WHEN the USS John F. Kennedy paid its much publicised visit to these shores recently, there was one unsung hero of its visit, a lone toiler ensuring that the stay was as congenial and odour free as possible. He was Sir Joseph Bazalgette or, rather, it was Sir Joseph Bazalgette, Dublin Corporation's sewage disposal vessel.
When I was a lad, I briefly worked for Dublin Corporation. Not on the Sir Joseph Bazalgette, I hasten to add, lest people start making odour jokes at my expense. No, I worked for the housing department and therefore had no occasion to take a trip anywhere near the Sir Joseph Bazalgette or its predecessor, the Seamrog A Do.
Despite its floral title, the Seamrog A Do was, probably unfairly, something of a running joke among desk jockeys like myself.
It was said if you did something dreadfully wrong in the course of your work - something which might make the city manager consider killing you before committing hara kiri himself with a corporation issue letter opener - then, rather than leave the city manager with blood on his hands, you would be sent off to the Seamrog A Do with a bucket and a mop, there to while away the rest of your days in the hold - quite literally, up to your neck in it.
Ignominious memorial
Most of us could think of few more ignominious memorials to our time on this earth than to have a sewage disposal vessel named after us. The more squeamish among us, those who keep drain companies in business by our refusal to unblock our own drains when the system encounters an unpleasant obstacle, might well come back to haunt anyone who had the temerity to stick his or her name on the side of the fish's least favourite visitor.
Sir Joseph Bazalgette, by contrast, would probably have been quite flattered by the sight of his name on such a ship. If he were still alive he might well be found standing on the deck, taking deep, lung stretching breaths and announcing to anyone who would listen that it was a good, healthy smell.
Bazalgette was an English engineer who constructed London's drainage system and the Thames Embankment. He was a notable pioneer of public health engineering at a time when public health was desperately in need of some engineering to safeguard it.
Bazalgette was also involved in the design of the 1906 Dublin scheme, this city's original great sewerage scheme.
Yet it is simply a coincidence that Dublin Corporation's sewage disposal vessel should be named after him. The vessel was originally owned by the Thames Water Authority but was bought from the TWA by the corporation, its name remaining unchanged. Since the late 1980s, the Bazalgette and its crew have done their utmost to ensure that our city remains a reasonably pleasant, low sewage place to live.
Busiest city in the world
London (and Dublin) probably had as much reason to be grateful to Bazalgette as modern day Dublin has to his seagoing namesake and its crew. In the 19th century, London was the busiest city in the world, the heart of an empire, and with that status came people, animals and dung, all in that order.
"The central streets were covered with a thick layer of filth," wrote historian Norman Gash, "the principal ingredients of which were horse manure, stone dust from the constant grinding of iron tyres on the paving stones and soot descending from the forest of London chimneys.
"The resultant compound resembled a black paste, which clung glutinously to everything it touched and emitted a characteristic odour reminiscent of a cattle market ... London produced in fact such a vast amount of excrement, both human and animal, that . . . the surrounding streets seemed to remain permanently foul." Dickens scholar Fred Schwartzbach was more succinct: "The mud must at times have been nothing less than liquid ordure."
This sounds like a very unpleasant place to be indeed. In fact, it sounds a bit like the hold of the Sir Joseph Bazalgette and therefore not the kind of place one would want to be for any length of time. London was simply awash with poo and Dublin was probably no better, which presumably meant that anyone heading out for an evening on the town would be well advised not to wear white shoes or, God forbid, open toed sandals.
Yet there were some who tried to fight the foul tide. As English academic John Sutherland pointed out in an interesting article on Dickens's Bleak House, what the crossing sweeper Jo is actually sweeping on the streets of London is dung, human and animal waste.
Crossing sweepers would labour like Hercules in the Augean stables, fighting a tide of nastiness in order to ensure that the well off wouldn't dirty their boots when they crossed the street.
Not much of a job
Being a crossing sweeper does not, therefore, sound like much of a job and was little more than a way of begging while doing something reasonably useful.
Crossing sweepers earned around a shilling a day for their trouble, lived in remarkable poverty and slept in close proximity to the substances they spent their working days redistributing.
When Bazalgette came along with his novel ideas about proper drainage and not defecating in the streets, he probably heralded the beginning of the end for the crossing sweepers, as well as doing away with the necessity of shouting Gardez l'eau before dumping the contents of one's chamber pot on the unsuspecting heads of passers by below.
Now Sir Joseph's maritime memorial is also destined to be made redundant by modern environmental demands. Under EU regulations, the dumping of sludge at sea has to cease by December 1998, which means the Sir Joseph Bazalgette is destined to go the way of the crossing sweeper. Instead, our sewage is likely to be treated so that it can be converted into a fertiliser product and disposed of on land. Sir Joseph, it is safe to say, would probably approve.