Abstract
This remark, which prefaced an edited volume produced by the Institute of Welfare Workers in 1925,2 was the mantra of industrial welfare supervisors operating in the aftermath of the First World War. They expressed concern about the impact of industrial work, the industrial environment and the relationship between the industrial environment and home life on specific groups of workers. Industry was in a state of crisis according to industrial welfare supervisors, who portrayed the relationship between employers and organised labour as one of bitter warfare, damaging both parties.
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Notes
E. T. Kelly (ed), Welfare Work in Industry — By Members of the Institute of Welfare Workers (London, 1925), p. 1: capitalisation in original text.
These tendencies should not be overstressed. Arthur McIvor argues that while labour intensification was fairly pervasive between 1880 and 1950 as British companies struggled to compete in an increasingly competitive international market, job fragmentation and deskilling was a less uniform process, curtailed by worker resistance, the unwillingness of employers to inaugurate changes when a ready supply of labour existed and the creation of new skilled positions in those fields of work that did undergo deskilling. See A. McIvor, A History of Work in Britain, 1880–1950 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 43–78.
See D. F. MacDonald, The State and the Trade Unions (2nd edition, London, 1976), pp. 43–52;
also J. Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement 1867–1974 (Thetford, 1983), pp. 40–82.
H. Duberry, ‘What a Trade Unionist Thinks of Welfare Work’, Journal of Industrial Welfare, 2 (1920), 12–13; 12. Duberry was the General Secretary of the Post Office Supervising Trade Union.
J. Dreyer, ‘The Human Factor in Industrial Relations’, in C. S. Myers (ed.), Industrial Psychology (2nd edition, Oxford, 1944: first published 1929), pp. 16–38; p. 17.
For an overview of the development of company welfare schemes in different industrial sectors, see R. Fitzgerald, British Labour Management and Industrial Welfare, 1846–1939 (London, 1988). Fitzgerald argued that systematic welfare provisions assumed a new importance in increasingly large and complex organisations, serving to minimise labour turnover and industrial discontent. Among smaller firms with lower profit margins, discretionary welfare provisions continued to predominate.
S. Sturdy, ‘The Industrial Body’, in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London, 2003), pp. 217–234.
N. Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (2nd edition, London, 1999).
See, for example, 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.
M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2006).
M. Jahoda, P. F. Lazarsfeld and H. Zeisel, Marienthal: The Sociology of an Unemployed Community (London, 1974. First published as Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal in 1933), p. 19.
H. L. Beales and R. S. Lambert (eds), Memoirs of the Unemployed (London, 1934).
‘The “Social Psychology” of Unemployment in Inter-War Britain’, in R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 228–258.
J. Gollan, Youth in British Industry: A Survey of Labour Conditions Today (London, 1937), p. 155.
G. Meara, Juvenile Unemployment in South Wales (Cardiff, 1936), cited in Gollan, Youth in British Industry, p. 154.
This approach was pioneered in the late nineteenth century by a voluntary organisation, the Mental After Care Association. See V. Long, ‘Changing Public Representations of Mental Illness in Britain, 1870–1970’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2004);
V. Long, ‘“A Satisfactory Job is the Best Psychotherapist”: Employment and Mental Health, 1939–60’, in P. Dale and J. Melling (eds), Mental Illness and Learning Disability Since 1850: Finding a Place for Mental Disorder in the United Kingdom (Abingdon, 2006), pp. 179–199.
F. Bramley, ‘The Attitude of Labour’, Journal of Industrial Welfare, 3 (1921), 407–409; 408.
J. Dover Wilson, ‘Humanism in the Continuation School’, Journal of Industrial Welfare, 4 (1922), 331–333; 331.
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. 97.
S. Wyatt and J. N. Langdon with F. G. L. Stock, Fatigue and Boredom in Repetitive Work: Industrial Health Research Board Report No. 77 (London, 1937).
B. Muscio, Vocational Guidance (A Review of the Literature): Reports of the Industrial Fatigue Research Board no. 12 (London, 1921), p. 1.
F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), p. 59 cited in ibid, p. 19.
A. S. Otis, ‘The Selection of Mill Workers by Mental Testss’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 4 (1920), 339–341 in ibid, p. 50.
C. S. Myers, ‘Monotony in Production’, Industrial Welfare, 7 (1925), 52.
This stereotype is discussed in more detail in V. Long and H. Marland, ‘From Danger and Motherhood to Health and Beauty: Health Advice for the Factory Girl in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 20 (2009), 454–481.
TUC Archive, MSS.292/140.1/2, Dr E. N. Snowden, ‘Injury Psychoneurosis (Traumatic Neurasthenia)’, 1 March 1938.
TUC Archive, MSS.292/140.1/2, J. W. Yerrell, ‘Memorandum on Nervous Diseases’, October 1937.
R. Fraser, The Incidence of Neurosis Among Factory Workers: Industrial Health Research Board Report No. 90 (London, 1947).
R. Hyde, ‘Editor’s Notes’, Boys’ and Industrial Welfare Journal, 1 (1918), 1–4; p. 3.
A. Wollacott, ‘Maternalism, Professionalism and Industrial Welfare Supervisors in World War 1 Britain’, Women’s History Review, 3 (1994), 29–56; ‘The Mother Heart: Welfare and the Underpinning of Domesticity’, in D. Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War 1 (2nd edition, London, 2000), pp. 164–186; ‘Biology as Destiny: Women, Motherhood and Welfare’, in G. Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (London, 1981), pp. 112–153.
H. Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880— 1920 (Oxford, 1990).
See, for example, B. Harris, ‘Educational Reform, National Fitness, and Physical Education in Britain, 1900–1945’, and J. Welshman, ‘Child Health, National Fitness, and Physical Education in Britain, 1900–1940’, both in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and H. Marland (eds), Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam, 2003), pp. 85–102 and pp. 61–84.
The subject received detailed attention by Hilda Martindale for example in 1926: Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1926 (1927), Cmd 2903, pp. 59–67.
B. Webb, Health of Working Girls: A Handbook for Welfare Supervisors and Others (London, 1917), p. 101.
These findings were reported in 1929 in a chapter on the subject of weight lifting by Sybil Overton, one of the medical factory inspectors: Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1929 (1930), Cmd 3633, pp. 99–103.
B. Harrison, Not Only The ‘Dangerous Trades’: Women’s Work and Health in Britain, 1880–1914 (London, 1996);
C. Malone, Women’s Bodies and Dangerous Trades in England, 1880–1914 (Woodbridge, 2003).
J. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England 1900–1939 (London, 1980);
D. Dwork, War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England 1898–1918 (London, 1989);
A. Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, 5 (1978), 9–66.
S. MacDonald, Simple Health Talks with Women War Workers (London, 1917).
Mass Observation, War Factory: A Report (London, 1943), pp. 85–86.
See Thom, Nice Girls, pp. 174–178; Braybon, Women Workers, 112–153; P. Summerfield, ‘Women, Work and Welfare: A Study of Child Care and Shopping in Britain in the Second World War’, Journal of Social History, 17 (1983), 249–269.
S.W., ‘The Problem of Home and Factory’, Journal of Industrial Welfare, 4 (1922), 25–26.
More broadly, Susan Aspinall’s doctoral research indicates that from around 1900 onwards, biological determinism co-existed and competed with environmentalist explanations for women’s health: S. Aspinall, ’Nature as well as Nurture: Environmentalism in Representations of Women and Exercise in Britain from the 1880s to the Early 1920s’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2009).
S. Sturdy and R. Cooter, ‘Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain C. 1870–1950’, History of Science, 36 (1998), 1–47.
Sturdy elaborates on this point at greater length in S. Sturdy, ‘Hippocrates and State Medicine: George Newman Outlines the Founding Policy of the Ministry of Health’, in C. Lawrence and G. Weisz (eds), Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine 1920–1950 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 112–134.
The Problem of Home and Factory Nigel Oswald has argued that the failure of this campaign helps explain why the introduction of the NHS failed to tackle preventable and chronic illness; in short, while medical practice was transformed, training was not: N. Oswald, ‘Training Doctors for the National Health Service: Social Medicine, Medical Education and the GMC 1936–48’, in D. Porter (ed.), Social Medicine and Medical Sociology in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 59–80.
J. A. C. Brown, Social Psychology in Industry (1954), p. 130, cited in Rose, Governing the Soul, p. 85.
Ministry of Health, A National Health Service (1944), Cmd 6502, p. 10.
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Long, V. (2011). Tailoring Provisions for Individualised Needs. In: The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230303836_5
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