TOILET HUMOR Chapter Four

 

I think the best way to describe the graveside ceremony was that it was short and sad. But mostly short. It was held Tuesday noon, 21 July, 1858, in London's park-like Brompton Cemetery. There was not a cloud in the sky. The temperature was in the mid-nineties Fahrenheit, and the formalities for the dearly departed Doctor John Snow, who had died of a stroke the week before, were as brief as decorum would allow. 

Many admired the “austere and painfully shy” man who would one day be called the “greatest physician of all time”, who founded not only anesthesiology but epidemiology as well. But on this day the stench overwhelmed grief and respect.

The stench wafted from the cesspit which snaked through the capital of the British Empire, 300 yards from Brompton Cemetery. In an average year, the Thames River's current was dwarfed by the twice daily 23 foot tides. But in 1858 the last rain in the Thames valley had been in March - over three months ago – and Old Man Thames had become a warm stagnant open air cesspit, it's swelling twice a day merely rearranging the human and animal waste piling up across the 700 foot wide 6 foot deep tidal flats, crossed by the new London Bridge.

Twelve years before, in 1842, the city had outlawed the municipal cesspits that were overflowing into the streets and polluting the 17,000 wells used by the 2 ½ million residents of London for drinking and cooking. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette would report: 'Within a period of about six years, thirty thousand cesspools were abolished, and all home and street refuse was turned into the river'" Now 250,000 tons of sewage was being poured directly into the Thames every day. Then, at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, some 827,000 curious paid a penny each to use a flush toilet for the first time. These proved so popular they were kept open for a year, earning over £1000 at a penny a flush. The public's apatite for indoor plumbing accelerated the transfer of poo from human bottoms to river bottom, which is why Dr. John Snow had opposed closing the cesspits.

Dr. Snow had identified the source of an August, 1854 Cholera outbreak that killed over 600 people, as a cesspit contaminated public pump in the poverty crippled Soho section of London. “I found that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump...that the deceased persons used to drink the pump water from Broad Street, either constantly or occasionally.” But even after identifying water as the means of transmission, Dr. Snow had cautioned against the outlawing of cesspits, because he knew without a sewer, that would merely postpone the problem.  His stand had earned him the enmity of most of the socially progressive scientists of the day, such as Dr William Murdoch and the great chemist Michael Faraday, who still ascribed the source of pestilence to mal-aria, or “ bad air”, and miasmas, disease carrying odors.

In July of 1855, Faraday wrote to the London Times, describing a boat trip down the Thames. “The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid....I tore up some white cards...and then dropped some of these pieces into the water...before they had sunk an inch below the surface they were indistinguishable...Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind.” In June of 1858 “blackish-green” water was reported by Health Officer Dr. Murdoch. “It is quite impossible to calculate the consequences of such a moving mass of decomposition... as the river at present offers to our senses”  Dr. Snow had warned about turning the river into an open sewer, but even in sewers the waster flows. The eight weeks of June-July 1858, when the Thames stopped flowing, came to to be called “The Great Stink”

Solutions to the problem of air or water born disease had been debated for almost two decades, through five Prime Ministers, two of them Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby. Whatever solution was offered, there were always objections to paying for it. In 1848 the conservative editors of “The Economists” turned to the Old Testament:: “Suffering and evil...cannot be gotten rid of: and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation... have always been more productive of evil than good”. No proof was offered for this contention. But the defenders of doing nothing went further. It was claimed new sewers would be an invasion of person freedom, a big government intrusion, a tax and spend liberal fraud. Filthy water was not the problem. And even the revered Dr. Snow was against big government sewer projects, claimed the opponents.

The latter argument was not quite true, but Snow's position was nuanced enough to be obscure  In fact he suggested it would be a good idea to end "that form of liberty to which some communities cling, the sacred power to poison to death not only themselves but their neighbors” Still the opponents confused enough of the public as to muddy the already filthy waters.  In 1855 Charles Dickens had satirized the opponents by describing a mythical pro-stink campaign rally. “Ratepayers... Health is enormously expensive. Be filthy and be fat. Cesspools and Constitutional Government! Gases and Glory! No insipid water!!” Dickens was kidding, but even to him the stench was no joke. He wrote a friend, “I can certify that the offensive smells...have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature” And still the opponents cautioned delay after delay, spreading confusion and misinformation much like modern day climate change deniers or anti-vaxers are still doing – proving again that we have not changed since leaving our Garden of Eden toilet.

Few would ever see the wiggling predators in a drop of Thames water under a microscope. But in the summer of 1858 everyone could smell the stench. It was, in the words of author David Barnes, “catastrophic...a devastating and even incapacitating onslaught. The stench was intolerable.” Wrote a reporter for the Illustrated London News, “The intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings (Westminster) which overlook the river. A few members...ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.”

The absentee tenant representing Leitrim, Ireland, John Brady, asked Lord John Manners, the Commissioner of Works and Public Buildings in Derby's second government, if anything could be done. Lord Manners replied the Thames was not under his “jurisdiction.” . Four days later another minister returned to the topic, and Lord Manners again avoided it, insisting, “Her Majesty's Government have nothing whatever to do with the state of the Thames".

Although Smith-Stanley was the Prime Minister in 1858, he sat in the House of Lords. The leader of the House of Commons was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, the most capable politician of his generation. And Disraeli realized the stench was growing stronger than the opposition. The desperate politicians were spending £1,500 per week to shovel 250 tons of lime across the mud flats at low tide. Under the direction of engineer Goldsworthy Gurney, curtains soaked in chloride were draped over the windows of Westminster to block the stench.  Nothing seemed to help. In mid-June Gurney had to warn the Commons, he could “no longer be responsible for the health of the house.” On 11 June, 1858 even the official diarist of the House of Commons was forced to note, “Gentlemen sitting in the Committee Rooms and in the Library were utterly unable to remain there in consequence of the stench which arose from the river.”

Finally, on 15 June, Disraeli brought the latest version of the “do something about the stench” bill up for debate, recalling the ancient river Styx, the river of death, and referring to the Thames as a “ a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors".  The cost would be a special 3 pence tax on all London households for the next 40 years - £3 million to rebuild the sewers of London.  Noted The Times,  “Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench” .

Wrote the London Globe, “Disgust, alarm, and reasonable precautions induced members” to finally take action. The Times wrote, “Gentility of speech is at an end – it stinks; and who so once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.”

The sewer plan, after almost two decades of design and redesign, was simple, as explained by Joseph Bazalgette, the man who would be responsible for building it. “The existing streams and drains all ran down to the river on both sides”, he wrote.   

First, the Thames -  that “pestiferous and typhus breeding abomination” -  was to be walled off by massive embankment, built atop new intersecting sewers (above, right center)  on either shore  “...so as to intercept those streams:”  Atop the embankments new roads could be built, and parks and open spaces. It promised a better world, a world of light and fresh air and ease of commute. But most of all it promised an end to the stench. 

The waste was not to be treated. It was merely to be dumped somewhere else, farther away, up stream, out to sea.  English humans were still searching for the Garden of Eden, where their poop would remain out of sight, out  of mind, out from under their noses and out of their drinking water.

The massive tax increase passed in just 18 days,  from creation, consideration, amendments, debate and passage. Usually only declarations of war received such quick treatment. It would have been cheaper to have fixed the problem earlier, and Lord knows most people wanted to fix it sooner. Uncounted lives would have been saved. The economy would have been improved, along with the health of the citizens, by following the simple rule of never shitting where you eat.  But it did not pass until the richest who refused to pay for the improvements, could no longer say no while holding their noses. It would take another twenty years to complete the work, but at last it was begun in August of 1858, just before the rains came back and the Great Stench ended.

The London sewers did not return English men and women to the Garden of Eden. None of us ain't ever going to get back there. And yet, we never seem to stop trying.

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TO WIT - The Political Insult

 

I can say without fear of contradiction that Abraham Lincoln was the most hated American politician in history. About one in four Americans spent four years trying to shoot him, for God's sake.

“Honest Abe” was described by one contemporary magazine as a “Filthy story-teller, despot liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, ignoramus, scoundrel, perjurer, robber, swindler, tyrant, field-butcher, (and) land pirate.” And a Chicago newspaper denounced one Lincoln speech by saying, “We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln could produce a paper so slipshod, so loose-joined, so puerile, not alone in literary construction but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp. He has outdone himself.” Wow; well at least the paper deigned to call him “Mister Lincoln”. Of course, the needle lost sting when you realize the Chicago Times was reviewing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

But then you come across the criticism of Mr. Lincoln offered by Mr. Peter Muggins, a private citizen from Ohio. He wrote the President the following letter: “God damn you, and your God damned old, hell fired, God damned soul to hell. God damn your God damned families’ God damned souls to hell. And God damn your God damned friends to hell.” After reading an outburst such as that what else is there to say except…everything? I believe that insults without humor are a mere expenditure of air, better used for survival 

It is easy to insult someone if you are willing to be reduced to grass vulgarity  Donald Trump is proof enough of that. But no honest person would ever mistake his vulgarity for wit. The first recorded insult was carved on the walls of an Egyptian tomb 4,300 year ago, when one fisherman ordered a second to, “Come over here, you copulater.” And it probably wasn’t original, even then.  And the twice impeached Donald never rose above that level of venom.

Lincoln occasionally gave as good as he got, of course. He described one opponent as one who could “…compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” But mostly, his wit was addressed to self depreciating humor. When accused of pandering to voters, Lincoln quickly replied, “If I were two faced, would I be wearing this one?”  But compared to the horrible things others said about him, Lincoln’s venom toward himself couldn’t hold a candle.

General George McClellan, who spent almost two years in close contact with Mr. Lincoln, described him as “…nothing more than a well meaning baboon”, and “An offensive exhibition of boorishness and vulgarity.” Of course history has since judged McClellan to be one of the biggest horse’s behinds in American history, so the source of the insult must have some bearing when judging the quality of the insult. For this reason McClellan loses. Again.

Because the issue here is not accuracy, nor political propriety or even civility; it is to wit, wit.  “The natural ability to perceive and understand – intelligence; keenness and quickness of perception or discernment; ingenuity, as in to live by one’s wits; the ability to perceive and express in an ingeniously humorous manner”; to wit:

In my subjective search for the wittiest political insult I have been disappointed by most modern commentators on George W. Bush, for various reasons. Most fall victim to shooting fish, as Ron Reagan Jr. did when he asked about our former President before he was our President, “What is his accomplishment?" The young Reagan replied, "That he’s no longer an obnoxious drunk.” Mr. Reagan gets points for bitterness and perhaps accuracy (he did know the younger Bush personally) but I must correspond with the adage that “He who has never been an obnoxious drunk at least once in his life, has not lived”.  And the missing element in Mr. Reagan’s observation is that elusive quality of “wit”.  You can't practice what you do not possess. 

I have eliminated most professional commentators from my search because they have staffs who daily submit attempts at wit, which are then weeded through for prized examples, to wit: Jay Leno on Bush being caught by a microphone using an obscenity at an international conference, “It’s not a big deal, President Bush using a four-letter word. Now if Bush used a four-syllable word…that would be unbelievable”; or David Letterman on the results of a poll; “One percent of Americans participating in this poll believe Dick Cheney is the best Vice President ever. Everybody else in the poll believes that one percent should be wearing funny hats”.

The same commentators are eliminated from contention as regards political insults in general, and for the same reason. To wit, Letterman’s riff on one of his favorite targets, Senator John McCain; “He looks like the guy who’s backed over his own mailbox. He looks like the guy at the supermarket who is confused by the automatic doors. He looks like the guy at the movies whose wife has to repeat everything”.

Eventually, I broadened my search to the world stage.   I had brief hopes I had found a choice subject in that indomitable woman, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, known to her fellow sexists politicians as “Attila the Hen” (Clement Freud), “Petain in petticoats” and “La Pasionaria of middle-class privilege” (Denis Healey), “The Immaculate Misconception (Norman St. John-Stevas) or simply “Virago Intacta” (various sources.)

Mrs. Thatcher was described by Lord St. John of Fawsley this way: “When she speaks without thinking, she says what she thinks”. Clive James described her speeches as sounding, “…like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.” Johnathan Aiken questioned her grasp of international events. “She probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus”.  And Denis Healey compared her rages to “…charging about like a bargain basement Boadicea.” Of course they all lose points for stooping to sexism.

Those sexists depths were surely plumbed however when Tony Banks accused her of behaving “…with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa-constrictor.” In fact the only drawback to Mrs. Thatcher as a contender in my search is that she was not as good a wit as the wits she inspired.

The reverse was true of the prince of the British political witticism, legendary Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not for the way he was described but for the way he described others.  He spoke of the man elected to replace him in 1946 this way; “An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door was opened, (Clement) Atlee got out. He is a modest man who has much to be modest about”. Of another opponent Churchill said, “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but...He once stumbled over the truth, but hasty picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

Winston described his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, as looking at foreign affairs “…through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.” And he observed that “Harold Wilson is going around the country, stirring up apathy.” And at the award ceremony where Lord Mountbatten was promoted and decorated after his destroyer was sunk in the Mediterranean, “What could you hope to achieve except to be sunk in a bigger and more expensive ship next time?”

An ever dutiful socialite, Churchill once bumped into his hostess, Bessie Braddock, at a party.  He excused himself, but Ms. Braddock scolded, “Winston, you’re drunk!” To which Winston replied, “Bessie, you’re ugly. And tomorrow I shall be sober.”  At another party Lady Astor told him, “Winston, if you were my husband I would flavor your coffee with poison” Churchill responded, “Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it.”

But Churchill’s best rejoinder may be apocryphal. While he was sitting on the toilet an aide supposedly knocked on the door to remind him that the Lord of the Privy Seal wanted to speak with him. Now, the Lord of the Privy Sea is not a Lord, is privy to nothing, and holds no seal. He is an advisor to the Prime Minister without a cabinet position, and so a person with no real power. This may explain why Churchill responded to the interruption as he supposedly did. Through the closed bathroom door he told the aide to, “Tell the Lord Privy Seal that I am sealed in my privy, and can only deal with one shit at a time.” The story may be myth, but it is clear that Winston stood head and shoulders above his contending wits while on the attack.

The Brits have an advantage in political wit-ery because of the weekly “Question Time” which forces their Prime Ministers to submit to cross examination directly from their  opponents in full public view, requiring both sides of the aisle to live by their wits. This has given rise to such lifelong political duels as the one-sided war between Benjamin Disraeli, who called his great adversary, William Gladstone , “…essentially a prig…All the prigs spoke of him as the coming man”. Disraeli noted that “If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune. And if anybody pulled him out, that, I suppose, would be a calamity”.

And the best that Gladstone could respond with was to complain that he lost an election because, “We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer”.  It’s no wonder then that Queen Victoria complained that Gladstone, in private conversation with her, always spoke to her as if she were a public meeting.

The only nation that comes close to the erudite viciousness of the English are the Australians, and they place heavy emphases on the viciousness. And the Australian  one-man Olympic insult team – one time Labor Party Prime Minister, the right honorable Paul Keating, who once said that most politicians have brains like a sparrow’s nests - “all shit and sticks”.  Clearly he meant to exempt himself.

It was Keating who described an opposition member as “..a shiver waiting for a spine”, and labeled another as “a desiccated coconut”,. Keating described listening to a speech by John Hewson as similar to “…being flogged with a warm lettuce” and Andrew Peacock as “…an intellectual rust bucket.” And when Peacock repeated an old charge against Keating, the P.M. described the attack as “A dog returning to his vomit.”  Keating even described one opponent as “All tip and no iceberg”, and a “pre-Copernican obscurantist”, whatever that is.

But best of all of Paul Keating’s insults is, in my opinion, his comparison of Malcolm Fraser to “…an Easter Island statue with an arse full of razor blades.” Ouch.

Yes, the world is filled with political insults that display wit, verve and élan, as when one British M.P. called another “..a semi-house trained polecat.”, or when Loyd George described Neville Chamberlin as “A retail mind in a wholesale business.”. An Italian politician described Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi as clinging to data “…the way a drunkard clings to a lampposts, not for illumination but to keep him standing up”. Sam Huston said that Thomas Jefferson processed “…all the characteristics of a dog, except loyalty.”  And when told that Dan Quayle had announced his intention to become George H.. Bush’s “Pit Bull”, Bill Clinton observed that Quail must have “…every fire hydrant in America worried.”

But without a doubt, in my opinion, the supreme American professional political wit (although he never ran for the office) was and always will be H. L. Mencken, the man who described democracy as "...the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”  It was Mencken who said that if Franklin Roosevelt became convinced that supporting cannibalism would help him win an election “he would be fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday.”

When describing President Warren G. Harding, Mencken wrote, “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

It was Mencken who said that “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar”. But Mencken hit his stride when he stooped to describe Calvin Coolidge. “He slept more than any other president, whether by day or night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.”

But did Coolidge inspire Mencken to deliver the deftest, wittiest political insult in history? I fear not. Nor was it delivered by Dorothy Parker, the fem-fatalist writer and razor wit, who, on being told that Coolidge was dead, immediately asked, “How can they tell?”

Nor was it the old Frenchman Georges Clemenceau, who sat through a bombastic speech by British Prime Minster Lloyd George, even though Clemenceau understood not a word of English. At the end of the speech the septuagenarian Frenchman shook his head in awe and whispered to an aide, “Oh, if I could only piss the way he speaks”; point taken. But still it falls short, not of venom, but of wit.

No, I believe the best, most accurate, most vicious witticism ever uttered by any politician sprang from the lips of Bob Dole, Republican workhorse and failed American Presidential candidate. Well before his own Presidential campaign, Dole attended a 1980 White House reception for former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, before they flew off to attend Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's funeral. Looking over the White House's Blue Room crowded with ex-Presidents, Dole was heard to comment, “There they are. See no evil, hear no evil and…evil.”

Accurate, biting, funny and inventive; and the very definition of wit.

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TOILET HUMOR Chapter Four

 

I think the best way to describe the graveside ceremony was that it was short and sad. But mostly short. It was held Tuesday noon, 21 July, 1858, in London's park-like Brompton Cemetery. There was not a cloud in the sky. The temperature was in the mid-nineties Fahrenheit, and the formalities for the dearly departed Doctor John Snow, who had died of a stroke the week before, were as brief as decorum would allow. 

Many admired the “austere and painfully shy” man who would one day be called the “greatest physician of all time”, who founded not only anesthesiology but epidemiology as well. But on this day the stench overwhelmed grief and respect.

The stench wafted from the cesspit which snaked through the capital of the British Empire, 300 yards from Brompton Cemetery. In an average year, the Thames River's current was dwarfed by the twice daily 23 foot tides. But in 1858 the last rain in the Thames valley had been in March - over three months ago – and Old Man Thames had become a warm stagnant open air cesspit, it's swelling twice a day merely rearranging the human and animal waste piling up across the 700 foot wide 6 foot deep tidal flats, crossed by the new London Bridge.

Twelve years before, in 1842, the city had outlawed the municipal cesspits that were overflowing into the streets and polluting the 17,000 wells used by the 2 ½ million residents of London for drinking and cooking. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette would report: 'Within a period of about six years, thirty thousand cesspools were abolished, and all home and street refuse was turned into the river'" Now 250,000 tons of sewage was being poured directly into the Thames every day. Then, at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, some 827,000 curious paid a penny each to use a flush toilet for the first time. These proved so popular they were kept open for a year, earning over £1000 at a penny a flush. The public's apatite for indoor plumbing accelerated the transfer of poo from human bottoms to river bottom, which is why Dr. John Snow had opposed closing the cesspits.

Dr. Snow had identified the source of an August, 1854 Cholera outbreak that killed over 600 people, as a cesspit contaminated public pump in the poverty crippled Soho section of London. “I found that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump...that the deceased persons used to drink the pump water from Broad Street, either constantly or occasionally.” But even after identifying water as the means of transmission, Dr. Snow had cautioned against the outlawing of cesspits, because he knew without a sewer, that would merely postpone the problem.  His stand had earned him the enmity of most of the socially progressive scientists of the day, such as Dr William Murdoch and the great chemist Michael Faraday, who still ascribed the source of pestilence to mal-aria, or “ bad air”, and miasmas, disease carrying odors.

In July of 1855, Faraday wrote to the London Times, describing a boat trip down the Thames. “The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid....I tore up some white cards...and then dropped some of these pieces into the water...before they had sunk an inch below the surface they were indistinguishable...Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind.” In June of 1858 “blackish-green” water was reported by Health Officer Dr. Murdoch. “It is quite impossible to calculate the consequences of such a moving mass of decomposition... as the river at present offers to our senses”  Dr. Snow had warned about turning the river into an open sewer, but even in sewers the waster flows. The eight weeks of June-July 1858, when the Thames stopped flowing, came to to be called “The Great Stink”

Solutions to the problem of air or water born disease had been debated for almost two decades, through five Prime Ministers, two of them Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby. Whatever solution was offered, there were always objections to paying for it. In 1848 the conservative editors of “The Economists” turned to the Old Testament:: “Suffering and evil...cannot be gotten rid of: and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation... have always been more productive of evil than good”. No proof was offered for this contention. But the defenders of doing nothing went further. It was claimed new sewers would be an invasion of person freedom, a big government intrusion, a tax and spend liberal fraud. Filthy water was not the problem. And even the revered Dr. Snow was against big government sewer projects, claimed the opponents.

The latter argument was not quite true, but Snow's position was nuanced enough to be obscure  In fact he suggested it would be a good idea to end "that form of liberty to which some communities cling, the sacred power to poison to death not only themselves but their neighbors” Still the opponents confused enough of the public as to muddy the already filthy waters.  In 1855 Charles Dickens had satirized the opponents by describing a mythical pro-stink campaign rally. “Ratepayers... Health is enormously expensive. Be filthy and be fat. Cesspools and Constitutional Government! Gases and Glory! No insipid water!!” Dickens was kidding, but even to him the stench was no joke. He wrote a friend, “I can certify that the offensive smells...have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature” And still the opponents cautioned delay after delay, spreading confusion and misinformation much like modern day climate change deniers or anti-vaxers are still doing – proving again that we have not changed since leaving our Garden of Eden toilet.

Few would ever see the wiggling predators in a drop of Thames water under a microscope. But in the summer of 1858 everyone could smell the stench. It was, in the words of author David Barnes, “catastrophic...a devastating and even incapacitating onslaught. The stench was intolerable.” Wrote a reporter for the Illustrated London News, “The intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings (Westminster) which overlook the river. A few members...ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.”

The absentee tenant representing Leitrim, Ireland, John Brady, asked Lord John Manners, the Commissioner of Works and Public Buildings in Derby's second government, if anything could be done. Lord Manners replied the Thames was not under his “jurisdiction.” . Four days later another minister returned to the topic, and Lord Manners again avoided it, insisting, “Her Majesty's Government have nothing whatever to do with the state of the Thames".

Although Smith-Stanley was the Prime Minister in 1858, he sat in the House of Lords. The leader of the House of Commons was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, the most capable politician of his generation. And Disraeli realized the stench was growing stronger than the opposition. The desperate politicians were spending £1,500 per week to shovel 250 tons of lime across the mud flats at low tide. Under the direction of engineer Goldsworthy Gurney, curtains soaked in chloride were draped over the windows of Westminster to block the stench.  Nothing seemed to help. In mid-June Gurney had to warn the Commons, he could “no longer be responsible for the health of the house.” On 11 June, 1858 even the official diarist of the House of Commons was forced to note, “Gentlemen sitting in the Committee Rooms and in the Library were utterly unable to remain there in consequence of the stench which arose from the river.”

Finally, on 15 June, Disraeli brought the latest version of the “do something about the stench” bill up for debate, recalling the ancient river Styx, the river of death, and referring to the Thames as a “ a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors".  The cost would be a special 3 pence tax on all London households for the next 40 years - £3 million to rebuild the sewers of London.  Noted The Times,  “Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench” .

Wrote the London Globe, “Disgust, alarm, and reasonable precautions induced members” to finally take action. The Times wrote, “Gentility of speech is at an end – it stinks; and who so once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.”

The sewer plan, after almost two decades of design and redesign, was simple, as explained by Joseph Bazalgette, the man who would be responsible for building it. “The existing streams and drains all ran down to the river on both sides”, he wrote.   

First, the Thames -  that “pestiferous and typhus breeding abomination” -  was to be walled off by massive embankment, built atop new intersecting sewers (above, right center)  on either shore  “...so as to intercept those streams:”  Atop the embankments new roads could be built, and parks and open spaces. It promised a better world, a world of light and fresh air and ease of commute. But most of all it promised an end to the stench. 

The waste was not to be treated. It was merely to be dumped somewhere else, farther away, up stream, out to sea.  English humans were still searching for the Garden of Eden, where their poop would remain out of sight, out  of mind, out from under their noses and out of their drinking water.

The massive tax increase passed in just 18 days,  from creation, consideration, amendments, debate and passage. Usually only declarations of war received such quick treatment. It would have been cheaper to have fixed the problem earlier, and Lord knows most people wanted to fix it sooner. Uncounted lives would have been saved. The economy would have been improved, along with the health of the citizens, by following the simple rule of never shitting where you eat.  But it did not pass until the richest who refused to pay for the improvements, could no longer say no while holding their noses. It would take another twenty years to complete the work, but at last it was begun in August of 1858, just before the rains came back and the Great Stench ended.

The London sewers did not return English men and women to the Garden of Eden. None of us ain't ever going to get back there. And yet, we never seem to stop trying.

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