Literally drowning in sewage
You think this is a metaphor, right? It’s not.
Something which went out to paying subscribers back in July...
“Look at the Thames and know the time for metaphors is over,” read a headline on Marina Hyde’s Guardian column back in April, “our politics is drowning in effluent”.
Far be it from me to criticise Marina who, at risk of sounding a bit luvvie, is not satisfied with being a brilliant writer but compounds her crimes by also being both lovely and an absolute hoot. In fact, in the text of the column – which concerns the direct line between the failure of water privatisation and the fact that Oxford’s rowing crew was defeated this year not just by Cambridge but by E. coli – she notes that “as metaphors go, it is on the nose in all senses”. This is a classic case of, “But I didn’t write the headline, though”. Personally, I blame the subs.1
Nonetheless, the time for metaphors is clearly not over, because “Our politics is drowning in effluent” is a metaphor. Nobody in Britain in 2024 – so far as we know – was actually drowning in sewage. This has not always, in history, been true.
Consider the Erfurt Latrine disaster of 1184: another event which works unnervingly well as a metaphor, but which did literally involve several dozen of the most senior nobles in medieval Germany literally drowning in sewage. Erfurt today is the capital of the central German state of Thuringia, but for most of the middle ages it was held by the Electorate of Mainz, whose archbishop was one of the seven prince-electors who got to pick the Holy Roman Emperor. It was thus something of an issue for relations between city and emperor that Conrad, the Archbishop of Mainz, and Ludwig, Landgrave2 of Thuringia, hated each others’ guts.
The reasons why are a bit too Game of Thrones to get into here, by which I mean: both extremely complicated and utterly incomprehensible if you’ve not been following since episode one. (There’s a comic here, if you’re curious.) Suffice it to say that there was a feud, and Henry VI, the king who’d later be elected emperor just so long as he kept Conrad sweet, didn’t want there to be. And so, he called everyone involved to Erfurt Cathedral to talk it through.
One slight problem with this plan was, it turned out, that the wooden floors in the provostry at Erfurt Cathedral had not been constructed with the intention of holding quite that many German nobles in one sitting. The floor on which the meeting was due to take place collapsed. The force of the impact took out the next one down, too.
The other problem was that the height of bathroom technology in the Germany of 1184 was the latrine: instead of relieving yourself out of a window and letting the elements take care of things, you’d just use a hole, which led to a cesspit in the ground. That meant that, on the day of the meeting, the provostry at Erfurt Cathedral stood above a cesspit, which was full to the brim with liquid excrement. It was into this that around 60 nobles – counts, burgraves, burgmaisters, the lot – fell, and proceeded to drown.
The reason this unfortunate event – in which a ruling class died horribly, thanks to a situation they themselves created – works as a metaphor, and has become a meme, hardly needs spelling out. There’s even a second layer, in the fact that Ludwig, Conrad and Henry alike all survived (the latter was sat in a stone alcove, and had to be rescued from his perch, high above the pit of effluent and corpses, using ladders), so that all the people really responsible escaped the fate their actions had visited upon their juniors.
Anyway, all this is far enough away from us, both temporarily and figuratively, for it to feel safe for us to enjoy it. A more recent accident involving untreated sewage and dozens of deaths feels, in multiple senses, rather closer to home. It’s thus rather more difficult to find it funny.
The SS Princess Alice was a paddle steamer employed, by 1878, to carry revellers between Swan Pier, by the Tower of London, and the resorts of the North Kent coast. On the evening of Tuesday 3 September, it was on its way back from one such trip to Sheerness, and was full to capacity with passengers travelling home from the Rosherville Pleasure Gardens near Gravesend.
It’s not clear whose fault the accident was – a later inquest placed blame on both vessels. But sometime around 7.30pm, an hour after sunset, the Princess Alice rounded the corner in the river at Tripcock Point, in what is now Thamesmead. And on entering Gallions Reach, it found itself in the path of a bigger vessel, the SS Bywell Castle, on its way to Newcastle to pick up coal. The two collided. The smaller ship broke almost instantly into three parts, and sank.
All this happened so quickly that few of those below deck made it out – a diver who visited the wreck later reported that passengers were still jammed upright in the doorways, where they’d died trying to escape. Those who did make it out, though, faced another problem.
Barking Reach, then still some miles beyond the city limits, was the stretch of the river into which London’s waste was released twice a day from the northern and southern outfall sewers. The result was what a letter to the Times described as, “Two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda-water with baneful gases, so black that the water is stained for miles”. The last such release had happened only an hour before the crash.
So despite the efforts by the crew of the Bywell Castle and those on shore alike to rescue survivors, several died later from ingesting the poisoned water. Exactly how many fatalities the accident had will never be known – no more did the ship take a register than a commuter train does today – but it’s believed to have been between 600 and 700 people, nearly half the number who went down with the Titanic. Accounts tend to lead with the “drowned in sewage” part, as I have here, because it’s the most striking detail in the story – but the truth is that most of those who died in the accident likely would have done so anyway.
Nonetheless, alongside the changes to maritime safety rules intended to prevent a repeat, the law was changed to require the water companies to purify sewage before dumping it, or to ship untreated effluent far out into the North Sea. The latter practice didn’t stop until 1998. The former seems to be only half-heartedly followed here today.
(Incidentally, there’s a brilliant account of the accident in The Way to the Sea, my sometime New Statesman colleague Caroline Crampton’s lovely memoir about the Thames Estuary and its history. Or you could read this from the Royal Museums Greenwich.)
You really need three examples to justify an article like this one. But the only other I’ve been able to find in my admittedly cursory searches is the Kanalmorde or Kläranlagenmorde – sewer, or sewage plant, murders – which took place in and around Frankfurt in the 1970s and 1980s. These were a truly horrific set of unsolved killings in which boys and teenagers aged between 11 and 18, many but not all of them male prostitutes, were tied up, violently assaulted and then thrown into manholes. Those who’d survived being beaten went on to drown.
Even writing that paragraph has made me feel quite queasy, so I’m not going to subject you to any more details – they’re here, if you want them – but suffice it to say any lingering sense we had that the idea of someone drowning in sewage was in some way funny has long since deserted us. Perhaps we should be kinder about those who died at Erfurt
On a different note…
I’m still mentoring the award-winning writer and music producer Matt Taylor, as part of the “A Writing Chance” programme Substack runs in conjunction with New Writing North. Matt writes about his experiences of growing up in care, being abandoned by the state at the age of 18, and getting from there to both a career in the music industry and Oxford. Matt is, in a fairly literal sense, awesome. Check out his Substack, Underclass Hero:
Please do not punish me next time I write for the Guardian, subs.
A noble ranking between Duke and Count. Bit like a margrave.
What you wrote about, notably SS Pricess Alice and is end in the stream of sewer water, is nothing new to me: I write about transport accidents. But the sewerage bit exceeded anything I read about the accident, including a copy of the accident report. So the conclusion could be that up to the days of the collapse of various 1990’s privatisation no-one really took notice of that aspect. Britain in many ways still is an unusually dirty nation.