Introduction
Although there is a wealth of literature on health and hygiene in the city, particularly in the long nineteenth century, rural aspects of public health have received far less attention – and even fewer researchers have examined the tangled connections that link the two. That can surely be explained in part by the enduring power of the pastoral idyll. Cities have long been characterised as grimy, sinful places where license – and diseases – thrive, providing a pungent contrast to the healthful countryside with its fresh air, fresh food and fresh open spaces. Yet connections, of course, exist and if we shift our gaze to follow them, rich historical geographies can be revealed. As Waddington observes when discussing issues of sanitation in Wales: ‘Town and country were medically interdependent: where one started and the other ended was more subtle than the boundaries of Poor Law unions or sanitary districts.’Footnote 1 Through the study of one crop, watercress, this article broadens the focus of historical studies to cover the horticultural sector and adds a new dimension to our understanding of the wholesomeness of food in a rural context and debates about sanitation. It also reveals complex interconnections between town and country, which not only had potent implications for public health and its attendant legislation, but also left a lasting legacy on specialist farming practices.
Newby suggests that the ‘First World War, like the Second, was accompanied by a considerable extension of state control into all aspects of everyday life – agriculture among them’.Footnote 2 As Thirsk et al. demonstrate in The Agrarian History of England and Wales 1850–1914,Footnote 3 such intervention did not arrive unheralded. Official interest in agriculture had begun to increase from the mid-nineteenth century, when a variety of factors meant that economic growth in agriculture stalled. It was a period when farming appeared increasingly inefficient and unable to adapt to changes on the land or in society. Agricultural surveys and reports were commissioned, and institutions associated with farming and agriculture grew in number, and increased in influence, during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Co-operative associations and societies appeared too, working to improve standards within their own industries as well as representing their members’ interests. In 1894, for example, the National Association of English Hop Growers was formed, and in 1902 the National Fruit Growers’ Federation was founded.Footnote 4 In 1908 the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) was created and by 1945, in an example of ‘agricultural corporatism’, it was ‘a partner of government, deeply embedded in all aspects of agricultural policy formation and implementation’.Footnote 5
The latter part of the nineteenth century was also a time when ‘the impact of science and scientists increased dramatically’.Footnote 6 French and Phillips’s book Cheated Not Poisoned? shows how early food regulation in the UK was prompted by Victorian concerns about the adulteration of produce, as well as the potentially injurious nature of food additives.Footnote 7 Public health became an issue for government and, as science discovered more about the causes of disease, agriculture and farming were increasingly subject to regulation. Official attention was initially focused upon meat and milk – in 1890, for instance, the ‘Infectious Diseases Prevention Act empowered Medical Officers of Health to prohibit the sale of milk if they believed it to be carrying infectious diseases’.Footnote 8 As scientific knowledge improved, attention began to turn to agricultural and horticultural crops. Colman’s, for example, ‘employed two chemists to monitor incoming mustard seed from 1893’.Footnote 9 However, as this article demonstrates through a study of the watercress industry and official reaction to an outbreak of typhoid in 1903, attempts by the state to regulate modes of production not only lacked coherence – there was also a marked reluctance to legislate at all, even when faced with a public health crisis.
Moves to raise standards were driven as much by growers as by government – and in the case of watercress these were rural growers, who wished to disassociate their ‘healthy’ country crop from its ‘unhygienic’ cousin grown in the metropolis. There is evidence to suggest that such a disparity did exist, certainly in the Victorian era, and this belief in bucolic purity might, in part, account for the state’s slothful response to the epidemic. Yet to imply a ‘city bad, country good’ division would be to oversimplify; instead there was a subtle interplay of shifting tensions and conflicting ‘moral and sanitary geographies’.Footnote 10 As Waddington observes, ‘the more society felt it had lost contact with the rural, the more metropolitan commentators idealised the rural environment as a moral and healthy antidote to urban life’.Footnote 11 Indeed, once attention is directed to matters of health in a rural context, the presence of disease, dirt and deprivation is soon revealed. Waddington’s work demonstrates that sanitary problems were less easily identified in the countryside – masked partly by farming odours and the stench of slaughter, and also by the presence of fresh air. Housing was poor and sanitation rudimentary, meaning watercourses and sources were frequently contaminated by animal droppings, human faeces and run-off from abattoirs. In addition, it is worth noting that poverty in a rural setting was easily reimagined as pastoral simplicity – the picturesque casting a veil that concealed hardship. It was as if a collective Claude glassFootnote 12 was raised to the eye, framing scenes of squalor into pleasing compositions. Legislation, which tended to be made for an urban context was, as Waddington reveals, often harder to enforce in, or apply to, rural areas. The authorities lacked power and living conditions tended to deteriorate. These problems of health and sanitation did not only have an impact on rural communities but could affect urban populations too. There were pathways of transmission and ‘urban problems could result from rural practice’.Footnote 13 As this article shows, those practices were frequently associated with the production of food.
Watercress, sewage and disease
Joan Thirsk’s seminal work Alternative Agriculture (1997) brought specialist crops to wider attention, and not only illuminated our understanding of the processes of agricultural change, but also heralded a revaluation of such crops and those who produced them; the central importance of women was recognised in this regard. Despite this, there have still been few studies of the historical geographies of horticulture – and watercress has been entirely neglected. Yet it is a crop that, when viewed as a cultural object, can be shown to bind the Metropolis and its rural hinterland in novel ways. Botanically unsuited to conventional production in market gardens – it grows best in flowing chalk streams – it was, in the nineteenth century, transported to London from neighbouring counties as well as from the urban edgelands. Imbued (figuratively and literally) with many of the qualities of the water in which it is grown, watercress is a shapeshifter, crossing boundaries and seeping through the borders of town and country. In so doing, it reveals that those borders have long been more permeable than traditional scholarship allowed.
In the nineteenth century, water was more than a medium in which cress was grown, it was also an agent that appeared to impart purity both to the plant and those who sold it. Commercial growing of watercress in England is generally accepted to have commenced in 1808 at Springhead, near Gravesend, in Kent.Footnote 14 Initially it would have competed with the gathered crop, which had been hawked in the city from at least the mid-eighteenth century, but soon seems to have been consumed in preference to ‘wild’ cress. Sold on the streets by ‘very poor persons … children or old people’,Footnote 15 it became an extremely popular addition to the diet of Londoners of all classes – a food that seemed imbued with the freshness of the countryside. ‘“Watercresses!”’, wrote William Earley in The Gardeners’ Chronicle, ‘forms perhaps as homely and familiar a term as one can hear amidst the variety of town cries; and indeed there can be no doubt that the seller of Watercressess is a good sanitary agent since he thus conveys to the many vegetable-starved residents, something at once wholesome, nutritious and refreshing.’Footnote 16
The vendors that Henry Mayhew met in London Labour and the London Poor would invariably splash water from street pumps on their stock to freshen it up and make it more saleable.Footnote 17 Watercress, rather like milk, is a foodstuff that must be consumed fresh. Once removed from water it can deteriorate rapidly, in taste, nutritional value and appearance. It is also susceptible to overheating. While Nimmo writes of a demand for milk that was ‘“warm from the cow”’, the warmth perceived ‘as an indicator of freshness, authenticity, and the apparent absence of human intervention between cow and consumer’,Footnote 18 watercress is perceived to be most fresh when it is cool and green, as if just lifted from its watery home. Victorian Britain, particularly London, suffered several serious epidemics of typhoid and cholera that killed large numbers of people and it seems reasonable to suppose that this increased the cultural value placed on purity. ‘Idealization of the countryside as the source of health and public virtue, and the role clear running water played in that idealization, was sharpened by both scientific advance and Victorian romanticism.’Footnote 19 How paradoxical then, that it was water – including that obtained from street pumps – which was responsible for those outbreaks of disease.
Water and disease ‘had been linked in a general way from the early days of the public health movement’, however this association was: ‘between water and cleanliness … and disease, rather than directly between water and disease’.Footnote 20 The orthodox belief was that: ‘most, if not all, disease was caused by inhaling air that was infected through exposure to corrupting matter’.Footnote 21 The first person to make a connection between polluted water and the spread of disease was the anaesthetist John Snow (1813–1858) who observed that during the London cholera epidemic of 1854, mortality was particularly high among people who used the public pump in Broad Street, Soho. Convinced that water from the pump was polluted, he persuaded the local parish to put it out of service by removing its handle. Snow’s ideas were not widely accepted and it was not until after London’s efficient sewage system was constructed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819–1891) in the 1860s, that the link between polluted water and disease was made.
There appear to be no accounts linking the water pumped onto watercress by street vendors with disease epidemics in Victorian London, although it seems reasonable to suppose that it must on occasion have played a part. However, concerns were raised about the water in which the cress was grown – as this was frequently polluted with sewage. On 10th December 1874, at a conference on ‘the sewage question’ held at the Society of Arts, Mr A. Smee – possibly surgeon turned chemist Alfred Smee (1818–1877) – ‘cautioned the public against watercresses grown in sewage’Footnote 22 but his concerns do not seem to have been disseminated more widely, as it was not until nearly a year later that mention was again made of the subject when a writer in the Gardeners’ Chronicle observed that ‘Watercresses are grown from sewage alone; and I believe an instance occurs near Brentwood where a piece of land is let at £10 per acre, and is supplied with sewage brought underground by piping.’Footnote 23 Readers are not cautioned against eating such cress, although the writer does add: ‘As to their wholesomeness, I am not prepared to make any statement.’
That plants, including watercress, could purify foul water by absorbing tainted particles was explained in a letter to The Standard in 1876Footnote 24 however, this quality was seen as a potential method of cleansing water, rather than a warning that watercress might easily become contaminated itself and should therefore be consumed with caution. Indeed, some appeared to favour sewage-grown cress over the purer variety. One account of 1854 observed that while watercresses were mainly cultivated at Springhead in Kent, ‘at Walthamstow, in Essex, and at Cookham, Shrivenham, and Farringdon, on the line of the Great Western … The best come from Camden Town.’ The writer continued:
Most people fancy that clear purling streams are necessary for their production, but the Camden Town beds are planted in an old brick-field, watered by the Fleet Ditch; and though the stream at this point is comparatively pure, they owe their unusually luxuriant appearances to a certain admixture of the sewerage.Footnote 25
It was the gardener and horticultural journalist Shirley Hibberd who first brought the issue of sewage-grown cress to wider attention. James Shirley Hibberd (1825–1890) lived in London and was: ‘a working journalist who had a real influence on horticultural writing … he must have been as famous then as media personalities are today’.Footnote 26 Hibberd, says Wilkinson, also became interested in the need for improvements to the urban water supply – and this, combined with his horticultural expertise, made him turn his attention to watercress cultivation. In 1877 he attended a meeting of the Royal Horticultural Society and demonstrated his system of growing cress in pans, a method that meant the plants could ‘at all times be supplied with pure water, and thus be preserved from contamination by the pollutions common to rivers, brooks, and even water-cress beds’.Footnote 27 The pans were fifteen to twenty inches in diameter and six to nine inches deep, and filled with soil mixed with pieces of chalk. Cuttings were inserted and within fifteen to twenty days could be harvested, the plants not being exhausted for about twelve weeks. Hibberd emphasised the dangers of polluted watercress in The Amateur’s Kitchen Garden.
It is not necessary to enlarge on the risks incurred in the consumption of watercresses that are obtained in the usual way; nor if we send to the beds for them are we safe, for the natural waters everywhere are more or less polluted, and the watercress is more than any other edible plant exposed to agencies detrimental to its wholesomeness.Footnote 28
In Home Culture of the Watercress – an 1878 work blessed with the intriguing subtitle Watercresses without Sewage, Hibberd again described his method of growing cress in pans. He was, says Wilkinson, awarded a Gold Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society for his work: no date for this is given.Footnote 29
Although Hibberd warned against eating watercresses grown in sewage, he was not specific as to the dangers and it was not until 1884 that a direct link between disease epidemics and watercress appears to have been voiced. It appeared in an article in the Gardeners’ Chronicle, which looked at cress consumption in London. The writer noted that watercress was: ‘much dependent on the description of the water in which it is grown, clean or foul’ and that while many vegetables required plenty of manure to grow well, watercress: ‘from being in a great measure immersed in the water that sustains it, is so far different to other things’.Footnote 30 Some watercress eaten in London was, the article continued, harvested from extensive beds ‘not 50 miles away’ where the crop was grown in:
sewage-water that has had the solid matter taken out of it by a process it under-goes, but which leaves it … much in appearance like diluted pea-soup, smooth, greasy-looking stuff that one might think would answer the purpose of stilling the storm-tossed waters of the sea.Footnote 31
Were readers not repelled enough by this description, the writer adds:
Cut and bunched as the Cresses are from this foul water, the presence of which is easily detected by the nose for a considerable distance … the foul matter cannot fail to dry on them; and even if the Cresses be washed in pure water as they are cut from the beds there are few, we think, who would like to eat them if they only knew from whence they came.Footnote 32
Significantly, the writer goes on to observe that: ‘This is a matter for consideration by the sanitary authorities, who have to trace out the sources of typhoid fever and cholera.’Footnote 33
Despite these intermittent warnings, it took a further ten years for the ‘sanitary authorities’ to begin to warn the public of the dangers of eating contaminated cress. In December 1894, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reported that the Medical Officer of Health for Lambeth, Dr Verdon, had ‘drawn attention afresh to the suspicion which lies upon watercress as a cause of typhoid fever’, after investigating several cases in his district. He discovered that cress consumed by the patients came from beds: ‘on the outskirts of London, which were supplied with water described by a public analyst as bearing all the characters of being little else than a sewage effluent’.Footnote 34 Cress grown in sewage took on a ‘luxuriant’ appearance and this encouraged the practice, as the crop looked particularly fresh and healthy (perhaps more visually enticing than its cleaner competitor); watercress, like milk, is extremely perishable.Footnote 35 Verdon, said the BMJ, had suggested that the Local Government Board should hold an inquiry into watercress cultivation around London. The journal expressed some doubts about his views because:
seeing the enormous consumption of this green stuff, and seeing that the particular watercress beds of which mention is made cover an area of about 25,000 square yards … one would expect that any typhoid pollution of such a popular comestible would be followed not by a few cases, but by an outbreak comparable only with the water or milk epidemics with which we are all familiar.Footnote 36
However, it agreed that an investigation would be worthwhile and, in doing so, made a distinction between watercress grown in the London area and that grown in the countryside: ‘We are told that the bulk of what is sold comes from a considerable distance, real country places where the risk of infection … is but small, but that the conditions of watercress cultivation are very different in the neighbourhood of London.’Footnote 37
The town vs country divide is evident here, with ‘real’ countryside perceived as a healthy, pure environment in which to grow food – the implication is that this is where watercress belongs. The city and its surroundings, not just the sewage-filled waters, are seen as dirty and polluting in themselves and not the proper place for growing food – especially not a plant so figuratively imbued with bucolic goodness. The BMJ report even ends by stating: ‘it is obviously unfair that a succulent and tasty luxury, accepted by the masses all the more readily as being a product of the country, should really be nothing more than a sewage-fed weed’.Footnote 38 There is a sense of indignation, not only regarding the use of sewage, but also that watercress is even grown in the vicinity of the city. In purchasing watercress, it seems to say, people are also purchasing a little piece of the countryside – and perhaps consuming the picturesque rural dream when they eat it.
A year later in December 1895, watercress again comes to official attention following an outbreak of typhoid at Wycombe Marsh (Buckinghamshire). Fourteen people had been affected since the September, with one death. Watercress beds in the vicinity were seen as a possible source of infection by the London County Medical Officer of Health, following concerns voiced by the Rural Health Officer that the watercourses in which the cress was cultivated were contaminated by: ‘pigsty refuse, slop water drainage, and other filth’.Footnote 39 Effluent from the local sewage farm was also discharged above the cress beds.
Despite the fact that watercress was implicated in these sporadic outbreaks of typhoid in the nineteenth century, there is no evidence to show either a widespread public reluctance to consume the crop, or any concerted or coordinated efforts to regulate the manner in which it was grown. Whether this was because scientists were still not unanimous in accepting that polluted water was a disease carrier, or whether the prevailing image of watercress as an innocent, pure and nourishing food was so powerful that it was difficult for people to accept that it could be contaminated, is a matter for conjecture. However, what is certain is that in 1903 all that was to change.
The Hackney Typhoid outbreak
It was in June and July 1903 that watercress was judged to have caused an outbreak of typhoid in Hackney, in which 110 people were affected. An inquiry was held and Dr King Warry, the Medical Officer of Health for Hackney, discovered: ‘beds situate in West Ham’ fed by ‘one of the most polluted branches of the River Lea; so that practically all the West Ham beds were fed by almost undiluted sewage’.Footnote 40 The Lister Institute found that the water and the cress were both badly polluted and an editorial in The Family Doctor a few months after the outbreak, uncompromisingly headlined ‘Watercress and Death’, declared ‘it is quite time that people became alive to the fact that sewage-polluted articles of food should not enter into their daily consumption’, and ended: ‘the bulk of the watercress supplied to the metropolis is sewage polluted, and a menace to the health of the community’.Footnote 41
The medical fraternity and the media appear to have felt that watercress had been implicated in too many epidemics for this story to be allowed to disappear again. In 1904 the BMJ reported on the case, repeating Dr Warry’s declaration that:
‘the bulk, if not the whole, of the watercress sold in Hackney is cultivated under such polluted conditions as to be liable at any time … to give rise to outbreaks of enteric fever [typhoid]. … is it not probable that watercress sold in other boroughs of London is similarly polluted?’Footnote 42
This time the negative publicity appears to have spread beyond the specialist media and public confidence in watercress fell, precipitating a drop in demand.
A story in The Fruit Grower of June 1904, begins with a letter from ‘WB’ of Wareham, Dorset in which he says he grows twenty acres of cultivated watercress but: ‘owing to the sewage-grown article destroying the confidence of the public, my returns for the season have not paid cost of production’.Footnote 43 This would have been William Bedford, a major producer, who went on to found the Dorset Farmers’ Union in 1918. He invites an official inspection. The editor says that the writer had enclosed: ‘a report from the medical officer of health of the Wareham and Purbeck Union, certifying the purity of our correspondent’s watercress beds. This is dated 1899, and we are informed that another report for 1904 has been prepared and is of even higher merit.’Footnote 44
The article reveals a widening split in the industry, with ‘non-sewage’ growers trying to distance themselves from those growing cress in unsanitary conditions. In the absence of any statutory rules about watercress cultivation or official inspection of sites Bedford, at least, appears to have felt that voluntary inspection was the only way to improve public confidence in his crop. The editor of The Fruit Grower, calling sewage-grown cress ‘a crying evil of the very worst kind’Footnote 45 offers sympathy for Bedford, and urged readers to lobby Parliament and local authorities to end the practice. The article ends by implying that growing watercress (and other produce) in sewage was in some places viewed as a satisfactory (and economical) means of treating sewage. It refers to the worry that, should sewage cultivation of cress be allowed to continue:
dilatory and neglectful local authorities, both urban and rural, will be encouraged to prosecute these sewage-farm schemes as an easy method of overcoming the difficulties attending proper sewage treatment … we have not the least doubt there are plenty of chemical, mechanical and electrical methods that can be utilised for sewage treatment without … producing germ-fed and germ-laden market produce.Footnote 46
The biological capacity of watercress to absorb impurities from water appears to have led some local authorities to encourage – rather than deter – growers from planting it in sewage water. Its action as a natural filter perhaps appeared to obviate the need for more expensive purification methods – in the same way as reed beds are used today as an eco-friendly means of cleansing water. Accompanying the article is an excerpt from a newspaper in Tottenham, in which a farmer defends his method of growing cress in sewage and denies that it is the cause of disease. The paper quotes the engineer to the local council: ‘Edmonton had been complimented by representatives of the other authorities on the purity of its effluent.’Footnote 47 In 1908 an article in The Fruit Grower stated that in 1870 ‘the growth of water-cress on sewage farms was recommended because of its cleansing power on the dirty liquid, and the profit derivable from its sale’.Footnote 48
Minutes of evidence from a House of Commons committee of 1867, which was investigating the East London water supply, show an expert witness extolling the virtues of watercress as a water purifier and observing: ‘I believe the main sewer by Hackney is tapped by some of the water-cress people, and they let it run through the water-cress beds; and when it comes out it is so pure as to be fit for domestic purposes.’Footnote 49 No comment is made on the quality of the watercress itself, or the possibility raised that it would not be suitable for consumption. There is a paradox here that watercress, a plant lauded for and associated with metaphorical purity, should also have the ability to act as a purifier of water – while the water, in turn, made the cress an agent of pollution.
The writer H. Rider Haggard produced a number of gardening articles for a London weekly in 1904, which were later turned into a book A Gardener’s Year. Writing of the problem of polluted watercress, and citing Dr Warry’s report, Haggard expresses a wider sense of dissatisfaction with local authorities, declaring: ‘This … is only another example of the unwillingness of our local authorities to incur unpopularity – or perhaps, in extreme cases, personal loss – by interfering with profit-earning industries merely because they bring unsuspecting folk prematurely to the grave.’Footnote 50 William Bedford produced an advertisement reproducing the ‘purity reports’ mentioned earlier. There are two of these from 1899, and one from 1904 and it is reasonable to suppose that Bedford requested all the inspections. The reports show that samples were taken of water both entering and leaving the watercress beds; that they were checked for ‘organic contamination’, and that springs and bore holes provided the water source – rather than the river. The samples of water are judged ‘excellent’.Footnote 51
Bedford appears to have had an astute understanding of the value of good publicity, for a photograph of men working on the cress beds he owned in Dorset appeared in various newspapers including the Manchester Daily Despatch in April 1905, which refers to ‘model watercress beds’ and emphasises that the source of the water is from artesian borings.Footnote 52 Another cutting refers to Bedford as ‘a scientific grower of cress’.Footnote 53 Science had made people suspicious of watercress, now some watercress growers were going to use science to improve its image. Good practice and good public relations were to be the key. The geographies here are interesting for, while traditional scholarship suggests that public health debates are located in the urban, with attendant legislation focused on the same – Nimmo, for instance, in the case of milk observed that ‘municipal health authorities sought to build an apparatus of sanitary surveillance by constructing a cordon encircling the city’Footnote 54 – scrutiny of the watercress industry, particularly with regard to legislation, or at least reform, increasingly took place in rural spaces. One reason for this was clearly the demand for regulation from rural producers themselves; another might well have been officialdom’s sense that the supply of cress from disreputable urban growers was dwindling, due to the expansion of London’s built-up area and the presence of increasingly efficient railway links, which facilitated transport of the fresh product from country to town. Certainly the London County Council declared that in 1900, when investigating polluted cress beds in Hackney, there were ‘only four beds … in existence within the county’ and suggested that ‘inquiries should be extended to beds outside the county’.Footnote 55 It was, perhaps, hoped that issues around urban adulteration of the crop would simply fade away.
On 7th February 1905 a report, introduced by Sir Shirley Murphy, Medical Officer of the London County Council, was published on the findings of an investigation of the watercress beds around London. According to the Liverpool Echo: ‘all the known beds supplying cress to London within a radius of fifty miles of Charing Cross were examined’.Footnote 56 There were 120 in all, varying in size from under a quarter of an acre to nearly forty acres. The investigation, described in a scientific work on sewage, concluded that while there was: ‘no material risk in consuming the watercress supplied from the majority’ of the beds, twenty-nine of the beds contained large or very large amounts of organic matter and: ‘effort should be made to prevent the consumption of watercress from these beds in their present condition’.Footnote 57 The report also noted that some watercress beds were polluted by: ‘cattle, by house drainage, by trade effluents, adjacent farms and stables, and “occasional deposit of human excreta near the intake”’.Footnote 58 Experts were undecided as to whether washing was sufficient to remove contaminants.
The official report of the Hackney scare generated yet more press coverage, both in the trade press and the wider media. In a number of pieces, criticism was directed at the authorities for failing to regulate the industry. On 20th April 1905 for instance, The Fruit Grower declared that while it was desirable that the industry had been investigated, the report had ‘resulted in great injury’ to many and damaged ‘growers of clean cress’.Footnote 59 The locations and owners of clean and/or polluted beds should have been identified, the publication said, so that both the trade and the public knew which sources of cress were safe to buy – thus establishing a division within the industry. Clean produce should be labelled as such.Footnote 60 Whether this suggestion was instigated by the publication, or was originally suggested by William Bedford, is not clear – however, what is clear is that demand for regulation was growing. The article voiced the hope that the Public Health Committee would ‘set a standard for watercress growers to aim at, and this standard should at least comprehend the condemnation of all beds that cannot pass the Council’s Inspectors’ examination tests’.Footnote 61 Manchester, as an industrial city and large consumer of watercress, also had an interest in the typhoid issue. A number of newspapers published articles assuring locals that the cress they ate was not produced ‘under unhealthy conditions in beds near the Metropolis’ but instead from ‘farms in Dorsetshire, Hampshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire’ which were ‘conducted on the most up-to-date scientific lines’.Footnote 62
It is worth noting that blame for the typhoid outbreak was not only placed on the water but also on the vendors. An article (in a cutting from an un-named newspaper in a private archive), quoted Dr Fegen, the medical officer for Croydon Rural District Council, in attributing ‘possible contamination of the beds’ to ‘the habits of the workers, or the persons, generally of the hawker class, who hang about the beds while the watercress is being gathered for them to take away’. Were one of these itinerants to be suffering from typhoid themselves, Dr Fegen said, then they could contaminate the water supplying the cress beds. Street sellers of cress had almost uniformly been portrayed as ‘poor but pure’ by nineteenth-century commentators, and had long been depicted as such in poetry, paintings and children’s stories, but this was not the first time they had come in for criticism. In 1889, a report in the British Weekly, a religious newspaper, published a description of a visit to the home of a cress girl, who lived in a room in Soho with a bed, a ‘filthy mattress’Footnote 63 and a basket of watercress under the bed, which she began to wash and tie into bundles. The report was keen to dispel romanticised images of watercress vendors, and said ‘if people could have a look at the rooms in which water-cress is kept after it leaves the market … they would never eat water-cress again, not even if they gathered it for themselves in country districts.’Footnote 64 It goes on to suggest that watercress, pure when it is grown in the countryside, is tainted once it reaches London – both by the city and by the street sellers.
Imagine for a minute a running stream between two green meadows. Look into the clear water, and see the water-cress moved backwards and forwards by the current! Then picture it in a London market … see the grimy hands of the cress girl, and watch her carrying it home in her dirty apron. She … puts it into a bucket which is used for every imaginable domestic purpose … the filth of the place gives it a relish … That is the truth.Footnote 65
Had the gaze of officialdom begun to encompass vendors due to the increasing awareness of the causes and transference of disease? Or did they represent an easy target – less tricky than tackling production practices and sanitary regulation? Both possibilities must be considered. Attention though continued to be focused on the places, and practices, of production.
Despite the calls for regulation of the industry in April 1905, no official action at government level appears to have been immediately forthcoming. In the September of that year, The Fruit Grower carried an article congratulating Edmonton Borough Council for taking steps to ‘discontinue the cultivation of watercress on the municipal sewage farm’ and hoping that ‘similar action will be adopted by other municipal authorities who grow watercress “under conditions involving danger to the community”’.Footnote 66 This not only shows that regulation was piecemeal, it also gives weight to the suggestion that watercress had on occasion been planted beside sewage farms with official sanction. On 4th October 1906 The Fruit Grower reported that the tenant in this case, who had his lease terminated by Edmonton Council, claimed for compensation and was awarded between £400 and £500.Footnote 67 However, the scene had been set for the cultivation of cress to become increasingly professionalised, carried out by large-scale growers who could invest in modern methods of production (sinking artesian bore holes, for instance) which the public – and government – could trust.
A brand of purity – cress from the country
It was during the First World War that the Board of Agriculture produced its first official report on the cultivation of watercress. This appeared in the March 1915 Journal of the Board and, as well as reporting that over 5,000 tonnes were consumed annually, it stated that ‘probably no vegetable to-day is grown under such perfectly hygienic conditions’ – raising the possibility that the recurrent concerns about contaminated cress had prompted its publication.Footnote 68 The report made a distinction between green-leaved and brown-leaved cress, saying that growers furthest from the cities tended to cultivate the latter as it withstood transportation better, and that it was usually grown in beds fed by artesian borings. In contrast, green cress (which was grown closer to populated areas and often in beds fed by a brook or river) might become contaminated with sewage, especially in hot summers. However, improvements had recently been made in the hygienic cultivation of the green variety.
The report then covered the location of beds, their formation, propagation, gathering (done by ‘men furnished with water-tight boots’), tying (‘done by boys and women’) and marketing – most cress being despatched by passenger train in light ‘chips’, which sometimes had ice placed in their midst to keep the cress fresh.Footnote 69 Legislation regarding the construction of watercress beds, or the source of the water that fed them, does not appear to have been enacted for, while the report stated that the principal requirement was to ensure cress was ‘grown in water which is free from contamination’ and which preferably came from ‘a deep source – a spring or artesian well’,Footnote 70 it did not say that this was a legal requirement (and Hansard records no debates on the issue). However, the report did go on to set out more stringent criteria for acceptable water sources, telling readers that cress should not be grown in water:
which is liable to fouling by surface water, or drainage from land which is manured by privy or ashpit refuse, by sewage or house drainage, by the content of any privy, cesspool, or water closet escaping into it, or by matters from any knacker’s yard, slaughterhouse, or premises on which any offensive business or trade is conducted. The water also should not be mixed with any liquids escaping from fold or farm yards or pigsties, nor liable to contamination by cattle, in the act of drinking it or otherwise.Footnote 71
Growers were: ‘well advised to ask for the guidance of the local Medical Officer of Health’ as to whether their cress was grown in acceptable conditions – although it is worth noting that they do not appear to have been compelled to do so.Footnote 72
The report ends by hinting at an official preference for watercress grown in the countryside as it says: ‘it is desirable that watercress beds should not be near urban centres’.Footnote 73 Workers, it says, should be ‘supervised, to ensure that they are not suffering from any infectious illness whilst handling it’ and the cress should ‘be properly protected from accidental contamination while in transit to the consumer’.Footnote 74 The report was illustrated with eight photographs of William Bedford’s cress beds at Bere Regis in Dorset, presumably illustrating best practice. Given that no other grower’s cress beds were photographed, and given that the emphasis on water purity echoed Bedford’s remarks, it seems likely that the report was compiled solely from information gleaned from a visit (or visits) to his farm. Bedford certainly seems to have taken advantage of the opportunity presented to promote his business. In one image, which illustrates how cress is cut and placed in non-returnable ‘chips’, a box stamped ‘Bedford’s Watercress’ on the lid has been placed on its side, so displaying the name clearly to the camera.
Another photograph showed how a path separated water from the beds from that of the adjacent stream, while another illustrated the levelling of beds and the preparation of them with gravel (rather than mud). These images, all of which feature people handling the crop in some way, seem carefully chosen to demonstrate the care and attention that the crop demands if it is to be grown ‘scientifically’ and in hygienic conditions. It is a tactile commodity, which requires close attention.
Whether the onset of war in 1914 had spurred the Board of Agriculture into writing this report is not clear. Burnett states that it was argued that ‘for the first two years of war, the British government paid practically no attention to food supplies’,Footnote 75 even though Britain was largely dependent on imported food.Footnote 76 Watercress does not appear to have been imported (its perishability making that unlikely at the time) so it is possible that it did not attract governmental attention since supplies were not threatened. The first Ministry of Food was not established until 1916, after which some price controls were set, with civilian rationing following in 1918. This was around the same time as advances in – and acknowledgment of the importance of – nutritional science. In 1916 William Bedford went to court to ask for exemptions from military service for four of his workers, part of his appeal resting on the crop’s value as a ‘medicinal’ food, which was ‘cheap and nutritious and refreshing … invaluable to indoor workers’.Footnote 77 He won his case. Vitamins had recently been discovered and wartime interest in raising the health of the population hastened the development of this branch of medicine.Footnote 78 Thus, once the war was over, the scene was set for the attention of both the medical profession and the general public to be directed towards good nutrition and the benefits of eating ‘healthy’ foods. Watercress shook off the taint of typhoid and began to enjoy positive publicity. Doctors began to recommend that patients should eat it. The New Health Society, which was established by the eminent surgeon Sir William Arbuthnot Lane in December 1925 in order to teach people about healthy eating, was so enthusiastic about it that it even set up a subcommittee on watercress with the slogan: ‘Eat more watercress’.Footnote 79
In spring 1924 the Ministry of Agriculture published an official report on watercress growing, which was reprinted in The Fruit Grower. This stated that the water in which it was grown ‘must be absolutely free from contamination of any kind, and scrupulous care must be taken by the grower to guard against this occurring’Footnote 80 and – unlike the first official report – went on to specify the manner in which watercress beds should be constructed, that is, the walls to be made of concrete (which is impermeable).
In the same year, William Bedford registered the trademark ‘Sylva Springs’ for his watercress – a name redolent of both picturesque countryside and pure water. It is not clear whether Bedford consulted with the Ministry of Health prior to registering Sylva Springs, or whether he contacted them after he had done so – however, in December 1924 a Ministry of Health reportFootnote 81 appeared, recording a visit that had been made to his watercress beds in Dorset by Harold Scurfield MD, a former Medical Officer of Health for Sheffield. A year earlier, Scurfield had delivered a paper on the benefits of eating watercress to the British Medical Association, a paper in which he had called for inspection of beds by ‘the river pollution authorities’. He had advocated the encouragement of watercress growing by the Ministry of Agriculture.Footnote 82 The report praised ‘the application of scientific horticulture to the growing of Watercress’, and gave the Sylva Springs brand the official (or quasi-official) seal of approval, emphasising its freshness, hygienic production and purity. The cress was harvested: ‘just in time to catch the train for each particular market’ and was ‘despatched in: ‘clean, new, non-returnable chip boxes’.Footnote 83 Bedford had introduced these in preference to the traditional ‘flats’ – reusable wicker baskets – which were considered less hygienic. Each bunch of cress, Dr Scurfield reported, bore ‘a wooden label bearing the registered title: “Sylva Springs Watercress”’. He ended his report: ‘The Sylva Springs label is therefore a guarantee to customers that they are purchasing Watercress produced and marketed under the best possible conditions – to put it shortly, Mr. Bedford has aimed at perfection and attained it.’Footnote 84
Individual rural growers, it seems, were still driving changes within the industry, rather than official bodies such as the Ministry or local councils. When further incidences of typhoid, as well as the pollution of cress beds, were identified in 1925 and 1927, the feeling appears to have been that councils could take no stronger action: ‘Although it is very desirable that polluted watercress should not be sold … so far as I am aware the Urban District Council have no legal power to require the use of the watercress beds to be discontinued.’Footnote 85 Dr Nash, the Medical Officer of Health for Heston and Isleworth Urban District Council, appears to have wanted stronger action, for he wrote to the Minister of Health on the matter, but further correspondence reveals governmental reluctance to take powers to close watercress beds. Councils could not close down beds themselves, it was concluded, without conclusive evidence. The burden of proof was on the authorities and there was no desire to make specific regulations regarding watercress beds.
A clear division had now emerged between the perceived healthiness of watercress grown in the countryside and that grown near the city. Yet despite the new awareness occasioned by the outbreak in Hackney, officialdom seemed reluctant to regulate modes of production in either location – or give growers more specific advice on how to ensure the purity of their water supply. The pressure to reform urban (or suburban) production appears to have come from individual health inspectors, while moves to regularise watercress growing in rural areas were driven by rural producers. It took many years and more outbreaks of typhoid before that situation was to change.
Concluding remarks
The rapid growth of the industrial city, and consequential rise in epidemics of diseases such as cholera, led public health to become an issue of governmental concern in the nineteenth century – as evidenced by the passing of legislation such as the Public Health Act of 1848. As awareness grew about the health risks of contaminated foodstuffs, so the state extended its reach by passing the first Sale of Food and Drugs Act in 1875 and turning its gaze to agricultural practices such as the production of milk and meat. Yet by viewing matters of public health through the prism of watercress, it is abundantly clear that the authorities were not always keen to regulate. Even when a major outbreak of typhoid in Hackney in 1903 was linked to sewage-grown watercress, action was piecemeal. This seems to have been driven in part by the budgetary and logistical difficulties of regulating the use of water, as well as by the perception of the countryside as a locus of purity, the ‘right’ environment for watercress. A spatial separation can be identified, with distinctions made between plants grown in the vicinity of the city and those grown in rural areas. Not only that, but moral geographies emerge – between town and country and between food and water, for evidence suggests that in Victorian London, public bodies may have deliberately planted watercress in order to purify water supplies – then allowed that same cress to be sold on the streets. The desire to be shown to provide a safe drinking supply in the city, outweighing any duty to ensure that foods consumed there were wholesome. Although there were repeated warnings about the dangers of watercress grown in polluted water, and even after the Hackney outbreak, moves to ensure safe modes of production were driven as much by elite growers keen to protect their brand as by government. The consequences of governmental inaction when faced by a public health crisis, will surely offer lessons to those having to deal with the epidemics of the twenty-first century.
Acknowledgements
This article draws on material contained in my thesis, so I would like to thank my supervisors David Matless and Carol Morris for their support and comments. I am also very grateful to the watercress growers who so generously provided access to their private archives.
