On a misty, drizzly night in January 1910, a group of men in thick overcoats with mud on their boots gathered in the New Gaiety restaurant in the Strand. It was an important and eagerly anticipated event in their calendar – the annual dinner of the Sanitary Inspectors' Association.
They had come a long way to be here – from the valleys of South Wales, the industrial heartlands of northern England and the fenlands of East Anglia. It was the time of the Suffragettes and Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith was in the middle of a "titanic struggle", as The Sanitary Journal described it, to pass his People's Budget. The budget included a controversial "super tax" for those on the astonishing income of more than £3,000 a year. The House of Lords would give way to Asquith's budget in April. Its power to veto bills would be permanently curtailed the following year.
The inspectors were summoned into the opulent Adam Chamber by a mouth-watering announcement, “dinner is served”, into the presence of their celebrated president – the magnificently-whiskered Sir James Crichton-Browne.
They must have felt a sense of achievement. Their predecessors, inspectors of nuisances, had been appointed as result of the Public Health Act of 1848. The association was incorporated in 1883. A year later, Sir Edwin Chadwick, a leading light of Victorian sanitary reform, had consented to be their president.
The association's 27th annual dinner, in 1910, was its grandest so far. As well as Crichton-Browne, it attracted an earl, an archdeacon, an MP, two lord mayors, a judge and senior officials from the Local Government Board and the Home Office. The guests were entertained by Miss Lillie Selden on her mandolin and music from the Gondoliers by Gilbert and Sullivan.
The association now had 1,350 members in England and Wales, organised into centres and branches. It had instituted its own professional examinations. Its members, who worked for local authorities, were beginning to achieve security of tenure and pension rights, rather than annual appointment. Reflecting the growing role of women in public life, the male association was shadowed by a Women's Sanitary Inspectors' Association.
Unusual upbringing
The fifth president of environmental health’s all-male professional body, Crichton-Browne, was a fellow of the Royal Society and a world authority on neuroscience and psychiatric disorders. He was a polymath and, it’s fair to say, somewhat eccentric. An outspoken man, Crichton-Browne was a scathing opponent of the "fad" of vegetarianism and the claims of table rappers and other psychic investigators.
He regarded the coming of the motor car, which had brought swirling clouds of dust in its wake, as a health menace and argued for the wider adoption of balloon travel. He was no teetotaller, saying that: "No writer has done much without alcohol”.
His upbring was unusual. Born in 1840, in Edinburgh, Crichton-Browne spent his childhood in the Crichton Royal asylum in Dumfries, where his father was superintendent. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, completing his thesis on hallucinations. The lunatic asylum was the milieu in which became famous.
In 1866, he was appointed medical director of the West Riding Asylum, in Wakefield. Here, he established a neurological research laboratory (there were plenty of brains to dissect), co-founded the world's first journal devoted to neuroscience, Brain, and wrote reports and papers that are regarded as classics of medical psychology. In 1875, he became the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy.
If some of Crichton-Browne's views were odd, others were quite rational. A liberal man, he favoured the wider use of outdoor regimes for sufferers from tuberculosis, more humane treatment for those with sexually-transmitted diseases, better housing for the poor and restrictions on the use of corporal punishment.
In 1908, he became the first president of the Eugenics Education Society. But a belief in eugenics – the pseudoscience of ‘scientific breeding’ – was not unusual in Edwardian Britain. Fellow eugenicists included George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill and founder of the welfare state, Sir William Beveridge.
His presidency of the Sanitary Inspectors' Association, which ran from 1902 to 1921, is often overlooked in his list of honours and appointments, but he took the role extremely seriously. Gratified by the eminence of their figurehead, the sanitary inspectors took him to their hearts.
On good form
He was certainly on good form on that night, on the 5th January, 1910, in the New Gaiety. With great panache, Crichton-Browne proposed the loyal toast. Edward VII, a heavy smoker and devotee of gigantic meals, was to die, prematurely, only four months later. The king, said Crichton-Browne is, "the pivot round which our mighty Empire revolves; beloved by all his subjects, revered by those who are beyond the pale, combining world-wide sagacity with fine human sympathy".
And the sanitary inspectors? Well, no less important, he notes they are "part of the national machinery for the maintenance and improvement of the health of the people". "Fifty years ago," Crichton-Browne tells his audience, "the national death rate was close on 22 per thousand living ... and what was it for 1908? Why, only 14. 7. That represents a gigantic saving of human life and of human suffering and capacity."
He recalls that, when he left university, the term microbe had not yet been coined. He had not attended a single lecture on hygiene, or sanitation, or dietetics. However, things have moved on: "Today there is no department of medical science more enlightened, more exact and more practical than that of preventive medicine."
He says, to appreciative laughter: "There was a time when they [sanitary inspectors] were not up to the mark. They were recruited from the ranks of broken-down tradesmen and they knew about as much about sanitation as they did about Sanskrit." But that has changed. " I would say that there is no body of men in the country who are doing more useful work, no body of men more determined to raise the status of their calling and improve their qualifications and efficiency, no body of men more cheerful and undaunted."
Their inspection duties, he explains, are multifarious – not least, smoke control and preventing food adulteration and contamination. Milk he observes, is often tainted with tuberculosis and illegally watered down.
He observes: "The sanitary inspector who was asked what a sanitary inspector inspects replied 'everything'." His listeners must have cheered and rapped their cutlery on the table. Crichton-Browne was one the world’s leading authorities on a new field of learning and here he was at their dinner, affirming the importance of the science of public health and their role within it. It must have seemed that the new century would be theirs.
Will Hatchett has been a social policy journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.
This post is adapted from The Stuff of Life: Publlc health in Edwardian Britain, Hatchett, Spear, Stewart, Greenwell and Clapham, CIEH, 2012, ISBN 978-1-906989-56-9