Abstract
‘The mere association of war and welfare sounds incongruous’, wrote erstwhile Factory Inspector Rose Squire in her 1927 memoir. ‘While the State demanded ammunition for the killing of men, it devised means to preserve the health and provide the comforts and recreation for the women who made it.’1 As the industrial production of the country shifted during the First World War to meet military needs, and thousands of women entered the workforce, the State developed a set of initiatives which would reappraise the functions of the factory and seek to transform the workplace environment.
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Notes
R. Squire, Thirty Years in the Public Service: An Industrial Retrospect (London, 1927), pp. 187–188.
See D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (2nd edition, London, 1992), p. xxi.
P. Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (2nd edition, Harlow, 1996), p. xiii.
J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (trans. Thomas Burger, London, 1989); pp. 222–235 deals explicitly with the emergence of the Social Welfare State.
G. Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain, 1830–1990 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 201–286.
S. Sturdy (ed.), Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere in Britain 1600–2000 (London, 2002);
N. Crossley and J. M. Roberts (eds), After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Oxford, 2004);
C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Massachusetts, 1999).
Crossley, in his study of resistance to psychiatry in the second half of the twentieth century, analysed the actions of multiple agents engaged in a critique of psychiatric practice through a model of social movement organisations: see N. Crossley, Contesting Psychiatry: Social Movements in Mental Health (London, 2006).
This chapter specifically explores the extent to which the state intervened to secure the health and welfare of factory workers; for an account of state intervention in the workplace more generally in both wars, see A. McIvor, A History of Work in Britain, 1880–1950 (Hampshire, 2001), pp. 151–170.
C. W. Baker, Government Control and Operation of Industry in Great Britain and the United States during the World War (Oxford, 1921), p. 5.
K. Middlemas, The Politics of Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911 (London, 1980), pp. 276–277.
D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 4;
J. Pickstone, ‘Production, Community and Consumption: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Medicine’ in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London, 2003), pp. 1–20.
The second son of chocolate manufacturer Joseph Rowntree, Seebohm worked within the family firm which was renowned for its industrial welfare. He produced sociological accounts of poverty and labour management, including S. Rowntree, The Human Needs of Labour (London, 1918). For an overview, See B. Harrison, ‘Rowntree, (Benjamin) Seebohm (1871–1954)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004). www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35856, consulted on 22 February 2008.
D. Proud, Welfare Work: Employers’ Experiments For Improving Working Conditions in Factories with Foreword by David Lloyd George PM and first Minister of Munitions (3rd edition, London, 1918), p. 37.
E. Bevin, ‘First Meeting of the Industrial Health Advisory Committee: Speech Delivered by the Rt Hon Ernest Bevin MP’ (London, 1943), p. 5.
R. S. F. Schilling, ‘Industrial Health Research: The Work of the Industrial Health Research Board’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 1 (1944), 145–152.
These regulations encapsulated recommendations made by the Ministry of Labour and National Service’s Departmental Committee on Lighting in Factories, Lighting in Factories: Fifth Report (London, 1940).
Select Committee on National Expenditure, Third Report: Health and Welfare of Women in War Factories (London, 1942), p. 3.
D. Thom with A. Ineson, ‘TNT Poisoning and the Employment of Women Workers in the First World War’, in D. Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War 1’ (2nd edition, London, 2000), pp. 122–143; p. 128.
H. A. Waldron stated that the number of full-time doctors had declined to 51 by 1951, citing the Table B in Report of a Committee of Enquiry on Industrial Health Services (1951), Cmd 8170, p. 29 as his source. This number how-ever referred only to the number of doctors who held full-time posts as Appointed Factory Doctors (i.e. the doctors appointed to undertake medical examinations of young workers to meet the legal requirements of the 1937 Factory Act).
The number of doctors employed voluntarily by employers on a full-time basis as industrial medical officers was given in the same table of the report as 186: H. A. Waldron ‘Occupational Health during the Second World War: Hope Deferred or Hope Abandoned?’ Medical History, 41 (1997), 197–212; 204.
See B. Harrison, Not only the ‘Dangerous Trades’: Women’s Work and Health in Britain, 1880–1914 (Abingdon, 1996);
C. Malone, Women’s Bodies and the Dangerous Trades in England, 1880–1914 (Woodbridge, 2003).
Statistics from the annual reports of the Factory Inspectorate for 1940, p. 24 and 1943, p. 52. Bridge’s thoughts on dermatitis and washing were given in The Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories for the Year 1941 (1942), Cmd 6397, p. 22. Given the remit of this study, the impact of war-time conditions on the rates of industrial illness are largely excluded from study; a brief overview is provided in Waldron, ‘Occupational Health during the Second World War’, pp. 202–205, while an analysis of the impact of wartime conditions on occupational health and safety in Scotland is provided by R. Johnston and A. McIvor, ‘The War and the Body at Work: Occupational Health and Safety in Scottish Industry, 1939–1945’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 24 (2004), 113–136.
See S. MacDonald, Simple Health Talks with Women War Workers (London, 1917);
B. Webb, Health of Working Girls: A Handbook for Welfare Supervisors and Others (London, 1917);
D. J. Collier, The Girl in Industry (London, 1918).
Mass Observation, War Factory: A Report (London, 1943), pp. 62–63.
J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (2nd edition, Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 204–245.
M. Baillie, ‘The Red Women of Clydeside: Women Munition Workers in the West of Scotland During the First World War’ (PhD Thesis, McMaster University, 2002).
For a fuller assessment of these schemes which interrogates their remit and impact, see N. Hayes, ‘More Than “Music While You Eat”? Factory and Hostel Concerts, “Good Culture” and the Workers’, in N. Hayes and J. Hill (eds), Millions Like Us? British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool, 1999), pp. 209–235.
The development of welfare supervision in this era is discussed in A. Wollacott, ‘Maternalism, Professionalism and Industrial Welfare Supervisors in World War 1 Britain’, Women’s History Review, 3 (1994), 29–56.
Sir William Beardmore, ‘The Boys’ Welfare Movement’, Boys’ Industrial and Welfare Journal, 1 (1918), 8.
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© 2011 Vicky Long
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Long, V. (2011). War and Industrial Health: The Productive Alliance. In: The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230303836_2
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