Women pioneers in environmental health

The first female recruits into environmental health were ladies from the genteel classes who ventured bravely into the slums and sweatshops of Victorian England. Some campaigned for votes for women. One, Charlotte Marsh, a celebrated suffragette, worked as a chauffeur for the prime minister, David Lloyd George.

In 1893, the vestry of Kensington – later to become the Royal Borough of Kensington – recruited two female sanitary inspectors. They were joining a workforce of public officials who had been employed, since the Public Health Act of 1848, to fight a daily battle against unsafe food, filthy, rat-infested streets, lethal backstreet workshops and slum housing.

It was a pragmatic appointment, necessitated by a particular set of conditions. The Factory and Workshops Act of 1891 had recently extended responsibility for inspecting workplaces from the national Factory Inspectorate, which only had 50 inspectors to cover the entire country, to local government. Many of those employed in factories and workshops, often in brutal conditions, were women.

Kensington’s enlightened medical officer of health, Thomas Orme Dudfield, had received complaints about poor working condition in local dressmakers’ establishments. He took the bold step of proposing females to fill paid positions in his vestry because, he confided, he did not have the resources to help a “numerous and somewhat helpless class” of young women. In addition, “some of the duties involved were of too special and delicate a nature to be properly discharged by male inspectors”.

Victorian values were at their height in the 1890s. No form of official discourse was available to discuss sexual or reproductive rights – apart from the ludicrous misnomer of the “fallen woman”. And yet prostitution was everywhere. A similar myopia applied to poverty. Many people believed that poverty was contributed to by genetically transmitted traits of mental weakness, such as ‘imbecility’ or ‘moral degeneracy’. They decried the illiberal breeding of the poor. Of course, it would help if the poor didn’t drink so much. Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics, based on the concept of encouraging reproduction only for ‘higher’ races and classes, was reaching its apogee.

Even otherwise enlightened individuals attributed poverty to a failure of character, rather than a failure of society. John Simon, Britain’s first chief medical officer, wrote, in his his book of 1897, English Sanitary Institutions, of the able-bodied who ‘flagrantly’ claimed Poor Law relief: “Their idleness is so wilful an offence against the community as to deserve treatment of a penal nature”.

Crossing the social divide

In public health, as in the law and medicine, the first women to breach the barriers of male professional entitlement, were socially well-connected, living in circumstances that meant that they did not have to marry to be financially secure. In the late Victorian period, Organisations like the Charity Organisation Society and the National Health Society developed as vehicles for such women, who wished to help the poor. They were often the daughters of doctors, soldiers and clergymen.

The rent collectors who worked for social campaigner, Octavia Hill, from the 1870s, keeping careful track of the domestic lives and habits of tenants, came from this section of society. Such women served a distinct moral purpose for the state. It was felt that they could inculcate sober and thrifty values into the feminine sphere of the Victorian household.

It must have been extraordinary for a female of their class to cross the social divide and enter what founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth described in a best-selling book in 1890 as ‘darkest England’ – a drink sodden sub-stratum, akin, in Booth’s eyes, to the most ‘uncivilised’ parts of the British Empire.

The women appointed to work under Dudfield, to inspect workshops in Kensington, both came from we would call privileged backgrounds. Their names were Lucy Deane and Rose Squire. Both were extraordinary individuals who overcame titanic obstacles of prejudice and social convention to serve long careers. They both rose to senior positions in public health and the civil service, blazing at trial for other women to follow.

Suffragist and peace campaigner

Born in 1865 in Madras, India, Lucy Deane was daughter to a colonel who was killed in 1881 in the First Boer War and the niece of a viscount. After the death of her mother, when she was 21, Deane set up house with her sister Hyacinth, in Kensington. She needed a job. Deane obtained a nursing diploma from the National Health Society, a Victorian philanthropic charity, and worked at the Chelsea Infirmary.

In 1894, after serving as a sanitary inspector in Kensington, she passed stringent civil service exams, gaining her position against stiff opposition, and became one of the first females to be employed by the Factory Inspectorate. With her colleague, May Tennant, she was responsible for inspecting sweats shops in Soho. In 1898, her work observations led her to being one of the first people to postulate that dust particles, particularly asbestos, caused lung disease.

In 1901, Deane served as secretary to a six-woman commission headed by Liberal supporter and suffragist, Dame Millicent Fawcett, to investigate reports of dreadful conditions in British-run camps in South Africa, during the Second Boer War. The commission's findings were damning. Deane insisted that highly critical sections of the report were included in the final version. By the time the war ended in 1902, a quarter of the inmates had died.

In 1904, she moved to Westerham in Kent. A keen supporter of votes for women, Deane organised a Westerham branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, attending marches and rallies in London.

She was not the only female professional in public health to campaign for votes for women. Charlotte Marsh, known as Charlie Marsh, from Newcastle, who had trained as a sanitary inspector, joined the radical Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1908. Unlike suffragist, Deane, who followed peaceful methods, Marsh, as a suffragette, believed that carrying out acts of violence was legitimate, to gain the right to vote. She was arrested following a demonstration in Parliament Square later that year and again in 1909, when she became one of the first suffragettes to go on hunger strike and to endure force feeding.

Marsh was a standard bearer at the funeral of Emily Davison, the sufragette who was fatally crushed beneath the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. She trained as a motor mechanic and worked as a chauffeur to the founder of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst. During the First World War, she served in the same role for prime minister,  David Lloyd George, who was sympathetic to the female suffrage cause.

The WSPU suspended its campaign during the First World War. Marsh became a member of the Women’s Land Army – a volunteer force recruited to take over agricultural work from men. Lucy Deane, too, took this route. During the war, she served on the executive committee of the Women's Land Army and on an arbitration tribunal for the wages of women munition workers.

in 1915, Deane was invited to attend the Women's Peace Congress in The Hague, but the government prevented most British delegates from attending by suspending ferry services between England and Holland. Deane was one the first women magistrates, in Kent. As founder of the Westerham branch of the Women's Institute, she produced and acted in Shakespeare plays. She also helped to set up a home in Chelsea for unmarried mothers and their babies.

Fearless investigator

Rose Squire, her co-appointee in Kensington in 1893, was the daughter of a well-known Harley Street doctor, William Squire. She was educated by a governess and presented at court to Queen Victoria. One of her father's patients was Lord Cardigan, from whom she heard stories about the Charge of the Light Brigade. Like Deane, Squire moved on from her Kensington foundations to achieve great things. In 1904, she was appointed, because of her tact, persistence and investigative skills, to research "the relation of industrial and sanitary conditions to pauperism", for the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws.

She and her colleague, Arthur Steel-Maitland, who was later to become a Conservative MP and a baron, were supported by two secretaries. They travelled to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, St Helens, the five pottery towns and Cornwall. They visited factories, docks and mines and took evidence from thousands of paupers. Women were discouraged from entering male places of work and, in many cases, forbidden.

That did not stop her. In her vivid memoir, Thirty Years in the Public Services (which is worthy of a Netflix series) she describes plunging down a terrifying, 3,000-foot shaft in a coffin-shaped capsule and walking down tunnels with a candle stuck in a ball of clay attached to her hat: "When our party emerged once more into the light of day we were scarcely recognisable and, to me at least, until I had bathed and donned dry garments, life seemed not worth living!"

In 1904, there was no compensation for industrial diseases, no national health insurance, no old age pensions, widow's pensions or employment exchanges. They would all evolve over the next two decades. Services catering for tuberculosis (the most common cause of destitution) and for infant and maternal welfare were in their infancy. Drink, she admitted was often resorted to, inevitably, when other forms of hope and relief were absent.

Her work made her angry. She wrote "Honest, hard-working, steady men were reduced to destitution by the conditions under which they were employed. I cannot recall without hot indignation and shame the cold fact of excessive hours, miserably inadequate wages, exposure to wet, to heat, to dust, to poisonous materials in the heavy iron and steel trades, in chemical works, in white lead, paint and pottery works, to say nothing of the inhuman system (or lack of a system) of casual labour at the docks." In 1918 Squire was appointed director of the women's welfare department of the Ministry of Munitions. 

This was an important job that suited her sympathies and capabilities. During the war, with male bread winners absent, two million women, including teenagers and grandmothers, worked in factories and half a million worked on the land. An estimated million more worked as munitions workers as 'munitionettes', to produce shell and cartridge cases. The work was highly dangerous and unhealthy. Contact with dangerous chemicals frequenlty made women il lfrom 'toxic jaundice', turning their skin yellow – hence their other nickname: 'canaries'.

Some of the plants were huge. Munitions Filling Factory No7 in Hayes, for example, employed 10,000 women and 2,000 men in buildings spread over 14 acres. It had a military guard of 190 men and a factory fire brigade of 60 female firefighters. There was a constant risk of serious, potentially fatal accidents, not least from explosions. Women were searched at the beginning of their shifts for cigarettes and metal implements. But these measures weren't fool-proof.

There were huge explosions at munitions plants in Faversham, Chilwell and Silvertown during the war, killing many people. The explosion at the Brunner Mond & Co TNT works in Silvertown, on 19 January 1917, was the largest industrial accident in British history. It toook the lives of 73 people, and injured more than 400, destroying several streets, two oil tanks and a gas holder. The explosion broke half a million windows and was heard as far away as Cambridge

Squire retired in 1926, as the first woman to hold a senior administrative position in the Home Office.

Women make inroads

A few persistent and single-minded women followed in the wake of Deane and Squire. By the beginning of the twentieth century, organisations like the Women’s Local Government Society, the Women’s Industrial Society, the National Union of Women Workers and the Fabian Society were pressing for female admission into workplaces dominated by men, often opposed by trade unions. By this time, there were a handful of female sanitary inspectors in London, working in Kensington, St. Pancras, Islington, Hackney, Suthwark and Battersea. There were also female inspectors in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and St Helens.

But many male sanitary inspectors did not welcome this incursion into their worplaces. They opposed female membership of their professional body, the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association, which was an all-male organisation, until 1901. They frequently argued that some parts of their job, such as lifting manhole covers to peer intro drains, or going into abattoirs, were too physically demanding or gruesome for women. At a meeting of the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association at the Carpenters’ Hall in London in 1989 Miss Tattershall and Miss Coppock of the Manchester Corporation were refused membership. The meeting was outraged when candidate ‘A. Elliott’ was found to be named ‘Annie’. Her name was duly struck off the list.

Women were obliged to take matters into their own hands. In 1896, a short-lived Women's Sanitary Inspectors' Association come into being, with seven members, based in London. By 1908, it had 100 members.

Legislative changes, such as mandatory health visiting following the Notification of Birth Act of 1907 and school medical inspections under the Children's Act of 1908, were changing the nature of the sanitary inspector’s role. Female inspectors had become relatively numerous by 1913 – there were 23 in Liverpool and 17 in Sheffield. In all authorities, their duties were focused on mothers, infectious disease and workplaces employing women, including laundries. This was an era, long before vaccines, in which epidemics of measles, German measles, mumps and whooping cough frequently took the lives babies and children. Tuberculosis, which took more lives than any other infectious disease, occupied its own category as a killer, for vigilance and inspection.

Rate collectors and lamp lighters

The war was temporarily to disrupt the Edwardian social order. After conscription began, in March 1916, women were increasingly visible as bus conductresses, porters and postal workers. Soon, the press began to report amazed sightings of women refuse collectors, road sweepers, rate collectors and lamp lighters. Their presence, often in clothing that was distinctly masculine, must have been a boon to those suffragettes who believed in equality in employment.

By 1915, a tenth of the Sanitary Inspectors’ Associations predominantly male 1,600 members had joined up. Fearing that “women would take men’s jobs”, the Sanitary Journal warned, condescendingly, that a “frantic rush of well-meaning wealthy ladies”, without proper training, could “wreak havoc” on public health. When women did take up what had been men’s positions, it was often on inferior terms and conditions. In many cases, they were appointed to dual posts, as sanitary inspectors and health visitors. 

An article written in The Sanitary Journal in November 1913 by a Miss Gorniot (her first name is not recorded), adopts the term, the ‘sanitary lady’. She is not a house fumigator or a drain cleaner, like the men in her department. Her work is to exert psychological influence upon the poor in the moral sphere, upholding the values of the respectable home. Her language would have been recognised by Octavia Hill, in the 1870s. A key  function of Hill’s exclusively female rent collectors on their weekly visits was to make sure that houses were neat and tidy, boots polished and children well-presented.

Miss Gorniot writes in the journal of the ‘sanitary lady’: “Her work is to help and elevate the poorer classes out of squalor and misery, teaching them to be better citizens and inspiring them with a sense of duty-towards their children, in this way endeavouring to keep down infant mortality ... Her work is difficult and ever uphill and she will have to bring to it ready sympathy and keen enthusiasm coupled with firmness and perseverance.”

Emphasising the gulf between the Edwardian social classes, she goes on: “There is a vein of warm heartedness underlying the oftimes hardened exterior of the people who live in the slums and the ‘sanitary lady’ must strike this vein before she can hope for success. Once she has found her way to the heart of the poor, her work become daily less and less arduous.”

The return of soldiers to civilian life, in 1918, led to the employment status quo being largely re-established. Women moved back, en masse, into the 'female' occupations of nursing, school nursing, health visiting and midwifery, which were less well-paid than equivalent male roles. They gained limited access to the Parliamentary vote in that year but would have to campaign for many more decades (a journey that is not finished) for equality in society and the workplace.

In 1915, reflecting its evolving membership, the WSIA had restyled itself as the Women's Sanitary Inspectors' and Health Visitors' Association. In the 1920s, health visitors gained national standards and training courses, and in 1997, their professional body was retitled the Community Practitioners and Health Visitors Association (CPHVA). To this day, the CPHVA, which is a trade union, part of Unite, retains mauve and green, which were chosen by the suffragette movement, as its colours.

Thanks to Jennifer R. Haynes, for her PhD, dissertation, Sanitary ladies and friendly visitors: women public health officers in London 1890-1930 and to Ava Greenwell’ for her chapter in the Stuff of Life, CIEH, 2012, The Women Inspectors.

This blog was written for public protection software company, RHE Global
 

No more ‘broken-down tradesmen’

Sir James Crichton-Browne was an early president of environmental health’s professional body. A polymath and pioneer neuroscientist, he is regarded as one of the last great Victorians.

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

Can Freemasonry find a role in the woke world?

Freemasonry has insinuated itself into our language – the ‘holy of holies’, the ‘third degree’, ‘on the level’. Its customs and practices have evolved over many centuries, smothering us in wool, like an enormous piece of knitting. How the hell can we get rid of it?
 
There was something about the coronation of King Charles III that was awfully familiar – the white robes, the gloves, the anointing with oil brought from the Holy Land, that business with the sword. Now, what was it? Oh yes, Freemasonry. 
 
It shouldn’t really be a surprise, Freemasonry, the Craft, has been entwined through the British establishment for centuries and it put down deep roots throughout the colonies. It was big, back in the day. It was one of the key cultural mechanisms of the British Empire.
 
Edward VII was Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England from 1874 to 1901, until he was crowned. George VI was an enthusiastic mason, as was his brother, who served as Edward VIII, before his abdication in 1937. The role of head of the United Grand Lodge is now occupied by the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Kent. His brother, Prince Michael of Kent, is also a senior mason. Prince Philip was a mason. King Charles never seems to have been one, breaking the recent link between serving monarchs and the masons that goes back to his great great grandfather. He’s not really into it.
 
The establishment will struggle to find a royal standard bearer for the craft, once the current Duke of Kent, who has the dismissive ‘you are a prole’ look of Martin Amis, pops his clogs. There just aren’t any suitably uptight royals in the next generation – Harry, no way Jose, William (nope, he’s sensitive, like his mum). Andrew? I don’t think so. He’s the public relations version of leprosy. They will have to find a more obscure, lower-tier royal to carry the banner and roll up the trouser leg. Hopefully one who isn’t a Nazi.
 
Does Freemasonry matter? Well, here are a couple of interesting facts. Fact one – Edward VIII was a fan of Adolf Hitler. They were photographed shaking hands, long after Hitler had begun rounding up and murdering Jews and Communists and euthanising disabled children. Fact two, so was the current Duke of Kent’s father, Prince George, who was the English grand master flash from 1939. He died when his RAF Short flying boat mysteriously crashed into a hillside in Scotland, on 25 August 1942, in broad daylight.
 
Was Prince George, an intelligent man who was rumoured to be Noel Coward’s lover and was a morphine and cocaine user, at the controls of the plane when it crashed?  Was he killed by MI5 on the orders of Winston Churchill (ironically, another Freemason) because it was feared that was about to do a deal with Hitler? We’ll probably never know, because the records have been destroyed, or sealed. The establishment is very good at covering its traces.
 
These two facts don’t mean that all Freemasons are extremely right wing – they’re not. But if you are you are right wing and a member of a uniformed service, like the police or the army, you are far more likely to be a mason, than if you are, say, a radical, left-wing layabout.
 
Jack Straw tries to clean up 
 
There are believed to be about six million Freemasons in the world. The world’s largest masonic organization, the United Grand Lodge of England, which is a male only institution, has a combined membership estimated at around a quarter of a million,
 
Periodically, concerns are expressed in Britain that masons’ vows of brotherhood to their fellow craft members mean that they cannot exercise public duties dispassionately. High-profile scandals in the 1970s and 1980s, concerning the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad and the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Branch, appeared to bear out these fears. More recently, there were accusations of a masonic cover-up in the South Yorkshire police’s handling of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster. 
 
How many members of UK police forces and how many judges and magistrates are masons? How many MPs and members of the House of Lords are funny handshake merchants? We don’t know. And we can’t know. A Freedom of Information request will, strangely, get you nowhere. Unofficial estimates suggests that 5% of judges may be masons.
 
In 1997, incoming home secretary, Jack Straw said that members of the police, judiciary and probation service should be required to disclose whether they are masons and that, if a voluntary register failed, he would bring in legislation. The United Grand Lodge of England defended membership secrecy, citing the case of an Italian judge who was a Freemason, whose appeal to the European Court of Human Rights had succeeded. In 2009, rules requiring declaration for judges were withdrawn. 
 
Since 2018, when there was a furore over masons in the Met allegedly blocking diverse police membership, the UGLE has been on a charm offensive, publicising its charitable efforts and its open, but not female, membership criteria. 
 
There are lodge websites all over the internet. You can easily find photos – a few black faces but mainly middle-aged white men wearing aprons. They look like the kind of people you would encounter at the bar of a golf club. With a couple of clicks, you can even take a virtual tour of the art deco Freemasons’ Hall which has a museum and looms spectacularly over London’s Great Queen Street, like a Babylonian ziggurat.
 
This is open-source, non-vanilla Freemasonry. The Met Police may be under attack for their racism, sexist and homophobia, but the masons are trying to find a niche in the culture wars, lying somewhere between me-too culture and wokery and a world of bizarre online conspiracy theories, in which alien lizard people abduct babies and hold meetings in secret underground bunkers, while flying saucers hover overhead.
 
The thing is, people love secret societies and funny handshakes. They just do. Freemasonry is the ultimate self-help group based on user-generated content. It has even insinuated itself in our language – the ‘holy of holies’, the ‘third degree’, ‘on the level’.
 
So don’t write of the masons just yet. The British establishment has the ability to place a rock band on the roof. it is malleable and adaptive. You know how you smiled when Charles, in his white robe, was being anointed with holy oil? That’s the smile that would land on your face at a village fete, at the dog with the waggliest tail competition, or when you discover a new Walkers crisp flavour. These customs and practices have rolled over us Brits over many centuries, like an enormous piece of knitting. You can’t easily unpick something like that. And maybe you shouldn’t.
 
Human beings are weird
 
Tbese are not just characteristics of Freemasonry. The mason’s apron is like the Catholic’s scapula. Revered texts, ceremonies, initiation rites and ranks of membership are common to all religions, clubs and sects. Humans are drawn to them because they confer order on a universe that may have no meaning or purpose. 
 
I'm a bit conflicted on this, because my grandad James L. Hatchett, who was the manager of Lloyd's bank in Droitwich, served as the mayor of that town and was a leading light in numerous local institutions, was a Freemason. He stood as an Independent. His campaign slogan in an election in 1956 was ‘Vote for Hatchett. He has no axe to grind’. There is something attractive about being an Independent, in a world of hectoring tub thumpers. In some ways, it's the spirit of middle England – which Droitwich, with its timbered buildings, its canal and its ugly ring road, physically represents. I never met him. He died just before I was born. When I think of my grandad, I remember the big leather chairs in his dining room and the neat garden, with its sweet willams and wallflowers. It's always summer. I refuse to believe that Jim Hatchett, mayor of Droitwich – who was a plump man with spectacles, somewhat bullied by his wife – was not a good person with only the best intentions. Of course, this could be entirely wrong.
 
Whether it's a cathedral or a scout hut, premises used for communal purposes embody, in their physical structures, narratives that correspond to a human journey. A Masonic lodge – they all have a black and white tiled floor, an altar and robing rooms – has the musty odours, tattered banners, stained glass and plangent organ music of a Christian Church – a strange English melancholy that makes you think of glorious deaths on foreign fields. Anyone who has been a mason would be entirely at home in the Houses of Parliament – which is not really surprising. Freemasonry is a church that was devised during the enlightenment, a period in which the cosmos could be interpreted as machine that had been set in motion by a divine maker – and measured. 
 
Freemasonry’s functional roles – warden, deacon, chaplain, almoner, worshipful master, are filled by individuals who are architects, clerks, soldiers, engineers, judges, clerics and policemen in their other lives (no wonder there are conflicts of interest). It is an instrumental religion, rather than one of pious hope. Their goal is to climb Jacob’s ladder to heaven, or, in the case of the American founding fathers, several of whom were Freemasons, to build a successful country, in which an individual can become prosperous and drive around in a pick-up truck.
 
That is why Freemasonry, for all its protestations that is open, inclusive and gender non-discriminatory (I made that up) never can be. Secret societies are secret. That’s why we like them. English masonic iconography references the killing of infidels by the Knights Templar and of the dragon by St George, who slayed, symbolically, the pagan gods of nature. But it also has echoes of ancient Coptic and gnostic religions.
 
Animals were ritually sacrificed in the Temple of Solomon, which Masons profess to the physical prototype of their lodges. Their blood was spilled on the brazen alter. Freemasonry is a pre-medieval survival, as peculiar as King Charles’ accent. It can never be entirely normalised. There are masonic lodges for football, rugby and motor racing fans and women. There are Catholic lodges and black lodges. Freemasonry is big in Jamaica. Probably, somewhere in the world, there is a lodge of socialist Freemasons. Freemasonry is a synonym for an esoteric, self-protective form of secrecy. And human beings embrace that. They are just weird.
 
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.
 

‘Back to basics’ on law and order

Policing has lost its way and is picking up the piece of a broken society. What’s the answer? We need a huge shift of resources to community-based services and a radical re-set of the role of the English and Welsh police services.

 

New Labour, from 1997, brought a new language and a new energy to social policy, not least in the hotly-contested area of law and order. It was as if a management consultant had been welded to a social worker. The party coined the phrase ‘social exclusion’ to replace the scary word ‘poverty’. ‘Joined-up’ and ‘community’ were popular adjectives. The public sector was blasted by business jargon and key performance indicators.

 

We owe the phrases, ‘community safety’ and ‘neighbourhood policing’ to this era. First term New Labour gave us the Crime and Disorder Act in 1998, community safety partnerships and anti-social behaviour orders, ASBOs – a fist in a velvet glove. The party was guilty, at times, of draconian responses to public order issues and of courting favourable Daily Mail headlines but it spoke to the social causes of crime and called upon a community response, beyond the boundaries and jurisdictions of the police – very different to now, when ‘victim blaming’ rules and the Daily Mail makes rather than merely influences policy.

 

The then novel concept of ‘joined up’ multi-agency working, bringing together police forces with council services, including environmental health, housing and social services can be seen, in retrospect, as bright point in decades of social policy decline. It was an approach that began to reduce long-standing inequalities.

 

Nixon of Dock Green

 

Jim Nixon, director of community safety for public protection software company, RHE Global, remembers those times well. In 1995, he was just starting out as a ‘beat bobby’ in Sandwell and Walsall, working in two tough areas of multiple deprivation, in the west midlands. Neighbourhood policing, he recalls, benefitted from ring-fenced funding. It was a key strand of well-resourced local authority regeneration projects.

 

Nixon says of his time in Smethwick, in Sandwell: “We were eight police officers, assigned to a very deprived beat, and dealing with everything. It could be low-level anti-social behaviour, or it could be burglaries, or armed robberies. We got to know everybody and everything that went on. We’d cover miles. We didn’t have a car. We would only use a car if we had arrest somebody.”

 

“Our role was to engage with the public and to get good quality intelligence. In terms of drug issues, we didn’t just tackle the dealers, we talked about rehabilitation with drug users. So it was a holistic service.”

 

Public sector budgets were slashed from 2010, with the austerity-led policies of the Coalition. More than a decade of continuing cuts have drastically reduced the footprint of local government to a faint shadow.

 

The ASB Crime and Policing Act of 2014 was a milestone. A tidying up exercise, it amalgamated 19 sets of ASB powers into only six, including public spaces protection orders, banning specific acts in designated areas, enforced by fixed penalties, issued by the police. It also attached civil injunctions to ASB measures, thereby reducing their evidential burden.

 

Many of the measures were opposed for impinging on civil liberties or even for criminalising lifestyles. But, to some extent, they were an inevitable response to a thinly-resourced policing system, in which community outreach could only be regarded as a luxury. They were also an attempt, suggests Nixon, to bring the English and Welsh police services under the firm grip of national control.

 

That attempt was doomed to failure, as it would be now. There are 43 police forces in England and Wales. They all have separate procurement and human resources arrangements and databases. They are all doing their own thing.

 

The latest iteration of national ASB policy, the Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plan, published in March, rings the changes on post-Coalition themes. It employs catch phrases, such as ‘hotspot policing’, ‘immediate justice’ and ‘zero tolerance’. It criminalises new behaviours, such as begging at cash points or cars at traffic lights and increase the upper limits of spot fines. The plan focuses on enforcement and punishment, rather than addressing the causes of ASB or even acknowledging that they should be tackled.

 

Police identity crisis

 

The youth services that were so successful in the late 1990s and early 2000s in keeping young people out of trouble are a distant memory and the concept of neighbourhood policing is virtually dead. Nixon reflects: “Police numbers are so low that even if you are on a neighbourhood team, you will invariably be used for response duties, on a daily basis.”

 

The police are normally the first on the scene when things go wrong – they are the experts in first response. Unfortunately, they are now sometimes the only ones on the scene. Nixon says: “You've often got police officers sat there for hours and hours in A and E departments, waiting for an entire shift for someone who is qualified to deal with mental health issues to arrive. That's why you're not seeing police officers on the streets.”

 

The police, Nixon says, are suffering from an ‘identity crisis’. Much-maligned, they don’t know what they are supposed to be, or to do, any more. In practice, they are picking up the casualties of the collapse of multiple public services. He argues: “Enforcement is only part of the solution. There needs to be a massive shift to early intervention, as far back as nursey school years, and a massively increased investment in preventive and reactive mental health services.”

 

Bring back the Peelers

 

The primary focus of community safety should not be enforcement, Nixon argues. That should be a last resort. It should be more about preventing problems from happening and nipping them in the bud. Tech should be used as a tool to facilitate this. We certainly have a lot of it – phones and tablets to share data, communicate with colleagues and access guidance on complex legislation, and, of course, lapel cameras, CCTV and drones. Unfortunately, local authorities, like police forces, are all going their own way – both institutions are only using a fraction of the potential of technology to ‘join up’ services.

 

Absolutely vital, at this point, many people believe, is a fundamental review of the role, accountability and governance of the police services. Why not a Royal Commission? With the police under increasing scrutiny, the issue is certainly large and important to merit one.

 

The Conservative politician Sir Robert Peel was there at the beginning – he established the London Metropolitan Police in 1829 – and he set some firm ground rules. ‘Peelism’ states that policing should “prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment; that the power of the police is dependent on public approval of their existence; that the police should exercise their powers with courtesy and good humour and that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action.” That, Nixon suggests, might not be a bad point to start from.

 

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.

 

On ‘Bread 2’ and the rise of alt-carbs

The launch, this month, of the Superloaf by Oxford-based company, Modern Baker, turned the thoughts of this blogger to the topic of the role of bread in the politics of health. It's pretty important – most of us eat it everyday – and, in some ways, it defines countries and their cultural attitudes to health and food – the French stick, sold and consumed each day, versus the British long shelf-life polywrapped sliced loaf.

 

Well a new player has just entered the crowded bread ‘space’ on these shores. The Superloaf, now available in branches of M&S and through Ocado has been billed by its creators, with a degree of marketing hyperbole, as ‘smart bread’, an ‘alt carb’, and ‘Bread 2’. So what is it?

 

First, it’s sliced bread in a poly wrapper, like we’re us used to. It’s made with standard white flour on high-speed machinery using the Chorley Wood bread process (invented in 1961 and used for 80% of British bread). It is co-manufactured by Hovis. However, the Modern Baker company uses what it describes at ‘targeted fermentation’. It omits refined sugars and adds fibres and bioactive plant compounds, to create a product that, the makers maintain, is better for blood sugar levels, more nutritious and has fewer carbohydrate than standard, mass-produced bread.

 

Its ingredients include psyllium husks, pumpkin seeds, brown flax seeds, apple cider vinegar and kelp – which would all be at home on the shelves of a health food shop. It does contain salt, which is bad for blood pressure, but far less than conventional bread.

 

Backed by funding of nearly £1m from Innovate UK, Modern Baker has grown to a 15-strong workforce and can make up to 20,000 loaves a week. The makers say that their product has the fluffy deliciousness of mass-produced bread – that claim has yet to be put to the test by this blogger.

 

Is this baking innovation a good thing? Hell, yes. As I may have mentioned before, ultra-processed food, especially in carbohydrate-rich forms, such as the nation’s favourite, sliced white bread, is a major contributor to the obesity-linked conditions which are clogging up the NHS. But the Superloaf is not cheap. Its recommended retail price for a 400g loaf, £2.30, compares unfavourably to Ocado’s M&S soft white medium sliced loaf, which costs 85p and weighs in at 800g.

 

In other words, it is four times more expensive – placing the gut microbiome-friendly Superloaf at the costly, niche end of the bread market, rather than in the school lunch box. In a more sensible and healthier world, the UK government would intervene in the bread market with taxation. A loaf of medium-sliced white bread would cost more than twenty cigarettes and the Superloaf would be less than a quid.

 

Don’t expect such a fiscal intervention to happen any time soon. No government in history has been elected on a manifesto promise of making bread more expensive.

 

Revolting bugs

 

Before trading standards services took on the job, environmental health practitioners and their predecessors used to tackle the mis-selling of food. It was a serious business – bread could lose most of its nutritional value by being adulterated with chalk dust or alum, milk was routinely watered down.

 

In some cases, adulterated food was highly toxic. In 1858, the nation was shocked when 21 people died in Bradford after eating the products of ‘Humbug Billy’ – sweets to which arsenic had been mistakenly added, instead of a popular sugar substitute, powdered gypsum, called ‘daff.

 

The case brought to light the need for specific, food-related legislation and a spur for this was provided by the work of chemist and pioneer microscopist, Arthur Hill Hassall, who carried out the UK’ first comprehensive food sampling programme, in the 1850s.

 

Hassall had previously appalled the public by discovering, through his lens, a new universe of weird-looking bacteria and other micro-organisms in water from the Thames. His equally alarming discoveries concerning food were published in The Lancet and led to the Food Adulteration Act of 1860.

 

The pioneering act of 1860 was strengthened in 1872, by the addition of sampling officers and public analysts, and, in 1875, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act introduced meaningful sanctions for those adding injurious substances to food or drugs.

 

The war against food adulteration and mis-selling is far from over – as the ‘horsegate’ scandal of 2013 made clear and this year’s discovery of rotten pork being sold for human consumption. A country disrupts relations with its main trading partner and abandons food controls imports to avoid bureaucracy – what could possibly go wrong?

 

What it says on the box

 

Adding extra ingredients to a staple of life to make it healthier, has a more recent history. The fluoridation of water to reduce tooth decay is a classic example. It was speculated in the nineteenth century that diets supplemented with fluoride would protect populations against tooth decay. Experiments in the US in the 1940s, confirmed the hypothesis and the fluoridation of water was born.

 

By 2008, more than 70 percent of the US population was served by fluoridated public water supplies. In England, as of 2023, only 10 percent of the population benefits from this scientifically-validated public health measure. Its opponents, who were the anti-vaxxers of their day, have been spreading a trail of disinformation since the 1960s.

 

Food fortification, or enrichment, has been less controversial, although it is opposed by some on civil liberties grounds. UK regulations of 1998 require that all flour, except wholemeal and some self-raising flours, is fortified with calcium, iron, thiamine (vitamin B1) and niacin (vitamin B3). It’s not uncommon to see niacin, riboflavin, thiamine, vitamin B6 and folate among the lists of ingredients of ultra-processed and extremely sugary cereals. In 2011, Kellogg’s made a commitment to add vitamin D to all of its children’s cereals.

 

Adding folic acid, which produces vitamin B9 in the human body, to bread has been adopted in more than 80 countries in the last two decades. It is proven to reduce birth defects, such as spina bifida, and anaemia. The US was the first country to mandate folic acid in bread, in 1998. Australia, New Zealand and Canada, followed suit. The UK government is currently consulting on a proposal to add 250 micrograms of folic acid per 100 grams of non-wholemeal flour.

 

You could say, as some food campaigners do, that much of this chemical fortification is merely adding nutrients back to ultra-processed foods from which they have been stripped, in a less bioavailable form. This blogger could not possibly comment.

 

The latest, and controversial to some, gene-editing technology known as CRISPR now enters the picture. CRISPR, is already being used to biofortify cereal crops such as rice, wheat, barley and maize, for example, adding carotenoids to rice, which convert to vitamin A and can prevent blindness. Tomatoes engineered to contain high amounts of gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA) are designed to reduce blood pressure.

 

The Superloaf, which is the product of five years’ research into the relationship between producing and baking dough and the gut biome, is a good example of ‘food as medicine’ – a trend which will certainly continue. EHPs and their colleagues, trading standards officers, will be tasked, as they have been since the nineteenth-century, to protect the public and to test marketing statements against reality.

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

Do you think that’s wise, Mr President?

The first presidents of environmental health’s professional body, all knighted, were an extraordinary group of people – nationally famous, single-minded and highly successful in their fields. One of them was ‘the last of the great Victorians’, another met Mark Twain.

 

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.

 

Battle for professonal recognition, from the town hall

 

Frustrations, membership rebellions and existential crises and are nothing new to environmental health’s professional body. They have occurred with surprising regularity over the past 140 years.

 

Environmental health practioners – people who work for councils and private companies who carry out food, health and safety and housing inspecctions – are practical, knowledgeable people. They know how important they are, even if the wider world doesn’t. Their work keeps people alive, but they don’t have the kudos, or the salaries, of the folks in white coats. They don't make a big song and dance about things. They just get on with it.

 

They wouldn’t expect the wider world to notice their fierce arguments and impassioned debates, governed by esoteric rules of procedure. They would probably be embarrassed if it did. This month’s blog is about an event that almost split the membership body for environmental heath apart. It occurred in 1918.

 

The disparity between the low status of inspectors and their vital role came to head, from the 1880s, as fast-emerging discoveries of germ theory and microscopy unlocked the secrets of disease. Inspectors had one foot in the drains and the other in the world of science. In their monthly journal, they read about topics including the latest theories on what caused TB in cows and human, the dangers of house dust, flies and flock-filled mattresses and the chilling and now discredited theories of eugenics.

 

Inspectors’ work was to inspect premises, serve notices and seize unfit food – a task that required, as today, knowledge of both practical matters and the law and powers of persuasion and, at times, discretion. Speaking in 1910, president of the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association, Sir James Crichton-Brown, summed up the inspector’s role eloquently (it’s a quote worth Blu Tacking to your wall: “They see, more than other men (yes, there were women too) except the police and the more devoted of the clergy, the dark and gruesome side of life of the clotted masses of squalor and misery that clog our civilization and yet they do not commit suicide or sink into melancholy or misanthropy, but push on with their work, undismayed and full of hope … the sanitary inspector who was asked what a sanitary inspector inspects replied ‘everything’.”

 

A bit special

 

So, yes, they were a bit special. Was not an eminent and knighted pioneer of neuroscience, the president of their professional body? No wonder inspectors felt somewhat resentful of the status of doctors, whose interests in the poor were often largely pecuniary and the medically-trained medical officers of health under whose direction they worked – professionals who knew the theory of disease but not necessarily the practice.

 

In an era in which outbreaks of typhus, typhoid and diphtheria were still common, their work provided the house-by-house and street-by-street data for their MoH’s annual reports (these documents, with their lists and statistics, provide fascinating insights into the diet, health and aetiology of Victorian and Edwardian Britain – the lives and deaths of ‘ordinary’ people).

 

Edwardian Inspectors earned £50 a year or less – little more than a skilled artisan – and they could be sacked on whim by councils, for example, if they had offended a wealthy local landlord or farmer, who might also be a magistrate.

 

The issue came to a head in the First World War. Inspectors who did not join the services or were called up worked in denuded departments, in an even more frenetic and thankless battle against disease. There had been partial national insurance since 1911 but doctors had to be paid for. For the urban and rural poor, clean food and good drains were by far the most important factors in life preservation.

 

The Sanitary Inspectors’ Association, which had begun in 1883, came up with a cunning plan. There was a good case, surely, for its members to form a quasi-national health service. But, for this to happen, they would need to be given reserved occupation status, exempting them from military service, and security of tenure and pension rights. In June 1914. The association sent a delegation to Westminster to press its argument.

 

Silver-tongued Lloyd George

 

The delegation was met by no less a person than chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, who was to become prime minister in 1915. Silver-tongued Lloyd George said that he had never heard “a more persuasive case”. But he did nothing. He had never intended to do anything. Lloyd George did not like councils, which he saw as ineffective and compromised by political influence, or their lead institution, the now antiquated-seeming Local Government Board, a body that also ran workhouses and the vestiges of the Poor Laws.

 

The Welsh wizard had bigger fish to fry. He was to abolish the LGB in 1915 and to overee the creation, in 1919, of a shiny new Ministry of Health, headed by the UK’s first health minister, Liberal MP Christopher Addison. This forward-looking institution was to provide the paradigm for post-war health in Lloyd George’s masterplan. He did not anticipate a prominent role for the sanitary inspector.

 

In the trenches of the Great War, inspectors built pit latrines, disinfestation stations and washing facilities for soldiers, working for commissioned officers who were often MoHs on civvy street. They were little more than labourers, still on the wrong side of the social divide. The war ground its way to a weary conclusion. It had unleashed powerful forces and expectations of change – catalysing a revolution in Russia and rent strikes on Clydeside that were feared by the British establishment to be a domestic version of Bolshevism.

 

In June 1918, the association sent a second group to Westminster to argue for professional recognition. This time the senior official who the delegation had expected to meet, head of the Local Government Board, Hayes Fisher, did not even bother to turn up, citing “important business elsewhere”.

 

Crushing humiliation

 

It was a crushing humiliation – not least for HH Spears, chief sanitary inspector for West Bromwich and editor of The Sanitary Journal. Over the course of the war, his frustration had grown that a vital segment of Britain’s health workforce, sanitary departments, were being overlooked. His bitterness grew after May 1917, when his son, Eric, was killed at the Second Battle of Arras – one of more than 700 servicemen to lose their lives on the same day.

 

A revolution had been quietly simmering at the association’s grass roots. Since 1915, in England’s industrial heartlands, the Soviet-sounding ‘joint committee of North Western Centre and the Manchester Sanitary Inspectors’ Branch of the Workers’ Union,’ frustrated at the association’s lack of success in achieving recognition, had been calling for radical change.

 

In July 1918, a sanitary inspector from South Wales, Eric Whone, took up the committee’s call. He argued, in a letter to the journal, that the association “is not competent nor capable of achieving for its members those essential benefits that they have a right to expect”. Noting the success and influence of the National and Local Government Officers Association (NALGO), founded in 1905, he called for the association to be dissolved and reconstituted as a trade union, affiliated to the Labour party.

 

Spears feared a civil war. He responded nervously that “overwork and continuous worry have put men’s nerves on edge” and called for more discussion on the issue. However, he announced that a referendum would be held of the entire membership. It would be worded simply – “are you in favour of the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association being re-organised as a trade union?”.

 

The referendum was duly held. The motion was lost. By then, people’s minds were on other things. The proposed health ministry seemed to betoken a more caring world. There was talk of a mass housing programme and of new maternity and childcare services. Still seeking greater official acknowledgement of its role, the association moved on. Spears retired from his West Bromwich post in 1934.

 

A well-liked figure, he remained as editor of The Sanitary Journal until 1943, having overseen it for 36 years and through two world wars. Spears had a hinterland – he was an amateur naturalist and a playwright. He died in 1950, aged 84. 

 

This blog appears on the RHE Global website

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own