96 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF NOTTINGHAM AND DISTRICT 



them. Existing interests snarl, and enrich the legal profession, when 

 competitors try to tap supplies or establish polluting agencies above them 

 in the watershed. Industrialists looking for expansion are finding that 

 polluted watercourses prohibit development of many otherwise desirable 

 sites. 



It will be seen therefore that industrial urban expansion have set their 

 own limits by their short-sightedness, permitted by absence of national 

 policy. The experience of the Trent Fishery Board in its work since 1923 

 has clearly shown that there are few, if any, industries in which provision 

 for the reasonable purification of their waste waters would be impractic- 

 able or even a serious charge on the industry. Any urban community 

 should be able to provide for the adequate treatment of its waste waters 

 on an annual expenditure of half-a-crown per head of its population out 

 of the normal revenue of £8 per head from rates for such a community. 



The root cause of the deterioration of the watercourses of the country 

 has been that it has never been laid down in gubernatorial policy that 

 watercourses maintained in a condition to sustain fish life would be 

 thereby guaranteed as to general suitability for industrial, agricultural 

 and even domestic purposes. 



It will be seen at a glance from the diagram that what may be termed 

 the persistent major pollutions in the Trent catchment are the Foulea 

 Brook (Potteries); the River Tame Basin (Birmingham and district); the 

 River Erewash (Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire boundary); and the River 

 Churnet. The adverse effect of these badly polluted tributaries on the 

 fauna and flora of the main river is apparent. The River starts off 

 badly polluted in the Potteries and for about thirty miles not a fish and 

 scarcely a water plant may be found. Vast improvements in sewage 

 disposal have been made in this locality and a limited number of trade 

 wastes are now alone responsible for the initial contamination of the 

 river. About half way down this polluted stretch, the river receives, as 

 a result of prehistoric sewage conditions, a serious retardant to natural 

 recovery. Plant life begins to show itself at Haywood, and some mud 

 fauna other than the apparently ubiquitous chironomids begin to appear. 

 Fish life then finds itself able to subsist for a time in the main river until 

 the River Tame and its tributaries (Birmingham district) completely de- 

 populate the river again. 



The valuable trout fishings of the River Dove and its tributaries are 

 faced mostly by pollution from milk waste. The depopulated River 

 Churnet offers scope for the study of the slow rehabilitation of a once 

 badly sewage-polluted river with however, the retardant effect of effluents 

 from dye works. That the River Derwent below Derby continues to 

 support fish life has only been made possible by the generous acceptance 

 of its responsibilities by a large artificial silk factory. Here a valuable 

 study should be made of the individual effects of the effluents from (a) a 

 group of collieries, (b) municipal sewage works, (c) a large artificial silk 

 factory, and (d) a large power station. In the River Tame and the River 

 Soar, the issue as to responsibility for fish mortality is too often confused 

 by the old stand-by excuse of storm-water. River pollution from these 

 angles calls for detailed biological investigation in situ if further progress 

 is to be made. 



