The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ social problems. For Levy, what had become clear was ‘not only the social conditioning of science and the vital need for planning … but the impossibility of carrying this through within the framework of a chaotic capitalism’ in which scientists felt unlistened to, undervalued and underfunded (only 0.1 per cent of the Gross National Product was devoted to scientific research and development in the 1930s; by the 1960s it was nearer 3 per cent). For Bernal, ‘Science has ceased to be the occupation of curious gentlemen or of ingenious minds supported by wealthy patrons, and has become an industry supported by large industrial monopolies and by the State.’ But in a capitalist society this had resulted in ‘a structure of appalling inefficiency both as to its internal organization and as the means of the application to problems of production or of welfare’. Bernal’s plan, or map, of the future direction of science had analogies with Keynes’ economic plan: government would need to take a centralised directional role in the healthy development of science and technology, as in the economy.

      But unlike Keynes, Bernal was and continued to be a Marxist all his life (though his membership of the CPGB lapsed in 1933 — or was allowed to lapse, since at the time the Communist Party entertained a certain suspicion of intellectuals). ‘During the years of the great Depression I began to study in a more serious way the works of the founders of Marxism, and there I found a philosophy … that could be lived and could be a guide to action,’ he wrote. The Social Function of Science was explicit — and much quoted both by those admiring and those critical of the ‘red scientists’ of the 1930s of whom Bernal was at the forefront (‘that sink of ubiquity’, Hyman Levy called him) — in insisting on science’s social responsibilities. Bernal also played a key role in the regeneration of the Association of Scientific Workers: ‘In its endeavour science is communism … In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements … Only in the wider tasks of humanity will their full use be found.’

      Across the river from the laboratories of London University and the Tots and Quots dining tables, an ambitious building designed for a new way of living was taking shape. In January 1935 the young Frances Lonsdale, who would become both a Somerset farmer (as a near neighbour of Evelyn Waugh) and an acute biographer of Edward VIII, was picking her way behind her future husband, Jack Donaldson, through the ‘dust and rubble of a new building that had recently arisen in the suburb of Peckham. The building, which had been minutely planned to serve an entirely original purpose, had a front elevation of curved glass windows set in concrete two stories high, and was functional, not in the architectural sense of the word in much use at that time, but in response to the needs of an inspired conception … Although built with a flat roof and without decoration, it had an elegant buoyancy which was to remind one, when it was lit up at night, of a great liner at sea … It was not quite finished, and it was for me astonishingly material evidence of what seemed an incredible venture.’ This modernist wonder had been designed by Sir Owen Williams, a noted structural engineer rather than an architect (a species he dismissed as ‘decoration merchants’), who already had to his credit the huge Boots factory in Nottingham and the glittering, black-glass-fronted Daily Express office in Fleet Street. Its simple, airy construction was designed expressly for the occupant: the Pioneer Health Centre, a cause to which Jack Donaldson would donate £10,000, nearly half the money he had inherited from his father. Lord Nuffield was also a donor.

      This ‘form following function’ ethos of modernist architecture was particularly salient, since the Pioneer Health Centre was constructed to house a large-scale experiment on the effect of the environment on health, a concentration on preventative rather than curative medicine. The pioneers were a husband and wife team, Dr George Scott Williamson and Dr Innes Pearse, and the new Health Centre was the result of five years’ fund-raising activity by the couple to move their work from a small house nearby to this beacon to their conviction that, like illness, health could also be contagious. Once a patient presented at a doctor’s surgery or hospital ward, Dr Pearce believed that he or she would be in ‘the advanced stages of incapacitating disorder’ — that is, they felt ill. She had been appalled when working in a welfare clinic in Stepney in London’s East End to realise that she had never seen a healthy baby. The only time mothers came to the clinic was in an emergency, and all she could do was to treat the ailing infant. There was no time to enquire into the circumstances of the exhausted-looking mother, and of course she never saw the father.

      What was needed were not just health facilities that acted as a ‘sieve for the detection of disease’, but conditions in which people could ‘keep fit and ward off sickness before they were smitten’; these would be provided by a place where the practice of health was distinct from the conventional practice of medicine. Only families, which the Peckham pioneers had decided were the ‘units for living’, were allowed to join, each paying a shilling a week (the Centre was intended to be self-supporting), and every member had to submit to periodic ‘health overhauls’ designed to check their capacity for individual, family and social life. For an additional few pence they could use a wide range of recreational facilities including a gymnasium, badminton court, roller-skating rink, swimming pool, billiards tables, a theatre space, and rooms for sewing parties or gramophone recitals. There were facilities for children (who had to be restrained from using the glass ashtrays for games of curling along the long corridors) and a nursery club for the under-fives, with specially designed equipment (and much note-taking by the staff) intended to improve family life and enhance personal development. While the Pioneer Health Centre was distinctly modern, experimental and forward-looking in its concept, organisation and habitat, it simultaneously looked back to a pre-industrial community in which a doctor knew his patients in health as in sickness, and the circumstances of their lives, a country village (though without the feudal superstructure) recreated in a busy, fractured inner-city area.

      Although Peckham had been chosen because it was a densely populated yet reasonably prosperous working- and lower-middle-class area where such facilities might be expected to add value to the inhabitants’ lives, the first survey of five hundred members conducted in 1936 found that 59 per cent suffered from ailments such as diabetes, high blood pressure, tuberculosis or cancer, even though they believed themselves to be healthy. Vindication indeed of the Centre’s prophylactic aims, the pioneers thought.

      ‘We are not here to dispense charity, nor to seek out the most helpless and unfortunate in order that we may succour them,’ Dr Scott Williamson told the Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell, in whose fiefdom the Pioneer Health Centre was located. Rather the Centre’s aims were ‘social self maintenance’, and the pioneers were ‘scientists hoping to find out how people living under modern industrial conditions of life might best cultivate health, and thus to benefit humankind as a whole’. The subscribers to this pioneer ‘laboratory’ (who described themselves as ‘guinea pigs’) spent their time there in conditions of ‘controlled anarchy’: the staff were instructed, ‘Don’t make rules to make your life easier,’ and Williamson encouraged the idea that the somewhat undisciplined children would eventually evolve their own system of order. Most of the staff lived communally in a large house on Bromley Common, and when not at work in the Centre they ‘wrangled all day long’. From 1935 a home farm established on the Common grew organic vegetables and produced fresh milk — ‘vital foods’ — at cost price for the Centre with the aim of discovering ‘how far the early symptoms of trouble [detected in a “C3” population] can be removed by fresh food grown on organic soil’ — Williamson and Pearse were both members of the Soil Association council.

      The Pioneer Health Centre was high-minded, utopian, convinced (‘strong meat’, Donaldson thought) — and ultimately not possible to sustain. Partly as a result of the introduction of the National Health Service in July 1948 the Centre was unable to attract sufficient funding, and it closed in 1950.

      While it may have been unrealistic to imagine in the economic climate of the 1930s that Pioneer Health Centres could be rolled out all over Britain, health centres practising medicine alongside welfare clinics (which Williamson and Pearce derided as ‘polyclinics’) were also a rarity (and indeed would be until the 1960s). Although the Dawson СКАЧАТЬ