The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

Tots and Quots dinners lapsed for a time in the mid-1930s (not helped by the fact that Hugh Gaitskell probably lost the Minute Book), but the club reconvened in 1939 (with a slightly shuffled membership which now also included Richard Crossman) as a ‘platform to proclaim our views … about the vast potential [for the] applications of scientific knowledge when dealing with the complicated problems of war’.

But although ‘Gip’ Wells, who had co-written the best-selling The Science of Life with Julian Huxley at his father’s bidding, resigned after the first dinner, complaining that ‘he had hoped the whole thing would be fun, whereas we were obviously going to become monastic and deadly serious’, the small (fourteen was the average number) group of scientists and economists met regularly during the worst years of the Depression, eating well as they pondered the responsibilities of their discipline in a country shot through with social and economic problems.

In 1934 Ritchie Calder, the scientific correspondent of the Daily Herald, advocated that the House of Lords should be replaced by what he called a ‘Senate of Scientists’. The year before, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, in his Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, had urged the formation of a ‘Solomon’s House’ of the wisest (men) in the land who would assemble to synthesise knowledge, appraise its progress and assess its impact on society. The nutritionist F. LeGros Clark stated that scientists found politics ‘a disreputable game’, which it was their duty to ‘try to transform into a pastime with clean, scientific rules’. Professor Frederick Soddy was explicit: since science was society’s ‘real master’, society should ‘insist on being ruled, not by a reflection of a reflection, but directly by those [scientists] who are concerned with the creation of its wealth, not its debts’. J.B.S. Haldane, writing in Nature in January 1934, had suggested that refusing to apply scientific method to the conduct of human affairs would bring about the failure of Britain’s political and economic system.

When it was suggested to the eminent biologist Julian Huxley that he should stand for Parliament, he dismissed the idea, saying that what guided his life was a passion for truth, not its ‘obscuration’. In the book he was invited to write for a series entitled ‘If I Were Dictator’ (since this was before the full development of Hitler’s Third Reich or Stalin’s USSR, the word ‘dictator’ was not freighted with the same terrible associations it later came to carry), Huxley further showed his disregard for democratic politics, proposing instead a corporatist state in which elections would be ‘superfluous’. A central planning council would replace Parliament, which was little more than a ‘talking-shop’, according to Huxley, and lacked the necessary expertise to the run the country (as, presumably by extension, the electorate lacked the necessary expertise to choose a government).

Social issues in the 1930s had a direct bearing on the scientific community: technological advances were charged with having thrown thousands out of work, and creating machines for military savagery; the Hunger Marches were a symbol of the malnutrition of the unemployed, which Sir John Boyd Orr would quantify in 1936 in his book Food, Health and Income; Oswald Mosley was using spurious ‘scientific’ arguments to inflame anti-Semitism; genetic inheritance was the subject of much debate — the sterilisation of ‘morons’ (defined by the journal Nature as making up ‘a large proportion of the slum population … mental defectives of comparatively high grade … people lacking not only in intelligence but also in self-control, which is the basis of morality, and they reproduce recklessly’) was seriously discussed in Britain and put into practice in Nazi Germany; while the growing threat of war later in the decade rallied scientific expertise to steel defences and develop weapons of destruction.

Moreover, world events were enlarging Britain’s scientific community. British scientists were made acutely aware of the pernicious uses to which scientific theories and inventions could be put when Jewish scientists such as the chemists Gerhard Weiler, E.F. Freundlich and Michael Polanyi, who had been dismissed or resigned from their research or teaching institutes after Hitler came to power, fled to Britain, as did the biochemist Herman Blaschko, the biologist Hans Krebs, the physicists Max Born, Hans Bethe, Heinrich Kuhn, Rudolph Peierls and Kurt Mendelssohn. Boris Chain, a young biochemist, left Germany on 30 January 1933, the day Adolf Hitler was created Chancellor, and came to Britain, where he sought the help of J.B.S. Haldane. Chain eventually moved to Oxford University, and in 1945 he and Sir Howard Florey shared the Nobel Prize for their work on isolating penicillin (though the university denied him even a readership).

After Chain, Haldane sought out more young scientists who needed to flee Hitler’s Germany, working alongside Professor F.A. Lindemann (who had himself been born and educated in Germany and later, as Lord Cherwell, would be Churchill’s wartime scientific advisor) and an Oxford Professor of Organic Chemistry, Robert Robinson, on the Academic Assistance Council (AAC — renamed the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning in 1936). The Council, chaired by the physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford, director of the prestigious Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory, had come into existence in May 1933 after William Beveridge (then director of the London School of Economics) wrote a letter to The Times drawing attention to the plight of Jewish scientists in Germany and Austria. Beveridge had been alerted to the situation by Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist who had worked with Einstein (who had declared his intention never to return to Germany and to resign from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in protest at Hitler’s racial policies in March 1933), and a young Englishwoman, Tess (Esther) Simpson, who went on to run the organisation.

By 1935 around 25 per cent of all scientists and 20 per cent of all mathematicians had been dismissed from German universities under the Nazis’ harsh race laws. The AAC sought to enable such people to continue their research in British universities or industry or, as so many yearned to do, to move to the United States, thus ‘salvaging’ a number of scientists, in some cases with great difficulty. ‘Brains in Germany seem to be going cheap and we have no tariff for them,’ wrote W.J. Sollas, the aged Professor of Geology at Oxford. By May 1934, sixty-seven ‘wandering scholars’, as Rutherford called them, had found positions at London University, thirty-one at Cambridge, seventeen at Oxford and sixteen at Manchester, greatly enriching the British scientific community.

Although the early 1930s were ‘by far the richest time there has ever been’ for scientific innovation, in the opinion of the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow, with an annus mirabilis in 1932, when John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton succeeded in splitting the atom, and James Chadwick did likewise with the neutron, there was disquiet among sections of the scientific community. Many felt that those outside their profession looked down on scientific activities as culturally inferior to the arts, and they themselves were seen as little more than lab rats producing work only ‘of great value in their own departments’, in the dismissive view of T.S. Eliot. The Bishop of Ripon, E.A. Burroughs, in his address to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Leeds on 4 September 1927, had invited the scientific community to declare a ten-year moratorium on research, for the general good of mankind, since while science had undoubtedly advanced knowledge, it had done nothing to increase wisdom. (H.G. Wells had recently in effect suggested a similar — though permanent — ‘holiday’ for the episcopate, also in the cause of human progress.) Society was suffering, in the Bishop’s view, from a ‘moral lag, a gap between moral and scientific advance, for man’s body had in effect gone on growing while his soul had largely stood still or gone back’.

Notwithstanding the Bishop, scientific research carried on, but the Association strove harder to break down public resistance to the advance of science. Some scientists discussed whether by growing more specialised they might have become ‘blinkered’ to the wider concerns of humanity, while others addressed the question of whether science had a particular relevance — even a special duty — to society. And a small number of radical scientists at Cambridge (particularly), London and a few other universities, or assembled round the Tots and Quots dining table, despaired that their agenda for the ‘social responsibility of science’ was not in fact what generally drove scientific endeavour or its public perception. As Zuckerman pointed out, the ‘efforts of scientists are generally misunderstood, because they are not interpreted to the world by scientists themselves, and because few of those who are immediately responsible for the conduct of social affairs are scientists. There are, for example, no scientists in the Government.’ Moreover, as the Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy argued to Julian Huxley in a BBC broadcast in 1931, ‘Since scientists, like other workers, have to earn their living … to a large extent the demands of those who provide the money will, very broadly, determine the spread of scientific interest in the field of applied science … I know of no scientist who is so free that he can study anything he likes, or who is not limited in some way by limitations such as the cost of equipment.’

J.D. Bernal (whose book The Social Function of Science was a manifesto and a blueprint for the unlimited potential of science for progress, especially once it was freed from the shackles of capitalism) took up the theme in response to a criticism from a fellow scientist that ‘Bernalism is the doctrine of those who profess that the proper objects of scientific research are to feed people and protect them from the elements, that research workers should be organised in gangs and told what to discover.’ It wasn’t, he riposted, as if the idea that science had a social function was new. It was ‘palpable and admitted fact’, and that function was ‘largely economic under present conditions and likely to become even more so’. Nevertheless, under capitalism, science was not generally regarded as being capable of ‘solv[ing] completely the material conditions of society’, Bernal wrote in 1935, ‘but rather the best application of science is conceived of as producing such a fatuous and stupefying paradise as … Brave New World [by Aldous Huxley, Julian’s younger brother, published in 1932]; at worst, a super-efficient machine for mutual destruction with men living underground and only coming up in gas masks’.

To Hyman Levy, as to Bernal, Lancelot Hogben, J.B.S. Haldane, Joseph Needham and other radical scientists, only a society transformed along socialist lines into a planned economy producing an abundance of socially useful goods, equitably distributed to all sections of the population who would thus feel ‘practically and morally bound to one another in this great collective endeavour’ would devote sufficient scientific resources to the solution of economic and 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 Report back in 1920 had advocated a system based on groups of medical practitioners working from publicly funded health centres which integrated preventative and curative medicine, this appeared too much like costly state interference with the autonomy of doctors, and the idea was shelved.

There was, however, a ‘polyclinic’ in the neighbouring (and much poorer) borough of Bermondsey, which opened in 1936 as part of what the radical borough (which had pulled down the Union Jack from the municipal flagpole and run up a red flag instead when the ILP won a majority on the Council in 1924) liked to describe as the ‘Bermondsey Revolution’. It was the brainchild of Alfred Salter, a doctor and the ILP MP for West Bermondsey, and the husband of Ada Salter, the first woman Labour mayor in Britain. Salter was determined to bring together ‘a solarium for tuberculosis, dental clinics, foot clinics, ante-natal and child welfare clinics’, formerly scattered in ‘ordinary dwelling houses’, into one building that would serve as ‘the Harley Street of Bermondsey’, where the range of services would provide the poor of the borough with ‘the best diagnosis and advice that London could provide … as good as any the rich could secure’.

Bermondsey did not rest content with a state-of-the-art health centre. It took its message out into the streets, proselytising about healthy living by means of posters, large-print pamphlets (forty-two were produced in 1932 alone), lectures, and electric signs flashing warnings against spitting, messages about the advantages of drinking milk, and pithy slogans such as ‘Your son and heir needs sun and air’. Furthermore, a disinfectant van was equipped with a cinema projector and a lantern for outdoor showings of short films made by the Public Health Department (the cameraman’s day job was as a radiographer), including such masterpieces as Where There’s Life, There’s Soap (a film for children on personal cleanliness), Delay is Dangerous (about the early signs of tuberculosis and the need to seek medical advice) and one with a slightly admonishing ring, Some Activities of Bermondsey Council, intended to remind the borough’s citizens how much their elected authority was doing for them in the fields of housing and public health (which it undoubtedly was). The open-air screenings took place in the summer months (though not in July and August, as it didn’t get dark until 10 p.m., and in any case many Bermondsey residents were away in Kent hop-picking — a film, ‘Oppin, was made about that too). The Council fitted twenty-four lamp-posts in various parts of the borough with special plugs so that the ‘cinemas’ could be plugged in, and films were shown in the street, in the courtyards of new housing estates, in parks, children’s playgrounds and the new Health Centre. By 1932 there were over sixty shows a year, drawing an audience of around 30,000, though both the number of shows and the size of the audiences had begun to tail off by the end of the decade.

An impressive modernist ‘drop-in’ Health Centre (designed by the Georgian émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin, who had already designed a prototype TB clinic for Dr Philip Ellman, the Medical Officer of Health for East Ham and a member of the Socialist Medical Association, which was never built) opened in Finsbury in North London, another very poor borough, in 1938. Built like a ‘megaphone for health’, with two wings splayed out from a central axis, it housed a TB clinic, a foot clinic, a dental clinic, a mother and baby clinic, a disinfecting station, a lecture hall and a solarium where the sun-starved children of the borough might benefit from ultraviolet-ray treatment, as well as fumigating facilities and a mortuary in the basement. So representative of a better life for all those who had previously suffered ‘C3’-level health — and health care — was Finsbury that it was depicted on one of Abram Games’ wartime posters urging ‘Your Britain: Fight for it Now’.

But for those not resident in one of those London boroughs and without reasonable means, provision for the unwell in the 1930s remained an example of hotchpotch availability, lack of funding and reluctance to extend state involvement, all resulting in inequality of access to medical services.