Healthcare in Bermondsey: reaching for the ‘New Jerusalem’

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1920s, 1930s, Bermondsey

1937 Sculpture by Allan Howes on Grange Road Health Centre

Before the advent of a national health service in 1948, progressive local councils took their responsibilities towards the health of their people seriously. Nowhere was this more so than in the crowded inner-London borough of Bermondsey, not least because the leading figure of the local Labour movement was a local GP, the redoubtable Dr Alfred Salter.

We’ve seen this already in Bermondsey’s health propaganda and in its beautification schemes.  Housing was, of course, another vital aspect of what can be truly called – in modern jargon – an holistic programme.  The borough’s commitment to a ‘cottage home for every family’, exemplified in the Wilson Grove Estate, was intended to promote healthy living in every sense.

Today’s post looks at the more direct expression of the council’s healthcare agenda and, in particular, at what remains one of its most striking and heart-warming elements – its campaign against the local scourge of tuberculosis.

Such work depended not only on an idealistic and reforming council – Labour took control of Bermondsey in 1922 and secured its majority in succeeding elections – but on dedicated healthcare professionals. When Dr King Brown was appointed Medical Officer of Health in 1901, he joined a team comprising a part-time medical officer, a chief sanitary inspector, eight district inspectors, and three clerks.

Bermondsey’s Health Department staff, 1930s

When he retired twenty-six years later, his department was made up of five full-time medical officers, a full-time dental surgeon and part-time assistant, an inspectorate of fourteen, a staff of eight health visitors, nurses and other assistants for dispensary and dental work, plus clerks.(1)

Such elaborate healthcare needed premises.  Following the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act the Council opened its first mother and child clinic in 1920.  Four others followed in rapid order.

Infant welfare in Bermondsey, 1930s

Public baths and washhouses (for laundry) had been a feature of local council provision since the mid-nineteenth century but even in 1925 it was determined that only 150 houses in Bermondsey had fitted bathrooms.  Typically the borough determined to provide the best public baths of their kind.

Bermondsey’s Municipal Baths, Grange Road

The Grange Road baths opened in 1927, with 1st and 2nd class swimming baths, 126 private baths, four baths for babies and Turkish and Russian vapour baths. A contemporary newspaper thundered against this ‘£150,000 Palace of Baths’ and its ‘Marble Halls and Stained Glass Windows and Turkish Baths That Few Can Afford’. They would, it claimed, have satisfied ‘even the most luxury-loving Roman patrician’.

He probably wouldn’t have used one of the eight rotary washing machines, four hydro-extractors or forty drying horses provided to do his own washing, however. Salter pointed out that the legislation required first and second-class provision and said he would have been happy to provide the baths free of charge had it been possible.  Later, local pensioners and the unemployed were granted free use. (2)

Projected health centre, 1928

The Council’s healthcare showpiece would be the new health centre promoted by King Brown’s successor, Donald Connan. The original £96,000 plans were scuppered by the refusal of loan support by the Ministry of Health and London County Council but the finished building – built at a cost of £44,125 and supported by the new Labour-controlled LCC after 1934 – remains impressive.

Grange Road Health Centre, 1936

Designed by Borough Architect, Henry Tansley, the building opened in 1936 and contained infant welfare and ante-natal clinics, rooms for radiotherapy and diathermy (heat treatment using high-frequency electrical current), a foot clinic and a solarium and dispensary for sufferers of TB.

There was nothing glamorous about the treatment of ‘corns, callouses, bunions, in-growing and thickened toenails and warts’ but it was a vital service for a local workforce frequently on its feet all day and Bermondsey was the first council to provide it.  The first clinic opened in 1930.  Five years later, Bermondsey’s mayor, Cllr George Loveland, could look back sardonically on the amusement it caused, knowing that ‘whatever new social service Bermondsey started it was invariably successful and often copied elsewhere’. (3)

There was nothing funny about TB though. In the 1920s, 5500 local people had TB, there were around 400 new cases each year and 200 to 250 died annually from the disease.  Almost half of those afflicted shared a bed and the council’s first endeavour was to provide backyard shelters for sufferers to sleep in.

Leysin

The council was determined to take a more proactive stance, however, and from 1924 the Council annually reserved six places in Dr Auguste Rollier’s pioneering Sun Clinic at Leysin in the Swiss Alps.  Of Bermondsey’s first six patients, five went on to make a full recovery and many local people benefited from the treatment over the years.

Light treatment at the Grange Road Health Centre

But King Brown knew a larger-scale and more local service was needed also. In 1926, Bermondsey took over three houses and gardens in Grange Road as a Light Treatment Centre, equipped with eight large mercury vapour lamps, two carbon arc lams, one water-cooled Kromayer lamp and two radiant heat lamps.  This was the first municipal solarium in Britain.  In the first year, 562 cases were treated in almost 18,400 attendances – with immediate effect for new cases of TB fell from 413 in 1922 to 294 in 1927; deaths from 206 to 175.

Dr Connan would remark that:

Miserable ailing children, delicate, anaemic and flabby are being turned into plum, rosy-cheeked youngsters full of life and spirit.

And by 1935 there were 30,000 annual attendances and 30 lamps in use daily, supported by three dedicated nurses.

All this came at a cost.  In 1931, Bermondsey spent £19,730 on maternity and child welfare – over one third more than that spent in the neighbouring boroughs of Camberwell and Southwark – and £36,877 on baths and washhouses – two thirds more than Camberwell. By 1938 the municipal debt stood at around £3m, compared to figures of £600,000 and £500,000 for Camberwell and Southwark respectively.

Side view of Grange Road Health Centre, solarium wing

Still, the local newspaper could conclude: (4)

So great have been the improvements that many parts of the borough are unrecognisable as the slum areas of years ago, and so long as the ratepayers are prepared to pay for these improvements they can have no grievance against their Council.

In 1925, Alfred Salter had looked forward to turning Bermondsey into a:

New Jerusalem, whose citizens shall have reason to feel pride in their common possessions, in their civil patriotism, in their public spirit, in the joint sharing of burdens, and their collective effort to make happier the lot of every single dweller in their midst.

Times change.

Grange Road Health Centre on a grey day earlier this year

Sources

(1) British Medical Journal, ‘Social Progress in Bermondsey’, Vol. 2, No. 3529 (Aug. 25, 1928)

(2) Fenner Brockway, Bermondsey Story: the Life of Alfred Salter, 1949

(3) Foreword to DM Connan, A History of the Public Health Department in Bermondsey, 1935

(4) This quotation, the one that follows and the preceding figures are provided in Sue Goss, Local Labour and Local Government.  A study of changing interests, politics and policy in Southwark, 1919-1982, 1988

All the illustrations come with permission from Southwark’s excellent Local History Library. Do visit it to find out more about the history of this fascinating borough. Some images have been placed in the public domain by the Wellcome Trust.

The Ironmonger Row Baths, Finsbury: ‘healthy recreation and personal cleanliness…for the health and well-being of our people’

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1930s, Finsbury

They’ve done a pretty good job with the recent £16.5m refurbishment of the Ironmonger Row Baths in Islington (Finsbury as was). The new facilities are smart and state-of-the-art but the ‘municipal’ look and feel of the exterior (which was Grade II listed in 2006) have been respected.

Times change. Now the Baths are operated by a social enterprise. There’s a privately run-spa which makes the old Turkish baths look a bit Dickensian in hindsight. But if our Municipal Dreams are to be more than mere nostalgia, perhaps these are necessary – or, at least, unavoidable – changes and it seems to me that the Baths still pay some proper regard to the ideals and intentions of the Finsbury Borough Council which opened them in 1931.

The refurbished Baths and new entrance

By then, the case for public baths and washhouses was long-established. Liverpool corporation led the way with the first publicly-funded public baths in 1828 and went one step further with the opening of a combined baths and washhouse (laundry) in 1842.

In London, an Association for Promoting Cleanliness among the Poor was founded in 1844. And Parliament passed permissive legislation empowering local vestries and corporations to use local rates to finance building in 1846 and 1852.

The stated aims of the 1846 Public Baths and Washhouses Act capture well the glorious mix of condescension and elevation that characterise Victorian social reform:

To promote the health and cleanliness of the working classes, and as a necessary consequence, improve their social condition and raise their moral tone, thereby tendering them more accessible to and better fitted to receive religious and secular training.

If we baulk at the patronage and thinly-veiled social control on display here, we should remember that these pious middle-class reformers were, for all that, on the side of the angels.

Angels, however, were thin on the ground in Finsbury. The borough council began discussing the erection of public baths within months of its creation in 1900. In 1902 plans were prepared by AWS Cross, the leading architect of the day in the field, but shelved. Five further schemes were debated in the years immediately following…and nothing happened.

By 1918, every town of over 200,000 population had either a public baths or laundry, as did every borough in London but Finsbury – one of the city’s poorest. Discussions began again in 1923 but talk was cheap, building expensive. Again the matter was shelved.

The politics of the borough were shifting however. From its inception, the council had been firmly in the hands of Conservatives, Municipal Reformers and Ratepayers – varying labels for a single politics – but the Labour Party had been gaining ground since the war. In 1928, Labour took control – narrowly (by 29 seats to 27) – and resolved to act.

The case seemed unarguable given the statistics presented by the new Baths and Washhouses Committee. Of 20,005 families in the borough, 4917 shared a single room and 7253 lived in two rooms. Of 12,000 dwellings, just 500 – only 4 per cent – had private baths.

Land was purchased and AWS Cross was commissioned once again – though now in partnership with his son, KMB Cross – to do the design. In October 1929, the Council voted to implement the Crosses’ plans using direct labour, accepting the Borough Engineer’s tender of £53,200. Labour argued ‘in this way the Council would be finding work for Finsbury unemployed, it would mean a better job’ and it would save money.

Unfortunately, the last point was not – in the strictest accounting terms – accurate. A lower private tender of £48,426 had been received. The Ratepayers’ Association (the current incarnation of the local Conservative Party) complained to the Ministry of Health of this waste of tax-payers’ money and the Ministry refused the necessary loan unless the cheapest tender were accepted.  The Labour majority was forced to back down. It’s not clear whether their face-saving stipulation that the contractors give work – at this time of severe depression – to the local unemployed was acted upon.

After all the politics, the Baths were formally opened by the Mayor of Finsbury in June 1931. The official programme of the event eschews rhetoric but then the dry detail – 18 washing compartments, five washing machines, three hydro-extractors, 30 drying horses and ironing tables with electric irons in the laundry; 40 slipper baths for men, 40 for women – meant more in practical terms.

The laundry © Islington Local History Centre

Washing troughs © Islington Local History Centre

The baths were open seven days a week, the laundry for six, with long hours and low prices that did their best to address local needs. At the height of the Great Depression, the Council provided free access to the baths to the local unemployed and pensioners.

© Islington Local History Centre

A planned second phase of building – and what leant the Baths their especial character – was completed in 1938. Full-sized and children’s swimming pools were opened…

The large pool: 100ft by 35ft with underwater floodlighting © Islington Local History Centre

The children’s pool: 50ft by 21ft © Islington Local History Centre

…and the most unusual new feature: Turkish baths containing a ‘Russian Vapour Room, three Hot Rooms and Shampoo Room’, open to men and women on alternate days at just 2/6 (12.5p).

In the official programme of the opening ceremony, the Council proclaimed its vision (1):

Believing that facilities for healthy recreation and personal cleanliness are essential for the health and well-being of our people, the Council for some years past have rigorously pursued a policy of providing modern public baths in the Borough, easy of access and within the reach of the most slender purse.

And then, in a sense, the Baths embedded themselves into the community. The Turkish Baths became one of only three public facilities in London and attracted a loyal clientèle  Into the 1960s, admission stood at 6 shillings (30p); a pot of tea could be had for a shilling and poached egg on toast for 1/4 (6.5p). They were a place for gossip or deals but above all for a little pampered relaxation in lives full of care.

The Baths in 1938 © Islington Local History Centre

Times change. Numbers attending fell, prices rose (though remained a far cry from their private spa equivalents) and the clientèle evolved. By the 1990s, one observer noted the ‘City fat cats’ and ‘more affluent Islington residents’ who populated the Baths.

The Baths shortly before their refurbishment © Nigel Cox and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The swimming pools remained a great resource for local schools and clubs and enthusiasts. And people still needed to do their laundry – a fact recognised in the modernisation and extension of the laundry in 1960 and its retention even in the new set-up. And when people did their laundry, they chatted and made friends.

The Ironmonger Row Baths were a social space – a statement which, when so much of our lives is privatised, is not as banal as it sounds.  This aspect was recognised by Islington and the architects commissioned for the refurb. So, while the facilities are ‘more pleasant, more comfortable, a bit more pampering’ now, they are not ‘too posh’ and those spaces where people gather have been retained.(2)

Still, part of you can’t help feeling that something is lost. The Spa does, nevertheless, seem pretty posh and the three young women in the sauna discussing art installations in Shoreditch light years away from the grounded realities of the hard lives of the Baths’ original patrons.

But then you give yourself a little shake and ask what precisely are you being nostalgic for – childhood rickets and a lack of indoor sanitation?  Wouldn’t those Finsbury councillors be celebrating the progress made in the lives of so many (though not all)?

In the end, I think the Ironmonger Row Baths represent what local councils can do best – address local needs in a collective fashion in changing times.

Sources:

(1) Programme for the official opening ceremony, 22 October 1938.

(2) Adam Goodfellow of Tim Ronalds Architects quoted in Plunging into History

Especial thanks to the helpful people at the Islington Local History Centre for access to relevant archives.

The Rowan Arts’ Plunging into History – Stories from Ironmonger Row Baths and Beyond project is a wonderful source which provides detail and colour and much more information on the local area and people than this brief blog entry could.

Esther Oxford, ‘Bath Time: faded grandeur…‘, The Independent, 3 August 1994, captures the Baths well before their refurbishment.  Hugh Pearman, ‘Scrubbing up nice‘, Riba Journal, is informative on the rebuild.

The amazing Victorian Turkish Baths website will tell you about Ironmonger Row and more historic and surviving Turkish baths in the UK than you could ever imagine.

The Baths and Washhouses Historical Archive is a superb and comprehensive resource on the subject more generally.  Do visit it.