Of late years, while working for the War Department, I have found it expedient to be more reticent, but the Camp Farm restoration has in one way or another become known to the public, and there can be no great harm in my now referring to the circumstances as neither martial law nor a censorship has yet been proclaimed in Hampshire.
When Aldershot Camp was first hutted, soon after the Crimean War, a certain Colonel Ewart, R.E., had imbibed true ideas of the separate system through his association with the work of the late Mr. Menzies, the Deputy Ranger of Windsor Forest, who preached and practised that system in the drainage of Windsor Castle and the town of Eton at a time when every other civil engineer scouted the possibility of keeping rain or subsoil water out of foul sewers—they said it was essential for flushing their big sewers.
Colonel Ewart, at any rate, impressed his corps, and after about 1866 one began to see the word FOUL painted up over gratings into which the soldiers were to pour their slops. A civilian, James Blackburn, also a friend of Menzies, was employed by the War Office to deal with the camp sewage on about 100 acres of rough heather-covered land close by, and he, knowing his business, watched what came down the sewers in wet weather and kept the Royal Engineers up to the Menzies standard.
[Sidenote: Mr. Blackburn’s successful management.]
Together with this initial advantage of having a regular volume of sewage not much affected by storm water to deal with, Mr. Blackburn had many drawbacks in the “pan,” as it is usually called, of iron conglomerate underlying the very irregular surface which was pitted all over with holes from which gravel or sand had been dug many years ago; but he persevered until he had got nearly all the area to bear good crops, when he entered the Camp Farm in competition for the Royal Agricultural Society’s 100_l._ prize in 1879 for the best managed sewage farm in the United Kingdom. The Report of the Judges at that competition is recorded in the Society’s Proceedings 1880, giving full statistics except financial accounts, which Mr. Blackburn withheld because he was then in treaty with the War Office for new terms after fourteen years’ work on the War Department Farm. My impression after reading the judges’ reports and having seen the farm a year or two previously to its date, is that, if the condition as to the production of the financial accounts could have been fulfilled, the first prize would have been awarded to the Camp Farm instead of jointly to those of Bedford and to Wrexham.