In 1874, nine cases of typhoid and typhus fevers occurred in it, "and the locality was conspicuous for diseases and premature deaths."
Asked what class of disease the people chiefly suffer from, the Medical Officer of Health replied:--
"Mostly from debility--zymotic diseases, and infectious diseases--such as whooping cough, typhus, typhoid fever, cholera, diarrhoea, measles, scarlet-fever, &c., &c., smallpox, and gin liver disease.... They are obliged to resort to gin on account of the close and depressing condition in which the people live in these Courts free from the public eye.
"The women have to stop at home; they do not get out, and therefore do not get any excitement. Then they take their drops. You can often see women at twelve o'clock in the day drinking in public-houses."
The Parochial District Medical Officer said:--
"The houses are so old that the air is really poisonous; it is full of miasma and dirt ... all the whitewashing and ventilation in the world would do no good. The condition of the property has got worse year by year."
These are but some of the cases about which "representations" were made to the Metropolitan Board of Works--sufficient, however, as illustration of others. And what an awful and appalling picture they present. Had the condition described been only temporary, a mere passing phase, it would have been dreadful enough; but it had been going on for years--it was permanently so--producing year after year its fearful crop of misery and crime, of disease and death, and scattering broadcast the seeds of disease and death, the "owners" all the while exacting the uttermost farthing they could in rents from the miserable inhabitants, and placidly and remorselessly giving disease and death in return: going on, too, during twenty years of government by "local authority"--Vestry and District Board--and nearly ten years after the passing of the Sanitary Act of 1866, with its provisions for the abatement of overcrowding and the maintenance of a certain standard of cleanliness.
A few years' experience of the working of the Housing Act of 1875 proved that it was dilatory, cumbrous, and costly to the ratepayers of London.
The arbitrator frequently awarded to owners of places unfit for habitation compensation equal or almost equal in amount to what would have been given if the houses had been good and sound. This the Metropolitan Board felt to be an injustice to the ratepayers upon whom the charge fell, and an encouragement to owners of houses occupied by poor people to allow them to fall into or remain in a dilapidated condition.