Healthcare in Bermondsey: reaching for the ‘New Jerusalem’

Tags

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 Wilson Grove Estate, Bermondsey: ‘A cottage home for every family’

Tags

1920s, Bermondsey

I have a soft spot for Bermondsey and we’re back there again. This is a short article about a tiny estate but Bermondsey Labour Party had come to the conclusion that small was beautiful well before EF Schumacher.

The Council naturally sought health and well-being for its population but it aspired to beauty too – as this earlier post explains.  Living in one of the most densely-settled, slum-ridden and industrialised boroughs of London, Bermondsey’s Labour activists sought to raise the conditions of the people by all means possible.

Lockyer Street, 1936

Slum clearance and rebuilding were, of course, a major priority and it was the nexus of the two that best reveals Bermondsey Labour’s unique brand of political idealism.

In large part, this special quality to local Labour politics reflected the personality of its principal figures, Dr Alfred Salter and his wife Ada. They had joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1908, convinced that nothing other than outright socialism could fulfil their Christian idealism and transform the conditions of the people among whom they lived and worked.

Seven ILP candidates contested Bermondsey’s council elections in 1910 but just one – Ada Salter – was victorious. From this small beginning, Alfred announced his dream:

We’ll pull down three-quarters of Bermondsey and build a garden city in its place.

When Labour did win power – it secured a majority on the council in 1922 – that essential vision remained in place and its first test was to be the clearance of a notorious area of condemned housing in Salisbury Street.

Salisbury Street clearance, 1926 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

These four acres housed some 1300 people. Death rates from respiratory disease were three times the London average, the infant death rate twice the London average. That the housing should be cleared was not in doubt – it had been condemned thirty years earlier. The issue was what would replace it.

Bermondsey Labour’s 1922 election address had been explicit:

The Labour Party stands for a cottage home for every family, and though this may not be possible at the present moment, we shall work and fight for measures tending to that end.  No more Progressive barracks and Coalition skyscrapers!

The high-rise developments they decried were the tenement blocks that were being built to rehouse many working-class families in inner-city London. The plan to transform Bermondsey into a garden city was not to be compromised.

From the Southwark Local History Library and Archive. © Wellcome Trust, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

Instead of tenements, Labour proposed a small estate of 54 cottages – ‘trim structures of warm, red brick, some with bay windows, others with recessed doorways, sheltered by an arched doorway’. Each would have three bedrooms, a living room, scullery, larder, bathroom and lavatory with hot and cold water. The new estate would house around 400 people.

Wilson Grove, 1934 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Wilson Grove, 1934 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The estate’s designer was Ewart G Culpin – a leader of the Garden City movement and later a prominent Labour member of the London County Council (LCC).  He would go on to design the modernist Poplar New Town Hall which I’ve written about previously.

In the years immediately after the First World War, this policy of Bermondsey’s was in line with that of the London Labour movement more widely and Salter’s radicalism wasn’t quite so far-fetched. Herbert Morrison had expressed the party’s official policy to the LCC in May 1918 – their object was to: (1)

break up London as we know it, to encourage the exodus outwards…and to plan a wide outer ring on garden city principles…We would build no more tenements…we would build new towns where possible, or garden suburbs where that was the best we could do.

But practically by the early twenties, there was significant opposition to Bermondsey’s proposal for Salisbury Street. A small scheme catering for 400 left some 900 of the current residents displaced. The LCC – then under Conservative control in the guise of the Municipal Reform Party – protested that the plans would:

create not only hardship to…such persons who would have to be accommodated elsewhere, but an unnecessarily large burden on the community for the sake of the favoured few who would be housed in the cottages.

In fact, neighbouring borough councils were also anxious, fearing that any displaced residents of Bermondsey would simply add to their own problems of overcrowding.

The Ministry of Health – responsible for housebuilding subsidies – blocked the proposals and requested the council submit a tenement scheme which would rehouse more people in the borough.

Bermondsey, though, had ‘decided that it would not put up anything of which it would be ashamed’ – ‘it steadfastly refused to warehouse the people in barracks’.

And it won. The short-lived Labour government of 1924 and Minister of Health, John Wheatley, sanctioned the scheme. Work began the following year and the estate was officially opened in November 1928, built by direct labour at a cost of £550 per dwelling.

There was justifiable pride in the scheme, made sweeter by the victory won. The mayor spoke of a:

magnificent piece of social improvement…We have cleared forever one terrible blot on our civic conscience, and we intend to go on steadily with the good work we have started until there is no place in the borough upon which we can reproach ourselves

He boasted £2000 collected in rents and not a penny in arrears: ‘We find that the people have responded magnificently to the Council’s efforts on their behalf, and they are taking infinitely more pride in their homes than ever before’.

There you have the early Labour Party’s paradoxical mix of paternalism and self-improvement in a nutshell. Ironically, it’s middle-class academics and some self-styled revolutionaries who feel most affronted by it. I’d simply point out that this was a conversation occurring within the working class.

If you visit the area today, you’ll find the estate between the new (1999) Bermondsey tube station and the river. And you’ll notice that Bermondsey is not a garden city. The Wilson Grove estate – a new identity to mark the distinction with its past – was the high-water mark of local Labour garden city ideals.

Plans for a second, similar, estate in Vauban Street were blocked and the Ministry once more demanded tenements. Salter stated grandiloquently that Bermondsey would ‘refuse to commit this crime against humanity’. But over time a more pragmatic approach developed.

The garden city ideal remained potent and garden suburbs in the interwar period (such as Becontree and Wythenshawe) and New Towns in the postwar period testify to its lingering power. But the need to rehouse inner-city populations more quickly and on a larger scale and the desire of Labour politicians to provide such larger solutions did – you don’t need to be told – lead to the embrace of multi-storey housing.  

Unavoidable pragmatism and well-meaning ambition did, in the end, trump the principled resolution of Labour councillors such as those in Bermondsey to provide ‘cottage homes’ for all.  

Back in 1928, speaking at the opening ceremony of Wilson Grove, Alfred Salter, now constituency MP, praised the foresight of the council:

that foresight – looking to the future and not only the present – not hurriedly throwing up dwellings which in 50 years’ time will become slums and therefore a disgrace to civilisation…

Having experienced some of the worst mistakes of postwar high-rise, I think we can grant him some perspicacity and the council some credit.

Sources:

(1) This and the quotation which follows come from JA Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918-45 (1993)

Most other contemporary quotations come from contemporary election addresses and newspaper reports provided by the excellent Southwark Local History Library, also the original source of the older images used.

The Beautification of Bermondsey: ‘Fresh air and fun’

Tags

1920s, Bermondsey

Excuse me if I begin my blog this week with a lengthy quote. It’s just that it seems to me to convey something simple and powerful about the drive and vision of a group of people who dreamed of nothing less than transforming a slum into a garden city.

If elected it will be our main aim to make Bermondsey a fit place to live in. We shall do everything we can to promote health, to lower the death rate, and to increase the well-being and comfort of the 120,000 people who live here.We will not allow our district to continue to be a by-word among the Boroughs and to be vilified by the Daily Press as a horrible, evil-smelling, slum-ridden and unlovely place. We will do what is possible to cleanse, repair, rebuild and beautify it, and to make it a city of which all citizens can be proud.   Bermondsey is our home and your home.  We will strive to make it a worthy home for all of us.  This is our conception of the object and purpose of local government…

Those were the opening words of the Bermondsey Labour Party’s address to local electors in November 1922. The party won 38 seats and an overall majority on the council which it retained till the borough’s abolition in 1965.

If ever such ambition was needed, it was needed in interwar Bermondsey. It was one of the smaller London boroughs but one of the most densely settled. Of its 1300 acres, 400 consisted of docks and warehousing. In the remainder, industry sat cheek by jowl with terraced housing and courts. In 1922, just 8.6 acres of the borough were public open space.

If such conditions oppressed local residents, they outraged the husband and wife team, Alfred and Ada Salter, who spearheaded local Labour politics. Alfred was the local GP, both were ardent Christian socialists. Their concern for the health and moral well-being of the people joined irresistibly in their fight for social justice.

Of those who had created this Bermondsey – ‘one huge slum’ as he described it unapologetically – Alfred could only lament:

They did not realise that they had cut off the people from the chiefest means of natural grace. They did not appreciate the curse and cruelty of ugliness.

And it was Ada who would do all in her power – all that local government allowed – to create grace and beauty in Bermondsey. One of the first actions of the new Labour administration was to set up a Beautification Committee and Ada chaired it for eleven years. Its first meeting in January 1923 announced its goal – ‘Fresh air and fun’ – and its agenda.

Ada Salter, shown with George Lansbury, then First Commisioner of Works in the Labour government, to her left, 1930 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

That agenda was ambitious. Council officers were to identify any waste ground – private or public – that could be planted with trees and shrubs and ornamented with tubs, rockeries, fountains and statuary.

The council was to provide window boxes free of charge to any resident that requested them and organise horticultural shows and gardening competitions to encourage those with green fingers.

Leisure would be catered for by a permanent bandstand and regular summer concerts. ‘Healthful exercise and bodily development’ would be promoted by providing new winter gardens and ‘other suitable places of public resort which can comprise gymnasia, bowling alleys, fives courts and open air baths’.

Even the borough’s public conveniences – an ugly necessity under the jealous eye of the Public Health Department – were to be made easier on the eye by screens of foliage and shrubs. The Committee would also seek powers to restrict unsightly advertising, dumping and constructions – in fact, ‘anything offensive to good taste.’

Not all of this was possible. The more elaborate plans for fountains, statues and the like just didn’t happen. The Town Clerk was adamant that the council’s powers did not allow free window boxes but free plants and compost were apparently permissible. Bermondsey never got its winter gardens though the London County Council did build a lido in Southwark Park in the 1930s. Those draconian powers restricting offences to good taste weren’t possible either though the railway companies were persuaded to better maintain the sidings which were a prominent feature of the borough.

Tulip beds, St James’s Churchyard, May 1931 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

St James’s Churchyard, ND © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Still, what was achieved was impressive: (1)

Bermondsey became a place of unexpected beauty spots. Amidst soot-grimed buildings one suddenly came upon splashes of brilliant colour, red dahlias, yellow daffodils They were like vases of flowers in a dusty room.

The Observer claimed that ‘outside the Royal Parks it would be difficult to find anywhere such masses of colour’. The Labour councillor who proclaimed in 1928 that ‘what was good for the West End was equally good for the East’ would have been proud of this literal vindication of principle.

Storks Road, 1935 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Storks Road today

Ten thousand trees were planted and seventy of the eighty grimy miles of street in Bermondsey became tree-lined. Most of the trees and shrubs – in the huge numbers that the Beautification Committee’s plans demanded – came from Fairby Grange in Kent, the house and gardens purchased by the Salters and given to the council as a convalescent home for nursing mothers and their children.

Keeton’s Road, 1932. View from Peek, Frean’s factory © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

Keeton’s Road today. This housing dates to the 1980s. The area was heavily bombed on 7 September 1940 – the first night of the Blitz with severe casualties in Keeton’s Road school which was being used as an evacuation centre. © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

To those who complained of the expense of all this tree planting, the Council simply pointed out that the work – subsidised by a 60 per cent subsidy from the Unemployment Grants Committee – provided work for those who would otherwise be on the dole.

Arthur Carr, chairman of Peek Freans at the opening of the ‘Joy Slide’, October 29, 1921 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

The dense, built-up nature of this inner London borough limited what could be provided in terms of additional open space but the existing parks and gardens – mainly former churchyards – were greatly improved in appearance and facilities. The pride and joy here was the large and elaborate covered slide in St James’s churchyard which had actually been donated by Peek, Freans, a large local employer, in 1921. Otherwise, the scope was limited and only three small open spaces were acquired and ‘beautified’ by the council in the twenties.

Opening of Tanner Street playground, May 1929 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

In fact, it is the intense quality of Bermondsey’s vision and the detail which capture the imagination. The Council was helped here by the dedication of two Superintendents of Gardens, Mr Aggett and Mr Johns – such proprieties of title were observed in those days – for whom beautification was both a labour of love and a matter of deep professional pride.

There’s no glamour in the dry detail of council staffing but it’s worth pointing out that the Beautification Department employed 36 people in 1926 and a further eight who were full-time caretakers of the parks and open spaces.

Local Labour’s 1925 manifesto uses a phrase that rings strangely today but the ‘mass upliftment’ they proclaimed was a two-way street.  The socialists of the day were both practical reformers and moralists.  They saw no contradiction in the two – betterment was something which both came from and was ‘done to’ the poor.  This was a community which treated morally would act morally. This was the radical respectability of the Salters and of the Labour rank and file in action.

Alfred Salter, planting a Tree of Heaven at the opening of the Tanner Street playground, May 1929 © Southwark Local History Library and Archive

In 1928, Alfred Salter, celebrating six years of Labour rule, stated:

The Party is like this because it is inspired by idealism, because it has a vision, because its efforts for human welfare are part of its religion. A great spiritual motive is working itself out in devoted service and practical achievement.

Trees, window boxes, flower beds and slides, even two new strains of dahlia (Salter’s favourite flower) named the Rotherhithe Gem and the Bermondsey Gem and created by Mr Johns, all played their part in this.

As Elizabeth Lebas argues: (2)

In Bermondsey, ‘beautification’ was not a substitute to political action, but a political action in itself.

And it was, I hope you agree, a rather beautiful form of political action.

Sources: 

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

(2) Elizabeth Lebas, ‘The Making of a Socialist Arcadia: arboriculture and horticulture in the London Borough of Bermondsey after the Great War’, Garden History, vol 27, no 2, winter 1999.

All the historic images are taken, with permission, from the superb collection of photographs held by the Southwark Local History Library and Archive. Most of the direct quotations above are taken from contemporary newspapers and election leaflets held in the library’s cuttings collection.  A big thank you to library staff for their generous assistance in this and related posts on Bermondsey.

The other major source is the very useful and interesting article by Elizabeth Lebas referenced above.

Bermondsey’s Health Education Campaign: ‘There is no wealth but life’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Bermondsey

The claim that Bermondsey might ‘be entitled in a few years to be regarded as one of Britain’s health resorts’ might seem pretty far-fetched. That claim made in 1928 – when the borough was one of London’s poorest and, in the words of the same speaker, ‘one huge slum’ – seems ludicrous.

Bermondsey: aerial view, 1926

But that was the ambition of Bermondsey’s new Labour council and its pioneering officials. And that was the goal of Alfred Salter – constituency MP, borough councillor and popular local GP – who articulated the dream.

Salter, with the indispensable support and industry of his wife Ada, was the driving force behind what became known as Bermondsey’s Revolution. He and his Labour colleagues believed ‘with Ruskin that “there is no wealth but life.”’

The means to defend, extend and enhance life that the Council mobilised were varied.  We’ll look at those too but this entry focuses on one area in which Bermondsey can claim to be unique – the design and scope of what was called (unashamedly in those days) its propaganda for health.

The campaign began in 1924 with a report by the borough’s then Medical Officer of Health, Dr King Brown, unpromisingly entitled, ‘Education of the Public in Hygiene’.   Behind the bureaucratese lay a missionary zeal shared with the Council leadership to improve working-class lives and conditions so systematically undermined by ‘Capitalism and Landlordism’.

The Council embraced the report and King Brown’s successor, Donald Connan, pioneered a breadth and range of public health education unequalled in the country.  The knowledge that so much ill health was preventable – even in the cruel circumstances prevailing in Bermondsey – fuelled the campaign.

TB, rickets, rheumatism, heart disease, venereal disease, diabetes and a range of infectious and industrial diseases were targeted.   Improved lighting and ventilation in homes were encouraged.   Self-help measures around diet and personal cleanliness were powerfully advocated.

The first school lecture was given in February 1925.  There were 440 further by 1933.  School certificates in hygiene were first awarded in 1930 and extended to a practical and written Diploma in Home Nursing in 1933.

Talks were given to any and every local group or organisation that would take them and leaflets produced on a range of subjects – 30 different pamphlets were in circulation before the war.  ‘Electric signs’ and advertisements were also employed.

But ‘from the start it was recognised,’ states Dr Connan, ‘that the scheme could not be complete without street preaching and, to conform with the general plan, this had to be illustrated by lantern slides and films’.

The campaign’s intention to reach local people and the inventiveness of that approach is best seen in the ‘cinemotor’ vans that the council designed and built to show films in the streets and open spaces.  Three customised vehicles were in use by 1939, taking their electricity supply from street lamps modified for the purpose.  (There is an imagination at work here rooted in realities which couldn’t be more prosaic yet more pressing.)

As the programme developed and its resources grew, a successful pattern emerged.   Dr Connan recounts: ‘Our usual procedure with an audience is to give a short talk illustrated by lantern slides, then show a film, invite discussion, and finally give a pamphlet on the same subject’.

What his formal language doesn’t capture is the excitement that these shows could generate at a time when so much of life was lived on the streets.  Naturally children were the most enthusiastic – shouting out or singing the captions to the slides and silent movies – but they helped to gather a crowd and in the end as many as 100 to 250 people might gather to watch.

The shows took place generally in the spring and autumn as the films couldn’t be seen in the brighter days of summer.  Not that the British weather always cooperated: in 1927 only 19 outdoors showings were possible; in the warmer, drier year of 1930, there were 70.

Most films were made and shot in the borough – adding to the sense of local identity and pride that the Council promoted so successfully, crafted and created by council employees, notably Connan himself, Mr Bush, the Chief Administrative Officer and Mr Lumley, its Technical Officer and Radiographer.  (These unsung heroes of municipalism deserve their name-check.) The Direct Labour Department made the sets.   Sound was added as the talkies arrived.

By 1938, the Council had a catalogue of 33 films of which 20 had been made by the borough.  When the scheme ended, a total of 30 films had been produced locally of which 16 survive.

Some advertised the public health services and achievements of the council.  Others such as Where There’s Life, There’s Soap (1933) and The Empty Bed (a stark warning of the risks of not immunising against diphtheria, made in 1937) conveyed straightforward advice on healthy living and disease prevention.

If the films were didactic, they were generally gently so – advisory rather than admonishing.  The 1930 film, Oppin, was unusual in being more direct in its criticism of the exploitative conditions prevailing in the Kent hop fields where many East Enders traditionally worked in the late summer.

If – to modern eyes – they appear guileless, that was deliberate.  For Connan:

The success of the films depends upon the plot which must be devised in such a way as to ensure a simple continuity of ideas throughout. The principle followed in preparing the pictures has been to make them self-explanatory…To enforce the lesson the greatest care has been given to subtitles. These must be simple and accurate, and while conveying a considerable amount of information, they must be concise and pointed.

If this seems patronising, remember that Bermondsey’s revolution was proudly home-grown and, literally in this case, won in the streets.  Its architects – whether middle-class Christian socialists such as the Salters, dedicated professionals such as Donald Connan or the working-class rank and file of Bermondsey Labour Party – wanted life and a fuller life for their people.

By the late thirties, they could look back on a record of solid achievement – a quantifiable improvement in all the key indices of health and a more intangible, qualitative shift in Bermondsey’s sense of itself and the expectations of its people.

There were wider social changes in this period, of course, but the advocacy of reforming local councils and the practical measures they implemented were a part of that change.

By 1935, Connan could already look back on one notable improvement in people’s circumstances.  He began by noting ‘a high degree of personal cleanliness is almost universal’.  But he went on to say that:

Possibly the most striking change is that which has taken place in the clothing of women and girls. Examples of medieval armour formerly worn are now rarely to be seen, and silk and artificial silk garments are almost as common in Wolseley Buildings [a Bermondsey tenement block] as they are reported to be in Berkeley Square.

Perhaps the Council’s film, Health and Clothing, made in 1928, played its own small part in this.

Sources:

The original images used here and much supporting archival information will be found in the Southwark Local History Library which anyone interested in learning more of Bermondsey’s past should visit. 

A major source for further information of Bermondsey’s public health campaigning is the Wellcome Trust’s online exhibition Here Comes Good Health!   You can view some of the films there and see additional photography.   Images above are taken from their site under the Creative Commons attribution.

Fenner Brockway’s Bermondsey Story: the Life of Alfred Salter (1949) is the best text on ‘Bermondsey’s Revolution’.  D.M. Connan, A History of the Public Health Department in Bermondsey (1935) provides the insider’s view and the direct quotes above. See also Bullman, Hegarty and Hill, The Secret History of our Streets (2012) for additional information on Bermondsey history.

Elizabeth Lebas’ book, Forgotten Futures: British Municipal Cinema, 1920-1980 (2011) contains a chapter – ‘When Every Street Became a Cinema’ – on Bermondsey.