HOW WATER MET MONEY 300 YEARS BEFORE GLOBAL WATER SUMMITS

By Dr. Emilio Gabrielli, International Water Consultant

Christopher Gasson has made it clear that Global Water Summits, like the one just recently concluded in Berlin, are where Water meets Money. However, this is not a modern phenomenon: Water first met Money nearly 300 years ago, in England. Let me tell you how.

Banknotes made with paper stopped having legal circulation in the UK at the end of September 2022. It seems a significant date for England in historical terms because, even if many countries had already abandoned paper banknotes for some years, the practice had been uninterrupted in England since the late 1600s. No matter how relevant this date may or may not be for the history of banknotes, it seems improbable that it could have anything to do with the history of water, but indeed it has.

When in 1989 the water utility serving London and much of its surrounding area, Thames Water (TW), was privatized together with the other water companies of the UK, on its very first day as a private company TW bought the PWT Group of companies (PWT), which at the time was probably the largest water technologist worldwide, even larger than French Degremont and the like. The PWT names derived from Portals Water Treatment, which was the original name when it belonged to the Portals, a Huguenot family who had escaped France.

In particular, mainly through PCI Membranes/ Stella Meta in the UK, Permutit-Boby in Australia and L*A Water Treatment in the US, PWT was a world leader in early specialised applications of desalination such as low-pressure RO applications for municipal use, industrial reuse and zero-discharge applications, military and emergency relief applications, juice and milk derivatives concentration.

UK colleagues that the BoE had first become directly interested in water treatment when, in the 1700s, it realised that the strength and durability of bank notes made with paper which was supplied by the Portals company, depended on the good quality and purity of the water used in the production process.

Obviously, the deal had been prepared in great secrecy during the period leading up to privatization, so that it could be swiftly implemented on the day that privatization occurred. The objective was for Thames Water, the largest UK utility, to get an immediate international footprint and one of a size that would allow it to compete for international contracts and acquisitions with the French giants such as Lyonnaise des Eaux and Compagnie General des Eaux.

At that time I was General Manager of PWT subsidiary Permutit-Boby in Sydney. I was hugely surprised to get to the office on the morning after the privatization of the UK utilities and discover that PWT as such no longer existed and we now had a different owner. The surprising thing is that at the time of its purchase by TW, PWT’s largest shareholder was the Bank of England (BoE), a fact that had puzzled me when I joined Permutit (later merged with William Boby of Melbourne and renamed Permutit-Boby), because I could not understand where the BoE’s interest in the water business had come from. I was then told by some UK colleagues that the BoE had first become directly interested in water treatment when, in the 1700s, it realised that the strength and durability of bank notes made with paper which was supplied by the Portals company, depended on the good quality and purity of the water used in the production process.

Portals was under strong pressure from the BoE to produce durable, strong paper for its banknotes, and so, after discovering that the resilience of the paper depended on the purity of the water used, Portals developed and introduced the basic water treatment processes still known today, such as water clarification by sedimentation and low velocity sand filtration. This was happening at Laverstoke Mill in Hampshire (which is also where PCI Membranes, more than two hundred years later, started manufacturing its tubular RO membranes) and the purification of water to produce the paper for its banknotes was so crucial and strategic to the BoE that it became a shareholder of Portals and eventually its major one.

This can be easily verified by an internet search: out of curiosity I entered“Laverstoke Mill” in Google and the first piece of information which appeared was this:

Laverstoke Mill is a large, multi-phase paper mill near Whitchurch, north Hampshire. It operated as a paper mill between 1719 and 1963, when Laverstoke was the principal mill of the Portal family, who from 1724 held the sole contract for the manufacture of Bank of Englandbanknotepaper…Thesignificanceof LaverstokeMillliesinthearchitecturalinterest of the buildings and its historical association with the Bank of England. It was one of the largest and foremost hand-made paper mills in Britain.

The treatment processes for purifying water for the paper industry were used at Laverstoke Mill for many years before anybody realised that they could also be useful in improving drinking water. One of the main events leading to the expansion of Portal’s purifying technology and its application to human water-consumption and wellbeing occurred in the following century, when the so-called Great Stink in Central London occurred during July and August 1858, because the hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent that was present on the banks of the river Thames.

When the necessity to purify water expanded in the XIX and XX centuries in England and elsewhere, Portals (hence indirectly the Bank of England) was the company with the strongest established know-how and expertise on the treatment of water. Portals started to expand and quickly developed its water business, becoming a world leader, known as the PWT Group of companies. Sadly for many of us, soon after the purchase TW started dismembering PWT and created the basic feed for much of US Filter feeding frenzy and the ephemeral existence of this company. In some cases it led to the loss of groups of uniquely highly specialised people, who would have played a key role in the expansion of desalination, for instance Los Angeles based LA W*T in municipal applications in the US.

It can be noted that the fact that the separate companies of the Group traded and promoted themselves with their individual names and specialization prevented PWT from being

About the Author

Emilio Gabbrielli has a degree in Chemical Engineering (1972) and a Post-Degree Certificate (1973) from the Bologna University, Italy.

He has 45 years’ experience in water at global level. His main areas of expertise are water desalination and reuse as well as water utilities. Between 2003 and 2008 he was the CEO of the Global Water Partnership (GWP), the IGO which promotes sustainable management of water resources.

clearly recognised as one of the most diversified and complete water technologist worldwide at the time. This was not the case for the main competitors of PWT, for instance French Degremont, which de facto already promoted its name as a one-stop specialised shop.

In conclusion, basic water treatment as we know it, was introduced, at least in the West, by Portals in England in the 1700s, originally not for the health and comfort of its people, but to ensure the strength of banknotes. Hence, in my view, September 30th 2022, when the paper banknotes issued by the BoE ceased to be legal tender, was not only a milestone in the history of paper money but also for the history of water treatment and how PWT, which consisted of so many important tradenames in water, “invented” the basic water treatment processes, which later became the standard treatment for potable water still widely used today.

He has served the IDA as a director for several terms and as President for the 2015-2017 term. He is a member of the IDA Honorary Council and VP of the IDA Foundation. He is an Honorary Global Ambassador of the Australian Water Association (AWA).

Emilio is currently operating as an independent consultant and is also a partner of Greening the Islands.