No-one could accuse early presidents of the Sanitary Inspector’s Association, later the Chartered Institute of environmental health, of not being famous, or important. The first seven of them, forming an unbroken chain from 1883 to1938, were knights of the realm.
Reviled by some, admired by many, but never ignored, the first president, Sir Edwin Chadwick, (pictured) was one of the most celebrated public figures of the 19th century. In an age when cholera and other waterborne diseases were prevalent in towns and cities, Chadwick, a privately-tutored Manchester-born barrister and follower of the utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, was obsessed about terrible state of London’s refuse collection and sewers.
His self-financed report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain was so forceful and persuasive that it led to a royal commission and, in turn, the Public Health Act of 1848, arguably the first piece of legislation of its kind, directing the full powers and insitutions of an industrialised state to making its citzenry healthier, in the world. Chadwick was instrumental in the setting up of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, which was to direct, only ten years later, the creation of London’s first extensive sewer network – a measure that saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Chadwick was also a social reformer – but he deserves fewer plaudits in this area. He was an architect of the 1834 Poor Law, whose central idea was to make workhouse unpleasant and punitive institutions, to discourage poor people from entering them. So – sewers great, workhouses terrible. One out of two is not bad.
Chadwick whose surprisingly small walking stick was formerly displayed in a glass case in the CIEH council chamber, was dogmatic, obsessive and dictatorial. “We prefer to take our chance with cholera than be bullied into health,” said a famous diatribe against his sanitary reforms in 1854, in the London Times.
By the time this Victorian grandee became the first CIEH president, in 1883, he was 82 years old. Even now, Chadwick clung to the long past its sell-by-date ‘miasma’ theory of disease (a belief, inherited from ancient Greece, that illness was caused by an invisible gas rising from rotting matter). He had been right about sewers, that poor sanitation made people ill, for the wrong reason.
He also believed that crime was caused by insanity and that a large proportion of orphaned children were the offspring of “hereditary vagrants, mendicants and delinquents”. But London’s improved sewers, it is estimated, had raised average life expectancy in the capital by 20 years, so let’s not judge him too harshly.
Hygeia: a city of health
As president, he was a tough act to follow. Step up to the plate, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson. A fellow of the Royal College of Physicians Richardson was a pioneer of forensic medicine and anaesthesia. He brough into use no fewer than fourteen anaesthetics. A strict abstainer from alcohol and campaigner for healthier food, he had had multiple public heath interests. As CIEH president, he led many deputations to the Local Government Board to argue for security of tenure for sanitary inspectors.
Richardson was a prolific writer of papers, biographies, plays, poems and songs. His Hygeia, the pamphlet of a talk that he delivered in 1875, is a fascinating piece of science fiction. It describes a purpose-built ‘city of health’. A population of around 100,000 would live on approximately 4,000 acres of land, with houses restricted to four storeys, in wide streets. The houses would be made from coloured glazed bricks, to facilitate cleaning, and have no cellars or basements – basement dwellings and workshops were the bane of the nineteenth century sanitary inspector.
Hygeia would be
served by underground trains and furnished with swimming pools, Turkish baths,
playgrounds, gymnasia, libraries, lecture halls, municipal slaughterhouses and
water and gas supplies. Factories would be separated from residents. Ozone
would be passed through drinking water and diffused through the houses to
disinfect them. Richardson was not a miasmist, he believed in the new germ
theory – bacteria were known about but not yet viruses.
He predicted
that, in his healthy city, dysentery, typhus, typhoid and cholera would be
almost unknown, scarlet fever, whooping cough and tuberculosis reduced and
smallpox ‘kept under control’. There are parallels for Hygeia in industrial
villages, like Bournville and Port Sunlight, and Letchworth Garden City but it
preceded all of them. The idea is still ahead of its time.
Written long before town planning had been thought of, it is a remarkable feat of imagination. In the days before the nano specialisms of today, scientists could be polymaths. They could present their latest idea as a dream, a play or a classical allegory. It’s also significant that a famous scientist and physician of Ward’s stature would assume an honorary position of a body devoted to sanitary science – medicine (treating people after they are sick rather than preventing sickness) had not assumed the virtual monopoly of health that it has today.
Publishers as presidents
For the third name on the honours board of ex officio appointments that once hung in the hallowed CIEH council chamber, let us move to Sir John Hutton. Hutton was a publisher of newspapers and journals, including Sporting Life and the ABC Railway Guide. A London county councillor, serving for the Progressive party, and a campaigner for parks, known for dedicating Hackney Marshes as an open space, when he was chairman of the London County Council, a position that he held from 1892 to 1895.
Interestingly, the fourth CIEH president also came from the publishing world and was even wealthier. Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid was descended from a long line of Highland crofters. Self-educated, he studied to become a non-Conformist minister but transferred his primary interest from religion to business, through journalism.
Gilzean Reid, the first president of the Institute of Journalists, became editor of the Edinburgh Weekly News, and in the early 1860s, founded the Middlesbrough Daily Gazette, a highly successful halfpenny evening newspaper. This made him his fortune. In 1885, he was elected as MP for the Aston Manor constituency in Birmingham, as a Liberal.
Gilzean Reid was the local MP for HH Spears, who was then, aged 19, working his way up the environmental health career ladder. It seems highly probable that Spears suggested Gilzean Read as a likely president of the association, following Sir John Hutton, in 1899.
Enter Mark Twain
Life has some strange twists and turns. From 1897, Gilzean Reid, took up residence in the splendid Dollis Hill House in Willesden, north London. Standing in extensive grounds this villa, now demolished, had asociations with Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, as well as Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill.
In the summer of 1900, the celebrated American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was Gilzean Read’s house guest. Twain wrote that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world”.
HH Spears, editor of The Sanitary Journal visited him there too. There is a reference to their meeting in the publication. Did they reminisce about the old days, in Aston – a place of densely packed slums and smoke-belching chimneys, where the sun rarely penetrated. Gilzean Reid was in his pomp, a British version of William Randolph Hearst. The celebrated publisher only served as CIEH president until 1901. He died in 1911, aged 75, following a motoring accident from which, Spears tells us, he never fully recovered.
First woman on
the board - hurrah! But is it too late?
He was succeeded as president by Sir James Crichton-Browne, who served from 1902 to 1921. Known as ‘‘The Last of the Great Victorians’, Crichton-Browne, who had walrus-like whiskers and was a world authority on lunacy, deserves a blog to himself, as does the first female president, the remarkable Janet Russell. She was elected in 2012, 129 years after Chadwick. The CIEH has now had three female presidents, bringing a century of male domination, at least in that role, thankfully to a close.
Splendid stuff, Will. I'm well up on Chadwick but was shamefully ignorant about his successors until now. Keep them coming.
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