“Rain this morning got to it,” says the superintendent, pointing to the collapsed brick wall of a sewer which was built more than a century ago. The superintendent, Francis Dillon, has been a sewer worker in Bolton for 47 years. His five men, in hard hats and jump suits, labour in the mud, shouting to each other above the whirr of an electric pump which is diverting sewage around the collapse.
Down this street, lined on one side by redbrick terraces, Dillon walks me away from the noise. The other side of the street is a cotton mill turned tube warehouse. Another mill, next to a railway line 50 yards away, is now making seats for Fords. But the sewerage system, 100 miles of which were built between 1860 and 1880 when Bolton was a boom town, is still doing the job for which it was intended. At current prices it would cost £53 million to replace the Victorian sewers with ones that didn’t cave in after heavy rain. Bolton metropolitan borough has an annual budget of £2 million for sewerage projects.
“I’ve earned a good living from it,” says Dillon, sucking on his pipe. “It a challenge. Every job’s different. It’s not always regarded as a skilled job; but on the other hand it is—timbering and all that. Very skilled.” Walking back to the collapsed sewer, he says that all these different chemicals they’re using now for car-spraying and such like are getting into the sewers, giving off poisonous gases. He shakes his head.
Parked next to the tube warehouse is a yellow van containing the safety equipment. David Wilkins, who has been a sewer worker for eleven years, shows me how it all works. “This is a gas detector,” he says, pulling out what looks like a biggish transistor radio. It has flashing red lights and an alarm device which buzzes when it detects gas.
He points to a small oxygen tank. “That gives you 15 minutes. If it’s a long job we use these,” Wilkins says, tapping a five foot high tank. “That gives you about eight hours. And we’ve got another one so we can keep going all the time. . . And we’ve just got a radio too.”
Some of the sewers are six foot in diameter, some three foot and others only two foot. “You more or less crawl up them,” Wilkins says. He does maintenance as well as getting called out on emergencies like this one. Often he does repair work at night, starting at 11 pm and finishing at 5 am. Sometimes, during heavy flooding, he has to work a straight 24 hours. A married man, with four children, he is on £74 basic. “With the overtime you can just about scrape by.”
“Better than being on the dole, isn’t it?” adds his workmate, Steve Pollitt, who has just walked into the van. David Wilkins is in the Transport and General, Pollit in General and Municipal Workers, two of the five unions involved in the current water workers’ dispute. “Weeks you get no overtime in pay packet, you throw your cap in at wife before you walk in and that. Terrible,” says Pollitt, who has three children. He has been with the council for a while, but only on sewers for a year. He thinks it’s great, “It’s varied all the time. Different jobs and that.” Didn’t it bother him when he first went down?
“I was a bit doubtful at first, but you get used to it. A lot of blokes won’t go down there. I was on a course, and a lot of the blokes panicked, like. Nothing to be ashamed of. If it doesn’t suit, it doesn’t suit.”
“It’s a bit warmer down there,” says David Wilkins. “Only thing is rats, when they won’t bugger off. You just shout, and usually they run off. But you get the odd one that’ll stand its ground and look at you.” They don’t even attack, do they? “No, they don’t bother you.”
Sewers aren’t dangerous, these men say, if you follow the drill and you’ve got the right gear. The only thing that sometimes worries them is Weil’s Disease (a form of jaundice, transmitted by rats), which David Wilkins reckons you can catch if you get cut while you’re down a sewer, or if something gets in the mouth. “Had one of our lads in for checks not long ago, put him in quarantine and that. He was okay, like. It’s very rare.”
Danger, anyway, always adds a dash of glamour. Standing up there by the gear, Wilkins in his green PVC suit, Pollitt in an orange one, these two talk about their work with real pride: they’re bored by all the shit jokes made at their expense, upset about public lack of interest in sewerage. (Interest is, of course, awakened under threat of a strike, as now). “People don’t understand anything about it. There’s a manhole in the road, and water underneath, and that’s as far as it goes.” Everyone wants more recognition.
Alan Howarth, one of three assistant directors of engineering in the borough, drives me to a £700,000 sewerage system under construction in Westhoughton on the outskirts of Bolton.
He parks the maroon Dolomite by one of the Portakabins on the construction HQ and introduces me to the site engineer, Harry Mitchell, who says that all the sewers in Westhoughton were built around 1875. “In them days, as you know, labour was very cheap. They had gangs of 20 and 30 navvies spading on to carts. They had good engineering. They knew what they was doing. But they wasn’t particular about detail. Course, these were the days of horses and carts, and a toilet at the end of the street.” These days the pipelines in new systems are set straight by laser beams.
I get changed into blue overalls, wellingtons and a white hard hat, so that Mitchell can take me to the new sewer they’re tunnelling. I follow him down a rocky ladder to the mud at the bottom of the heading. The small truck, on rails, which brings out the clay has just been emptied. Lit by a string of light bulbs, the tunnel is four feet high—too low to walk in, too high to crawl. Hump-backed, we slouch through the puddles till we get to the two Irish miners at the face.
Vince Dunne is taking a breather, smoking a cigarette. He and his workmate, Ray Falsey, are both caked in clay. There’s a strong smell of sweat. Dunne points at a tree trunk embedded in the face: that is what’s holding them up. These two are on £60 a day, and can make up to £400 a week with overtime. “Top hand, eh, Harry?” Dunne boasts. His boss nods, says he’s lucky to have him. Dunne has been tunnelling for 24 years.
He attacks the clay around the tree trunk with a clay-spade, which is like a pneumatic drill. The noise in this small tunnel is ear-splitting. Dunne screws up his face against the flying fragments of clay. Falsey, the surgeon’s assistant, then hands over the circular saw and, after two minutes sawing, Dunne picks up a hammer and deals huge blows to the trunk, which still won’t budge. I walk back down the tunnel with Harry Mitchell. When we get to the end, there is a triumphant shout. Vince Dunne has won his battle with the tree trunk.
Back at the council’s engineering department, Alan Howarth and his colleague, Gordon Sheldon, are talking about the major sewer accidents they’ve had in Bolton. In 1958 there was a massive sewer collapse in Fylde Street: they show me the pictures. It looks like an earthquake. The whole street had to be demolished. The next big collapse was in 1976.
Most dangerous of all, through, was a| caved-in sewer which created a huge hole ; under a busy road used by double-decker buses. People could have been killed.
I ask him what might happen if the strike went ahead. “Sewage spilling into the streets,” interrupts Alan Howarth. “That’s the emotive thing someone on the radio was talking about. Bubbling up out of the grids. . . Still, I suppose if a sewer got blocked, and no one went to unblock it. . .”
In 999 cases out of 1,000, says Sheldon, ; the sewage would end up in the water supply. “It’s not nice, no,” he says. “But sewage does get into the water supply anyway. There’s less risk to health than sewage on the street.”
“I thought, ‘What an emotive thing’: causes alarm and despondency,” Howarth continues, gloomily. “Although if someone wrecked it, if you got sabotage. . .” His eyes light up. “We could soon get sewage running in the street, couldn’t we?”
“Yes,” says Sheldon. “We could all right.”
