweep away the elaborate provisions

of the London building code and replace them with standard byelaws in the same form as those which apply in the provinces. Planning and amenities

The provisions of the London Building Act, 1894,

relating to the laymg out of streets, the space about buildings and the height of buildings were until recent times almost the only control exercisable over the mode of developing land in London. They provided for the widths of streets, the avoidance of culs-de-sac and the

distance which buildings must be set back from the centre of the street; no building was allowed to be erected in front of the general line of buildings in a street and, if necessary, the superintending architect was to decide what was the general line of buildings in any particular case. As regards the space about buildings, there were provisions requiring domestic buildings (those other than offices or factories) to have

524 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

a clear open space at the back of them and the height

of the building was to bear a relation to the size of

this space. There were special provisions about open space adjoining inhabited basements and about the

size of internal courts.

As far as the height at the front of a building was concerned, any building built before 1894 could be rebuilt to the same height and other buildings (except churches or chapels) must not be more than eighty feet high (except for two storeys in the roof and ornamental

architectural features) without the Council’s consent. A secondary limitation provided that, where a street formed after 1862 was not more than fifty feet wide, a building abutting upon it must not be higher than the distance from the front of the building to the opposite side of the street and there were special provisions relating to the heights of working-class dwellings in some cases. “‘ For practical purposes, the maximum effective

height of a building, with its two storeys in the roof, is usually taken to be one hundred feet, although, if full

advantage were taken of the angle of the slope of the

root (75°), a considerably greater height could be attained.” These were the provisions which, from 1894 onwards, regulated the planning of streets and the

height of and space around buildings in London; and they are still in force to-day. It will be obvious that they overlap and may be inconsistent with requirements which might be imposed under town planning powers.

Town planning schemes provide for the height of buildings to be controlled by reference to the width of

streets and the angle at which light falls into the

windows of the building. They also prescribe the maxi-:

mum amount of a plot of land which may be covered by buildings, how streets are to be laid out and planned,

and the density to which the ground may be covered by buildings.

A fuller account is given in the next part of this

1 Report of the Advisory Committee on the amendment of the London Building Act, 1930, p. 8.

HEIGHT OF BUILDINGS 525 chapter of what provisions the Council has made under

town planning powers,! but at this poimt it seems appropriate to review the effect of the present situation

in London. The Building Act provides for a general height limit throughout the county of about one hundred feet, up to which, as far as that Act is concerned, anyone

may erect a building: under town planning control, London has been provisionally divided into three zones, with limits of height varying from about one hundred feet in the central zone to forty feet in the outer zone,

and differing for various classes of buildings. In both cases the Council may allow. greater height. The

Building Act provides for a definite space to be left behind a building and regulates its height at the back accordingly : town planning control provides for a limit, varying in different parts of London, to the amount of land which may be covered by buildings. Clearly there is difficulty here; the builder is faced with positive limitations laid down in an Act of Parliament which, however, he cannot rely upon, but has to ascertain what other, and possibly different, limitations are imposed by town planning. Comment on this state

of affairs was made by the Advisory Committee; but curiously enough, although they so strongly recommended flexibility in the provisions relating to construc-

tional questions, they suggested the perpetuation of definite statutory requirements in matters such as height, building line, lay-out of streets and space about

buildings, which, in the varying conditions all over London, have at least an equal claim to be flexibly controlled.

Admiumstration of the Building Acts

The London Building Acts are administered through the superintending architect centrally,and locally through

the district surveyors in the forty-four districts into which the county is divided for the purpose. The superintending architect is a statutory official 1 See post, p. 535.

526 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

with supervisory powers over almost all buildings in London. He is appointed by the Council, whom it is his duty to advise on all questions of building control, and the central administration of the Building Acts devolves upon him. For some purposes he has a judicial capacity under the Act — for example when he has to determine

the general line of buildings in a street. At the same time he is the co-ordinating link between the Council as central administrative authority and the local work done by the district surveyors. The position of superintending architect would by itself be a post of grave responsi-

bility and, coupled as it is with the duties of architect to the Council, it calls for unusual capacity from its holder. On occasions there has been criticism of this dual arrangement, but not by those who realise that an officer who is himself engaged in building operations and understands the difficulties and problems which practising architects must face is less likely to be hide-bound and unreasonable in carrying out his duties as a supervising official.

Any one intending to do any building in London must give notice to the district surveyor in whose district

the work will be done before he starts work, with full details of what he intends to do; plans of special types of building have to receive the approval of the Council. The district surveyor must, by supervising operations on

the site, see that the statutory provisions and byelaws

relating to buildings are properly carried out. If a builder does not wish to comply with any particular provision, the district surveyor has no power to relax it ; the builder can, however, apply to the Council to waive or modify in his favour the application of many of the byelaws and statutory provisions. The district surveyor has great powers, one of the most impressive being that he can require work to be pulled down if it is not properly done. He is also the watchdog of the Council for such matters as dangerous structures and inadequate means of escape in case of fire. The officials who in the provinces perform similar

functions, though with less detailed supervision, are

TOWN PLANNING 527 officers in the service of the local authority. The district surveyors in London, although appointed and dismissible by the Council, have not hitherto been in the service of the Council or any other authority and their work is paid for by fees from builders, owners of buildings or in some cases the Council; the amounts of the fees are fixed by a schedule to the London Building Act, but the Council has power to vary them from time to time. In 1889 the Council first passed a resolution referring to its Building Acts Committee the question of the status and remunera-

tion of district surveyors; half a century later that reference will be discharged, if Parliament passes a bill, at present before it, under which the district surveyors will become salaried officers of the Council. The London Building Act provides for a tribunal of appeal — an independent body consisting of three per-

sons appointed by the Home Secretary, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Surveyors’ Institution respectively. The Council provides the tribunal with offices and staff, and it is open to a builder to appeal

to the tribunal in some cases against decisions of the Council, the superintending architect or a district surveyor with which he may be dissatisfied. The tribunal has not been overworked, for in general appeals have

been rare.

II. Town PLANNING

The London County Council can claim an indirect part in the introduction of planning in this country on a national scale, for the Housing, Town Planning, etc., Act, 1909, was introduced by John Burns, when president

of the Local Government Board, who had served his

apprenticeship in the public service on the Council. The

planning powers given in this first Act were widely

drawn: authorities were enabled to make schemes for securing sanitary conditions, amenity and convenience, for controlling the use of land and for regulating the density of buildings, the space around them, and their size and height. The Act also contained the very impor-

528 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING tant provision that schemes were to have statutory effect

and that existing provisions of Acts of Parliament

which were inconsistent with them were to be pro tanto repealed.

Not much town planning was done in this country before the war. The early powers were permissive. It was not until 1919 that every borough and urban district council was required to prepare a town planning scheme

for all land in its area to which the 1909 Act applied.

After the war the local authorities concentrated on urgent matters which brooked no delay, housing in particular, and until the passing of the Town Planning Act, 1925, comparatively little attention was paid to planning. In the haste for housing, many sites were selected without enough care. Experience soon shewed the need to apply planning to areas already developed, a need at long last satisfied when powers of controlling already developed lands were given in 1932.

This broad sketch of developments should enable the happenings in London to be seen in their national setting. Planning, as we know it now, is estate management on a

big scale: it is, or should be, very much what a big

landowner of broad views and public spirit would do to regulate development so that every part of his land 1s

harmoniously related to the remainder and the whole becomes a well-planned unit in an ordered town or protected countryside. Town planning legislation 1s only regulative ; it does not do more than ensure that, when development or redevelopment is undertaken, some orderly method is followed. Moreover, the Town

Planning Act frankly recognises established interests and gives, with important exceptions, a right of compensation to an owner who can shew that he has been injured by the provisions of a scheme. This liability to pay compensation all too often fixes an unbridgeable gulf between the ideal vision and practical possibilities, particularly in London where land values have reached dizzy heights. These points should be remembered by

those who are apt to expect too much from planning control.

KARLY PLANNING SCHEMES 529 Karly measures in London

The London County Council was and is the only county council which was made the primary planning

authority for its area; in the rest of the country the primary powers are vested in municipal corporations and urban and rural district councils. The City, being a fully

developed area, was for practical purposes outside the scope of planning until the passing of the Act of 1932. When the bill for that Act was before Parliament, the City Corporation strongly and successfully urged that it and not the Council should exercise planning powers in the City. An anomaly was thus created, for the closely allied control given to the Council under the London Building Act extended over the City, save for a few provisions. In 1918, with the end of the war in sight, the Council

turned its attention to planning, and instructions were given to the three officers chiefly concerned to prepare a report on the subject. Work on the survey of London, already begun by the Royal Institute of British Archi-

tects, was continued and extended by the Council as opportunity offered, until, by the time that the power

to apply planning control to developed areas was given, the Council had comprehensive information at hand of the use of land and buildings within the county, of the dates at which development had taken place and of the nature and extent of the changes. Later a sub-committee on the control and development of London was set up and in 1923 the Council’s valuer, after a survey carried out on instructions given in the previous year, recommended that schemes should be prepared for the undeveloped areas of London and that powers be sought for the planning of developed areas. Resolutions before 1934

1924 marks the passing of the first resolution by the Council to prepare a planning scheme. This was a kind of trial trip for about twenty acres at Streatham, adjoin2M

530 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING ing the public open spaces of Streatham Common and the Rookery, and undertaken partly for the protection of their amenities. This small experiment was followed

by the resolution, a few months later, to prepare the South-East District scheme — a more ambitious affair

covering 1,750 acres, including a large area of crown land in Kitham.

It was redevelopment rather than new development that was the main problem for London, and although 1924

may seem late in the day for the first town planning resolutions, the Council’s town planning committee had originally considered the town planning of built areas in 1923, but postponed dealing with it until the question of undeveloped areas had been settled. As a foundation the committee spent the next two years upon enquiries of very wide scope and made a comprehensive report,

which they presented in June, 1926,1 in consequence of which the Council resolved that the Town Planning Act, 1925, with any suitable modifications should be applied to built areas, and that the Minister of Health be urged to promote legislation accordingly. An invitation to the local authorities of the country to support this proposal received favourable response from the

Metropolitan Boroughs’ Standing Jot Committee and the County Councils’ Association. The Minister of Health

replied that he hoped to introduce legislation as soon as a favourable opportunity occurred —a promising indication which, however, did not bear fruit for another SIX yeals.

In early endeavours to act up to its opinions the Council was not always successful. In 1927 it tried to obtain the consent of the Minister of Health to the pre-

paration of a scheme for an area which included the Foundling hospital between Brunswick and Mecklenburgh Squares, St. Pancras, and some adjacent property, covering over two hundred acres likely to be redeveloped. This proposal was strongly opposed, and the Council did

not succeed in convincing the Minister that the whole of the area should be included. Later, after the passing 1 Council minutes, 29th June, 1926, pp. 975-980.

FOUNDLING SITE 531 of the Act of 1932, the Council passed a resolution for a new scheme — the Bloomsbury and North-West Finsbury scheme — which included the same area as the old Foundling hospital scheme and more, to a total in all

of nearly six hundred

acres, and this resolution j4//. ANY pr QE

received the Minister’s ee a Naa » aS

approval. —~ ee ON: Before leaving the itt Smee. \:

period up to 1934 with pLLLUIU aie \..)

which weworth are now deal- | Ba " as Zeee ee ing, it is recording + 4 that the Council, in 1933, 's, AUK Vlei a ames

twice usedofemergency oyeM A application planning iN [J ahMii ee ye. control to protect con- Wee ‘a | WL x MK nia KiB oe. ES was the Westminster oe Where ==» Abbey scheme, covering aS mace Eg nearly twenty-two acres. miaeusiettitens

This resolution was WANTED—AN OPEN-AIR MINISTER

passed because proposals . Fer OrCM esi want mom)

for new buildings were Punch December 1926 being mooted which, 1b (This cartoon appeared while the Council and others

e view of the ey.

was tought, would sPou were endeavouring to save the Foundling hospiat

The case clearly fell within one of the avowed objects of town planning — preserving the existing character

and features of a locality with special architectural, historic or artistic interest. The other scheme was that for St. James’, Westminster, to control a proposal

for a new building in Arlington Street, overlooking Green Park, which might have endangered the amenities of Green and St. James’ Parks. The general scheme

The Town and Country Planning Act, 1932, opened

the way to comprehensive application of planning to

532 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

London. A map of London would then have shewn a piebald patchwork of sixteen separate town planning schemes in different stages of progress, covering unrelated areas whose only approach to a point in common

was that most of them comprised the few remaining undeveloped lands in the county.1 Altogether, these planned patches amounted to about 24,000 of the 76,000

acres of the county. The prospect of laying, in one sweeping gesture, the guiding hand of town planning on so much as 52,000 acres of intensely developed and

ever-changing property was at once tempting and formidable.

Between March and June, 1934, the question was looked at through new eyes. The electors had returned to power a party pledged to apply planning control to London as a whole, and within five months of that

event the resolution to do so was passed. It was a

bold performance, but was necessarily followed by a period of feverish activity. All that was involved could

not be foreseen, and soon over-worked committee members and officers had such a struggle to keep their heads above the sea of applications for decision that it is astonishing that time was found to devote to working out principles.

The first hurdle, of course, had been to obtain the consent of the Minister of Health, and a preliminary public inquiry was held in January, 1935. The opposition was great, most of it on the part of estates which had been well developed and well managed and some of which could point with pride to the creation of the

London squares. These estates covered only about

three thousand acres, but they were far more important than their size, because they were areas of high value,

undergoing or liable to undergo fundamental change either by rebuilding or alteration in the use of existing buildings. The inquiry lasted three weeks and the great problems were argued with the aid of an array of twentyfour counsel and many expert witnesses. In the event, the Minister of Health confirmed the resolution of the 1 See diagram, p. 533.

GENERAL SCHEME 533 Council, except for the Inns of Court, which were regarded as “static areas’’, not likely to be redeveloped within any measurable space of time. Thus at long last, almost the whole of London came

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534 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING decided to pass a town planning resolution covering the City, which was confirmed by the Minister in October, 1936. It was now clear that the patchwork of existing schemes must be absorbed into a comprehensive plan. The former schemes had perforce disregarded borough boundaries. When, however, the new schemes are produced, the county will be divided into six large areas, each comprising a number of boroughs and no part of a borough being in more than one scheme. How much difference this will make can be appreciated from the

diagram on page 533 which shews in hatching the

areas of the sixteen pre-1934 schemes, and in black outline the areas of the six new schemes. Mode of preparing schemes

Town planning is no work to be carried out in dicta-

torial fashion remote from local interests. Parhament has, indeed, provided that it should be otherwise, and the Council has undertaken its great planning tasks in a spirit of co-operation broader than the strict letter of the statute. It was decided to dispense with what is known as the “ preliminary statement stage ’’ and proceed at once to prepare draft schemes for London. The metropolitan borough councils were asked to send

in planning proposals for their boroughs in outline ; while they were preparing these, the Council itself prepared proposals for the county generally on the broadest lines. These two sets of proposals were discussed between officers of the Council and of the borough councils,

and at the same time the views expressed by owners of large estates who had been asked for suggestions about the future planning of their lands were examined.

The Council was then able to prepare draft schemes

which, after further consultation, could be formally presented to the Council, publicly advertised and notified to those owners who had availed themselves of the right given them by statute to be registered for the purpose. By the beginning of 1939 this stage had been reached in the scheme for area IV.

PROVISIONAL PRINCIPLES 535 Provisional principles With developers clamouring for permission to carry out individual proposals which in many cases involved

the determination of matters of principle, the Council lost no time in producing for the guidance of owners, architects and builders an outline of the general basis on which it was proceeding in some of the most impor-

tant matters —for example, height of buildings and proportion of site which might be built on. For regulating the height of buildings the county has

been provisionally divided into three zones. In the

central business and industrial areas the greatest height is permitted — eighty feet for residential buildings and one hundred feet for business and industrial buildings.

In intermediate areas likely to be redeveloped with

blocks of flats or where there is commercial development the heights allowed are sixty feet for residential buildings and eighty feet for commercial premises. The third zone for the most part covers the suburbs, where single-family dwelling-houses are likely to continue and predominate,

and here the heights prescribed are forty feet for residential buildings and sixty feet for buildings of other types. The heights laid down in these zones are subject

to two important qualifications: the first is that the buildings must be constructed so that the light falls into

their windows at an angle which is not steeper than fifty-six degrees in the central areas, fifty-one degrees in the intermediate areas and forty-five degrees in the third zone. The second qualification is that the Council may allow greater height of buildings in any case, and also may allow other heights for special buildings. At the same time that the Council divided the county into zones for height it prescribed the amount of any particular site which it would allow to be covered by buildings. It became clear to the Council that a division into three height zones and three zones for site cover would be too crude, and a number of intermediate combinations of total height and total site cover were therefore provided which, in effect, divided London into four

536 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING zones for residential buildings and six zones for industrial

buildings, stepping down, as it were, from the highest and largest building in the central areas to the lowest and

smallest in the outskirts. These combinations afford such variety that most normal cases of redevelopment can satisfactorily take place within their limits.

The Council has not settled in the same way any broad provisional principles for the density to which land may be covered by buildings generally — a differ-

ent point from the proportion of any specific plot of land which may be covered by a particular building upon it — nor has it declared “ use zones ”’ prescribing

the purposes for which buildings shall be erected in specified areas. Town planning control was applied to London late in the day and much of the use of the land in London had been already determined. The Council

has felt it possible, therefore, up to the present to

exercise only a guiding influence, with the object of modifying or eliminating anomalies which have arisen through lack of control in the past. A good deal more will later be necessary, and there will be provisions as to density and use zoning in the individual schemes. Control of mtervm development

It may be thought that there is little real planning control m London because the area covered by completed schemes is so small. This is profoundly incorrect. Planning authorities cannot in terms prohibit any pro-

posed development during the interval between the coming into force of a resolution and the operative date

of a scheme (the interim development period); but if development is undertaken without their consent which later, when the scheme comes into operation, 1s found to be contrary to its provisions, the owner can be required

to undo the development at his own cost and without compensation. Few, therefore, are willing to risk development during this interim period without consent, and, where development takes place with the aid of money from outside sources, the fact that every prudent

INTERIM DEVELOPMENT 537 lender insists on town planning consent being obtained

operates with unseen cogency on behalf of interim

control.

As practically the whole of London is now under interim control except the area, relatively small, for which schemes are in operation, the number of applica-

tions for consent made to the Council is very large. Over 30,000 applications have been made during the last three years, of which 11,800 were received between April, 1937, and April, 1938. The proportion of consents to refusals is rather more than five to one. In order to save time and expense for applicants, the Council has publicly declared its willingness to receive applications for a “ decision in principle ”’ ; the applicant

may, before preparing detailed plans, send in a brief statement and outline of the building he wishes to erect

and obtain the Council’s views. This system is to be highly commended and has done much to save the heavy cost of preparing detailed plans for submission, which

owing to some fundamental objection to the whole proposal might have to be rejected altogether. There is great variety in the character of the applica-

tions for development, which may range from a large housing estate or factory site to a small garage or cycle

shed, from a big block of offices in the west end to a small shop on the outskirts of the county. On the whole, owners of land take great care to submit their proposals to the Council, though the prize for meticulous observance of the letter of the law must certainly be accorded to the applicant who asked for town planning consent to the placing of a doll’s house in his back garden ! Administration

The broad basis of planning legislation made it the concern of more than one chief officer. On questions of

planning and layout it was primarily a matter for the superintending architect, but as all land development necessarily affected the valuation of land in London, the Council’s valuer was also interested. For many years, if

538 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING anyone were to ask who was the principal town planning officer in London, the architect and valuer would have had to be described as Siamese twins, as it were, fulfilling

jointly that single function. Other aspects of town

planning affected other officers ; for example, the chief engineer would be closely concerned with any matter

that might affect street improvements in London. In 1937, however, a blending of duties was carried out by

the Council which resulted in the architect’s becoming, to all intents and purposes, the Council’s principal officer in charge of building regulation, whether under

the London Building Act or the Town Planning Act. Although the district surveyors were, strictly, officials concerned only with the Building Acts, town planning control necessarily concerned their work and, soon after the general resolution for London was passed, arrangements were made for them to discharge local planning duties. Turning now from the officers to the committee side of administration, here too a blending of functions has

had to take place. Throughout its life until 1934 the Council had a Building Acts Committee exclusively con-

cerned with operating the provisions of the London Building Act. In 1923 it set up a Town Planning Committee, which was entrusted with town planning func-

tions. When in 1935, the resolution applying town planning control to almost the whole of London became effective, the prospect of every application for develop-

ment having to be referred to two committees was alarming in its possibilities of wastefulness, error and disagreement. The Council therefore combined into one committee, the Town Planning and Building Regulation Committee, the two committees which had hitherto dealt with town planning and the Building Act separately and,

as an important part of the arrangement, set up a sub-

committee of the new committee, to which was entrusted the inspiring but difficult task of preparing town planning

schemes for London. To deal with applications at the rate of nearly 12,000 a year, the members of the committee formed a rota for handling routine cases, where

BLENDED ADMINISTRATION 539 no major principle was involved, the decisions being confirmed by the committee. It is one of the requirements of the Town Planning (General Interim Development) Order, that the Council should consult metropolitan borough councils on speci-

fied types of town planning application. The Council has interpreted its obligations widely. The borough councils have throughout shewn strong interest in the application of planning control to their localities, and the Council has fostered this interest and taken advantage of the opportunity to obtain on all important questions the views and advice which the borough councils, with their

local knowledge, are able to give. In addition to the borough councils, government departments have in some

cases to be consulted, for example where land in the neighbourhood of royal palaces or parks is being redeveloped, and the Council has arrangements for rapid and effective consultation. Under the Town Planning Act an applicant has a right

of appeal to the Minister of Health, but only against a refusal of his application or against conditions attached to a consent. An adjoining owner who objects to a proposed development which the Council decides to allow cannot appeal to the Minister to disallow the development. This fact is very often not understood. Owing to the situation that has been pointed out earlier in this chapter, it is, of course, possible for the same matter to be a subject of appeal both to the Minister of Health

under the Town Planning Act and to the tribunal of appeal under the London Building Act,! but no difficulty of this kind has arisen. The soundness of the Council’s town planning admuinis-

tration is well illustrated by the results of those cases in which applicants have appealed against its decisions to the Minister of Health. Between April, 1937, and April, 1938, the Council decided nearly twelve thousand cases

and of these only thirty-four were the subject of an appeal to the Minister. Twenty-eight of the appeals the 1 See ante, p. 527.

540 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING Minister dismissed, upholding the view expressed by the

Council, and in only six did he vary or reverse the

Council’s decision. Some amusing cases sometimes arise.

For example, a proposal was received for building a reinforced concrete house of modern design in a part of London where the houses were mainly Georgian. The

proposal caused a great outcry in the district, but the Council felt bound to give its consent. There was therefore no appeal to the Minister of Health, but the adjoining owners took the question to arbitration and then to the High Court, to enforce a restrictive covenant in their

favour. The court produced a veritable judgement of

Solomon, of which the effect was that while two sides of the house might remain as designed, the other two must

be treated to make them harmonise with adjoining buildings !

IlJ. ReeionaL PLANNING

The fundamental theory of planning is to establish a regional plan containing the main framework into which should be fitted the various schemes. The ideal region for this purpose is the local economic and social unit, and a regional plan is desirable where this unit includes

the areas of a number of local planning authorities. The economic and social unit for London is not the county alone, huge though it be, but Greater London. Greater London has by no means been outside the general movement for joint action. Some of the early joint committees were appointed among the authorities

in its outer areas and a number of them still exist. More interesting, for our immediate purpose, however, are the efforts made for joint action in Greater London as a whole, though it has to be admitted that they have not met with much direct success. After a conference called by the Minister of Health in December, 1926, a Greater London Regional Com-

mittee was formed consisting of forty-five members. The London County Council, the City Corporation and the Metropolitan Boroughs’ Standing Joint Committee

GREATER LONDON PLANNING 541 were each directly represented, as were the county councils of Essex, Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Bucking-

hamshire, Surrey and Kent and the county borough councils of Croydon, East Ham and West Ham; the municipal and district councils were formed into a number of groups with representation for each group, the areas of the groups coinciding, where possible, with those of the joint advisory committees constituted in areas outside London. The total number of authorities

participating in the committee, either directly or indirectly, including the county councils and excluding the joint committees, was no less than 138 for an area of 1,846 square miles. Furst regional committee

The regional committee first met im November, 1927, and set itself an ambitious programme. It set up sub-committees for considering decentralisation, open spaces (in particular the provision of a “ green belt ’’) and traffic, and established a technical sub-committee. Later it appointed as technical adviser Mr. (Sir) Raymond

Unwin, a leading planning expert; and obtained the help of the valuer of the London County Council and the experts employed by the joint planning committees

within the area. Survey work was undertaken, and

reports were published. The first, issued at the end of 1929, dealt with open spaces, ribbon development, additional town planning powers and the question of a regional planning authority for Greater London. In 1931 was issued an interim report on land available for open spaces, which set out the warning that of the land

within a radius of eight to twelve miles from Charing Cross which had been suggested as suitable for playing fields in a survey made by the London County Council a few years previously, already no less than five thousand acres had been covered with buildings. In March, 1933,

the committee produced another report, embodying a memorandum by their technical adviser which contained a comprehensive review of the Greater London region

542 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING and suggested the basis of a general development scheme and plan for Greater London; and, whether one agrees or not with the proposals put forward, it 1s an interesting

document. It emphasised the need of a green girdle of open spaces round London, and advocated an ordered scheme of decentralisation instead of the disordered sprawl of development which had been taking place,

but recognised that these objectives could not be attained by planning alone.

Nothing of moment emerged from these efforts except the education of public opinion on the need particularly of the green belt and, to some extent, of more discipline in development. Building in outer London, however, had proceeded at such a pace that the plea for more orderly development was a cry in the wilderness ; and the first endeavours to launch a green belt scheme foundered on the financial difficulties of

1931. The green belt had to wait till, in January, 1935, the Council made its generous and public-spirited

offer to subsidise its establishment up to a total of £2,000,000.1

Second regional committee

In March, 1933, the regional committee m its

original form came to an end. It had been leading a precarious life, especially after the financial stringency of 1931 had curtailed its means, which at first amounted to a maximum of about £4,400 a year, but by the end

of its term had dropped to £1,700. Before expiring, however, it took measures to leave an heir, and in the same year a new committee was set up, consisting of thirty members representing London and the other county councils, the City Corporation and the county borough councils, and the municipal borough and urban district councils.

The new regional committee was entrusted with advising on the co-ordination of planning schemes in the region, making suggestions on any matter affecting 1 See chapter 21.

REGIONAL COMMITTEE 543 the planning or development of the region and — a new point — exercising any powers delegated to it by any

local authority in the region, but, so far as executive powers were concerned, only with the consent of the county council concerned. The maximum income of the new committee was under £3,000. A technical adviser was appointed, with offices and staff, but the technical sub-committee was not set up again.

This committee, too, led an uncertain life. More

and more it began to feel itself becoming an unpopular fifth wheel to a coach whose movements it had no influ-

ence to guide. The independent attitude of the town planning authorities in the region precluded any delegation of executive power, and its advice, though helpful to many of the smaller authorities, was seldom sought

by the larger bodies who should have been the real mainstay of regional planning. In December, 1935, it was called together to decide whether it should go out of existence or be replaced by some more loosely knit

organisation, which could be called together by the Minister of Health when required. Opinion was divided, and, after several stormy meetings, no agreement could be reached. The committee expired in September, 1936,

its last words being an assurance to the Minister of Health that it would welcome initiative on his part in securing new and appropriate means of co-ordinating town planning in the Greater London area. Six months later the Minister set up a new Greater London Standing Conference on Regional Planning, with twenty-four members representing local authorities in

the region, and an income limited to £360 a year. The new body was to have no staff of its own, but

the technical sub-committee of officers of constituent authorities was to be set up again. Its functions were hmited, no originating powers being given. The change from “committee ’’ to “conference ’”’ was significant, even though the previous committees had been, in effect, little more than conferences.

One cannot but feel that all this is a disappointing

§44 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

story. There is no denying that there is not sufficient will for co-operation among the authorities of Greater London for anything approaching the executive joint committees which now exist in large numbers in the provinces ; or indeed for any large measure of voluntary general co-operation, as distinct from co-operation in a specific objective such as has been shewn so admirably

among the county authorities in achieving the green belt. A strong influence against anything of the nature of joint executive committees is the clear reluctance of the authorities in the region to entrust their powers to

other bodies. There is to some extent an underlying

tradition of mutual hostility and suspicion which breaks out from time to time. With these and other obstacles, it is little wonder, though none the less deplorable, that general co-operation between local governing bodies is, on the whole, more difficult to attain in Greater London than usually in other parts of the country.

In none of its successive guises did the regional

committee have much money placed at its disposal for

the tasks allotted to it. The maximum that could be raised from the constituent bodies was an agreed total of about £4,400 a year, and the highest sum expended in any one year amounted to £4,012. These were meagre

means even for a survey of the planning problems of

Greater London, much less for formulating any definite proposals. In New York, where there is less tendency for idealism to be clogged by foreboding about practical possibilities, a sum of no less than £200,000 was placed,

from a private source, at the disposal of an unofficial committee for the survey of, and preparation of town planning proposals for, the New York region. That survey was comprehensive and detailed, and the reports alone provide a whole library, the most thorough of its

kind ever undertaken. Surveys on this scale are not generally necessary, but the sum put at the disposal of the New York committee is a truer acknowledgement of the importance of the problem than the relatively small

amounts allotted to the Greater London Regional Planning Committee.

STRUCTURAL CONTROL 545 The failure of the regional committee is an example

of the breakdown of theory in the face of practical obstacles. In an ideal world such a regional organisation would have been the best way of achieving co-ordinated

planning ; in practice it did not prove to be the most effective instrument.

IV. SPECIALISED WoRK

Structure of places of entertaanment

The Council exercises a very full measure of control

over the construction and management of places of entertainment. Over the fifty years there has been a steady improvement in the standard of safety, both of buildings and equipment, in London. The development

of fire-resisting materials has enabled theatres and

cinemas to be built which, so far as the structure of the building is concerned, are fully capable of resisting fierce

fire. Much has been learnt about ventilation and the control of fire, if 1t does occur in a theatre. Inthe modern

theatre and cinema there is hardly any danger to the audience from fire itself, and nowadays the main concern is the avoidance of the results of panic. Not many years ago a shght and unimportant fall of a piece of the ceiling of a theatre near a ventilating fan caused an unnecessary panic in which many people were injured. Ample provision is therefore made for gangways to be wide and kept clear of all obstructions and for an abundance of well-lit

independent exits from all parts of the theatre. Fifty years ago there were gas lighting on the stage and quanti-

ties of inflammable material both there and in the

dressing-rooms. Nowadays gas lighting has been abolished altogether on the stage, and almost all scenery, properties and curtains and many of the dresses are given treatment which makes them non-inflammable. These important powers are exercised through the superintending architect and his expert officers, in consultation with the London fire brigade. , 1 See also chapter 23.

2N

646 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

From time to time stands are erected in London to view public spectacles and these, too, come within the pur-

view of the Council. There is a curious distinction that, if the stand is constructed wholly of wood, it is the metropolitan borough council who is responsible for seeing that it is properly erected ; but if it 1s of metal or partly of

wood and partly of metal, the control les with the London County Council. With the rapid growth in recent years of the tubular-scaffoldmg method of construction, almost all stands at such recent events as the Royal Silver Jubilee in 1935 and the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were supervised by the Council. Not only were their strength and accuracy of construction superintended by the collaboration of the district surveyors, but the same principles of adequacy of entrance and exit and precautions against fire as are applied in places of entertainment were carried out in respect of every stand erected in London. The custom of erecting stands for viewing coronations is of some antiquity. From the time of the coronation of

Charles II (1660), St. Margaret’s churchyard has been used for the purpose. For the coronation of Queen Anne

(1702) the churchwardens provided “a hogshead of claret, musick and other usual things’’. At the coronation of George I a loss was sustained by the contractors who erected the stands, in consequence of “ the rudeness and insolence of the soldiers in hindering persons going to their scaffolds in order to their taking places ”’, and the

vestry had to refund to them £60. For George III’s coronation a hogshead of port was provided, but this was omitted at the time of the accession of George IV “ as it might give rise to tumult which, it is understood, was the consequence at the last coronation ”’.? Means of escape m case of fire

Before 1905 the Council’s powers in this matter were mainly confined to factories and workshops under the 1 See special and annual report of*the vestry of the United Parish

of St. Margaret and St. John-the-Evangelist, Westminster, June, 1889.

MEANS OF ESCAPE 547 Factory and Workshop Acts of 1889 and 1901. The London Building Act of 1894 only provided that means of escape from the upper floors of new buildings more than sixty feet high must be installed to the satisfaction of the Council, and that houses or factories more than thirty feet in height must have means of access to the roof where a parapet was provided. In 1902 a disastrous fire in Queen Victoria Street 1 created a strong public opinion and by the London Building Acts (Amendment) Act, 1905, the Council was given control over a much wider range of buildings, including existing buildings, of which the most important were all those which had any storey more than fifty feet above the ground or which normally contained more than twenty persons. Under these provisions alone, 26,000 buildings in London have been equipped with satisfactory means of escape, and as far as factories are concerned, the Factories Act, 1937, has given the Council even wider powers of control over

all factories where more than twenty persons are employed or more than ten persons above the ground floor. Buildings wm relation to traffic

One of the principal problems which has to be faced

in New York is the fact that at any given time there are more persons in the skyscraper buildings than the streets surrounding them could possibly accommodate. In London, where buildings are of more limited height, the problem is not as great, but the fact that places of entertainment and large office buildings and business premises attract great numbers of persons in their own motor cars, for which there is no place while their occu-

pants are engaged in pleasure or business inside the buildings, has been growing in intensity and received particular notice from the Advisory Committee on the amendment of the London Building Act, 1930. That committee recommended the provision of underground

parking places by public authorities and, subject to safeguards, the construction of garages underneath 1 See chapter 20, p. 490.

548 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

buildings and the encouragement of special garage buildings with many floors. A year after their report appeared, two special orders were made by the Minister

of Transport relating to this problem. The first gave the City Corporation and the metropolitan borough councils powers to provide parking places in London ; the second gave the Council special powers of control over the design of entrances to and exits from buildings, with the object as far as possible of discouraging the erection of buildings which did not, in the phraseology of the moment, “ consume their own cars ’’, and avoiding

the construction of ways in and out of important premises in such a fashion that traffic in adjoming roads

was impeded or endangered by vehicles travelling to and from them. These powers the Council exercises through its organisation for building control. Naming of streets and numbering of houses

The practice from time immemorial in London seems

to have been for names of new streets and changes in

the names of old ones to be decided in each parish without any regard even to adjoining parishes, much less to the metropolis as a whole. The problem had, however, been tackled by the Metropolitan Board of Works, which, in the course of its thirty-three years of existence, had changed the names of 3,260 streets. When the County of London was created in 1889, the list of streets still shewed an extraordinary amount of duplication. There were as many as 1,048 streets bearing one or

other of the ten most common street names, such as George Street, James Street and Church Street. The Post

Office was particularly concerned at the position and made strong representations to the Council. After a spate

of activity in the early Progressive days, the Council settled down to a more sluggish flow, accepting a certain

amount of duplication as inevitable. During the fortyseven years ended December, 1935, over 2,700 streets

were renamed. In 1935 the Town Planning and Building Regulation

STREET NAMING 549 Committee of the Council embarked on the policy of abolishing all repeated street names in London, of which there were still about 3,300, roughly one-sixth of the total

number of streets. It was no easy matter to find satisfactory names for so large a number, or to reconcile the many conflicting claims for retention of existing names. As was bound to happen in such an extensive undertaking, there were some errors of judgement,! but on the whole the renaming has been well done and has paid regard to historical association and local interest.

The most helpful factor in the whole proceeding was the assistance which the Council received from the local authorities, who, though often reluctant to make alterations for reasons that can well be understood, yet sunk their preferences in many cases In order to achieve

an advantage for London as a whole. The work now done should be permanent, and the upheaval caused by the changes should never have to recur on a like scale. In 1889, it must be remembered, less than half London south of the Thames had been developed, while to-day the county is almost wholly built up. With the development of large new blocks of flats, to many of which the same names have been given by the proprietors, a new naming problem has arisen, and the Council has made provision to deal with this in the powers which it is now seeking from Parliament. In addition to the names of streets, the Council con-

trols the numbering of houses. St. Paul’s Cathedral is recognised as the central point for London, and the

numbering of houses begins at the end of the street nearest to the cathedral, except where a street leads from a main thoroughfare to a less important street, when the numbering starts from the main thoroughfare. 1 Of a proposal, with which the Council did not proceed, to rename

Lower Grosvenor Place as ‘* Arabella Row ’’, Punch wrote (4th December,

1935) — ‘It shews from this strange sample

How far we've fallen from The standard and example Of good Sir Laurence Gomme.’ Gomme, a distinguished antiquarian as well as clerk of the Council, was mainly responsible for the naming of Aldwych and Kingsway.

550 LAND DEVELOPMENT AND BUILDING

Any one standing in a street with his back towards St. Paul’s will find the odd numbers assigned to the houses on the left-hand side and the even numbers to those on the right. Superstition enters into the numbering of houses, and the Council has received many imploring requests not to require a house to be numbered 13, or to allow some so-called lucky number to be at-

tached to a particular house. To all of these it turns a deaf ear.

CHAPTER 23

PUBLIC CONTROL AND ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE UNDER the wide and rather mysterious heading of “public

control” are grouped a number of functions which the Council exercises for the protection of the public or of particular classes. They include measures for public protection against physical danger and against fraud and harmful activities, and for the protection of shop employees and theatrical performers. The department to which these duties are entrusted also undertakes the collection of revenue from local taxation licences and the registration of motor vehicles, so that it is some-

what of a maid-of-all-work. Akin to the service of public control is the licensing of places of entertainment,

but this is carried out by a separate Entertainments Committee, under which the work is done by the clerk of the Council with technical assistance from the archi-

tect and the chief officer of the fire brigade. It is simplest to give a short account of each of these services in turn, for they bear little relation to each other, except

that most of them are “ police’ services in the widest sense. The chapter will conclude with a short account of the Council’s concern with the administration of justice and coroners.

I Exploswes, petroleum and celluloid

The Explosives Act, 1875, 1s the main provision controlling the manufacture, storage and conveyance of

explosives. In London the manufacture of explosives can be carried on only in premises licensed by the Home 551

552 PUBLIC CONTROL Secretary. Before the grant of the licence, the Council is required to hear any objections to the proposal and may express an opinion on the terms of the proposed licence. If the Council assent, the applicant is entitled to the licence, but if the Council suggest additional conditions or dissent, the applicant may appeal to the Home Secretary. At the end of March, 1938, there were ten factories licensed by the Home Secretary in London. Factories manufacturing toy fireworks are inspected by the Council’s inspectors by arrangement with the Home

Office. .

Premises in which explosives are kept for sale also need to be registered or licensed, and the main duty of

the Council is to inspect them when, once each year during October and the early part of November, they become arsenals of fireworks. Inspection 1s strict and regular and its success is illustrated by the general immunity from accidents. The popularity of celebrating the discovery of Guy Fawkes shows no sign of waning, for the number of premises registered in 1892 was about 3,400, whereas to-day it is 4,600. ‘Petroleum ”’ covers two very different products — “petroleum oil’ (kerosene) or as it is more commonly called, paraffin, and “ petroleum spirit ’’, more generally known as petrol. Petroleum which gives off an inflammable vapour at a temperature of lessthan 73° F’. (2.e. has a

flash pomt below that temperature) is classed as petrol, and petroleum which does not give off an inflammable vapour below 73° F’. is classed as paraffin.

There has been a striking change in the relative

importance of these two substances during the period with which we deal, owing to the invention and develop-

ment of the internal combustion engine. Fifty years ago paraffin was extensively used for lamps, and as it had a flash point at or over 73° F. was not controlled

in any way. On the other hand, in those days the

demand for petrol was so much less than the supply that large quantities of 1t were destroyed as worthless and the oil companies used to add to paraffin as much of

PETROLEUM 553 the low flash constituents of crude petroleum as they dared, in order to avoid waste. In consequence, the paraffin of those days usually flashed at a point very httle higher than the legal limit of 73° F., and one of the most important duties of the Council’s inspectors was

to visit the London oil wharves and take samples of oil to establish that 1t was really paraffin and not petrol. The number of fires and accidents directly traceable to paraffin lamps was so large (the subject had previously

recelved much attention from the Board of Works) that the Council made strenuous efforts to raise the legal flash point to 100° F., but failed ; now, so great 1s

the demand for petrol that the flash pomt of modern paraffin is over 100° F. Another interesting reversal of the relation between paraffin and petrol is provided by the gasindustry. Before gas mantles were introduced, the lighting power of a gas jet was of great importance, and many thousands of gallons of petrol were kept at gas works to be introduced into the gas to increase its

lighting power. Nowadays it is the heating power of gas that really matters, and so far from introducing petrol into it the gas companies have found it worth while to install plant to extract any petrol that it may already contain.

In 1892 the normal amount of petrol stored was

only half a million gallons, kept at the twelve hundred places licensed by the Council for the purpose, and at three-quarters of them there were only a few gallons,

kept in cans in iron lockers or small brick and iron stores and sold chiefly to costermongers for their flare lamps. The bulk of the half-million gallons was stored

at places from which petrol was obtained for manufacturing processes, of which, even in those days, there

was a remarkable variety. To-day the total amount authorised to be kept is nearly twelve million gallons and there are well over five thousand places licensed for petrol storage. At nearly four thousand of these large quantities of different brands of petrol are stored

in underground tanks, in accordance with the precautions which the Council has established after much

554 PUBLIC CONTROL thought and experiment. The fact that petrol vapour becomes highly explosive when mixed with air and that it tends to sink to the lowest level gives rise to added dangers in garages, especially in basements. By

no means all the petrol in premises licensed by the Council is used for motor cars, as it is also employed in manufacturing processes as varied as the making of

golf balls, hats, linoleum, pianos, buttons, asbestos packing and cattle medicine. One of the largest users of petrol, apart from imternal combustion engines, 1s the industry of spraying with cellulose paint, which has rapidly increased in recent years.

Not only the storage but also the conveyance of petrol is regulated by the Council. Although as far back

as 1871 local authorities were empowered to impose conditions on the subject in granting licences, the power was too limited, as 1t applied only while the spirit was being carried within the district of the licensing authority. After the Council had for years advocated comprehensive control, national regulations came into force in 1926 which substantially gave effect to the Council’s own code of rules

for the conveyance of petrol. All tank waggons with headquarters in London are thoroughly examined every

year by the Council’s inspectors, to ensure that their safety devices are in order and as a safeguard against the serious consequences which might result from an accident to a tank waggon liberating as much as 2,500 gallons of petrol into the public streets and sewers. In 1897 1t was made unlawful to keep large quantities of carbide of calctum without a licence, and premises of this kind are now inspected ; 459 licences were granted

in 1937, of which more than half were in conjunction with licences for keeping petroleum. Celluloid is highly inflammable and decomposes at a comparatively low temperature, emitting inflammable

and poisonous gases. Its physical properties are so valuable that it is very widely used, and one of its most notable forms is cematograph film, which is considered to be specially dangerous, as it contains a high propor-

CELLULOID 555 tion of nitro-cellulose and has a large surface area in relation to its bulk. Before 1915 the Council had no control over celluloid, except indirectly over some of the manufacturing premises which could be classed as danger-

ous businesses under the London Building Act. In that year, after negotiation with the cinematograph film industry, the Council obtained from Parliament, under the London County Council (Celluloid, etc.) Act,

some control over places where celluloid was stored. The Act did not cover the storage of manufactured celluloid articles, for it defined a celluloid store as a place where more than one hundredweight of raw celluloid was kept at one time, or more than twenty reels or

eighty pounds in weight of packed, or any quantity of loose, cinematograph film. All celluloid stores had

to be registered with the Council and provided with proper means of escape, and safety precautions had to be observed. Storing celluloid in any part of a building

below a part in which people lived was prohibited, except with the Council’s consent. The main control over celluloid factories lies with the inspectors of factories

employed by the Home Office under the Factories Act, 1937.

Celluloid articles kept and displayed in shops remain

free from regulation, but the Council has for many years distributed before Christmas suggestions to shop-

keepers of precautions which they should take. The Council has no control over celluloid or cinematograph film in private houses and, although the extent to which control of this kind is really justified may be arguable, evidence suggesting that there was need to investigate this danger was given by the Council before a departmental committee in 1938. Tests of weights and measures, gas and electricity

The earliest measures were derived from the human body, for example the foot, the hand, the pace and the

cubit ; and the earliest standardisation of measures in this country was the declaration in Magna Carta that

556 PUBLIC CONTROL “one measure of wine shall be through our realm and one measure of ale and one measure of corn, that is to say, the quarter of London. . . and it shall be the same

of weights as it is of measures”. In the time of

Henry III the English penny was called a sterling, and by an Act of 1266 it was provided that the penny should weigh thirty-two grains of wheat, well dried and gathered out of the middle of the ear ; twenty pennyweights were

to make an ounce and twelve ounces a pound. To-day there are still two basic measures in the British system— the imperial standard pound, a platinum cylinder nearly

1:35 inches high and 1-15 inches in diameter, and the imperial standard yard, a bronze bar one square inch in section and thirty-eight inches long, with cylindrical holes, one near each end, between the centres of which the distance is exactly thirty-six inches. The London County Council and some other local authorities are

called upon to provide local standards, which are

periodically compared by the Board of Trade with their

reference standards and are used by the inspectors of weights and measures for checking the standards which they take about with them when performing their duties. The Council derives its powers to control weights and measures from the Weights and Measures Acts, these powers being transferred by the Local Government Act,

1888, from the justices. The Weights and Measures

Act, 1889, required that weighing-machines should be verified and stamped in the same way as weights and measures already were ; and inspectors were to hold a

certificate of competence from the Board of Trade. The Act also introduced the first effective measures for

regulating the sale of coal. The Council divided the county into fourteen districts, to each of which was allotted an inspector of weights and measures and a coal officer.

The extent to which the old scales and weights have been superseded by modern self-indicating scales and

other devices is well illustrated by comparing the

statistics of weights and measures tested in 1892-93 and 1936-37. The number of weighing instruments

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WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 557 verified in the former year was rather more than 27,500, and in the latter this number had risen to nearly 29,000. On the other hand in the former year the Council verified more than 257,000 weights, while in the latter the number had fallen to just over 175,000. Many of these modern weighing and measuring instruments are of very complex design, and more than eight hundred special types have received the sanction of the Board of Trade. This complexity calls for a high standard of knowledge

and skill on the part of the inspectors of weights and measures, who, before placing a stamp of verification upon any appliance, must satisfy themselves that it 1s correct and conforms to the regulations. This may be a matter of checking a balance so delicate that it will weigh a single hair, in contrast to a weighbridge that will weigh a hundred and sixty tons, or verifying such instruments as the automatic weigher for recording the weight of a ship’s cargo, the measuring machine for

filling milk bottles, or the “area meter” which will indicate the superficial area of a hide, however irregular its shape may be. It is remarkable that until 1926 the public was protected against short weight or measure only in the sale of coal, bread and tea ; not until the passing of the Sale of Food (Weights and Measures) Act, 1926, was it made a punishable offence to give short weight, measure or number in selling by retail any article of food or drink used by man. To-day about 300,000 articles of food are

checked in London every year. To these duties were added in 1929 the checking, analysing and sampling of cattle and poultry foodstuffs and fertilisers, which have to be guaranteed by the sellers under the Fertilisers and Feeding Stuffs Act, 1926. The Council itself in 1926 and 1927 promoted legislation to enlarge its originally simple

power to weigh coal so that it could prevent the sale of coal containing an excessive amount of unburnable matter, and could exercise similar powers over coke as over coal.

In the earliest days of the distribution of gas there

558 PUBLIC CONTROL were no gas meters and the companies had to trust to the honesty of consumers that they did not burn gas for a greater number of hours than was agreed upon. Needless to say, there were many abuses, and owing partly to these and the difficulty of preventing leakages from the early gas-holders, no dividends were paid for

some years. 1825 marks the bringing into use of the first effective gas meter, but it was not until 1859 that the Metropolitan Board of Works was given power to test and stamp them. The testing was an unpleasant and expensive business, as gas itself was used and the testing offices smelt abominably in consequence. The Council later discontinued the use of gas for this purpose and has made many improvements in the methods

of testing meters. There are three gas-meter testing

offices, dealing with about 300,000 meters every year, of

which about one in seven fails to pass the statutory

tests.

In addition to the testing of meters, the gas itself has been continuously tested for power, purity and pressure since 1860. Until 1920 gas was charged for according to the amount consumed, but the Gas Regulation Act of that year provided for a new basis of charge

in accordance with its heating capacity. This change has increased the importance of gas testing, and in seventeen testing-places in London,. established and maintained by the gas companies but staffed and controlled by the Council, the pressure and calorific value of the gas is continuously recorded and the gas chemically examined for any trace of impurity. The electricity orders for London require the Council to appoint electrical inspectors, whose principal duties

are to test meters and the pressure of supply. The first of these duties is performed at the Council’s electricity meter-testing station, where new meters are certified and disputed meters checked. The Meters Act, 1936, required (as from Ist July, 1938) all new meters to be tested and sealed by the Electricity Commissioners. This has modified the Council’s position as a certifying

GAS AND ELECTRICITY 559 authority for new meters, but 1t remains the sole authority in London for the settlement of disputes.

In order to test the pressure of supply the Council has required electricity undertakers to install special recording meters at many places. These meters are sealed by the electrical inspectors and they must satisfy

themselves by constantly examining the records that the pressure of supply throughout the area is being maintained within the statutory limits. During the year 1937, 239 electricity meters of which the accuracy was questioned were tested and 532 new meters were tested and sealed at the Council’s station; in addition, between the beginning of July and the end of November, 1938, 5,041 new meters were tested for sealing by the Electricity Commissioners. Smoke abatement

The first complaint about inconvenience caused by smoke seems to have arisen when coal was introduced in the fourteenth century, and the objection then was on the ground of personal comfort, not on the modern

ground of public health. By the time of Elizabeth the smoke nuisance was receiving a fair amount of attention, and in Charles II’s day the diarist John Evelyn published a pamphlet, Fumifugium, and intro-

duced into Parliament a bill for the reduction of smoke, which, however, did not become law. The modern powers to deal with nuisances from smoke were

transferred from the police to the vestries and district

boards as sanitary authorities by the Public Health (London) Act of 1891. The Council in the following year gave special instructions that cases of smoke nuisance were to be reported by its officers, and in the next two years referred nearly fourteen hundred cases

to the sanitary authorities for action. From 1899 the Council was active in exercising the special powers relating to railway locomotives and in the course of ten years instigated many prosecutions. This activity started because railway companies used bituminous coal

560 PUBLIC CONTROL during the Welsh coal strike of 1898 and, finding it cheaper, continued to use it, with the emission of more smoke as a result.

The powers of the Council were extended by its General Powers Act of 1910, which enabled it to act where a borough council was itself an offender, and authorised the expenditure of £500 a year on investigating the problem of smoke consumption. A general Act, the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act, was passed in 1926 which enlarged the powers of local authorities and enabled them to make byelaws. The domestic chimney is one of the chief causes of smoke nuisance in large towns, but the legal powers to deal with it are very limited and it is not practicable to take drastic measures. Offence from this quarter, however, has been greatly reduced by the use of gas and electricity for heating and cooking, and in less measure by the use of other smokeless fuel. The London County Council has made its full contribution to this advance by the provision made in its own housing schemes.

An interesting indication of what can be done,

under pressure, is afforded by the measures taken in the case of the new electricity generating station at Battersea. When the station was proposed in 1929 the

Council does not seem at first to have realised the full implications, for it contented itself with withdrawing its objection to the proposal m exchange for protective

provisions for an adjoiing school and for Battersea

Park. The Westminster City Council, however, raised strongly the question of the effect on public health of

the emission of smoke and grit from the generating station and, in particular, the emission in vapour of large quantities of sulphuric acid. The Westminster Council desired to promote a bill to stop the progress of the station, but the County Council did not feel, as a matter of honour, that it could support such a course. It jomed, however, with the Westminster Council and

other local authorities in sending to the Minister of

Health a strong deputation, with the result that measures were taken, after thorough mvestigation and

SMOKE 561 much experiment, which have removed the danger from the operation of the Battersea and the Fulham power stations.

An indication of the great improvement which has been effected in metropolitan conditions is afforded by the present rarity of the dense, sooty fogs — “the London particular’ — which used to descend on the metropolis in past years ; but there is still a good deal

to be done and progress should be helped by the Advisory Council for Smoke Abatement set up in June, 1938, for Greater London.

Shop hours, employment agencies and theatrical performers

The first legislation to ameliorate the lot of shop assistants was an Act of 1886 making it illegal to employ

anyone under eighteen years of age for more than seventy-four hours a week. This was the only general

limitation on hours of work of shop assistants until 1934. Since 1899 shopkeepers have been required to provide seats for women shop assistants, but there was no comprehensive legislation until 1912, when to every shop assistant one half-holiday each week was secured.

During the war the control of shops was included in the scope of the Defence of the Realm Act regulations and provisions were then made which were continued after the war in the interests of shop assistants. It is from this that arises the common misconception that the limitation of hours during which food, drink, sweets, cigarettes and other articles may be sold was something to do with the war-time emergency which has been unnecessarily continued into times of peace. The so-called “DORA ” restrictions are modern shophours legislation.

More recently the old limit of seventy-four hours’ employment in a week for persons under eighteen years of age has been reduced to forty-eight hours, and over-

time by anyone under sixteen has been prohibited. Proper lighting, ventilation and temperature of shops 20

562 PUBLIC CONTROL and the provision of washing and sanitary conveniences

have at the same time been secured. Yet further restrictions have been imposed by the Shops (Sunday

Closing Restriction) Act, 1936, which, with certain exceptions and special arrangements for the Jewish Sabbath, requires all shops to be closed for the serving

of customers on Sunday. Special orders have been made under which shops and stalls in such places as Petticoat Lane, Club Row, Lower Marsh and The Cut

are allowed to remain open until 2 p.m. on Sundays.

It rests upon the Council to ensure that these conditions are carried out, and in the capital city of “a nation of shopkeepers ”’ the task 1s a large one. In 1937 the Council’s inspectors visited over 88,000 shops and found nearly 36,500 infringements of the Act, more than half of which were failures to exhibit notices which the

Act requires to be displayed so that shop assistants may be aware of their rights. The great majority of the cases were dealt with by oral caution, but over 2,000 of them were taken to the courts and penalties amounting to more than £1,500 were imposed.

Not only those seeking employment but would-be employers require to be protected from exploitation at the hands of unscrupulous agents. As far back as 1905

the Council obtained power to require agencies for domestic servants or for theatrical performers to be registered, but it was found that the control was not strong enough. In 1910 this was extended to enable annual licences to be granted to agencies instead of merely requiring them to be registered, and the new powers were applied to every kind of employment agency. In 1921 the powers were codified, by one of the Council’s

General Powers Acts. The Council has made byelaws

for the conduct of employment agencies, limiting “booking ”’ fees to 2s. 6d., prescribing the records to be kept and regulating modes of advertismg and other

matters, in order to prevent fraud. The burden of agents’ charges on the unemployed has caused the Council much concern; it has no power to limit the

SHOP HOURS 563 fee charged where employment is found, and its efforts

to obtain power to do so have not so far met with

success.

During 1937 the Council granted 294 and renewed

247 licences to carry on employment agencies; five applications were refused and three licences were revoked.

Among those engaged in the theatrical business there

have always been a number of black sheep who, after taking a company of theatrical performers into employment, abandon them during the course of their engagement, sometimes leaving them stranded far from their homes. The entertainment industry, to its lasting credit, for years endeavoured to secure legislation that would stamp out this evil and in 1925 they persuaded Parlia-

ment to pass the Theatrical Employers Registration Act. Since that date anyone engaging or employing three or more theatrical performers must, in London, register himself with the Council (if in the City, with the Corporation) and he must advertise his intention to register before he does so. The total registered by the Council at the end of March, 1938, was 2,155. Difficulty in administration was experienced because proceedings

could not be initiated by the Council but only by a

common informer. This situation, however, was rectified by an amending Act of 1928 enabling the registra-

tion authority to take proceedings. Even under this Act the Council’s powers were insufficient: out of 179

cases of complaint it was found that in 115 it had no legal power to take action.

It may be added that, in order to prevent cruelty, anyone who exhibits or trains performing animals in London must be registered with the Council, whose officers can at any time enter the premises where the animals are being trained, but are not allowed behind the stage when a public performance is in progress.

These provisions are contained in the Performing Animals (Regulation) Act, 1925.

564 PUBLIC CONTROL Massage establishments

The Commissioner of Police in 1913 expressed his view to the Council that many of the establishments in

the West End of London which advertised massage, manicure and electrical treatment were really disorderly

houses, and in 1915 the Council obtained power to register them. Registration was soon found madequate and in 1920 control by licence was substituted. Power was also given to the Council to make byelaws for the prevention of immorality in connection with establishments for massage or special treatment. The importance which was attached to this matter may be gauged from the unusual provision that, if the Council thinks that any premises advertised as being used for some legitimate

business other than massage or special treatment are in fact used for immoral purposes, it may, with the approval of the Home Secretary, take action as if control applied to them.

Of equal importance to the prevention of immor-

ality is protection of the public against harmful,

unskilled or unqualified treatment. For example, the Council requires that ultra-violet ray treatment shall be administered only in accordance with directions given by a registered medical practitioner; this condition was recently challenged in the courts, but its legality was upheld. The number of licensed and regis-

tered establishments has grown from 846 in 1916 to 2,990 in 1937, and the effectiveness of the Council’s vigil-

ance 1s well shewn by the fact that, although sixty-six licences have been refused or revoked since 1920, appeals against those decisions succeeded in only five cases. Charities

There is little co-ordination of charitable work in London, though more is done there in the name of charity than anywhere else in the kingdom. Endowed charities are under the aegis of the Charity Commission

or the Board of Education, who make schemes for regulating them. On schemes relating to charities in

CHARITIES 565 London the Council is usually consulted, and in many cases may nominate a representative on the governing

body of the charity. In respect of other charitable endeavours, the Charity Organisation Society does valuable work in directing voluntary effort to the best

ends and discouraging predatory persons and enterprises. Of unendowed charities two types have been singled

out by Parliament for special control — war charities and charities for the blind. Unless these charities are registered with the Council and thus made subject to its requirements as to submitting accounts and sound administration, it 1s a penal offence to make a public appeal for funds on their behalf. The Council can strike

off the register any charity which is improperly ad-

ministered, and there is an appeal to the Charity Commission. It can also, subject to the same right of

appeal, refuse to register fresh charities on the grounds of lack of bona fides or the prospect of unsound adminis-

tration. In the case of charities for the blind, it can also refuse registration on the ground of redundancy, a provision which unfortunately does not apply to war charities. Although it is twenty years since the war ended and there are a sufficient number of admirable charities covering the whole field and assured of public

support, the Council still receives applications to register new war charities. The total number of war charities registered by the Council up to the end of 1937 since the operation of the War Charities Act, 1916, is 944, of which 835 were registered before the end of 1919: 64 have been permanently removed from

the register, and 816 have wholly ceased to operate. The comparable figures for charities for the blind are 51 newly registered, 1 permanently removed and 11 having ceased to operate. Diseases of animals

The Metropolitan Board of Works had its attention constantly engaged by contagious diseases among animals,

and often had to deal with glanders, cattle plague, foot-

566 PUBLIC CONTROL and-mouth disease and swine fever. As London and its surroundings became more and more developed with

buildings and the agricultural land was reduced, this work declined. The various Acts and departmental orders are now administered in London by the Council and, in the City, by the Corporation. The work of the Council has been chiefly concerned with glanders, anthrax, swine fever and rabies.

How greatly conditions have changed during the lifetime of the Council is indicated by the fact that, in 1899 there were nearly 2,300 cases of glanders amongst horses in London ; by 1912 the number had dropped to

172. The drastic policy of slaughtering any animal that reacted to the diagnostic test has been effective ; no case has arisen in London since 1921. The story of the gradual development of more effective measures for dealing with glanders provides an instructive lesson

in administration. The diminution in the number of cases is, of course, due to some extent to the reduction in the number of animals in London and the introduction of mechanical means of transport. Another contrast is found in the case of dogs. The fear of being bitten by a mad dog—so common years ago — has wholly disappeared. In the five years ending in 1892, a hundred and ninety dogs were killed by order of the metropolitan police as suspected of rabies, and

it was established that forty-nine of the dogs had the disease. No case of rabies in London has, however, been reported since 1899. Under the Agriculture Act, 1937, all veterinary work

has been transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, but the Council’s inspectors keep daily watch

at railway cattle sidings and elsewhere to detect any case of contagious disease or of unnecessary suffering during transport. Collection of revenue

It is the Council which collects for London the duties on licences for dogs, guns, armorial bearings, carriages,

MOTOR VEHICLES 567 game-dealing and killmg game and, until recently, male

servants. For this work the Council employs twenty collectors, whose duty it 1s also to report any cases where

hability has been incurred and a licence has not been taken out. The Council has power to impose a mitigated

penalty on the offender and to give him the option of paying this as an alternative to proceedings. As far as carriage licences are concerned, the Finance Act, 1920, abolished the old licence duties and substituted increased and new duties on private motor cars and on goods vehicles which before that time had been exempt.

The licences are renewable yearly on Ist January or quarterly on the first day of each quarter, and the

numbers have risen from 131,500 in 1921 to over 621,000

in 1937. The fact that all licences are renewable on a few specified dates throws a heavy periodical load on the Council’s staff which is met by the appointment of temporary assistants and working overtime during rush periods.

The Council has been faced with rapidly growing

duties in keeping the register of motor vehicles in London and issuing licences to drivers. In 1904 the Council registered 8,268 new vehicles, in 1919 it registered

37,939, and in 1937, 74,423. Since 1930 the Council has also kept the register of motor vehicles in Great Britain and Northern Ireland travelling under foreign identification plates, a duty previously performed by the Commissioner of Police. Driving licences, of which about 18,000 were issued in 1904, have shown an even more remarkable increase

than licences of motor vehicles. In 1937 the Council

issued nearly 361,000 licences. Every holder of a driving licence from the Council is registered; the

register contains more than a million names and consists of 2,650 volumes, of which eighteen are devoted

to the surname Smith. The change in the policy of endorsement of licences 1s well illustrated by the increase

from a hundred in 1904 to nearly twenty thousand in 1937. Although there are only twenty times as many licences as there were in 1904, there are two hundred

568 PUBLIC CONTROL times as many endorsements. The endorsements have to be entered in the register kept by the Council.

II Incensing of entertainments

There has been a great change in the principal forms of indoor entertainment for the public since the ’eighties.

The theatre has maintained its position; music-halls have undergone a marked change of character; from 1909 onwards the cinema has been growing into the most

widely enjoyed form of entertainment ; and, in recent years, the development of wireless broadcasting has profoundly influenced the habits of the people. Theatres,

music-halls, dance halls and cinemas all concern the Council, and some other forms of entertainment, such as boxing and wrestling, also come under its control. The control of London theatres is a historical freak. There are three kinds—the patent theatres (Drury Lane and Covent Garden), so called because they derive their right from letters patent granted by the Crown ; theatres licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, namely all those in the City, Westminster, Finsbury, Marylebone, the Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and Southwark (the parliamentary boroughs as existing at the passing of the Theatres Act,

1843); and theatres licensed by the Council under

powers which it inherited from the justices of the peace. The Council also took over from the Metropolitan Board of Works a general power, exercisable with the

Lord Chamberlain’s consent for theatres in his jurisdiction and the Home Secretary’s consent in other cases.

This was the power to call upon owners of theatres to remedy defects where they were such that special danger

from fire might result to the public. It was decided by the courts in 1901, however, that once a notice had been

given to a theatre, the power was exhausted as respects that theatre, and since then other means of enforc-

ing safety precautions have been adopted. The Lord Chamberlain, with whom the Council’s relations have

THEATRES 569 always been cordial, requires as a condition of his licence

that the Council’s directions shall be carried out, after reference to arbitration if necessary, and the Council similarly enforces requirements for the theatres under

its own jurisdiction by attaching them as conditions to its licence. With the concurrence of the Home Office,

requirements for the patent theatres are also enforced by the Lord Chamberlain. The question of transferring the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction to the Council was

mooted during the Council’s early years, but a select committee reported against it in 1892 and since then the anomalous arrangement that the Council inspects and reports defects and the Lord Chamberlain enforces its suggestions has been successfully and harmoniously

carried out. It may be added that theatres automatically carry an excise licence for alcoholic drink.

The change in the London music-halls is a social development for which the Council can claim a large share of credit. They differed widely in quality, from the magnificence of the Empire and the Alhambra, through a host of halls fitted with chairs of varying degrees of comfort, to the “free and easies”’ which were simply rooms attached to public-houses. All had one feature in common —the entertainment was a blend of show and song with opportunity for taking

alcoholic drink. It was against this blend that the

Council from the beginning set its face and gradually brought to an end. The power to license music-halls had a strange derivation from the Disorderly Houses Act, 1751 — an eighteenth-century restriction on “ the

multitude of places of entertainment for the lower sort of people’ which were said to be a “ great cause of thefts and robberies, as they are thereby tempted to spend their small substance in riotous pleasures’. This Act followed the issue of a pamphlet by the novelist, Henry Fielding, then chairman of the Middlesex quarter sessions, on the social evils of the time, and this original fountain of authority has developed in scope and value far beyond its first conception. When the Council held its first licensing session it

570 PUBLIC CONTROL found that among the places licensed by the justices there were thirty-two music-halls without any restriction as to sale of intoxicants, two hundred and twentyeight public-houses or restaurants, of which many had music-halls attached, and seventy-four places of entertainment which were probably not licensed for alcoholic

drink. The Council at once prohibited the sale of

intoxicants in five cases and imposed limitations of varying degrees of stringency in five others. The aim was indirectly to reduce the amount of drinking, but in particular, and as an immediate measure, to prevent alcoholic drinks from being served in the auditorium.

Year after year the restrictions were imposed on one licensee after another, till finally all premises of the kind had become the subject of conditions, differing from each

other it is true, but in the main following a grouping which was appropriate to the various classes of place.

The task was not easy, and the vigorous exercise of its jurisdiction by the Council brought gibes and criticisms in abundance, particularly on the head of Mr. (Sir) John M‘Dougall. In the course of the 1895 election, John Benn stoutly defended the Council’s policy in relation to the music-halls. He said — “ ‘I will tell you what the Council has done. . . . We went round London and found that place after place had to be condemned ; London was in fact full of death-traps.’ He went on to point out how the Council had insisted on proper exits plainly marked ; how they had insisted

on the doors opening outwards so that in the event of a panic the danger would be reduced to a minimum ; how they had insisted on decent arrangements being made for the performers in their dressing-rooms and

offices. Then the Act had said they must see to it

that the performances were decent. Many councillors found this a very irksome part of their duty.” It was in connection with this campaign for decency in musichall performances that the Council gained the reputation of a “‘ Paul Pry’. As John Benn said — “‘ At the end of the first Council it was said ‘Oh! those M‘Dougall-

ites, those Paul Prys will have to go.’ We were cari-

MUSIC-HALLS 571 catured in every newspaper and every pantomime by some hideous-looking image to represent the County Council.’ . . . He showed on the evidence of Mr. Herbert

Campbell that the work of the actors was made easier

now that there was no longer the clash of glasses in

the auditorium; that they could put up better and lighter entertainments, and that, now that ordinary people knew that they could go to the halls without fear, the industry was more prosperous than ever and

the shares had gone up.’ Among others, performances at the Aquarium were criticised, and on one occasion

a statement was published that two members of the

Entertainments Committee had been there to ascertain whether Zeeo, a girl acrobat, was suffering from sores

on her back as a result of her performances, and that ‘the two members were admitted to the lady’s dressing-

room, her mother and father being present, and then, after ocular demonstration, they acknowledged the false-

ness of the statement’. It need hardly be said that, when the matter was raised in the Council, M’Dougall

indignantly denied the story, which no doubt was

malicious.®

Difficulties over the serving of alcoholic drinks were not allowed to arise m connection with cinematograph

halls, m which the sale of intoxicants has never been permitted. There were, however, problems of a different

kind. The rapid development of the cinema during the first decade of the present century led to the passing

of the Cinematograph Act, 1909. This act put an end to exhibitions of moving pictures, by means of unprotected apparatus of primitive type, which were being given to audiences crowded into small converted shops and other unsuitable places. Any place in London giving cinematograph shows for more than six days in a year

had to be licensed by the Council under the Act and 1 Gardiner, John Benn and the Progresswve Movement, pp. 269-270.

2 Proceedings in the Council on 3rd March, 1891, as reported in

Saunders, History of the First London County Council, p. 415. 3 See Punch’s idea of a coat of arms! (p. 578).

572 PUBLIC CONTROL had to conform with the regulations of the Home Secretary.

Soon Continental films of the so-called “daring ” type began to be shown in this country and in 1912 the British Board of Film Censors was set up, appointed

and remunerated by the trade itself. The Council, in common with a large number of other licensing authori-

ties, agreed that normally only films passed by the

Board should be exhibited. The Council retained, how-

ever, a residual discretion, and acts for London as an authority for reviewing decisions of the Board against which an exhibitor desires to appeal. On these occasions the conference hall at the County Hall is turned temporarily into a duly licensed cinema, and members of the Entertainments Committee, in company with members of some of the licensing authorities of districts around London, view the films behind guarded doors. During the last seventeen years there have been forty-six films

reviewed : in respect of fourteen of them the Board’s decision was confirmed, and in the remaining thirty-two cases permission was given to shew the films in London, subject to special conditions.

At the end of 1938 the Council received a crop of complaints about the disregard of declared prices for seats in some cinemas. Shortly, the complaints were that, although seats at lower prices were vacant, members of the public were kept waiting outside and endeavours made to persuade them to pay higher prices by exhibiting

boards stating that no seats below a named price were available; and that in wet weather or when business was good, prices were raised without notice. The complaints were investigated and proved to have good foundation in some cases, whereupon the Council gave the cinema

trade the opportunity to rectify the matter by selfdiscipline. This did not have the desired result, and the Council has therefore made a rule requiring seat plans,

with marked prices, to be exhibited, prohibiting any increase during the day of prices declared on the plan,

and preventing any person desiring an available seat from being kept waiting an unreasonable time.

CINEMAS 573 Public performances of music, boxing and (since January, 1939) wrestling have also to be licensed by the Council, and so has dancing in public. Dancing was of secondary importance before the war, when it

could be classified either as a formal matter conducted in private or public ballrooms or professional dancing of the type shewn on a theatrical stage. The post-war development of the cabaret show, with professional performers giving exhibitions on the floors of restaurants and diners dancing during the service of meals, created a fresh problem, and the Council has had to adapt its licences to provide for varied situations. The need for control of public boxing and wrestling — particularly ‘all-in’? wrestling — speaks for itself, and, although control of public boxing is exercised by the licensing

authorities in several towns in England, the Council is among the pioneers in obtaining power to license

wrestling.

During the ‘nineties, societies such as the National Sunday League used to give, at places licensed for music,

lectures followed by concerts of sacred or other good music, and in 1898 the Council began to require that Sunday concerts should not be given “ for private gain

or by way of trade”. Eleven years later the Council somewhat elaborated its restrictions, excluding the use

of costumes, dancing or any form of variety, play or sketch (a limitation which remains unchanged), and requiring that balance-sheets should be submitted monthly and that employees who worked during the week should not be pressed to assist at Sunday concerts.

The war brought a spreading movement in favour of Sunday cinema performances unhindered by the limitations of the quality of programme which were imposed on other forms of Sunday entertainment. As early as 1916 the Council had given the licensees of cinemas freedom in making arrangements for Sunday exhibitions, provided that performances should not be given outside the period 6 P.M. to 11 p.m. and that all profits should be paid over to a charity approved by the Council.

574 PUBLIC CONTROL This method of regulating the opening of cinemas on Sundays was in due course challenged. A common informer, acting under the old powers of the Lord’s Day Observance Act, 1781, brought the Council before the courts and obtained a declaration that to allow cinemas

to open on Sundays was a breach of the Act. Faced with this situation, after a legal fight which was taken to the Court of Appeal, the Council asked the Home

Secretary to promote legislation to have its action legalised for the future. The result was the passing of the Sunday Entertainments Act, 1932, applicable to the whole country, m which was embodied the effect of the conditions imposed in London by the Council to ensure a weekly rest day for workers in cinemas which open on Sundays and payment to charity

of a proportion, though not the whole, of the profits. Under the Council’s scheme, the proportion of profits payable to approved charities (which must be in aid of preventing or alleviating human suffering or destitution mainly among inhabitants of London) 1s at present 123 per cent, and there are over three hundred cinemas in London now permitted to open on Sundays on these

terms. The Act also gave local authorities power to license Sunday concerts and to impose conditions as to the character of the performances, but it did not enable them to require, as in the case of cinemas, that a proportion of profits should be paid to charity, or that workers should have a weekly rest day.

The best designed regulations for safety in places of entertainment are worthless unless properly carried

out. “L.C.C. standard” is regarded throughout the country as a model, and the Council’s code is probably

the strictest, and certainly the most elaborate, in

operation. Its enforcement is a matter for which the Council depends partly on the good faith of the exhibitors themselves and partly on frequent imspections. The great majority of entertainment licensees in London are imbued with a real sense of responsibility for

the safety of both public and performers. Their loyal

SAFETY REGULATIONS 575 co-operation has done much to establish London’s long

and exceptional record of freedom from catastrophe. On the other hand, continuous inspection cannot be dispensed with, if it is to be ensured that every safety device is working properly and every rule of safety is being observed. The Council has now to watch over eight hundred and fifty places of entertainment seating more than half a million persons, as against the two hundred and thirty-four places which could accom-

modate less than quarter of a million persons fifty years ago. Every year twenty-four thousand inspec-

tions and surveys are made, in consequence of which there are few places in London safer than a seat in one of its theatres, halls or cinemas.

Ill Administration of justice

Among the functions taken over by the Council from the county justices were some powers and duties in relation to the administration of justice in London. Assizes for London are held in the Central Criminal Court, familiarly known as the Old Bailey. The courthouse is provided and maintained by the City Corpora-

tion, but the establishment expenses of the court are

borne as to seven-eighths by the London County Council and as to the remaining eighth by the councils of adjoin-

ing counties parts of whose areas are within the jurisdiction of the court. It is the Council which pays the

costs of the prosecution in criminal cases at the Old Bailey, at London sessions, and at London police courts.

London was a new county, and the Local Govern-

ment Act, 1888, had therefore to provide for a new court of quarter sessions. Formerly London had been covered by the jurisdictions of Kent, Middlesex and Surrey and of the City of London, which was a county of itself. The quarter sessions created for London were given jurisdiction over the whole of the administrative

county, except that the City was to continue as a

576 PUBLIC CONTROL separate entity unless, with the assent of the Corpora-

tion, made subject to the new jurisdiction. They are presided over by a chairman and deputy-chairman who are paid by the Council, being appointed by the Crown on the Council’s petition. The business of the London sessions was formerly

conducted at the Clerkenwell Sessions House. After the question had been considered by a departmental committee in 1909, the Council decided, having failed in negotiations with the City Corporation for the use of the Central Criminal Court, to demolish the Newington Sessions House and build a new court for the London

sessions on the site. The tender was accepted only a few weeks before the outbreak of war, and the work of building made partial progress. In 1917 the Ministry of Munitions authorised its completion so far as would enable it to be used temporarily for government offices ; shortly after the conclusion of the war the Government

vacated it and the Council was able to complete and equip the court.

An important branch of the Council’s work is the maintenance of remand homes for children waiting to be brought before a magistrate as juvenile offenders. Under the Children Act, 1908, the Council became the

authority in London to provide remand homes (or ‘places of detention’, as they were then called) for every petty sessional division in the administrative county. The same Act transferred to the Council the buildings already provided for the purpose by the Metropolitan Asylums Board. Three remand homes were taken over, but as the number of delinquents decreased it was found that one was enough. This home, originally housed in a former elementary school, was transferred to larger and more suitable premises at Shepherd’s Bush when the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933, increased the demand for accommodation.!

The Council also inherited from the justices the power to appoint coroners (outside the City), pay them 1 For later developments see chapter 10, p. 275.

CORONERS AND INQUESTS 577 salaries and provide accommodation for inquests. A coroner must be a barrister, solicitor or legally qualified medical practitioner of not less than five years’ standing and since 1920 every coroner appointed by the Council

has possessed both legal and medical qualifications. Although the Council appoints coroners and pays their salary, it has no control over them nor power to dismiss them. The Lord Chancellor may remove a coroner from office for inability or misbehaviour in the discharge of

his duties, but reported cases since 1800 are rare. Only twice has the Council applied to the Lord Chancellor for the removal of a coroner, each time without

success. :

The Public Health (London) Act, 1891, required the Council to provide accommodation for inquests and this

was done in the next few years throughout London. Formerly the coroner used to hire a room for his inquests

at his own expense, and the practice of holding them in public-houses was frequent, as rooms were obtainable

there more readily and more cheaply than elsewhere. In 1894 five hundred and sixty-eight London inquests were held in public-houses, but not one has been held on licensed premises since 1901. Mortuaries, as distinct

from coroners’ courts, though often close to them for convenience, are provided by the metropolitan borough councils.

The law of inquests remained in an unsatisfactory state for many years and the Council repeatedly urged improvements on successive Lord Chancellors. The law

was not put into a generally satisfactory state until the Coroners (Amendment) Act, 1926. Among other things, this Act enabled a coroner to order and pay for a post-mortem examination without holding an inquest, and in consequence it has been possible to reduce the number of coroners’ courts and places for inquests from twenty-six to fourteen. It was due to the Council, too,

that the payment of jurymen summoned to inquests in London was instituted. Coroners have still occasionally to hold inquests on

treasure trove, perhaps more frequently than in days 2P

578 PUBLIC CONTROL gone by in consequence of the alteration of the law which now entitles the finder of treasure trove to the full value of his find, so that any inducement to conceal

it 1s removed. There also survives the special jurisdiction of the City coroner to hold inquests on fires occurring in the City, under the City of London Fire

} \mm | usre) We

Inquests Act, 1888.

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FRays ) READY-MADE COAT(-OF-ARMS) FOR THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL

Arms : Quarterly; Ist, three music-hall stars blatant voided of guile charged

with double-entendres studded azure; 2nd, issuant from a “ring” sinister spotted exposed proper a balance-sheet and distinctly fichée to the last,and all under a cloud sable’; 3rd, a civil doctored turtle pommelled and affronted proper charged in the middle for betterment with a belabour member poignant in satire or battersea cough-drop rampant 5 4th, two party-coloured fightingcocks dancetté in fury chronically embroiled proper on a ground litigious in the main. Crest: A prude vigilant on the pounce armed with pince-nez and reticule highly proper; in her bonnet an heraldic bee rampant. Supporters : On either side an antique civic effigy habited proper up to date, the dexter bearing a special globe gules, and the sinister a star extra-special vert.

Punch June, 1897

PART IV THE COUNCIL’S EXTERNAL RELATIONS

CHAPTER 24

THE COUNCIL AND PARLIAMENT

THE London County Council was the child of Parliament, and, like most children, it was a source of anxiety to its parent during its unruly youth. Politics appeared at the beginning, and it was soon clear that the party

complexion of the Council was a matter which the Government could not ignore.

Looking back over the last half century, it is interesting to find that in most years the party in power at Westminster has not been in general sympathy with the majority party at the County Hall. During the eighteen years of the Progressive régzme, from 1889 to 1907, the Government of this country was Conservative, except

for the weak Liberal interregnum of 1892-95. The ardour and ambition of the Progressives aroused alarm

in government circles and at times more than their share of reprobation. During the years when the Liberals held the reins of government, there were so many coachmen pulling in so many directions that no real progress was made, and for London nothing more

helpful was provided than yet another Royal Commission, whose recommendations, though pleasing to the Progressives, ran quickly away into the dry sands of political impotence.

Hardly had the Liberals gained their great parliamentary majority of 1906, when the London elector deserted his Progressive love and installed the Municipal

Reform party in favour, to reign for over quarter of a

century. Until the latter part of the war they had a Liberal Government to deal with all the time. With the creation of the Coalition, party feeling on the Council died down. After the war came a period, from 1922 to 1929, during which there was party sympathy between 581

582 THE COUNCIL AND PARLIAMENT Parliament and the Council; save for the short Labour Government of 1924, the Conservatives had a parliamentary majority throughout those seven years. Then came two years with Labour, supported by Liberals, in power; and since 1931 a National Government of dominantly Conservative complexion has been in office,

covering the remainder of the Municipal Reformers’

term and the first four years of Labour rule on the Council. Apart from the seven years after the war, which may well be explained by the desire for unanimity in undertaking the work of reconstruction, the significant fact can be recorded that the London electors

tend to support the opposite party for the Council to that which they support for Parliament.

The sharpest contests between the Council and

Parliament took place in the early years before 1900,

when some of the avowed aims of the Council caused so

much concern to the Government of the day. Once the London Government Act, 1899, had passed and the metropolitan borough councils had been safely created

as a bulwark against aggrandisement,' the attitude of Parliament towards the Council seems to have changed ;

moreover, some of the reforming zeal of the Progressives had by then toned down. The Acts which most enlarged the functions of the Council — the Education (London) Act, 1903, and the Local Government Act, 1929

(transferring the public assistance services), were both passed by Conservative Governments, whose predecessors had looked askance at the Council’s early demands for more functions. The dawn of the twentieth century marks the start of an increasing faith in the Council as an administrative instrument. The nineteenth century fears of rivalry to Parliament, engendered partly by the memory of the mighty influence wielded by the City

over kings and parliaments of days gone by, seem

fantastic now. This change may well have come about in part because Parliament’s growing sense of its own 1 “Tt was thought that without such sub-division the responsibility of the London County Council might exceed its capacity for executive work and that its authority in the capital of the Empire might prove to be excessive” (Cambridge Modern History, vol. xii, p. 61).

CONFLICTS WITH PARLIAMENT 583 burdens bred a readiness to delegate local and even regional affairs to local government authorities, under the surveillance of ministerial departments. Of the contests in early years between the Council

and Parliament it can truly be said that the majority were party disputes. In particular this is true of what we may call the “lost causes”? — the endeavours of the Council to absorb the City and to make itself the authority for police, water, markets and electricity. Some of the other early contests, such as the Council’s long-pursued efforts to obtain power to run trams over the Thames bridges, were more concerned with vested

interests than party politics. The famous fight with the Board of Education over the re-organisation of schools in 1910, though a fight with a government department rather than with Parliament itself, had a party flavour, as it was the interpretation of a Liberal edict by a Municipal Reform council which was in issue. On the other hand, there have been contests on non-party matters—for example the perennial complaint by the Council of unfavourable treatment for grants from the national exchequer. Since the war the most vivid clash was a non-party dispute —the Waterloo Bridge controversy ; on the policy of rebuilding Waterloo Bridge for six lines of road-traffic

both parties at County Hall were agreed, but one had deferred to parliamentary pressure against its better judgement and was a tacit, but rather embarrassed, participant in the vigorous line which the Council took early in 1934. A more recent illustration of a party fight is the bill for rating empty properties which the Council unsuccessfully promoted in the session 1935-36.

Let us turn now from the broad topic of the Council’s

general relations with the sovereign legislature to the more detailed question of promotion and opposition of bills in Parliament. As regards its own bills the Council is in a somewhat special position. Local authorities have a right to promote parliamentary bills to attain lawful objects for which their existing powers do not suffice

584 THE COUNCIL AND PARLIAMENT The Council has from the outset exercised this power annually, in addition to the annual promotion of a money

bill which we shall mention later. When the Progressives were in office and eager to extend the Council’s range of functions, a spate of special legislation, much of it unsuccessful, was only to be expected. Yet in addition to these special bills the Council found it neces-

sary every year to promote a “ general powers ’”’ bill conferring upon it additions to, or modifications of, its

powers and duties. This practice has remained unchanged throughout the Council’s life, and is the outcome

not of spontaneous zeal for greater control over the inhabitants of London, but of the compelling influence of the administrative problems of a unique community. The Council’s general powers bills are characterised by the variety, and often by the complexity, of their provisions. The typist who produced a draft of one of them under the heading “ L.C.C. (General Posers) Bill’ was

unconsciously close to the mark! Nor has there been any lessening of this quality by the introduction of provisions promoted on behalf of the metropolitan borough councils, some of whose needs in the spheres of

finance and superannuation have tested fully the ingenuity of the draftsman. The difficulty of persuading Parliament, and opponents, to accept bold recasting of existing law, with the modifications desired, has led to many of the provisions taking the form of “ legislation by reference ” — that is to say, amendment of a previous

enactment which is referred to, but not set out.

Frequently the references may run through a series of statutes and the seeker for the law must spend distracted hours comparing five or six separate Acts before he reaches, often with misgiving, what he believes to be the

truth. The Augean stables of the fifty years of London County Council legislation have long awaited a legal Hercules, but with the annual pressure of new demands, it has so far proved a task too formidable to add to other

burdens, though a start was made in 1930 with the

passing of a consolidated London Building Act, followed in 1936 by a consolidated Public Health Act for London ;

LONDON LEGISLATION 585 and a bill to codify the machinery of London local government is being promoted in 1939. Apart from the general powers bills, the Council often

promotes special bills for particular objects. Theoretically, any provision might be put in a general powers bill, but for various reasons this may be undesirable. The matter may be so important — for example, a big highway improvement costing scores of thousands of pounds and affecting many acres of valuable property —

that it would overload the bill; or it may be highly

contentious, so that to include-it with other provisions might result in all being lost; or, as a matter of parliamentary tactics, 1t may be wiser to promote in a separate bill a provision of a special character, even if uncontroversial. Another feature peculiar to the Council 1s the annual money bill. This is a bill which the Council 1s obliged to promote, for, unlike other county councils, most of whose borrowing 1s sanctioned by government departments, the Council has to obtain, from year to year, sanction from Parliament itself to borrow money for the purpose of its

functions. But for this special situation, there could have been no fight in Parliament about Waterloo Bridge ;

it was over the Council’s application to borrow money for the cost of demolishing and rebuilding the bridge that the arguments raged. Any other county authority would have obtained the approval of the Ministry of Transport without any argument at all — for, be it remembered,

the Ministry of Transport agreed with the Council’s policy in that matter. The Council deserves credit for the share it has taken, by its private bills, in one of the chief modes of developing the powers of English local authorities — the estab-

lishment of individual precedents which, repeatedly enacted, are in time accepted as “ standard clauses ” which Parliament will always grant to a local authority on proof of need, or are applied throughout the country by general statute. One of the most important modern

sanitary Acts, the Public Health Act, 1925, consists

almost wholly of provisions for which there are numerous

586 THE COUNCIL AND PARLIAMENT

precedents in the private Acts of individual local authorities. We may take as an example of a principal sphere in which the Council has introduced pioneer legislation — that of “ public control ’’,1 the regulation of particular

forms of activity in the public interest. For example, between 1915 and 1935 the Council secured many new powers relating to the issue and transfer of licences for places of entertainment, the prohibition of unsafe premises

and the extension of hours of opening. In the regulation of employment agencies, massage establishments and lying-in homes, and in the protection of the public from food manufactured in insanitary surroundings or in contact with disease, the Council, although not always first in the field, has been among the earliest authorities to obtain and administer beneficent powers of which several are now included in general Acts of Parliament.

Again, we may take an interesting case of pioneer action by a metropolitan borough council promptly followed by the Council in the next year. In 1926 the Bermondsey Borough Council obtained power to license

and otherwise control street traders, a provision based on the recommendations of a departmental committee

on street trading in 1921. In its General Powers Act of 1927 the Council obtained the Bermondsey powers for the remaining metropolitan borough councils, and since then many other authorities have followed suit, including the Middlesex County Council. Another example of pioneer legislation is the special

power to deal with mental patients on a voluntary

basis which, as has already been mentioned,? the Council obtained in 1915.

In addition to promoting its own bills, the Council keeps, and has always kept, a watchful eye on all legis-

lation affecting London introduced into Parliament. This may be private legislation, promoted by public bodies, statutory undertakers and others, which may prejudice the Council or the interests of the ratepayers

1 See chapter 23. 2 See chapter 14, p. 347.

PIONEER PROVISIONS 587 of the county. Bills promoted, for example, by statutory undertakers in London have been successfully opposed by the Council to obtain protection for consumers. Equally the Council is vigilant in examining public legislation, whether introduced by the Government or by private members. As far as government legislation is concerned, most of the Council’s successes

in the interests of London are achieved in the quiet atmosphere of preliminary discussion with the govern-

ment department in charge of the bill, often months before it is introduced. The custom of preliminary discussion is now well established, and the introduction of unheralded legislation into Parliament has become such an unexpected rarity that, when it does occur, a sturdy

protest to the responsible minister is the immediate sequel. This changed technique is one of the notable advances which fifty years of progress have conferred. It is unassuming and little realised, but highly valuable ; the waste of time, temper and — worst of all — good relations which the old manner of jousting at arms’ length

produced can well be spared from modern administration, which is more than strenuous enough without it. Mention of the government departments leads naturally to a consideration of the Council’s relations with the ministers of State. In the provinces, where the govern-

ment department is the usual sanctioning authority for loans, the relationship is close. It has, in fact, erown closer in post-war years, during which there has been discernible a double influence — the tendency of the central departments to exercise more control over the policy of local authorities by using (to describe it

crudely) either bribes or financial threats, and the tendency of local authorities to tolerate much in exchange for a grant from the national exchequer,

tendencies somewhat lessened now by the merging of specific grants in a block grant under the Local Govern-

ment Act, 1929. Grants have been so largely used during these latter years as a sop to sweeten the swallow-

ing by local authorities of more and more duties, that

588 THE COUNCIL AND PARLIAMENT there has been some lessening of their degree of independence. This is not to say that local independence has disappeared: far from it, for local authorities are in a stronger position to-day than they were fifty years ago and their influence manifests itself potently — not

least in the powerful local government associations which have now established so clear a relationship with

the central government that they are almost variably consulted on matters affecting local authorities at large

before action is taken. Nor, indeed, has the pressure been all on one side; the growing habit on the part of local bodies of looking to the central authority for aid, not merely financial, but in matters of policy and sometimes even of technical detail, has played its share.

If we set against this general picture the situation of the Council, there seem at first to be differences so ereat that the Council might well prove an exception

from the general rule. In the first place the Council goes to Parliament for sanctions for capital expenditure

and not to a government department. This fact alone, however, does not make a wide difference; the ramifications of the modern system of grants are so intricate that few matters can be wholly divorced from the ques-

tion of exchequer assistance. There 1s a measure of control and supervision by the Treasury over capital expenditure and the closest relation between the Council

and the departments of State over a large part of the Council’s activities. This would in any event be natural,

for the central authority has much influence in the general policy for the country in local government

matters and the Council would ill serve either London or the State by acting the runagate. A second difference is the degree to which London is the subject of special legislation. Hlsewhere in this book it has been explained how London seems on many occa-

sions to have been regarded as a thing apart, and by reason of its special character and difficulties has been often omitted from general legislation. In such matters as public health, building regulation, street works and drainage, as well as finance, London has its own special

GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS 589 code. To some extent this leads to independence of the guiding ministerial hand. Although, therefore, the tie between the Council and the departments of State is looser than that which binds other local authorities to them, the nature of the bond is little different and the spirit of the relation is the same. This spirit is a compound of accommodation with firmness, docility with independence, trust with wariness and — if it comes to a fight — good humour with pugnacity. It is truly English, and to those used to official

relationships abroad it must seem strange, perhaps inexplicable.

While the vast majority of matters in which the

Council comes in contact with central departments 1s handled without public argument, there are fights sometimes. These may be either disputes over government proposals — a prominent recent example, in which the

Council acted in unanimity with all the other local

authorities in the land, was the question of bearing the cost of air-raid precautions — or objections by a government department to legislation promoted by the Council. In the latter case the objection may, in exceptional cases, take the form of opposition by the minister concerned

at the second reading of the bill (a course which 1s normally fatal to the proposal) or, more generally, a report by the appropriate department of State to the select committee to which the bill is referred. These reports are given due weight by the committee but are

by no means conclusive. There are cases on record where the Council has obtained powers from Parliament

despite the adverse criticism of a government department.

In so short a compass it is possible to give only an outline of the general spirit which pervades and has pervaded the Council’s relations with Parliament and the ministers of the Crown. The most noteworthy features

are the development of that spirit from something approaching active hostility and distrust to confidence

and friendliness, even where there are differences of

590 THE COUNCIL AND PARLIAMENT political complexion, and the change in the method of contact, from distant official correspondence to informal discussion. The relentless increase in the pressure upon all the governing and administrative institutions of the realm has doubtless played a great part in bringing this about, for common difficulties breed understanding and phability in relations. It is not that the fighting spirit has gone; it is simply that there is so little time to fight.

CHAPTER 25

THE COUNCIL AND OTHER LOCAL AUTHORITIES

Or late years relations between neighbouring local authorities have become more ‘intimate, and in some respects more difficult. The movement of population, expansion of services and development of communications have bound districts more closely together, increasing not only the number and degree of matters of common concern but also the possibilities of conflicting interest. Intimacy may make for war as much as for peace. More co-operation has become a real need and so also, for some services, has something in the nature of a common plan,

even if only in broad outline with plenty of scope for

local diversity in its application. Of this situation London is a special example, as the hub of a great congeries of urban communities governed by independent authorities. The relations of the Council with other authorities

provide an interesting study in modern government. It would be instructive to compare London in this

respect with other large cities. New York, Paris and the Berlin and Vienna of earlier days have

been confronted with similar problems. The general tendency has been to increase the powers of the central

local governing body at the expense of those for the districts. This process has gone on far less in London

than elsewhere. The Council has grown greatly in stature and in girth compared with the City Corporation and the metropolitan borough councils ; yet its growth

has not been so much at the expense of the municipal authorities as by absorption of the functions of other

special bodies and through the conferment of new 591

592 OTHER LOCAL AUTHORITIES functions upon it.1 The tendency to entrust new functions to county councils and county borough councils rather than to municipal borough councils and urban and rural district councils is general, and London reflects it in its own way.’ In this question of distribution of functions between

counties and districts we are confronted with one of

the big problems of democratic government, a problem which is largely a conflict between two desirable object-

ives. On the one side stand the claims of efficiency and equity — the advantages of an area large enough to attract members and officers of the needed calibre, including the specialists nowadays required ; to enable related services to be dovetailed ; and to spread costs

equitably over districts rich and poor. On the other

side are the risks of autocracy and bureaucracy, which can flourish among members as well as among officers. This is not the place to pursue these tempting subjects.

They have been mentioned in order to indicate the important principles which lie beneath the perennial struggle, be it loud or quiet, over the distribution of functions between different classes of authorities; and because the significance of the principles is often little appreciated, for example in the advocacy of some of

the more facile proposals for regional government. The City of London

Of the relations between the Council and the City Corporation in the first few years after 1888 a general indication has been given in earlier chapters.* To have achieved the creation of a democratic county council without incorporating in it the prestige and resources of 1 Even in 1894 the Royal Commission on amalgamation of the City and the County of London referred to “ recent legislation the tendency of which would seem to have been to assign to the County Council the duty of administering each new Act, without always minutely considering

whether it was the body best adapted for it’ (see p. 18 of their report).

2 Out of every £100 spent by all local authorities from revenue, county councils spent—in London, in 1890-91, £13, 16s. and in 1935-36, £59, 2s. (excluding the Metropolitan Water Board); elsewhere, in 1890-91, £9, 18s.

and in 1935-36, £25, 12s. 3 See chapters 3 and 4.

THE CITY 593 the City Corporation was to the Progressive reformers

almost to have cracked the nut without gaiming the kernel. It was inevitable that violent assaults on the City should continue, and Lord Rosebery’s policy of peaceful penetration seemed to many members inadequate for the needs.

It would be wrong to think that the relations

amounted to continuous enmity; there is plenty of

evidence to the contrary. The loan of the Guildhall to the Council for its meetings during its first year and the early (1891) co-operation between the Council and the Corporation over the question of London water supply * are examples which shew that, deep beneath the surface, was buried a seed which in due time was to blossom into

a flower of friendship. The struggle of reform versus vested interests, even more strongly than purely political

antagonism, kept the two bodies apart, and when

between 1892 and 1895 occurred one of the rare and brief periods during which the Council and Parliament were predominantly of the same political complexion,

matters came to a head. Responding to pressure of which the influence had made itself felt strongly in the Council and outside, the Government appointed a Royal Commission on the amalgamation of the City and County of London, with Leonard Courtney as chairman and (Sir) Homewood Crawford, the solicitor to the City Corporation, as one of its members. The terms of reference to the Commission were “ to

consider the proper conditions under which the amalgamation of the City and the County of London can be effected, and to make specific and practical proposals for that purpose”; and dispute quickly arose over their interpretation. The Corporation, not unnaturally, contested the suggestion that it was being presented with

a fait accompli, and maintained its right to present evidence to shew that amalgamation was not desirable

at all. The majority of the Commission did not share that view ; in their opinion, “ that such an amalgamation is desirable if it is practicable we understand to be 1 See chapter 26, p. 623.

2Q

594 OTHER LOCAL AUTHORITIES assumed in the terms of reference to us”’.t The atmosphere became increasingly tense and at a comparatively

early stage of the proceedings Crawford resigned and

the Corporation withdrew its witnesses and took no further part in the inquiry. Despite the handicap of being without direct evidence on many important matters affecting the City, the Royal Commission produced a report embodying a scheme for a new Corporation of London, with members directly elected en bloc every three years, presided over by a Lord Mayor; and for local functions a series of district councils, of which

members were to be directly elected for three years, one-third retiring annually, and having a mayor to be chosen each year. The resources of the City Corporation were to be distributed between the authorities, and

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