Joseph Bazalgette

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Sir
Joseph Bazalgette
CB
Born
Joseph William Bazalgette

(1819-03-28)28 March 1819
Clay Hill, Middlesex, England
Died15 March 1891(1891-03-15) (aged 71)
Wimbledon, Surrey, England
OccupationCivil engineer
Children10
Insignia of a Knight Bachelor

Sir Joseph William Bazalgette

River Thames.[1] He later designed Hammersmith Bridge
.

Early life

Bazalgette was born at Hill Lodge,

Huguenot immigrant who developed ties to the future George IV and subsequently became wealthy.[2][a]

In 1827, when Joseph was eight years old, the family moved into a newly built house in

land drainage and reclamation
to enable him to set up his own London consulting practice in 1842.

In 1845 the house in Hamilton Terrace was sold and Joseph married Maria Kough, from County Kilkenny in Ireland. At the time he was working so hard on expanding the railway network that two years later, in 1847, he suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1847, while he was recovering, London's Metropolitan Commission of Sewers ordered that all cesspits should be closed and that house drains should connect to sewers and empty into the Thames. A cholera epidemic ensued, killing 14,137 Londoners in 1849.[3][4]

Bazalgette was appointed Assistant Surveyor to the Metropolitan Commission in 1849, taking over as Engineer in 1852 after his predecessor died of "harassing fatigues and anxieties." Soon after, another cholera epidemic struck in 1853, killing 10,738. Medical opinion at the time held that cholera was caused by foul air: a so-called

John Snow
had earlier advanced a different explanation, which is now known to be correct: cholera was spread by contaminated water, but his view was not then generally accepted.

Championed by fellow engineer

Enabling Act, despite the colossal expense of the project, and Bazalgette's proposals to revolutionise London's sewerage system began to be implemented. The expectation was that enclosed sewers would eliminate the stink ('miasma') that was thought to be the cause of cholera and, as a result, eliminate cholera epidemics
.

Sewer works

The old Abbey Mills Pumping Station
Ornate interior ironwork of the Octagon, Crossness Pumping Station
archives

At that time, the River Thames was little more than an open sewer, empty of any fish or other wildlife, and an apparent public health hazard to Londoners.

Bazalgette's solution (similar to a proposal made by painter John Martin 25 years earlier) was to construct a network of 82 miles (132 km) of enclosed underground brick main sewers to intercept sewage outflows, and 1,100 miles (1,800 km) of street sewers, to divert the raw sewage which flowed freely through the streets and thoroughfares of London to the river.

The plan included major

Deptford (1864) and at Crossness (1865) on the Erith marshes, both on the south side of the Thames and at Abbey Mills (in the River Lea valley, 1868) and on the Chelsea Embankment (close to Grosvenor Bridge; 1875), north of the river. The outflows were diverted downstream, where they were collected in two large sewage outfall systems on the north and south sides of the Thames, called the Northern and Southern Outfall Sewers. The sewage from the Outfall Sewers was originally collected in balancing tanks in Beckton and Crossness, then dumped, untreated, into the Thames at high tide.[5]

The system was opened by

Edward, Prince of Wales in 1865,[6]
although the whole project was not completed for another ten years.

Partly as a result of the

Princess Alice disaster, extensive sewage treatment
facilities were built to replace the balancing tanks in Beckton and Crossness in 1900.

The basic premise of this expensive project, that miasma spread cholera infection, was wrong. However, the new sewer system's unintended consequence was removing the

typhoid epidemics.[8]

Bazalgette's capacity for hard work was remarkable; every connection to the sewerage system by the various Vestry Councils had to be checked, and Bazalgette did this himself, and the records contain thousands of linen plans with handwritten comments in Indian ink on them "Approved JWB", "I do not like 6" used here and 9" should be used. JWB", and so on.[citation needed] Unsurprisingly, his health suffered as a result. Thames Water holds the records in large blue binders gold-blocked reading "Metropolitan Board of Works" and then dated, usually two per year.[citation needed]

Family

Bazalgette arms

Scion of a

London SW18
.

Married in 1845, at

JP (Ireland),[9]
Sir Joseph and Lady Bazalgette had eleven children including:

  1. Joseph William, born 20 February 1846
  2. Charles Norman, born 3 March 1847
  3. Edward, born 28 June 1848
  4. Theresa Philo, born 11 August 1850
  5. Caroline, born 17 July 1852; married George Chatterton
  6. Maria, born 1854; married Robert Wickham
  7. Henry, born 14 September 1855
  8. Willoughby, born 18 March 1857
  9. Maria Louise, born 1859; died unmarried
  10. Anna Constance, born 3 December 1859, married Major Frederick Blacker
  11. Evelyn, born 1 April 1861[10]

Awards and memorials

Memorial to Sir Joseph Bazalgette on Victoria Embankment, London WC2
Detail of Hammersmith Bridge, designed by Bazalgette

Knighted in 1875, Bazalgette was elected President of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1883.[citation needed]

A

Thames Tideway Scheme, would be named the Bazalgette Embankment.[12]

Dulwich College has a scholarship in his name either for design and technology or for mathematics and science.[13]

Bazalgette Mausoleum, Wimbledon

Other works

Notable descendants

  • Will Bazalgette (great-grandson), RCAF pilot awarded the Victoria Cross
  • Edward Bazalgette (great-great-grandson), musician and television director
  • Sir Peter Bazalgette
    (great-great-grandson), television producer

Note

  1. ^ Louis Bazalgette's tailoring account for the Prince Regent (who later became King George IV) was worth over 2 million pounds (adjusted for inflation) and was guaranteed by Parliament.

References

  1. ISBN 978-0752493787
    .
  2. ^ Adonis, Andrew; Parris, Matthew (23 September 2014). "Joseph Bazalgette". BBC Sounds. Great Lives. BBC. Retrieved 29 February 2024.
  3. ISBN 9781856197168
    .
  4. HMSO
    . p. 146.
  5. ^ "How the system worked". Crossness Engines. Archived from the original on 2 October 2012.
  6. ^ CharlotteDunn (30 October 2018). "The Princess Royal visits the Bazalgette Sewer Network". The Royal Family. Retrieved 24 February 2021.
  7. ^ Mann, Emily (4 April 2016). "Story of cities #14: London's Great Stink heralds a wonder of the industrial world". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 February 2021.
  8. ^ "'Dirty Old London': A History of the Victorians' Infamous Filth". NPR. 12 March 2015. Archived from the original on 23 June 2017. Retrieved 13 March 2015. [the famous great sewer network of the mid-19th century] basically took away the possibility of wholesale cholera epidemics in the city, typhus and typhoid – they all were reduced.
  9. ^ "Obituary – Lady Bazalgette". The Times. No. 36706. London. 4 March 1902. p. 8.
  10. ^ www.burkespeerage.com
  11. ^ "Bazalgette, Sir Joseph William (1819–1891)". English Heritage. Archived from the original on 1 August 2011. Retrieved 20 October 2012.
  12. ^ "Tideway honours Victorian pioneer". The Construction Index. 28 July 2020. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  13. ^ The Master's Report to the Governors for the School Year 2004–2005 (PDF) (Report). Dulwich College. p. 7. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 December 2007.

Further reading

  • Choice or chance? The virtues of London Stock bricks for the construction of the Bazalgette sewer network in London (c.1860-1880)-I J Smalley, A Assadi Langroudi, G.Lill, British Brick Society Information 148, 10–19. 2021.

External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Joseph Bazalgette.


Professional and academic associations
Preceded by
Sir James Brunlees
President of
the Institution of Civil Engineers

December 1883 – December 1884 		Succeeded by
Sir Frederick Bramwell
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