The Unpleasantness in the Basement

Our four storey, semi-detached, stone house overlooking Greenhead Park was built in 1880 and has substantial cellars. One is set out as a wine cellar, with stone shelving and a lockable door, another contains four gas meters, a third which previously housed the kitchen range and bread ovens, now just has an old ceramic sink and a plumbed in washing machine belonging to Eva in flat four. This once pretentious, if not quite grand, Victorian residence was converted into flats long ago.

The largest cellar room has, in common with many Victorian basements in Huddersfield, an enormous stone slab table, with several hooks above for hanging the meat butchered on the table. More mundanely, a corner holds Yorkshire Water’s water meter and one entire wall is taken over with electricity meters, switches and fuse boxes for the whole house.

Sadly, as this isn’t a Gothic horror story, the unpleasantness in the basement had nothing to do with the abandoned ovens, or the meat hooks or even that marvellous stone table, begging to become a sacrificial altar. Neither was it related to the complex electrical arrangements, or the gas meters, or even the water supply. The unpleasantness would have happened even if the cellars had been completely empty; it was merely a consequence of them being very deep.

The ceiling height down there, where there still is a ceiling, is about eight foot six inches, give or take a few huge sections of sagging laths. This is a good height for a cellar and, as even Eva’s washing machine drains well, indicates that the drains must be even deeper. Where they are accessible, via two manholes in the garden, the depth certainly looks about ten or eleven feet. 

As the cellars still have so many original features, they obviously haven’t been tanked, or even damp-proofed. Damp patches on walls are regular features and parts of the floor are frequently damp after heavy rain. Loose water usually indicates that the gulley which drains water from the first floor bath is blocked with leaves; this is easily remedied from ground level.

However, when there was a rather stronger than usual smell in our kitchen on the floor above, something else was obviously going on. The pipes in the cellar weren’t leaking, there was no foul drain in there to account for the stench or the sewage, which was slowly creeping across the floor. We moved things away, all except for Eva’s washing machine which we propped up on battens. When I went down again to check progress and saw water actually squirting out through tiny holes in the external wall more than a foot above the floor, we called Yorkshire Water.

Yorkshire water don’t appear to get their hands dirty these days, they sent their people. The man from Drains Aid opened the manhole beside the back door and revealed that it was full to almost its entire twelve foot depth with grey, stinking, oily sewage. Oh Joy. This had been seeping through the walls of the manhole, through the ground and into our cellar. It would continue doing so unless the drain was cleared.

The pipe was rodded from the second manhole, which was theoretically downstream. This had no effect. The man from Drains Aid summoned a monstrous, noisy truck, of the type I have seen referred to as a sludge-gulper. This contraption squeezed its bulk up the narrow back lane, avoiding the stone walls by 2.5 millimetres. It proceeded to pumped out the delightful contents of the manhole, for which we were charged £110, because, the man from Drains Aid, he say, “No! The problem is your problem not Yorkshire Water’s, because it is a private sewer.” He also said there was a blockage downstream so the problem would recur.

Not knowing any nearby drainage experts, we phoned the local Environmental Health office for advice. The Environmental Health Office sent a junior, who took a small look at the problem and admitted she was out of her depth - the sewage was already rising again. She summoned her boss, who came out the following day. His assessment was that, as the next door house used the same run of drains and had done so well before a certain, crucial date which came before the formation of separate water authorities, when sewerage was still the responsibility of the council, the drain was a common sewer and therefore the responsibility of Yorkshire water.

Drains Aid returned, pumped out the foul water again, then rodded and flushed out the drain from both ends, removing a large amount of foul solid matter, resembling rags. This is formed by wipes, luxury toilet paper, cotton wool, nappies and sanitary products being flushed into Victorian sewers, which were never designed to cope with such absorbent modern materials.

The problem appeared to be solved. I wrote to the occupants of the other flats, begging them not to flush anything except toilet paper. We even had our £110 refunded by Drains Aid. So we cleaned the cellar floor with bleach, reinstated Eva’s washing machine and hoped for the best.

But more was to come…

(in the next episode…)