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1
Town Hall,
Hammersmith, W.6.
To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors
of the Metropolitan Borough of Hammersmith.
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen.
I have very much pleasure in presenting to you my Annual
Report on the health and sanitary circumstances of the Borough
for the year 1954. Once again I regret that it was not possible
to publish it earlier, as the Registrar General's figures which are
necessary in order to calculate the vital statistics were not
available sooner.
The year behind us is chiefly notable for a decrease in illhealth
and a further increase in the standard of living of our
citizens.
The death rate was the lowest ever recorded in the Borough
—9.1 deaths per thousand living persons. Hammersmith is
quoted by the Registrar General also for having a particularly
low suicide rate, comparable in fact with those places in England
which have least suicides of all. Only three were better than
Hammersmith and these were Wakefield, Cardiff and
Bermondsey.
We can congratulate ourselves also on the lowest number of
deaths from tuberculosis ever recorded—21 for the whole year
—and, furthermore, that now there has been no death from
diphtheria for ten years.
Standards of living depend substantially on standards of
housing. Both the County Council and the Borough Council
continue to provide new flats, mostly in the south of Hammersmith.
It is to such places that the Medical Officer of Health
and Sanitary Inspector rarely have to go. That speaks for itself.
It means that, on average, tenants of healthy homes have less
ill-health than those who live in doubtful accommodation.
The position of the elderly, however, continues to be an
unfavourable aspect of present-day times. Hospital accommodation
for them is virtually non-existent, and it would seem that
more and more confine themselves to one miserable room and
become, as it were, hermits and outcasts. As they mix less and
less with others, so do they retire more into themselves and so
their health declines. Much as the Council are doing for the
elderly in this Borough, much more remains to be done, and the
Council have no powers to proceed further. A local Doctor
quotes that a patient of his—a case of high blood pressure—who
was living alone and was falling "all over the place with giddiness"
was admitted to Hospital in November, urgent application
for admission having been made the previous May. He continues
"The plain fact is for the chronic sick the Hospitals are closed
to us."