Hints from the Health Department. Leaflet from the archive of the Society of Medical Officers of Health. Credit: Wellcome Collection, London
The annual report on the health, sanitary condition, &c., &c., of the Parish of St. Mary Abbotts, Kensington for the year 1895
This page requires JavaScript
and addresses of the outworkers; and so it has proved, and so
it will continue to be, unless duplicates of the lists should be
supplied to the Sanitary Authority. In section 27 an important
amendment of section 15 of the Factory and Workshop
Act, 1883, is made, by the repeal of the words which exempted
bakehouses let or occupied before the first day of June, 1883,
from compliance with the requirements of certain regulations
specified therein. These regulations, of much importance
from the sanitary point of view, must hereafter be complied
with in respect of all bakehouses. When the Bill of 1883
was before the House of Commons, I called the attention of
the President of the Local Government Board to the
propriety of omitting the words in question, and which have for
twelve years disfigured the Act. These words, as I then
stated, legalise, by implication, the continuance, within or
near existing bakehouses, of water-closets, ash-pits, drain-openings,
&c., although the presence of such things in a bakehouse
established subsequently to 1883, would satisfy a court
of summary jurisdiction, that " the room or place used as a
bakehouse" was, by reason of such nuisances, "in such a
state as to be, on sanitary grounds, unfit for use or occupation
as a bakehouse;" and so the occupier would be liable to pains
and penalties, and to notices for " the purpose of removing the
ground of complaint, viz., under section 16." There was,
however, no time to alter the Bill of 1883, which having been
brought in very late, was passed on the last day of the
Session. It is a defect of our London bakehouses that so
many of them are underground, and are, by consequence,
ill-lighted and imperfectly ventilated. It is satisfactory to
note, therefore, that a first step has been taken in the new
Act towards a better state of things, sub-section (3) of section
27 directing that " a place under-ground shall not be used as
a bakehouse unless it is so used at the commencement of this
Act." It is further enacted that "if any place is so used in
contravention of this Act, it shall be deemed to be a workshop
not kept in conformity with the principal Act" (i.e., the