9
The City in the Country

By this raising, the lake [Thirlmere] will be greatly extended, and will be more in harmony with the surrounding scenery than the narrow riverlike mere which now exists.
John Frederic La Trobe Bateman, 1868

Indignation about the ravaging effects of smelters and chemical manufactures—the holes and heaps of St. Helens or the Black Country or the Lower Swansea Valley—did not supply the impetus for an organized preservationist movement. The moving force was the perception that the city was intruding everywhere, sending out its tentacles to grasp even the most precious of the remaining natural sanctuaries. This apprehension stirred resistance and supplied it with an agenda. As a result, organized preservationism became, from the decade of the 1860s onward, a political force promoters of development and their allies needed to reckon with.

Paradoxically, this sense that the countryside was in danger grew during the extended period when activities connected with growing cereals and raising birds and livestock became increasingly the source of livelihood for rural people. F. M. L. Thompson has reminded us that industry, including cottage industry, gradually departed from the country when steam energy came to be applied to machinery, thus leaving the countryside more agrarian than it had been before or ever would be again.^[1]

Throughout the nineteenth century, city and country managed to keep their distance and distinctness. Thompson estimates (or conjectures) that Victorians added about 300,000 acres to the 100,000 acres of urban streets, housing, and other buildings existing in England and Wales at the beginning of the reign.^[2] Those who experienced that unprecedented

spread of city into country space were understandably concerned about the blurring of margins. George Cruikshank expressed that anxiety in a famous cartoon, drawn in 1829, called "London Going Out of Town." It depicts an army of chimney pots marching on defenseless hayricks, cows, sheep, and fields while the city, behind a screen of poison gas laid down by tall smokestacks, fires off salvos of bricks. However, as the country retreated before this onslaught, Thompson again reminds us, it gathered its forces and placated the advancing enemy by cultivating more intensively and extensively and shifting some of its production to animal husbandry, vegetable and fruit growing, and milk, cheese, and butter processing.

In addition, the power of this attack was not overwhelming. There is general agreement that the great urban invasion took place, not in the nineteenth century, when towns were comparatively tightly packed, but after 1918. Urban land space in Wales and England increased by nearly a million acres during the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of conversion from agricultural and wasteland to urban uses reaching a peak in the 1930s.^[3] Fringe areas, not suburb, not country, but scabrous mixtures of gravel pits, vacant or "dead" land, noxious industries, and small dairies, poultry cooperatives, pig farms, and highway-oriented businesses did not surround cities to anything like the same depth they do today in Britain and, to a greater extent, in North America.^[4] By contrast, Victorian cities and the rural countryside managed to abide together as separate entities even while the population was increasing fourfold and becoming overwhelmingly urban between 1800 and 1900. Into the early twentieth century, a clearly discernible line divided the built-up area of Manchester, the symbol of urban industrialism, from surrounding farmland.^[5]

While the country was becoming more countrified, it was responding in every part to the city's gravitational pull. Railways made it profitable to enlarge slate quarries in North Wales and to roof the new suburbs. As cities grew larger and richer, Aberdeenshire stoneworkers cut more blocks and slabs to build city halls and bridges, pave city streets, and commemorate the dead in city cemeteries. Because urban building contractors required softwoods for new housing tracts, some landowners experimented with planting pines and firs on their estates.

In turn, demand from city meat markets preserved grazing lands in remote and peaceful landscapes. By the 1880s large companies were supplying dairy farmers within range of railway depots with strainers and cans, collecting and cooling the milk, and distributing it to distant urban markets and to cheese, butter, and biscuit establishments. Other farm-

ers, strategically placed to send small fruit to city jam factories, began, as early as the 1850s in Cambridgeshire, to specialize in strawberries, raspberries, plums, and pears. The coming of the Great Northern Railway to Bedfordshire at midcentury caused landowners along the line to divide farms into small holdings for intensive growing of onions, new potatoes, and sprouts. To nourish these vegetables, the railway wagons that carried the produce to Covent Garden returned with horse manure from London's streets. A Captain Peel even built a branch line to make sure his tenants had a supply. Thus from the beginning of the railway era, the food chain between country and city grew ever longer.^[6] Having greatly furthered specialization in the nation, urban markets, served by steam railways and then by steamships and refrigeration technology, eventually extended that process worldwide.^[7] Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any aspect of the countryside that remained entirely impervious, isolated from, and unresponsive to, the city's attraction.

While cities were drawing material in, they were also reaching out, far into the countryside, to dump sewage and refuse and to tap resources. Of these resources, water was the most sought after. Surface and underground supplies were exploited from areas near the major cities. When London, for example, had polluted the Thames and the Lea, it began tapping the underground sources of those rivers in Hertfordshire, to the dismay of that county's town corporations and agriculturalists.^[8] But it was the building of reservoirs or the conversion of lakes into reservoirs that demonstrated most conspicuously the effect of city growth on the surface of the countryside. A growing number of these reservoirs added to or detracted from, depending on one's point of view, the landscape features of some of the most "naturally" beautiful parts of Scotland, North and South Wales, Dartmoor, the Lake District, and the Pennines.

Beginning in the 1830s, cholera and typhoid outbreaks and confusion about the source and means of contamination caused city dwellers to grow anxious about the purity of local water supplies, and these anxieties were graphically confirmed by the reports in 1844-45 of the Royal Commission on the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts. Since existing techniques for water purification were not sufficiently far advanced, reformers felt they needed to look ever further afield. Furthermore, the thirst for water was increasing with population growth and a rising rate of domestic and industrial consumption—and doing so at the same time that pollution of subsurface reserves and the depletion of water levels by pumping were diminishing usable supplies. These factors came together to create a major, if not the major, challenge for urban re-

formers.^[9] It was "now well understood," an engineer told the directors of the New Glasgow Water Company in 1837, that "no community can have a reliable water supply when it comes directly from a stream or river."^[10] Observed another midcentury engineer: "The same causes that have rendered a larger supply necessary, have tended to render the water thus obtained, unfit either for domestic use, or for many manufacturing purposes."^[11] If rivers and streams flowing through or near cities were the natural avenues for disposal of sewage and industrial chemicals, then how could these watercourses also be the sources of water supply?

In London the search for a way around this dilemma began in the Middle Ages. Early engineers looked away from the Thames to streams and springs in the surrounding countryside. The most impressive of these engineering works was carried out by Sir Hugh Myddleton who built a system of pipes and aqueducts to bring pure water from Hertfordshire to Islington in 1613. Later in the same century residents of Manchester queued in the Old Market for already inadequate supplies. In the 1670s a local doctor commented on the poor quality of water trickling from the conduit and warned that it was the cause of "glandular obstructions and scrofulous swellings."^[12] A response came from Sir Oswald Mosley, whose estate lay on the river Medlock. He connected the river with the town and distributed its water through pipes, a project carried out both as a civic service and as a source of income.

In 1809, when Manchester's population was about 100,000, a private company took over this system and supplemented it, in 1825-26, by building a reservoir at Gorton, four miles from what was then the town's edge.^[13] Nevertheless, demand during the next few decades kept well ahead of efforts to increase supply. As more homes connected water closets to sewer pipes, more water was required to move the waste along. Textile manufacturers became aware that acute shortages of clean water imposed limits on industrial expansion, limits that private enterprise had shown itself incapable of overcoming.^[14]

Remarkably early, in 1808, a public gathering passed a resolution claiming that private water companies could not be expected to serve the public interest and calling for public water management; but Parliament, intent on privatization, refused to listen.^[15] Then in 1847, nine years after the city's incorporation, the Manchester Corporation did get permission. It set about purchasing the water company and began acquiring most of the 10,000-acre Longdendale Valley drainage area (usually called, at the time, a "gathering ground") on a stretch of the Etherow River, from ten to twenty miles northeast of the Gorton Reservoir. The

site had much to recommend it: a fairly high annual rainfall, few plowed fields to send topsoil mixed with manure into the river and its tributaries, and, best of all, no mills and therefore no "greedy mill-owners."^[16] The duke of Norfolk, who owned the land on one side of the Etherow, and Mr. Tollemarche, who owned the land on the other, were easily persuaded to cooperate.^[17] In 1847 Parliament gave permission to borrow money and assess rates, and the city corporation's engineer, John Frederic La Trobe Bateman, began work soon after. By 1851 water from most of the seven other impounding reservoirs along the Etherow began flowing into Manchester, eventually doubling the city's supply.

Bateman, still a young man, was one of the most experienced international reservoir builders of his day. He was an important early figure in the slow process by which hydraulic engineering changed from what he called the "guess or 'rule of thumb'" period of the canal builders to the somewhat more systematic, statistically based, approach of midcentury.^[18] He commenced his researches into the feasibility of converting the Longdendale Valley into a reservoir for Manchester by measuring rainfall rates in the gathering ground, calculating how the feeder streams could be directed and coordinated, and studying the absorbing qualifies of the vegetation and the soils. There is no indication that he cared about the basin's environment for its own sake; his object was to manage the supplies of the watershed so as to obtain the maximum possible quantity of water of the softest and purest quality and to send it by the force of gravity to the homes and industries of Manchester.^[19]

What did concern him was the possibility that his high reservoir dams might not be able to stand up to nature at its most extreme, although in his public statements he tried to be reassuring. He recognized that flash flooding was a real danger. The gathering ground of the Longdendale Valley rises from 500 to 1,900 feet and receives drainage from the westerly slopes at the southern end of the Pennines, so flooding was a common occurrence. To meet that danger, Bateman constructed ten holding reservoirs and fitted the impounding reservoirs with outflow pipes. The dams, however, were embankments made of earth and rubble and faced with puddle—dampened clay, sand, and gravel trodden into a semi-impermeable mixture by laborers wearing special boots. This technology was centuries old and was used to build the many low reservoir dams (rarely more than five feet high) needed to keep the canals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries filled during dry seasons. What was special about these Victorian dams was their greater size and the stress caused by the weight of the core, or puddle wall, at the center, extend-

ing well below the stream or river bottom into a stone-lined trench. Problems sometimes occurred when water seeped into the cracks between the trench lining and eroded the clay at the point of contact with the puddle wall. The much higher dams needed for the Longdendale project greatly increased the danger that the heavier core would settle unevenly, crack along the deep cutoff trench, and weaken the dam's underpinnings. Furthermore, gathered behind these strong yet potentially capricious barriers at Longdendale was "the largest aggregate capacity of any artificial sheets of water in the world," according to the Manchester Guardian .^[20]

Only good luck prevented a disaster when these dams were first put to a test. In 1849 a flood washed away one embankment, and the stored-up water destroyed a downriver school, wrecked several bridges, and covered a number of fields, but, the timing being fortunate, drowned no one. Bateman repaired the damage and this time embedded discharge pipes in masses of concrete. Nevertheless, when unusually heavy rains fell steadily for six days on already saturated ground in early February 1852, there was a chance that the whole system might be destroyed. According to reports, crowds gathered all night in the rain to watch the effect of rapidly rising water on the reservoirs. Cottagers began removing their furniture. Just when Bateman became most apprehensive, the heavy rain eased, and, except for small landslides, the reservoirs remained intact.^[21]

Much of the anxiety that night was the result of a catastrophe that had occurred four days earlier when the sixty-seven-foot-high earthwork dam of the Bilbury Reservoir gave way above the manufacturing village of Holmfirth in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In retrospect, disaster seemed inevitable. Starting in 1838, a consortium of mill owners built a series of reservoirs along two small rivers. The contractors they hired threw earth and rubble barriers across the top of a deep gorge through which water had formerly rushed in torrents down to Huddersfield. The dam at Bilbury Reservoir was the largest of these. Its construction was carried out as cheaply as possible. Builders poured loose rubble into the earthen embankment and mixed small stones into the puddle facing. A coroner's jury subsequently found that the project's backers had spent only half of what it would have cost to do the job properly and then had refused to carry out any repairs, arguing that money spent on maintenance could only come out of wages. Presumably, this threat succeeded, even though it was obvious that cracks were forming and the discharge pipes had silted up. Everyone predicted that "something would happen."

At 12:30 A.M. on February 5, the expected took place. The unusually

heavy rains had filled the reservoir to the top for the first time and spill-over water had seeped into the cracks in the puddle wall and through the rubble interior.^[22] Nevertheless, the valley people retired to bed, ignoring "with supine indifference," one report commented, the obvious signs that waters were rising rapidly and that the valves were choked. Most villagers had already fallen asleep when a wall of water hit Holm firth, sweeping away whole streets of cottages and then carrying on for a further five miles until the valley broadened out and weakened its force. Approximately 100 people drowned. Whole families died in their beds; boilers of steam engines were stranded in gardens; skulls and bones from graveyards were strewn about.

It was a national event. Subscriptions from the major cities raised £60,000 to help the survivors, a testament to the rarity of natural disasters in mid-Victorian Britain. The jurymen who heard evidence of what had caused this one expressed regret that the directors of the commission responsible for this criminal neglect could not, under the law, be found guilty of manslaughter.^[23]

In spite of this evidence in the 1850s that high dams made of clay, earth, and gravel were, in areas where rainfall was heavy, apt to disintegrate unless painstakingly built up and constantly maintained, they continued to be so constructed in Britain long after the use of masonry and concrete had become common elsewhere.^[24] Thomas Hawksley, one of the most prolific of the dam builders, consistently refused to use concrete even for the cutoff trenches or for grouting in the stone footings, although Bateman began to apply portland cement occasionally after the 1870s to places that needed to be especially watertight.^[25] In France engineers did not use earthwork dams if the height was more than forty feet.^[26] Earthen reservoir dams in Victorian Britain frequently were more than double that height. Conservatism about adopting new materials and methods in a country that had so long an experience in constructing canal and water mill reservoirs may have been a factor, but it seems much more likely that tight budgets forced engineers to follow customary procedures. Ratepayers in localities might be persuaded to support long-term investment in new water supplies, but there were limits to that revenue source, and, except for private enterprise, there were no other sources.

Municipalities, on the other hand, could make such investments at favorable rates by offering local taxes as collateral. The more enlightened among the municipal governments were willing to realize profits, not from the utility itself, but from its indirect benefits to the economy and

society as a whole. From the midcentury on, other cities followed Manchester's lead and took control over their water supplies, so that by the end of the century about eighty percent of the water companies were owned by the cities they supplied. This represented a major investment of public funds. However, there were constraints imposed by the necessity to raise large sums locally so that engineers like Bateman were restricted in their use of new construction technology.

Bateman's Longdendale project was fairly sophisticated, measured by the standards of the time; even so, Robert Rawlinson, distinguished geologist and expert on river pollution, criticized Bateman for having cut costs on some of his many other municipal supply systems to a dangerous extent.^[27] Rawlinson did not, however, put all the blame on Bateman. Municipal authorities simply could not be persuaded, he said, to spend more on reservoir dams than contractors customarily spent on railway embankments, even though it was understood that the action of reservoir water on clay or mortar created far more complicated engineering problems.^[28] Some cities, particularly those with comparatively small industrial units or where water supply was not as crucial as in textile towns, were reluctant to make such a heavy commitment. They usually compromised by giving support and services to private monopolies.

Sheffield was a case in point. Its city council waited until 1888 to purchase the Sheffield Water Company, even though the bursting of one of that company's reservoirs in 1864 caused the greatest single "natural" catastrophe of the century. The circumstances were not unlike those at Holmfirth. In 1853 Parliament gave permission for the Sheffield company to build a series of reservoirs along the steep hills and gorges of the Loxley Valley. One of them, the Bradfield Reservoir, contained by the Dale Dyke Dam, held more than 700,000,000 gallons. The clam was located 450 feet above Sheffield and at a distance of six and a half miles from the city's outer edge.^[29] Considerably higher than the ill-fated Bilbury Dam, the embankment at Dale Dyke was also built of earth, rubble, and puddle. Unfortunately, at Dale Dyke, this material was simply dumped from carts onto the site.^[30] "It is not a reservoir embankment," a Scottish engineer was later to remark, "it is a quarry tip."^[31] One result of such carelessness was that the foundation settled, possibly causing the brittle cast-iron outlet pipes inside the embankment to fracture.^[32] Villagers of Bradfield, downstream from the dam, spoke among themselves about how carelessly the work was being carried out, and the resident engineer named Gunson seems to have been aware of the risk but to have decided that the cost of strengthening would be prohibitively high.^[33]

Thus when flood waters, accompanied by gale winds, filled the reservoir to the brim on the evening of March 11, workmen opened the pipes. They became alarmed when the buildup continued, especially when one worker discovered a fifty-foot crack in the dam wall. A messenger rode to Sheffield to summon the chief engineer. On hurrying to the dam, he noticed that the villagers of Dam flask, the nearest community below the reservoir, were moving their cattle to higher ground. It was good that they did so, because shortly after the engineer reached the dam, it collapsed with a terrible roar, and the trapped water of the Loxley River charged toward the sleeping citizens of Sheffield, brushing away trees, villages, bridges, and factories in its path. The first victim was a newly born child, pulled from its mother's arms when the flood hit Lower Brad-field. By the time the torrent, on its rush through Sheffield, had spent itself, 270 people had perished. One body was carried to Doncaster, fifteen miles away.^[34] The company admitted to having been negligent and raised city water rates twenty-five percent to pay the £373,000 compensation bill. Only after years of debate and delay did the city council decide to ask Parliament for permission to buy the company out, permission that was granted nearly twenty-four years after the disaster.^[35]

This episode was the century's most dramatic demonstration of nature's supposed retaliatory powers. Editorialized the Builder , "It is particularly interesting to observe how nature punishes the moral errors on the part of great societies."^[36] It was also a demonstration of the consequences of purse tightening by city officials, many of whom were holders of water company stock. But evidence of this kind did not slow the process of municipal reservoir construction or persuade many aldermen to experiment with safer construction technology. Cities continued to extend their reach farther and farther out in order to divert water from countryside to city and frequently from one watershed to another. Where rivers and streams were converted into lakes, this intervention could be regarded as an enhancement of the beauty and amenity of rural areas, but where the resource being tapped was an already existing lake and beauty spot, the reaction could be angry and vociferous. This the Man: chester City Council discovered when it decided to listen to Bateman's advice and extend the city's water system ninety-six miles out to Lake Thirlmere in the heart of the Lake District.

Bateman's recommendations were contained in a report to Manchester authorities in 1868 in which he detailed increases in water consumption since 1855 and listed the advantages to be gained by adding Thirlmere to the existing system. He spoke of the extremely heavy rain-

fall in the area and showed how the level of the lake could be raised forty-five feet without damaging adjoining property, this part of the Lake District being sparsely inhabited and seldom visited by tourists. He added that in its natural state Thirlmere was of little use even to sightseers, but as a reservoir it would be accessible. An encircling carriage road would provide one of the loveliest drives imaginable.^[37]

Most of the city councillors were convinced. After trying, and failing, to persuade Liverpool to go along with a scheme for jointly developing both Thirlmere and Haweswater, Manchester decided in 1876 to ask permission to go ahead with the acquisition of Thirlmere alone^[38] —only to meet with strident opposition inside and outside Parliament. This opposition Bateman characterized as either self-interested or inspired by "the sentimental idea that it was sacrilege to invade the precincts of the lakes for any such utilitarian purpose as giving a supply of fresh water to famishing thousands of the manufacturing districts."^[39] Seldom had the issue of values been more concisely stated. What has been called "the greatest battle of the picturesque front"^[40] during the second half of the nineteenth century was between developers on the one hand and preservationists on the other. In a particularly graphic way, it pitted the need of urban industrialism for additional natural resources against the need of nature lovers to retain unspoiled the rare beauty of the lakes, the most poetic of landscapes, a symbol of the possibility that human beings and nature could abide together in productive harmony.

Speaking on behalf of the Manchester City Council in 1925, Michael Anderson recalled the public rejoicing in Albert Square when Thirlmere water first reached the city in 1895. However, he admitted that the public reaction to the project had not always been so enthusiastic. Despite the fact that time and use accustomed the public to the thought that it was proper for engineers to set about "improving on the work of the hills,"

but when to that is added a proposal to drown a beautiful valley, putting a small hamlet, the Dun Bull Inn, and a church beneath the flood at the behest of the thirsty industries and scullery taps down on the distant plain, the sentiment that townspeople feel for the country-side is thoroughly awakened. Many of the people who can escape with their wounded nerves from the world of Watt and Arkwright look upon the lake district as a sort of half-way house to heaven, and they were naturally concerned as to the effect the scheme would have on the landscape.^[41]

Anderson was, perhaps, being gently ironic when he mentioned the attraction of the lakes for wounded sensibilities, nevertheless his remark is a reminder of how important this particular Arcadia was in the his-

tory of Victorian preservationism. Since the eighteenth century, travelers, most of them from the higher reaches of society, had sought out the lakes in their search for the sublime. In the next century, middle class travelers, influenced by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Ruskin, had tended to look, not so much for the vast, the intense, the terrifying, as for the beautiful, the picturesque, the harmonious. No place in England seemed closer to embodying all the values attributed by the imagination of the time to a landscape ideal—a landscape that seemed to many a "halfway house to heaven." Because the romantic poets had made the lakes sacred, proposals to exploit the aesthetic or physical resources of the region were, by definition, acts of sacrilege. Passionate and articulate reaction could be expected.

Wordsworth set the pattern of resistance when he spoke out early in the nineteenth century against vulgar villa builders and later against the railway promoters. He fired off two eloquent letters to the Morning Post in 1844 on hearing that a spur line might link Kendal with Lake Windermere and spoil forever the solitude of a wilderness "rich with liberty." It was on that occasion that he asked, in an accompanying sonnet, whether any treasured place was safe "from rash assault?"^[42]

That question arose again forcefully when a royal commission made inquiries into proposals for transporting "surplus" water from the north to London as a substitute for using the polluted Thames. Although Bateman's proposal to build a series of reservoirs in a catchment area near Snowdon in North Wales received the commission's blessing in 1869 (but not, as it turned out, Parliament's), commissioners gave serious attention to its closest rival, a plan prepared by George Hemans and Richard Hassard to make a reservoir for the Manchester Water Commission out of Ullswater, one of the ornaments of the Lake District. Recognizing that so famous a beauty spot had to be treated with some respect, these two engineers suggested piping in water from Thirlmere and Haweswater, thus keeping Ullswater at a reasonably steady level. Supporters of this alternative pointed out the disadvantages of building reservoirs where tilled fields, pastures, villages, churches, and graveyards would need to be flooded. Far better, they argued, to enlarge and control natural lakes, especially since the strategy in this case would be to convert the other two lakes into balancing and distributing reservoirs. That way, they claimed, little that was romantic need be lost, since Haweswater and Thirlmere were seldom frequented and had no "particular beauty about them."^[43]

Because Parliament decided not to act on the commission's recom-

mendations, there was no need for highly organized protest; nevertheless, lovers of the Lake District had received warning that solitude would need vigilant protection. Thus when Bateman's plan to turn Thirlmere into another reservoir for Manchester became public in 1876, those with long memories knew what to expect and quickly organized themselves. Wordsworth had earlier asked the winds and torrents to protest against "a false utilitarian lure,"^[44] and many of his admirers were prepared to join in.

The campaign to save Thirlmere was organized by Robert Somervell, whose family owned a shoe business in Kendal. Before leaving his Lakeland home to become a Cambridge undergraduate, he had been converted to Ruskinianism by reading The Political Economy of Art ; so after taking his degree and becoming a schoolmaster at Harrow (where he taught English composition to Winston Churchill and instructed three Trevelyans), he became one of the original Companions of Ruskin's Guild of St. George.^[45] Because Somervell's pamphlet Water for Manchester from Thirlmere contained an endorsement by Ruskin, the press assumed that it spoke the Master's voice and paid attention.^[46] The result was that one of the first organized attempts to preserve natural beauty for its own sake became associated with Ruskin, who was at the time suffering from stress brought on by Whistler's action for libel. That and an attack of mental illness prevented him from taking a leading part. The youthful Somervell, who had taken the initiative and had worked out most of the tactics, got far less credit than he deserved.

His struggle to save Thirlmere grew out of an earlier struggle to protect it from mining interests. On hearing in 1875 that railway developers planned a line to exploit an iron ore deposit on the side of Helvellyn, Somervell said "[I] felt, like Elihu in the book of Job, that I must speak out or burst." He drew up a protest, appended a petition to Parliament, and circulated hotels and lodging houses in Windermere, Ambleside, and Grasmere. A copy reached Brantwood on Coniston Lake, where Ruskin had recently taken up residence. "Fancy our joy and pride," Somervell recalled, when the great man asked if he could append a supporting circular. As it turned out, the petition, signed by three to four thousand, including Carlyle and other literary notables, never reached Westminster, the railway proposal having been dropped; but the names and machinery were in place when the Manchester Corporation disclosed its latest designs on Thirlmere two years later.^[47]

At a meeting in a Grasmere hotel, Somervell and a number of businessmen who catered to the tourist trade formed the Thirlmere Defence

Society and raised £1,000 on the spot. Somervell drew up another petition and sent it to those who had signed the previous one; more money soon came pouring in. Octavia and Miranda Hill invited him to strategy meetings at their house in London, where discussions took place about what line to take before a select committee set up to hear testimony and make recommendations. Somervell's petition had concentrated on the "aesthetic and general public argument." Robert Hunter, who had conducted so many successful campaigns for the Commons Preservation Society, thought this approach to the committee would be the most productive in the long as well as the short run. But he was overruled by businessmen pragmatists who supplied most of the finances.^[48]

In the meantime, the debate between the developers and preservationists grew more and more passionate. Dr. James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester, became a target for preservationist ire when he told an audience in 1877 that two million urbanites had a right to draw water, a prime necessity for life, from any place where they could get lawful access. He then went on to endorse claims made by Bateman and other promoters that the exercise of this right need not impoverish the exploited area. Man, acting as God's steward, could, he thought, improve on wild nature and in so doing expose an ever-widening segment of the population to the loveliness of lake and mountain.^[49]

The Spectator responded to this claim that natural scenery existed to enhance the well-being of the city dweller by printing a caustic article called "Manchester and the Meres." What does it matter, its author asked, that doubling the size of Thirlmere will submerge the little church of Wythburn, since the engineers promise to build a prettier one higher up and carry the surrounding gravestones to a "fresher bit of ground"? Must, then, the old winding road go? Never mind; the problem hardly exists: a straight new carriage drive can be cut level around Helvellyn. What about the enlargement of the lake? Clearly a positive step, considering that nature has erred in placing so disproportionately small a body of water in such magnificent surroundings. Here was an aesthetic infelicity human ingenuity could correct. True, the need for a strong and high embankment might be an intrusive element in the charming scene, but, "by scattering a few large boulders over its front, and planting a few trees in the midst of them," the dam can be made to fit into its setting, "if indeed it does not approach in grandeur to its proud neighbour the Raven Crag."^[50]

In letters to the press and repeatedly in Fors Clavigera , Ruskin was equally sarcastic and far more blunt. The appropriate sentence to be

passed on that city of Balaam ("cowardly in war, predatory in peace") for its criminal act of invasion, he wrote, should not decree that the "Lake of Thirlmere be brought to the top of the town of Manchester, but that the town of Manchester, or at least the Corporation thereof, should be put at the bottom of the Lake of Thirlmere." Earlier, on hearing about Bateman's plan, he wrote: "But landscape, and living creature, and the soul of man,—you are like to lose them all, soon. I had many things to say to you in this Fors —of the little lake of Thirlmere, and stream of St John's vale, which Manchester, in its zeal for art, is about to drain from their mountain-fields into its water-closets."^[51] He was no Roman Catholic, Ruskin wrote in Fors Clavigera , "Yet I would not willingly steal holy water out of a font, to sell;—and being no Roman Catholic, I hold the hills and vales of my native land to be true temples of God, and their waves and clouds holier than the dew of the baptistery, and the incense of the altar."^[52]

Deep in the culture of the time was this belief that nature's sacred places must be preserved from desecration. Even Mr. Punch could be serious through his comic mask on such a subject. Thus this last stanza of a verse, written and illustrated by Linley Sanbourne on the occasion of Somervell's pamphlet about Thirlmere:

Though Commerce claim free course,
     and subtle Greed,
In mask of Progress, her convenience plead,
Should Wisdom not be chary
In casting Nature's dearest dowers away?
Leave Lakeland still to elf, and fawn, and fay,
For Art, Thought and Toil self's place of play,
And Sanctuary.^[53]

Implicit here is the Wordsworthian view that nature needed no improvement and that arguments from utility rested on an arrogant assertion that the progress of civilization justified any abuse of nature. Against this assertion, the Ruskinians maintained nature's intrinsic value. Prominent among this group were Octavia Hill, Hardwick Rownsley, and Robert Hunter—the triumvirate who were to form the National Trust in 1895 and who, along with people like George John Shaw-Lefevre, James Bryce, and William Morris, were at the heart of Victorian and Edwardian preservationism and conservationism.

Less vituperative and adamant than Ruskin but hardly more conciliatory was the Bishop of Carlisle. In a much-discussed letter to the Times in October 1877, he asked if Manchester really believed that God had

created the site and elevation of Thirlmere as "a providential arrangement for the satisfaction of the wants" of one grimy city. In fact, he continued, the special virtue of the lake was that it had, over the years, so little to do with humans. Somehow it had managed to keep itself free "from villas and all that is villainous." Invoking the "shades of Wordsworth," the bishop stated that "the substitution of engineering contrivance and utilitarianism for Nature in her most primitive and untouched beauty" was to be countenanced only under "some great pressure of necessity," a concession his critics were glad to exploit.^[54]

On the leader page, the Times gave the Bishop of Carlisle's position its endorsement, but, adopting its best magisterial tone, went on to regret that a major contest between Beauty and Utility seemed to be shaping up. "All beauty," pronounced the editorial writer, "is essentially incapable of demonstration."^[55] As for the argument from utility, according to the Times , that went against Manchester: when submitted to the felicific calculus, the harm done to a national recreation ground and thus to the profits of a growing recreation industry must weigh more heavily than the pain imposed by compelling the Manchester City Corporation to pay for more expensive water. Water supplies were, the Times conceded, growing scarcer and thus more valuable. But rarer still in an increasingly artificial world, its editorial writer observed, was "recreation that is really refreshing." Therefore, applying the doctrine of "utility rightly understood," it must follow that the water commission ought to look elsewhere for a place to build its "tank."^[56]

This and similar notices in the press, the bishop's letter, Ruskin's denunciations, an article in the Spectator and another in the Saturday Review , the public questioning of the capacity of self-interested municipal corporations to manage the nation's water supply, had their intended effect. They provoked John Graves, Chairman of the Waterworks Commission of Manchester, to send back a spirited counterbarrage. Who gave, he asked, these priests, romantics, intellectuals, art critics, poets, and agitators the right to sneer at villadom? (He admitted to being a villa owner.) By what right do these "sentimentalists" disparage the claims of trade on water resources: where but in industrial expansion will a growing population find employment? It was Ruskin, he was sure, who was behind much of this ill-informed emotionalism; Ruskin was the man "who delights in charging the windmills of political economy and common sense" and longs to submerge Manchester at the bottom of Thirlmere. As for the Bishop of Carlisle, "The Bishop of the Lakes," he invokes the spirit of Wordsworth to impress Parliament with "ignorant clamour."

But do these dilettantes "know what they mean by ridiculing the wants of trade ?"^[57]

Sentimentalists, he continued, have a distorted view of nature, supposing, as they do, that its forces always are enlisted on the side of beauty. Ignorant of geology, they are blissfully unaware that heavy rainfall has, over centuries, eroded the banks of Thirlmere and piled up sediment on the swampy end of the lake. Nature creates beauty but also destroys it. Nature can be improved. The proposed dam can be made irregular and picturesque; by deepening the lake, engineering can restore it to the full health it enjoyed in its prime. Now only the single proprietor is allowed to take his boat out on the lake; the proposed new road will allow thousands to enjoy what privilege now denies. Furthermore, the reservoir will act as the best of all preservationists: no lead mine developers will ever be allowed to pile up tailings and thus send toxic fluids to seep into the source of Manchester's water supply.^[58]

As might be expected, the Thirlmere defenders treated with more disdain than it merited Graves's assertion that nature destroys what she builds. By far the most interesting of these responses came from one of the century's finest practitioners of the art of writing letters to the editor, Octavia Hill. She had established her reputation as a reformer by purchasing (with Ruskin's money) slum property in the Marylebone district of London and, instead of razing the old buildings and starting over, rejuvenating them, thus preserving some neighborhood continuity. Consistent with this respect for artifacts that contain within them evidence of their own past was her comment that the slow process of sedimentation that had narrowed Thirlmere and built up the swampy area meant that nature's lake "contains its own history." The process of change in nature has its own aesthetic, she insisted, although not one that admirers of things new are apt to detect. To discerning eyes, things of value can arise out of natural decomposition:

Again, some of us liked the sedgy margins of our lakes, where great reeds and rushes grew, and had been rather glad to remember there were still left in England some few swamps where grass of Parnassus and bog-bean and bog-myrtle could be found. Here too, it seems, we were wrong, and Manchester will help us by draining or flooding over our lake shore, and giving us instead a bare bank of mud or of shingle.^[59]

Those Manchester men, she concluded, who instruct us in the nature of beauty, who think a dam strewn with a few boulders can rival Raven Crag, who believe more is necessarily better, who prefer straight roads to winding, little-frequented bridle paths, who have no concern about wild

swamp flowers, and who boast that they will improve our old lake by making it new: "are these the men to whom we are going to commit one of the loveliest lakes and valleys our England owns?"^[60]

Hill was aware that such appeals would have a greater effect on readers of the Times than on those members of Parliament who represented urban constituencies. Politicians capable of appreciating swamp flora would think twice before expressing this interest in a public forum. Therefore she tended to side with the pragmatists rather than with Hunter and Somervell. Aesthetic arguments, she believed, would have no effect on politicians unless it could be shown that the health and future prosperity of Manchester did not depend on the destruction of wild beauty. Thirlmere defenders would present expert witnesses who could show that wells sunk in the new red sandstone area of Lancashire would be an adequate, although somewhat more expensive, alternative. What the effects of abstracting water would be on that less celebrated landscape seems not to have concerned them.

For these tactical reasons, opposition witnesses tried to indicate where alternative supplies might be found when a Commons select committee, chaired by the noted scientist and promoter of technical education Lyon Playfair, began its hearings. Others who appeared suggested that Manchester was more interested in making profits from selling water to purchasers along the line of supply than in assuring economic growth and improving the sanitation of her citizens. In reply, supporters of the bill cited demographic statistics and compared costs. The committee found for the bill promoters and dismissed the notion that heavily polluted South Lancashire and industrial regions north of Manchester might be viable alternative sources of water in the future. It stated that "any of the Westmoreland and Cumberland Lakes" were legitimate areas of water exploitation.

However they did concede to the protesters that the region was "a valued possession of the whole nation," that proposals to intervene in such sites must demonstrate that no injury will be done to natural beauty, and that the facility should act to preserve such beauty for future generations. Commissioners were satisfied, the report continued, that the Thirlmere project answered these conditions: it would bury one island but create two new ones; the fluctuation of water levels would expose no unsightly mud banks since the lake edges were shingle; doubling the size of the lake would create—and here commissioners cited the authority of a landscape gardener named W. Broderick Thomas—a better pro-

portion between water and land masses and restore the lake "to its ancient condition."^[61]

This language about the value to the nation of aesthetic resources was new to official publications. It represented a victory of sorts for the growing influence of the kind of environmental argument used so effectively by the Commons Preservation Society in its battles against enclosing landlords during the 1870s. When speaking about "preservation of the scenery," the Liberal politician W. E. Forster felt the need to add, "to use a phrase now current."^[62] This concession to aesthetics served the preservationist/conservationist causes but brought little comfort to residents of other beauty spots threatened by urban-industrial growth, especially since the report and subsequent legislation invited further exploitation of the lakes. Friends of the Lakes realized correctly, as subsequent events proved, that Haweswater, Ullswater, and Windermere would be next.

Although the preservationists lost the battle for Thirlmere, they did win another skirmish. Reacting to pressure, Parliament inserted into the 1879 Manchester Water Act the commission's "environment clause" stipulating that "all reasonable regard" be shown for preserving the scenic beauty of the place and another clause protecting existing rights of access.^[63] Preservationists also emerged from the struggle experienced in organization and tactics and equipped with a ready supply of rhetoric.

Whenever threatened with some new threat of invasion during the 1880s, the Friends of the Lakes chose confrontation. Canon Hardwick Rownsley came forward as their spokesman and rallying point as Ruskin, suffering from depression and bouts of mental disorder, tended to withdraw. But the "Seer of Brantwood" could occasionally be roused. In a letter dated April 7, 1884, to The Manchester City News , Ruskin imagined a future "Lift," which would carry enthusiastic travelers to a "Refreshment Room on the summit" of Helvellyn before it made a "'drop' to Ullswater; while beyond the rectilinear shores of Thirlmere reservoir, the Vale of St John will be laid out in a succession of tennis grounds, and the billiard rooms of the Bridal of Triermain Casino be decorated in the ultimate exquisiteness of Parisian taste."^[64]

A later chapter will address the object of this heavy sarcasm: the popular recreation industry and its effect on the environment. Worthy of note here is the failure, on the part of Ruskin and the many others who adopted his tone, to leave much room for compromise. The preservationists showed nothing but contempt for Manchester philistinism in particular and proletarian tastes and urban values in general. Nature must

be protected from the moral as well as the physical poison spreading out from cities in ever-increasing volume. Developers, "not content with vomiting pestilence,"^[65] are intent on destroying the purity and simple faith that had imprinted itself on the landscape of remote places. Urban predators will, Ruskin warned, "deface your ancient hills with the guilt of mercenary desolation," determined as they are on driving an "ancient shepherd life into exile, and diverting the waves of . . . streamlets into the cities which are the very centres of pollution, of avarice, and impiety . . . [and] blasting the cultivable surface of England into a treeless waste of ashes."^[66] These were strong words. In his angry wish to show contempt, he denied the possibility of working out some pragmatic way to reconcile a set of legitimate but conflicting demands: of an increasingly urbanized population for pure water and access to places of natural beauty, of rural people for some security in their way of life, of cultivated people for peace and quiet, and of naturalists and historically minded people for continuity and variety in species and places.

Ruskin's uncompromising position was consistent with his general attitude toward capitalist exploitation. Just before the Thirlmere threat, he had been carrying on a protracted feud with the Bishop of Manchester over the subject of Christianity and usury.^[67] However, there was some justification in the allegation that his attitude to reservoirs was of the "not-in-my own-backyard" variety. Had he not once enthusiastically promoted a scheme for damming an Alpine valley of the Rhone and turning it into "one Paradise of safe plenty"?^[68] Some critics have suggested that his anger, and perhaps Carlyle's, was less purely environmentalist than it was anti-Manchester and what that city represented to so many professional middle-class intellectuals.^[69] Motive aside, the fact that such an array of eminent Victorians took part in the campaign meant that the national newspapers would carry the discussion to a wide audience throughout the 1880s.

The Battle of Thirlmere between Beauty and Utility was never resolved on the theoretical front. If, however, we consider behavior, a somewhat more optimistic reading of the event is possible. It is obvious that the reservoir promoters did not anticipate the strength of feeling their bid to appropriate a renowned beauty spot would stir up. They still seemed clumsy and inept at public relations when the time came, just after the First World War, to make the next move, this time on Haweswater. On the other hand, it was obvious, even in the Thirlmere construction plans, that Manchester wanted to be a good steward (or thought it prudent to appear like one), as its water commission understood that concept. It

Figure 9.
Lake Thirlmere becoming a reservoir (1891). We look south from the lake's outlet
 to the site of the Manchester Corporation's new dam—a project for raising the water
 level fifty-one feet and transforming Lakeland poetry into urban resource. 
(Engineering 52, 1891)

made minor and spasmodic attempts to heal or disguise the scars made by dam building and the construction of tunnels to take the water on its three-day journey to its destination. The project supervisor, George Henry Hill, stipulated that local rock be mixed into the concrete used to construct aqueducts so that they might harmonize with their surroundings.^[70] (See Figure 9.)

In 1908, advised by Professor Fisher, one of the leading forestry experts of the day, the commission set out on a ten-year plan to plant trees on the steep slopes of the catchment area. The object was to stabilize the soil, improve its capacity to hold moisture, turn a profit, if possible, and keep sheep from polluting the water. A six-acre nursery supplied most of the saplings, shrubs, and grasses for the planting operation and also served as a botanical laboratory. Although the outbreak of war in 1914

put a temporary end to Fisher's plan, some 2,000 acres of the 12,000 owned by the city were successfully reforested by the mid-1890s.^[71] This allowed commissioners to claim high ground as preservationists: had their decision to convert grazing land back to forest not acted to purify the region? Had they not rationalized the region's water system by "altering nature's plan" and "diverting helter skelter streams into more profitable courses"? Their practical, not sentimental, conservationism had, they pointed out, managed to control rapid runoff and its erosive effects while at the same time, through planting and restricting public access, succeeded in leaving the site more "wild" than it had been for many centuries.^[72]

Thirlmere's defenders did not applaud the commission's accomplishment in reforesting the slopes. They held up this aspect of water commission policy as a prime example of how even well-intentioned governmental (in this case, municipal) intervention was almost certain to be physically and aesthetically destructive. Virtually all of the trees planted under Fisher's direction were alien importations: firs and spruces from Alaska and the American and Canadian Pacific coast, Scotch pines, and European and Japanese larches. In 1906 a visitation of saw flies (Nematus erichsoni ) defoliated most of the larches and spun cocoons in the litter and moss of the plantation floor. Specialists from Manchester University recommended spraying with arsenate of copper, but the knapsack sprayers used could not reach the tree tops, so "insectivorous" birds were introduced and housed in 400 nesting boxes to keep them from migrating. The city council was pleased to report that by 1912 the saw fly epidemic seemed to have passed and the forest had gained new species of bird life.^[73]

What lessons the "nativists" among the late Victorian and Edward-ian Friends of the Lakes, and they were the majority, drew from this "success story" were decidedly less positive. Discouraged with planting larches, the water commission concentrated on Sitka spruce, perhaps the most unpopular of all conifers with visitors because of the brooding quality of its dark foliage. Some came eventually to regret the demotion of the more cheerful larches.^[74] Even the care the Manchester landlord took in keeping the area neat and tidy had its detractors. So "prim" and "paper-planned" is the place, noted Norman Nicholson in 1963, "that you expect to find a public convenience behind every tree."^[75] W. G. Collingwood had written several decades earlier: "The old charm of its shores has quite vanished, and the sites of its legends are hopelessly altered, so that the walk along either side is a mere sorrow to any one who

cared for it before."^[76] Asked B. L. Thompson in 1946, do we really want another Black Forest?^[77] Canon Rownsley would have not hesitated to give his answer. After surveying the region once the scars had a chance to heal, he concluded that "henceforth neither painter nor poet will come for rest and song, where the pack-horse bells at far intervals were once 'The only sound that dared intrude / Upon the Sylvan solitude.'"^[78]

That so exuberant an enthusiast as Rownsley could emphasize the value of peace and quiet has caused some who have written about the Lake District to reflect on how strongly the Wordsworthian tradition influenced the late Victorian and Edwardian preservationist movement.^[79] Few Wordsworthians would have been open to the suggestion that the lakes should be allowed to evolve to suit democratic tastes. It has been pointed out that the Thirlmere defenders felt a tension between their contempt for proletarian manners and their insistence that the Lake District was a national treasure for all to enjoy. They saw the contradiction but could find no way to resolve it.^[80] Nevertheless, critics and defenders of the Thirlmere project seem to be in general agreement that Manchester's first intervention in the Lake District had been less than a success from almost any but an engineer's or a forest manager's point of view; as an exercise in public relations it had been, by general agreement, a "debacle."^[81]

A century later, this Victorian and Edwardian contest between Beauty and Utility continues but the contestants and the issues are no longer quite the same. Concern about the appropriation of famous beauty spots by city developers has lessened now that the National Trust, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, and other countryside protection groups provide leadership and direction to preservationists. Also, a great increase of interest in hiking, bicycling, climbing, and camping, clearly discernible from the 1880s on, gave the cause (once largely the preserve of the middle-aged and the professional middle class) youthful energy and change of focus. Then the advent of popular environmentalism in the 1960s again enlarged the recruiting grounds.

Thus a proposal the Manchester Corporation made in 1961 to tap Ullswater provoked a well-orchestrated outcry and was defeated in the House of Commons. Blocked for the first time, corporation engineers and public relations experts came up with an expensive new plan to send water from Windermere and Ullswater by way of Haweswater to a treatment works at Watchgate before sending it, along with the water from Thirlmere, on to Manchester. Chemical treatment would make it possible to permit public access to the three new additions to the system, the alternative of fencing these tourist sites being impractical anyway. Elaborate

devices for hiding away pumping stations and masking the sound of their machinery won over enough support finally to carry the measure through Parliament.^[82]

Therefore the struggles on the picturesque front had not been entirely in vain. Consciousnesses were undoubtedly raised. On the other hand, the battle to preserve Thirlmere and the skirmishing that followed demonstrated to all combatants, preservationists included, the conceptual limitations of romantic conservationism.^[83] The appeal to beauty could not hold fast, in the forum of contending interests, against the argument from necessity. Neither could it hold its own against the resource conservationists-those who championed the cause of sustainable development and advocated wise, rather than reckless, exploitation.

In claiming respect for the Thirlmere, which time and natural erosion had fashioned, on the grounds that it was an entity with its own history, its own ends, its own system of self-regulation, Octavia Hill seemed to have approached what we now think of as an ecological perception, a sensibility that conceives of natural environments as biotic communities characterized by diversity, complexity, and symbiosis. Had she gone on to regret the passing of the bog myrtle and the bog bean, not simply as valued individuals, but as indicators of the existence of a unique, self-regulating community, and then warned the Manchester Corporation that indifference to such communities can have dire and unpredictable results for human beings, she might have shown the country how to construct firmer strategic defenses against the city. In this sense, at least, the environmental forces are now in a somewhat stronger theoretical position than they were in the past.