It's Always More Complicated

You know, I think by the later 1930s child psychology might have had something to say on this topic, but you just shake your head in bewilderment and look for sociological reasons -

Anyway, I came across this in The Oaken Heart apropos of evacuee children:

One of the oddest of these was this lack of house-training among their children. All young things need house-training. It is one of the jolly reminders that civilisation, like peace, is a reward for effort and not a free gift for a lucky nation. The training of some youngsters takes more effort than others, especially if their general standard of physique is not so good, but these suburban children were uniformly first-class. The whole of Auburn remarked upon it. With very few exceptions the children were fine, fit, rosy and beaming with health, yet the habits of nearly all of them would have disgraced any two-months-old pup.

After a lot of listening to the main difference between Auburn’s inconveniences and the luxuries of town life a dreadful suspicion came into my mind that it might be that to a certain temperament these new labour-saving devices with which urban homes are crowded might create a situation in which it would be much easier to clean a floor, do unlimited laundry and wipe down the furniture than to train a baby; for it needs more than physical work to teach a child, or indeed any other little animal.

She does note that with the mothers, 'for a certain section of the newcomers the bottom had been knocked clean out of life by their transplantation' but she relates this entirely to the material conveniences of their former lives, and yeah, you might consider it must have been a shock to go from London streets and shops, not to mention what sound like seriously superior child welfare clinics giving them support, to a small rural village.

Okay, I will concede that a lot of work on child development (HAI John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott!) occurred as a result of wartime upheavals and working with evacuees and displaced children but I still think there would have been some concept based on pre-existing studies.

(I'm also wondering about what sort of sanitary facilities were standard in Auburn at the date in question and how they compared with those the urban kids were used to.)

....I encountered the onward march of Christmas trees from the pub on the corner, very Birnam wood. I anticipate they will encroach yet further from the actual pub forecourt over the coming days, on previous form.

While still am not enamoured of the behaviour in Tube stations of The General Public, I will concede that there were decisions made in the placing of signage which have contributed to the kine in the gateway issue.

There was something Very Odd, from the noises therein, going on in the baby changing room of the historic (1890s dingdong in the Camden Vestry of Should We Even Be Providing Public Ladies Loos, in which GB Shaw took a vociferous part) Parkway Ladies opposite Camden Town Tube Station.

Flattering comments about the green streaks in my hair by members of staff at Boots Opticians: 2

Verdict on state of my eyes: in health, though new glasses advised.

New glasses on order. (Please to pass sal volatile and sanitive madeira, the price grows never less.)

On my walk the last couple of days there has been Work Being Done just along the street. An area has been fenced off with a notice -

'Work being done on pipes, by Thames Water, bringing you world-class tap water'.

Take it away, Tina!

Thames Water issue urgent 'do not drink' warning to hundreds of Surrey homes

Thames Water tested water samples after dozens of residents in south-east London reported sickness and diarrhoea

Thames Water among six water firms sued for up to £1.5bn by billpayers over sewage discharges

Pity I didn't have a spray-can of paint or some chalk or a marker pen.

Sid waves hello: Gonorrhoea cases reach record high in England, plus, there's a dance in the old spirochaete yet:

Syphilis, meanwhile, rose 9.4% - from 8,693 to 9,513, the highest number since 1948 - with more heterosexual men and women becoming infected. Both have more than doubled in the past decade.

Dr Jen Gunter's guide to Supplements: [P]lenty of information about risks. If the supplement industry isn’t going to provide you with informed consent, then I’m stepping up!:

It’s important not to confuse “cutting edge” with inadequately studied products quickly foisted on people courtesy of unfettered capitalism. And it’s equally as important to note how many of these unstudied/inadequately studied products and medications were meant for women.

Representations of motherhood in the media: a systematic literature review. Also touches on the issue of marketing....

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The Beautification of Bermondsey: ‘Fresh air and fun’ (Have I posted something about the Salters and Bermondsey before?) This is rather charmingly about bringing England's green and pleasant land into a fairly grim bit of the built environment, I should just like to know whether these Christian socialists sang 'Jerusalem' at their meetings.

This piece Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder: Environmental Crisis and Metabolic Rift in Nineteenth-Century London takes a rather different perspective on urban environments and their relationship to the wider context. But also - perhaps - leads to reflection on the gradual shift from the grimly utilitarian agenda of civic reform to the wider one embraced by the Salters.

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Pioneering research: An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre.

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The daughters had to wait until their father was mad to attain any freedom: the family life of George III: he sounds like a terror to his daughters, and not so great to his sons:

While the sons escaped the tight domestic hold, the girls were trapped, suffering crippling boredom and frustration. They longed to marry, and only found out years later how many offers their father had rejected.... several disasters... resulted from George III's desire to dictate his children's futures, notably by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which prevented them marrying without his permission until they were 25, and requiring them to declare their intentions to parliament.

Dept of, Bad Ideas:

Disney rides shut down because people dump cremated ashes. We suspect that this may be a problem, whatever the deceased may have wanted, in other venues, on account of 'Human cremated remains are considered a biohazard, and require an intensive level of cleanup with special equipment'.

Also a case of, what are they even thinking? and this headline hardly does the proposal full justice: Ancient Welsh mountain byway threatened by resurfacing plans:

Winding its way through the Cambrian mountains in mid Wales, the Monks Trod byway was built to link two medieval abbeys and is now a wild and wonderful route for people seeking a little tranquility. But the peace and quiet is being jeopardised by “foolhardy” plans by Powys county council to use hundreds of thousands of pounds from the UK government’s levelling up fund to resurface the byway, making it accessible to off-road motorcycles. Many lovers of the Trod say it will ruin the meditative nature of the route, while conservationists are worried it will put precious flora and fauna on protected sites at risk and damage the fragile, peat-rich landscape the path traverses – an important carbon store.

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Dept of, Wymmynz Herstorye:

Agreeing to Disagree in Feminist Newsletters:

[F]eminist periodicals functioned as what the literary scholar Kathryn Flannery calls “counterinstitutions” to conventional education wherein women could participate in the construction of new political knowledge. While many readers-turned-writers contributed articles and reviews, the most collaborative exchange of ideas took place in letter-to-the-editor pages. Constant calls for opinion produced lively debate in the form of letter-writing that often spanned several issues of a newsletter or magazine. These forums of communication were integral to collaborating with broad and active readerships in the women’s movement.

Looking beyond the obvious: The Victorian female franchise:

[W]omen had the right to vote and to hold office in a range of local and parish institutions from their foundation. The reason that women were able to vote was due to the fact that many local franchises were based upon payment of poor rates, irrespective of the sex of the person paying those rates. This was effectively a household franchise, and single or widowed women who owned or rented eligible properties were able to exercise the vote. The organisation and powers of local government had arisen from immemorial custom and incorporated elements of the common law as well as combinations of by-laws and private and public parliamentary acts.
....
The emphasis on the parliamentary and municipal electorates also means that it is easy to overlook the fact that women continued to vote and to hold office for a range of local bodies, including overseers of the poor, surveyors of the highway and constables, as well as for parish servants such as sextons and beadles.

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Dept of, Gone to the Big City to Earn My Fortune, please send Dosh: From expensive rent to efforts to keep up with fashion, a young man’s missives on display in Cumbria are relatable to today:

When Ben Browne set off on horseback from his small village in the north of England for the bright lights of London in 1719, his concerns were not so different from those of today’s young people. Mainly: please send money, everything is so expensive. About 65 letters sent by Browne to his father back in Troutbeck, in the historic county of Westmorland, now part of Cumbria, have survived the intervening 300 years. On Tuesday they go on display at Townend, the Browne family home that is now cared for by the National Trust. The letters are full of vivid descriptions of Browne’s new life in London, where he trained as a clerk to a lawyer, as well as his need for funds. Early on, he encountered social unrest in the form of violent protests by Spitalfields silk weavers against imports of calico from India.

Dept of, and coincidentally also connected to Westmorland: Steal not this book for fear of shame': a hidden gem in the Stationers' collections:

[T]he surprise is the presence of a small, shabby book printed not in London but in Scotland, with a north-western English provenance, meant for children to read. The book is Thomas Boreman’s A Description of above Three Hundred Animals, printed and sold by the Edinburgh bookseller William Darling around 1782. First appearing in 1730, Boreman’s compendium of animals is famously and fantastically unlimited by reality, including animals such as unicorns, manticores, and dragons. Massively popular, it was printed throughout the century, furnishing thousands of children with educational material filled with pictures.
....
The book has been bound in plain calfskin, likely around the same time it was printed. It has clearly been roughly handled; with the front cover detached, the leather peeling away from the boards, and deep, regular scratching and scribbling on the front and back. The pages inside have also been subject to a litany of abuses: torn, ripped out, dog-eared, softened from many turnings and absorbing the oils from many sticky little hands. Perhaps most interestingly, the book is filled with the names and writing practice of children. Mostly from the Armstrong family of High Rutter in Drybeck, Cumbria (then Westmorland), they have often obligingly included their ages and the dates of their writing, revealing that several generations from this family used and delighted in the blank pages as much as the pictures.

I had an o sancta simplicistas moment yesterday via bsky, where somebody was posting, somebody's post from Some Other Social Media, saying that as somebody whose job is entering up medical codes, for A Long Time Now they have never had to input the codes for polio, pertussis, measles, rubella, mumps, etc and really doesn't know why they are bothering to vaccinate for these defunct ailments anymore....

(I also saw something about one of the last people to still be in an iron lung as a result of polio pre-vaccines, and this is still, at least for us Olds, living memory.)

Admittedly, I also saw somewhere somebody going yay Ozone Layer Hole is fixed Nature is Healing but I find that Scientists are Sceptical, or at least cautious in their optimism over that and that perhaps it is All More Complicated than simply doing away with CFCs (and the wildfires and so forth have Not Helped).

Massive improvement in fighting the Invisible London Pertiklers of the present day: London Ulez averts more air pollution than that caused by capital’s airports, report shows:

The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said: “The decision to expand the Ulez was not something I took lightly but, when confronted by the evidence, it was clear that clean air zones like these are the most effective way to cut toxic air and meaningfully protect people’s health.
“In a few short years the Ulez has prevented tens of thousands of tonnes of toxic nitrogen oxide emissions from being released and the London-wide expansion is enabling 5 million more Londoners to breathe cleaner air.”
Khan said that non-transport sources still contributed half of the deadly emissions produced in London, and called on the government to provide the necessary funding and powers to allow the capital to tackle other sources of air pollution.

I am reminded, somehow, of the Disasters That Did Not Happen Because Preparedness... (Y2K, e.g.).

Happy 175th birthday to public health.

The Public Health Act 1848 was a major landmark in the history of health in England and Wales. It is 175 years old on 31 August 2023. Testament to the vision of the act, life expectancy in England and Wales has nearly doubled between 1841 to 2011. The largest increases have been through improved drinking water and sanitation, better housing, and better nutrition. Life expectancy continued to improve through the first 65 years of the NHS and the welfare state. But austerity policies since 2010 have seen life expectancy stall and inequalities widen.

There was also, of course, the surge of therapeutic optimism is the wake of penicillin and the idea that medical science was on the verge of discovering the Cures for Everything, probably in the form of a swallowable pill.

These magic bullets turned out to have their own downside, as I discovered I remarked in a panel on the history of contraception when I came across a recording of it: that the idea of A Pill was absolutely in tune with the zeitgeist, pretty much, even if the actuality, even in the early stages, turned out to be Rather More Problematic (just look at the things male scientists considered 'minor side-effects').

And Sid is over here waving....

But the idea that, these days medical science can cure All The Things rather cuts against a public health agenda, and (arguably) this could have something to do with the erosion of the public health system from c. the 70s.

And now we're pretty much back to the era of the Great Stink.

The waterways of the UK are awash with sewage and I daresay there are faint earthquakey rumblings in the vicinity of Wimbledon, where Sir Joseph Bazalgette is buried.

And today was spotted in the wild somebody hymning the praises of wood-burning stoves in the Telegraph.

Hai, let's go back to the Great Smog and the London Pertickler!

Quite apart from the environmental impact of burning wood - cough choke - there's the environmental impact of where the wood to burn comes from....

I suppose at least it's not a fossil fuel?

Goodness knows what was going on in the minds of the protestors throwing soup at Sunflowers (behind glass, fortunately). At least when Mary Richardson slashed the Rokeby Venus there was an obvious symbolism to the protest. We feel that Vincent would have been on their side?

Somebody did mention somewhere that funding art exhibitions is a favoured form of culture-washing by oil companies. But this was hardly explicit?

Apparently there were also cavils about Wasting Food?

To which I saw one response that selling the painting would feed I forget how many millions -

Except there is that thing of selling treasures that are in some form of public ownership to raise money, and the likelihood that they will end up in some private vault? (e.g. library some years ago that had a spare First Folio and a financial crisis.)

At people going about a pandemic disease that they find personally inconvenient 'got to live with it'.

As if 'living with it' is just about shrugging your shoulders and letting the dice fall as they may.

Am surprised at no reports of rumbling in the cemeteries where Victorian sanitarians are buried.

Because when you are dealing with a disease like this, very like the kinds of things they were dealing with, which had no actual cure, a high rate of mortality, and debilitating effects on survivors -

- what you threw your efforts into, was *PREVENTION*.

Even pre-Victorians - the Venetian quarantine of ships in time of plague, etc.

Cholera - okay, your measures against miasma had not worked, but once Snow had pointed out that it was water and not airborne - sewers (though even then, it had to wait until Parliament was inconvenienced by the Great Stink of 1858 to get the money voted.)

Smallpox - vaccination, plus isolation hospitals for active cases.

Encouragement of social practices - you know, like not spitting in public, which was about TB? -

- and Fun-packed public information film, which warns of the dangers of germ-spreading sneezing in wartime.

Thinking also of a whole range of things from food adulteration to avoidable death in childbirth, that people presumably thought were interfering with trade (and their right to colour sweeties with arsenic, bulk out bread with alum, etc) and flying in the face of religion, nature, and the fact that Doctors' Hands Could Not Possibly Be Filthy.

While occasionally efforts of prevention were misguided and just wrong (routine inspection of sex workers for STIs at a time when diagnosis was pretty much guesswork, just saying), and certain interventions now considered excessive (I was part of the generation of what are now deemed unnecessary tonsillectomies), prevention, and it's mostly something that has to be undertaken at a collective level, is usually the horse to bet on

Sharks!! in the Thames!!! with venomous spines!!!!:

[S]harks including tope, starry smooth-hound and spurdog -- a slender fish measuring some 23 inches and covered in venomous spines -- have been found. Spurdogs can be found in deep water, and the spines in front of the shark's two dorsal fins secrete a venom that can cause pain and swelling in humans. Tope shark, which feed on fish and crustaceans and can reach 6 feet and up to 106 pounds, have never launched an unprovoked attack on humans*, according to the UK's Wildlife Trusts. Meanwhile, the starry smooth-hound, which can reach up to 4 feet and 25 pounds, mostly eats crustaceans, shellfish and molluscs.

There are also flourishing in a river barely 50 years since considered biologically dead, seals, seahorses and eels.

How long this will last as water companies continue to behave in a way that promises to hurl us back to the period preceding the Great Stink and the situation depicted in the Punch cartoons: 'The Wonders of a London Water Drop':

[P]osits the existence of a new kind of microscope known as the Molecular Magnifier, which will show you the exact chemical make-up of a drop of water down to the basest constituent. The basest constituent turns out to be London’s political class.... disporting in the liquid dirt as in their native element.