A drinking fountain with two bowls marked by an obelisk.
John Gurney (1819-1890) was MP for King's Lynn. In the following year John Bell designed another memorial drinking fountain combined with obelisk at Stratford in memory of John Gurney's uncle Samuel Gurney. The commission for a fountain with clean drinking water was part of a wider Victorian concern prompted by concerns over Cholera which was rife during the nineteenth century. In 1849, for example, it claimed 5,308 lives in Liverpool and 1,834 in Hull. In 1854 an outbreak in Soho ended after removal of the handle of the Broad Street pump by a committee instigated to action by the physician and self-trained scientist John Snow (1813-1858). Snow had established the link between cholera and contaminated drinking water in 1854, in addition, Henry Whitehead, an Anglican minister, helped Snow track down and verify the source of the disease, which turned out to be an infected well in London. Their conclusions were widely distributed and firmly established for the first time a definite link between germs and disease. Clean water and good sewage treatment, despite their major engineering and financial cost, slowly became a priority throughout the major developed cities in the world from this time onward.