xi POLITICAL LIFE 277 



Office of Works or in the possession of my old friend 

 Dr. Percy, who was at that time in charge of the 

 ventilation and general sanitation ; the fact being 

 that when Sir Charles Barry had finished the build- 

 ing there was some kind of quarrel between him 

 and the Office of Works, and the authorities were 

 never able to get from him a plan of the drains. 

 The consequence was that when we came to 

 examine into the drainage, we had to cut up the 

 thick bed of cement on which the Palace was built, 

 and had, in fact, to investigate the drainage of every 

 closet and slop-stone in the place. 



The condition of things was frightful : in many 

 cases there was no fall ; there were cess-pits in the 

 spaces under the House of Commons from which the 

 air for the Chamber was obtained. These pits were 

 filled with foul matter, and, in short> the state of things 

 inside the building was about as bad as it could be. 

 But outside the arrangements were equally defective. 

 The whole of the drainage of surface-water and of 

 sewage passed through a penstock in the Speaker's 

 garden into the metropolitan main sewer running down 

 the Embankment. This sewer was thus in direct 

 communication with the sewers of the House, and 

 when, as was often the case, this main sewer became 

 water-logged, the foul gases were bottled up past the 

 penstock, and were forced up into the sewers under 

 the Houses of Parliament. 



We at once took the bull by the horns, and made 

 a complete change in the arrangements, (i) by having 

 a plan of the whole of the drains within the building, 

 and (2) by adopting Shone's method of air-displace- 

 ment of the sewage. According to this plan, which 

 has been found to work admirably, the sewage and 

 the rain-water together flow into several large iron 



