ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a document by Manchester’s most eminent chemist, helps people to understand why the very existence of the Mersey and Irwell Joint Board represented rapid reaction to a new administrative possibility. It had long been clear that most liquid and liquifiable wastes – whether organic or inorganic; domestic, commercial or industrial – sooner or later entered watersheds. The Mersey and Irwell Joint Board, which has commissioned Roscoe’s report, was set up under the 1889 restructuring of local administration, which led most conspicuously to the establishment of county councils, which were to be a Conservative means to counter the growing Liberal power in municipal boroughs. H. E. Roscoe had begun to speak out on sewerage questions in the late 1880s, but his work with the Mersey and Irwell Board brought him authority as a consultant in the field of waste water treatment during the next decade.
