"In three rooms in Hayes Court, each 10 × 8 × 8 feet; each with only one window opening into a narrow court; each occupied by eight persons = 80 cubic feet to each person." The Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras (1865) described some of the consequences of the conversion of a house, built originally for one family, into one inhabited by several families:-- "... At present these families occupy usually a single room only in a house of six or eight rooms adapted for only one family. The water supply is inadequate, and at some distance from the upper rooms, and there is but one closet, one dust bin, one coal cellar, and one wash house for the whole. No one is responsible for the cleanly condition of the closet, the water tank, the single staircase, the basement, the areas, and the yard, or for emptying the dust bin." One of the worst forms of overcrowding was when it resulted in what was described as "indecent occupation." For instance, as reported (1861) by the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel:-- "In a room in Windmill Court there slept the mother, two adult daughters, and two adult sons. "In another room in the same court, a man and his wife, the daughter aged 16, and three adult sons." In 68 instances the rooms were "indecently occupied," that is to say, adult brothers and sisters, or a father and daughter slept in the same room. And he wrote:-- "We may well inquire how such gross indecency and want of self-respect can exist in this country, which is usually considered to be the centre of civilisation, and where so much money is spent in imparting religious and moral instruction to the people--yet such is the state in which many of the inhabitants of this district live, as is ascertained on a house-to-house visitation." And in the following year he wrote:-- "On visiting the houses in low neighbourhoods it is by no means of unfrequent occurrence to find an adult brother and sister, a father and adult daughter, a mother and adult son, occupying the same bed. What good citizenship can be expected to be manifested by a class in whom the moral feeling is so low?" The Medical Officer of Health for St. James', in his report (1862), wrote:-- "This close association of several families in one house is productive of immense evil; it prevents proper parental control; it encourages an association of the sexes which leads directly to one of our greatest social evils; and is one of the most fruitful causes of the spread and fatality of zymotic diseases of childhood, and lays the foundation of the scrofula and consumption which every year carry off a fifth of all who die amongst us.... "It is almost impossible, amidst the filth and stench of dirty houses and imperfect drains, that the working man's family should be able to develop those moral and intellectual qualities which are, after all, more worth to the community than any saving of rates." The Medical Officer of Health for St. Martin-in-the-Fields, wrote (1865):--