The Pimlico Sewer Minisode of 1849 | Episode 42

We're headed back to Victorian England in this special end of year Christmas minisode. So bring your hip waiters and your breathing apparatus. There will be feces. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous podcast. Together we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On this very special mini catchupisode, I'll explain to you why this year earned a feces themed minisode. I'll do it by reminding you why Victorian England sucks so bad. And although you won't learn a lot about feces, you will hear a lot about them. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. So it's been a while, and I am very sorry about that. I've been away unavoidably and I feel pretty bad about it. But mind you feeling pretty bad was kind of the whole reason that I went away. I like to start this real quick with a heartfelt thanks to all those people who reached out to make sure that I hadn't died, you know, elaborately and on fire like you think, but no, nothing like that. See. I advocate a lot for mental health on this show, and I just had to take a little time to work on my own. I also wanted to share a very special thanks to all of you who embraced their spirit of generosity and your ability and don'tate it to the show. And I do all of this from my heart, out of my own pocket. And even though they say that money can't buy happiness, if you think that the one dollar of your money isn't noticed and sincerely appreciated like louder than applause, you may be crazier than I am. It may be a little, but it means more than you can know. So thank you. But enough of that tis this season, and I will be damned if you're going to go one more week without me sharing something awful. Whenever I've done one of these catchup minisodes, I've always kind of shared some thematically relevant tale of woe and last time I surprised you with a short but sweet feces related calamity. And in that same tradition, please enjoy the following tale. Think of it like a modern dance interpretation of my beer, and review what was my year? Like Today's short tail takes place in the filth covered tunnels beneath eighteen forties London. You probably spend about zero point zero percent of your time thinking about viewers, probably why you couldn't imagine life in a populated area without them. But thankfully I'm back and I am here to help you imagine. We visited Victoria in London before, to quote from an earlier episode, the Church thought bathing was an act of vanity. Indoor plumbing was as much of a fantasy as flying cars. On top of that, London itself was a disgusting hell hole like famously gross and awful. The sky was brown with smog from the Industrial Revolution, the Thames River was almost thick enough with human sewage to walk on, and Parliament was worried that the smell of the river flowing by the debate chamber would kill them. And don't get me started on the great horse manure Crisis of eighteen ninety four that could almost be its own episode. Victoria. London, in short, is exactly the reason I warn you not to eat during this show, and I remind you that your favorite characters from Victorian romance novels smelled worse than anything that you've ever sat beside on a bus or subway. For hundreds of years, Londoners depended on night soil collectors. Yep, that's what they called it. These enterprising businessmen would move feces from local suspits to the city's rivers close. I was disgusting, and eventually flush toilets came along and they could just drop plot directly into sewer tunnels that directly connected to the Thames. The city was still a living nightmare in every way imaginable, but baby steps. Our story takes place in Pimlico in Westminster, in London. It's a beautiful, upscale residential area, renowned for its architecture and public gardens. Kind of a far stretch from its origins as a feces glazed cobblestone nightmare of old. It bristles with history and style. But I guarantee you this next bit of history is not memorialized or celebrated anywhere by anyone for any reason. Roll up your pant legs and let's jump in. Sewer workers were scheduled to investigate blockages and smells and maybe the occasional croc or chud. This was all done on a kind of rotating schedule, and that meant that some stretches were ignored for years at a time. Early on the morning of October twelfth, eighteen forty nine, Thomas G. Daniel Pert and John Atwood made their way to Warwick Way in the Kenilworth area of central Westminster, careful not to tread through any softened up animal corpses along the way. They were there to make arrangements for flushing. This part of the tunnel is part again of some well overdue maintenance. The sewer under this area had been bricked up a few years earlier at the far end where it was normally going to connect to the main sewer, and the men were going to have their hands full. No one had been down there in about two years, except for maybe Tasher's. Atasher was a sewer hunter. They weren't hunting food down there, I mean they searched for copper valuables embedded in pooh, I mean, geez, don't be gross. Also, they made about six shillings a day. That's about twenty bucks a day. And if you're thinking, wow, what a terrible wage for a terrible job, well six shillings a day put them solidly among the top earners in London's working glass so bo. Anyway, ge Pertinett would climb down into the sewer under Warwick Way and that was it. They never resurfaced. By that evening, the police arrived and they were able to confirm that the men had died or forgotten their names, but one way or the other they were not answering. After no small bit of finger pointing and slap fighting, one of the laborers was voluntold to go down into the tunnel and look. I forgot to mention earlier. These sewers were only five foot tall. They were spherical, and they were bricklined, but they weren't any fun to trapes around in. And of course, if there's anything to make feces more pungent, it's proximity. Five seconds later he was back up top. He said he saw the three men and they'd collapsed in the water. And then he just noped out of there, rather than just flushing them out and making them the Atlantics problem. A rescue mission was discussed. Now again, science and medicine wasn't that much better understood than hygiene back then, and case in point, some of the would be rescuers there were convinced the men could be saved, regardless of the fact that they'd been lying face down in water for the better part of a day. So the rescuers decided to enter the sewer from a different point off Cambridge Street by Eccleston Square Park if you know the area. Two men, a laborer named Richard Sherman and a surgeon named Henry Wells, descended into the tunnel. After a minute, they got real quiet. Charles Dickens wrote that the smell of London could strike a man dead, but this was ridiculous. After a few more minutes, a policeman named John Walsh couldn't take it anymore. He puffed his chest, ripped off the shirt and dove headfirst into the sewer to investigate for himselfquickly pop back out carrying the limp body of the surgeon Wells. A quick examination determined that, in their words, every trace of life within him had been extinguished, his skin had turned blue, and every piece of metal on him turned black. When they turned to question Walsh, he was already gone back into the sewer, and he emerged moments later with Sherman's body. Rescuers had used smelling salts and ammonium on all the men, and amazingly, Sherman spluttered, I mean, it's not really a sign of a living brain necessarily, but it's a sign of life nonetheless. And rather than wait for the applause, Walsh returned to the sewer again, this time to get better intelligence on the first three men. I mean, clearly this man was indestructible. After a time, as the papers later reported, he was, in his turn, dragged out a corpse. By this time, the police had a working theory that the sewer was killing people. Police tape wasn't a thing yet, so they stood guards swinging their clubs to prevent anyone from going in. And so going in was a non starter. Workers were ordered to begin digging entry points through the street. On that scene in Raiders, where they opened the arc of Covenant and all the wind and the ghosts flew out and melted people's faces. So imagine that same scene, but make all the actors throwing up from the smell. G Pert and Atwood's bodies were recovered and brought to the nearby Clarendon Hotel, a presumedly to horrify the guests. For most people, the mere sight of a corpse is a trying experience. But this was different and their words quote the faces next and upper parts of their chest were completely bronzed and having a glaze on them, particularly the front of the face. The face of Policeman Walsh, who had spent less time in the sewer, did not have the same extraordinary appearance, being a little bluish. An officer from the Commissioner of Sewers knew exactly what had happened. He dipped a metal coin into the sewer, and in just eighteen seconds it turned black. Two This part of the sewer had been bricked up and blocked from joining the main sewer for a few years, like we said, and in that time he believed that hydrogen, sulfate, ammonia, lime and carbonic acid all vultron together to create an inescapably toxic trap. They said, it stopped really being the sewer a long time ago it had become an elongated cesspool. Oh wait more detail. You think your neighbors are full of shit, keep this. According to science, a single person yields about three hundred and twenty pounds of poo in a year. Next time you have to go to the bathroom, you can tell people that you have to unyield yourself. You're welcome back to Kenilworth. Three houses fed into this section of the sewer, and that section had been closed off like we said. And when they were done, they figured out that those three houses had produced eleven three hundred and eighty pounds that's five point seven tons of PLoP and whiz in that time. I don't know who lived there, but that is enough for thirty five regular people. That is about two and a half dodge caravans filled with sewage. Poor ventilation and poor drainage made this part of the tunnel unsurvivable for a single moment to any animal life. This in a town where, as we discussed already, horses would regularly die in the streets and be left to bloat in the sun and occasionally drench an unsuspecting pedestrian when its stomach burst. And in the tradition of hating every single aspect of urban Victorian existence. They introduced stink pipes to help vent sewer guises and prevent future disasters like this. Five people died and the rest of the city had to get aerosolized feces blown in their faces as a result. Most of the stories we cover kind of sound like horror stories disguised as a history lesson. But today's story, No Joke, felt more like a horror story than most, and it doesn't even end there. Watch this. In eighteen seventy eight, a new sewage system was finally complete and the people of London could rest easy. But a passenger steamboat on the Thames called the Princess Alice crashed into a coal carrying ship called the Biwall Castle, and the Princess Alice sank. It only took four minutes and six hundred people had been thrown into the Thames. And this happened just downstream of two sewage pumping stations, and one hour before that they had pumped about seventy five million gallons of raw, untreated sewage directly into the Thames. One one hundred and thirty people were pulled alive from the river and the many later died from having swallowed the black, poisonous water. So this brings me back to the analogy bad luck has a way of spawning more bad luck, like running out of a burnie building right into a wood chipper. This year has been for me like a final destination movie, with death replaced by depression and anxiety. This year kicked me down more ways than I can remember, and I know that this can lead to some pretty dark places. So I I want to address my mentally ill brethren. If you're not feeling it this time of year or any time of year, there's no shame in it. There's no shame in owning your sadness. Your feelings are not your fault. You didn't do anything wrong, you didn't ask for this, and you are stronger than you think. But if you or someone you care about isn't right now, please remember you can always call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at one eight hundred two seven three. Talk what you need to remember. Please remember, you just need to get up more times than you're knocked down. You have survived everything that has ever happened to you, and so have I, But not the people in our upcoming episodes. That's right, New Year, new episodes. If you like rockets and bridges and cannons and escalators and things that crash and people that scream, we have something for you. Before we just quickly wrap this up, I also want to shout out my listeners with hearing a parents. You have been heard, and I've been working on creating past episodes as YouTube videos with accurate captioning, starting all the way back from episode one, So there you go. Let me know if you'd like the doomsday sticker or a barf bag, and please take my most heartfelt happy Chris Mahana Kwanzaka and happy holidays to you all. Be safe, take care, hug something and we'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.