[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Hanover Square, The Vestry of the Parish of Saint George].

  • Hanover Square (London, England). Parish. Vestry.
Date:
[1865?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: [Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Hanover Square, The Vestry of the Parish of Saint George]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    18 is made]n—and in three several places says [naming the person against whom the complaint is made']. Whereupon the magistrate's clerk sent a polite message by a constable to the Medical Officer of Health, asking him to name the owner, or if not this, at any rate to go and point out the owner to the constable who was to serve the order, or to authorize some one else to point him out; for, as he reasonably enough said, it would not do for the officers of the court to incur risk of actions and damages for serving on the wrong person an order that might end in seizure of goods or imprisonment. He said that it might be very well to use the word owner only, if the proceedings were to end in levying a distress on the premises concerned; but when it came to fines, or to seizing the goods of a person who lived a long way off, and still more to imprisonment, it was very necessary to have the exact person specified and no other. It needs scarcely be said, that the Medical Officer of Health also declined to run this risk, and so the proceedings dropped, with Mr. Capron's sanction, who said they had come to a dead lock; for, as it happened, nobody knew who was the real owner. The supposed owner was insolvent, and the property seemed to be in the hands of persons for whom three legal firms were concerned, each of whom had some fruitless correspondence with us about this vexatious case. But now, the insolvency of the owner brought us a remedy. The woman who was supposed to be owner used to collect rents from the poor people who still clung to this dirty house, but she paid nobody. So that at last the water was cut off on Oct. 19th. Then we took out a new summons for declaring the place unfit for human habitation; but before it was served, some one had taken possession of the property, and turned all the tenants out; since which it has been repaired, and seems to be in good hands.