Bazalgette; the early years

I am Joseph William Bazalgette, born in Enfield London in eighteen nineteen. My father was a retired Royal Navy Captain. I was just twelve years of age when the first case of cholera was recorded. When I was born the urban life expectancy in some areas was around thirty-five years of age but within a decade it dropped down to just twenty-nine years. Why, did you know that when Queen Victoria came to the throne only half of London’s infants lived to see their fifth birthday? It’s not surprising when you think that half the population were living in cities that were unplanned. Factories and worker’s houses were built without sewers so all the filth had nowhere to go so it was just emptied out onto the street. Disgusting. The Anglican cleric Sydney Smith once said, “He who drinks a tumbler of water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on the face of the globe”. This became the reality for many of the three million people living in London in eighteen thirty-two, when cholera first struck.