Abstract
Documenting his journey across England in 1933, J. B. Priestley recorded his response to the factories sited on the outskirts of London. ‘Years in the West Riding have fixed for ever my idea of what a proper factory looks like’, he noted: ‘a grim blackened rectangle with a tall chimney at one corner.’
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Notes
J. B. Priestley, English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933, Introduced by Margaret Drabble (1934; London, 1997), p. 20.
See N. K. Buxton and D. H. Aldcroft (eds), British Industry Between the Wars: Instability and Industrial Development 1919–1939 (London, 1979) for an over-view and individual chanters devoted to the fate of specific industries.
T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, trans. T. Cumming 1972, London, 1989), p. 131.
A. Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890), footnote 124; Oxford English Dictionary, (2nd edition, 1989), consulted online at http://dictionary.oed.coin/ on 4 February 2008.
See D. Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, 2003), pp. 106–128.
D. Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (Yale, 1993), p. 178.
Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999), p. 8, p. 22. Quoted in ibid, p. 187.
See V. Long, ‘Industrial Homes, Domestic Factories: the Convergence of Public and Private Space in Interwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 50 (2011). On the inspiration modernist architects took from industrial practices, see M. F. Guillén, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture (Princeton, 2006).
Morris, ‘A Factory as it Might Be’, 17 May 1884.
Browne described his vision of the utopian asylum in the fifth lecture of his 1837 volume, What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought to Be, now most readily available in A. Scull (ed), The Asylum As Utopia: W. A. F. Browne and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Consolidation of Psychiatry (London, 1991), pp. 176–231.
E. Cumming and W. Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement (London, 1991), p. 7, p. 18.
C. Harvey and J. Press, ‘John Ruskin and the Ethical Foundations of Morris & Company, 1861–96’, Journal of Business Ethics, 14 (1995), 181–194; 190.
D. Nve, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994).
R. Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), p. 2.
W. W. Fowler, ‘Gilbert White of Selbourne’, Macmillan’s, 68 (July 1893), pp. 182–189;
cited in D. Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (2nd edition, Cambridge, 1994), p. 15.
M. J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 167.
D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998), pp. 25–102.
B. Luckin, Questions of Power: Electricity and Environment in Inter-war Britain (Manchester, 1990), pp. 73–93.
See L. Briggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology and Work in America’s Age of Mass Production (Baltimore and London, 1996).
F., Tones, Industrial Architecture in Britain, 1750–1939 (London, 1985), p. 76.
Ibid; see also M. Stratton and B. Trinder, Twentieth-Century Industrial Archaeology (London, 2000), pp. 1–17.
J. Skinner, Form and Fancy: Factories and Factory Buildings by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, 1916–1939 (Liverpool, 1997); a point also made in Stratton and Trinder. Twentieth-Century Industrial Archaeology.
For a Europe-wide introduction to health in the interwar years, see I. Borowy and W. D. Gruner (eds), Facing Illness in Troubled Times: Health in Europe in the Interwar Years 1918–1939 (Frankfurt am Main, 2005).
The most comprehensive account of developments in Britain is G. Jones, Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain (London, 1986). In Jones’ account, interwar health activities were viewed as part of a social hygiene movement, informed by social Darwinism, which was active between 1900 and 1960.
C. Webster, ’Healthy or Hungry Thirties?’, History Workshop Journal, 13 (1982), 110–129;
H. L. Beales and R. S. Lambert (eds), Memoirs of the Unemployed (London, 1934).
See S. Sturdy, ‘Hippocrates and State Medicine: George Newman Outlines the Founding Policy of the Ministry of Health’, in C. Lawrence (ed), Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine 1920–1950 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 112–134.
I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Raising a Nation of ‘Good Animals’: The New Health Society and Health Education Campaigns in Interwar Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 20 (2007), 73–89.
David Matless provides an overview of mid-twentieth-century interest in diet before analysing proposals for an organic diet: see D. Matless, ‘Bodies Made of Grass Made of Earth made of Bodies: Organicism, Diet and National Health in Mid-Twentieth-Century England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 27 (2001), 355–376.
S. Carter, Rise and Shine: Sunlight, Technology and Health (Oxford, 2007).
J. Lewis and B. Brookes, ‘The Peckham Health Centre, “PEP”, and the Concept of General Practice During the 1930s and 1940s’, Medical History, 27 (1983), 151–161;
K. Barlow, ‘The Peckham Experiment’, Medical History, 29 (1985), 264–271.
For a detailed analysis of the Socialist Medical Association, see J. Stewart, The Battle for Health: A Political History of the Socialist Medical Association (Aldershot, 1999);
H. Sigerist, Socialised Medicine in the Soviet Union (London, 1937).
Cited in 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. 38.
T. Oliver, The Health of Workers (London, 1925).
Oliver’s earlier principle publications had included Diseases of Occupation from the Legislative, Social, and Medical Points of View (1908), Lead Poisoning in its Acute and Chronic Forms (1891) and Dangerous Trades (1902).
E. W. Hope, in collaboration with W. Hanna and C. O. Stallybrass, Industrial Hygiene and Medicine (London, 1923), p. 45.
R. Squire, Thirty Years in the Public Service: An Industrial Retrospect (London, 1927), p. 45.
This is discussed in N. Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998), especially ‘The Domestication of the Germ’, pp. 135–156.
For an analysis of the new approach adopted by the Inspectorate in the interwar years, see H. Jones, ‘An Inspector Calls: Health and Safety at Work in Inter-war Britain’, in P. Weindling (ed.), The Social History of Occupational Health (London, 1985), pp. 223–239.
Jenson and Nicholson Ltd, The Function of Colour in Factories Schools and Hospitals (London, n.d., circa 1940s?), pp. 20, 40.
Photograph without parent article, captioned ‘Ambulance room of Mather and Platt, Ltd. The large workshop can be seen through the window.’ Industrial Welfare 6 (1924), 365. The photograph of the restroom at the Wallace Scott Tailoring Institute likewise depicts a room for which curtains cover the lower half of the windows, indicating that the adjoining space was in fact a production space: See C. U. Kerr, ‘A Model Factory in Scotland’, Industrial Welfare 6 (1924), 16–21; 19.
Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1937, p. 80. See also E. Robertson, M. Pickering and M. Korczynski, ‘Harmonious Relations? Music at Work in the Rowntree and Cadbury Factories’, Business History, 49 (2007), 211–234.
E. Hallas, ‘The Trade Union Point of View’, Industrial Welfare, 5 (1923), 31–34; 33.
For an analysis of the role played by working-class organisations in driving legislative change in this field, see S. Barton, Working-Class Holidays and Popular Tourism, 1840–1970 (Manchester, 2005), pp. 107–132.
M. Glucksman, Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-War Britain (London, 1990), pp. 226–256.
P. Gurney, ‘Labour’s Great Arch: Cooperation and Cultural Revolution in Britain, 1795–1926’, in E. Furlough and C. Strikwerda (eds), Consumers Against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan 1848–1990 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 135–171; p. 140. The interrelationship between the reform of consumption and of production is personified by Robert Owen who was renowned as both a pioneer of co-operative stores and a reformer of the factory system of production.
See M. Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 80–87. Though, as Gurney makes clear, wages and hours of workers employed in Co-operative Wholesale Society factories were rarely exemplary; mechanisation and the division of labour predominated and strikes were not uncommon: Gurney, ‘Labour’s Great Arch’, p. 155.
B. Lewis, ‘So Clean’: Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization (Manchester, 2008), p. 116.
J. K. Walton, ‘Towns and Consumerism’, in M. Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain Volume III 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 715–744; p. 733. See also Lewis, ‘So Clean’, pp. 154–191.
See E. Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2009), pp. 9, 120–122.
For a discussion of the economic, social and political concerns which company towns were presented as the solution to, see M. Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design o fAmerican Company Towns (London, 1995). For specific British examples, see Lewis, ‘So Clean’, pp. 93–153. The close relationship between housing reform and industry in the inter-war years is traced in Long, ‘Industrial Homes’.
See F. H. A. Aalen, ‘English Origins’, in S. V. Ward (ed.), The Garden City: Past. Present and Future (London, 1992), pp. 28–51.
E. P. Cathcart, E. M. Bedale, C. Blair, K. Macleod and E. Weatherhead, The Physique of Women in Industry — A Contribution Towards Determination of the Optimum Load: Industrial Fatigue Research Board Report no. 44 (London, 1927), p. 80.
See C. Chin, The Cadbury Story: A Short History (Studley, 1998), pp. 19–35.
See H. Chance, ‘The Angel in the Garden Suburb: Arcadian Allegory in the “Girls’ Grounds” at the Cadbury Factory, Bournville, England, 1880–1930’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 27 (2007), 197–216.
A. Adams, Medicine by Design: the Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943 (Minneapolis, 2008), p. 109.
See R. Fitzgerald, British Labour Management and Industrial Welfare, 1946–1939 (London, 1988).
Page advertisement for I. R. Morley, Textile Manufacturers, The Times, 25 June 1914, p. 6.
See M. Mayhew, ‘The 1930s Nutrition Controversy’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (1988), 445–464;
C. Webster, ‘Healthy or Hungry Thirties?’, History Workshop Journal, 13 (1982), 110–129.
Various aspects of the inter-war debate on nutrition are also discussed by the contributors to David Smith’s edited volume: D. F. Smith, Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century (London, 1997).
British Medical Association, Report of Committee on Nutrition (London, 1933).
T. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, 1990), p. 5.
For a more detailed description of the design of the Boots factory, see Darley, Factory, pp. 122–128 and D. Yeomans and D. Cotton, Owen Williams: The Engineer’s Contribution to Contemporary Architecture (London, 2001), pp. 82–92.
E. O. Williams, ‘Factories — a Few Observations thereon made by Sir Owen Williams at a Discussion of the Art Workers Guild, 21 October, 1927’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 35 (1927), 54–55. Cited in ibid, p. 82.
For a rather uncritical account of these developments, see S. Phillips, ’Industrial Welfare and Recreation at Boots Pure Drug Company 1883–1945’ (PhD thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 2003). Phillips lists the 1934 pamphlet as Souvenir of Boots Beeston Factory. The Owen Williams quotation is taken from p. 71 of the thesis.
N. Hayes, ‘Did Manual Workers Want Industrial Welfare? Canteens, Latrines and Masculinity on British Building Sites, 1918–1970’, Journal of Social History, 35 (2002), 637–658.
J. Melling, ‘Employers, Industrial Welfare, and the Struggle for Work-Place Control in British Industry, 1880–1920’, in H. Gospel and C. R. Littler (eds), Management and Labour in British Business Strategies, (London, 1983), pp. 55–81;
H. Jones, ‘Employers’ Welfare Schemes and Industrial Relations in Inter-War Britain’, Business History, 25 (1983), 61–75.
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Long, V. (2011). The Rise of the Healthy Factory. In: The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230303836_3
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