Back to main contents

HOPES AND DREAMS

SANITARY INSPECTORS IN WARTIME

EMERGING HAZARDS

CHRONOLOGY

REMINISCENCES

Back to main contents

EHJ June 2002 Ten prime ministers and twelve general elections ago, the United Kingdom was a sombre place. Butter and meat were still rationed and Allied forces were fighting in Korea. The cold war was getting chillier - the newspapers were full of stories of atom and hydrogen bomb tests. Winters in big cities brought dense, sulphurous smogs killing thousands of people and the conurbations were scarred by gaping bomb sites.

At least the Festival of Britain, which was held on London's South Bank in 1951, had pointed to a brighter future, with its clean new buildings and its needle-like icon, the skylon. And the pageantry of the coronation, held in Westminster Abbey in June 1953 - the first to be televised - must also have lifted the mood of the nation.

Fifty years ago, local authorities were far more powerful and autonomous than they are today. Run by clerks and town clerks, they employed architects and ran substantial building programmes. With their baths, libraries, parks and cemeteries, they were well-regarded local parliaments, touching every aspect of people's lives-welfare, leisure and public health.

In 1952, sanitary inspectors, the forerunners of today's EHOs, worked under the general direction of medical officers of health. And in many other ways their role pointed back directly to the 1848 Public Health Act, which had established their predecessors, inspectors of nuisances.

In 1952, a typical public health department was concerned with controlling infectious diseases, inspecting food and hygiene in shops and restaurants, ensuring cleanliness in factories without powered equipment, checking drains, disinfecting bedding and household items, destroying pests, maintaining standards in abattoirs and dairies and many other duties, including dealing with unfitness in housing and, a significant problem, overcrowding.

Officers had legal powers to seize and condemn unfit food, to prevent nuisances and to remedy unhealthy housing. Their departments made detailed annual reports, providing a revealing snapshot of the health of their localities. These make fascinating reading today.

The creation of social services departments in 1970 gave councils a new focus - empowering the poor rather than replacing slums and killing bed bugs. The local government re-organisation of 1974 further diluted their public health function. The number of councils was hugely reduced and responsibilities were split, often confusingly, between counties and districts.

Since the 1970s, the functions of local government have been increasingly replaced by government agencies and quangos. Councils have less spending power and, despite New Labour's modernising crusade, fewer and fewer people seem interested in local elections. But, at the same time, environmental health has broadened into a sophisticated and multi-faceted profession, crossing all sectors and taking on wider, often global concerns - such as sustainability and the new public health agenda.

An editorial from The Sanitarian of June 1952 is strangely prescient. It is concerned with recruitment difficulties and the appropriateness of sanitary inspectors to deal with new environmental hazards and civil defence. But the practical, multi-skilled nature of the profession seems curiously unappreciated by the powers that be. How little things have changed. With a few alterations, much of the editorial could have been published in June 2002.

Will Hatchett, editor
Environmental Health News