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94
By September, 1904, the School Board and the Council, as its successor, had
appointed 11 nurses whose duties specifically included the supervision of personal
hygiene of the children. The school nurses at that time worked under great
difficulties. There was then no explicit statutory sanction for dealing with conditions
of personal uncleanliness, and the nurses were compelled to carry out their duties
in face of much opposition from irate parents. As many as 50 or 60 indignant
parents attended on occasions at the schools to interview the nurse in the discharge
of her duties ; riots and assaults were not unknown and it is a tribute to the patience
and tact of nurses and teachers over a period of years that a very strict and comprehensive
scheme is now in operation with very little opposition from the parents of
London school children.
During this period there is no doubt that a great change has taken place in the
attitude of parents. Formerly looked on as almost an inevitable accompaniment
of indifferent home conditions and unsatisfactory cleansing arrangements at home,
the campaign has demonstrated that these conditions can be eradicated in many
cases if enough attention is given to the trouble. Further the children of those
early years are the parents of to-day and they have had brought to their notice
during their own school life the advantages and desirableness of endeavouring to
maintain a high standard of cleanliness. It is also probable that prevailing hair
fashions have made it somewhat easier to detect the trouble in its early stages. An
encrusted head is now never seen in the schools, a child with body lice but rarely,
and, although the nurses' examinations show that about 15 per cent. of the children
are still classed as "verminous," this figure is only obtained by including children
many of whom have a few nits only, and on whom no actual live vermin are seen.
(About two-thirds of the children now classed as verminous are noted as having
nits only.)
With the passing of the Council's General Powers Act, 1907, and the Children
Act, 1908, the Council was given powers to arrange for the compulsory cleansing,
under certain conditions, of verminous school children. Previous to the passing of
these Acts, and subsequent to 1904, the Council had sought, and obtained, the cooperation
of several of the borough councils in the direction of cleansing the bodies
and clothing of verminous children. These arrangements were, however, on a
voluntary basis and invited the parents to avail themselves, free of charge, of the
facilities for bathing and disinfestation provided by the borough councils at their
stations which had been erected under the Cleansing of Persons Act, 1897. The
Council in 1910 itself established and equipped three cleansing centres and it was at
these three stations that arrangements were made for the compulsory cleansing of
children in accordance with the powers conferred on the Council by the Children
Act. These arrangements were later extended by agreement with the various
borough councils, so that by the year 1911 a fairly comprehensive scheme was in
operation for practically the whole of London. In the case of the three Council
stations referred to above, the influence was restricted to schools in the vicinity,
but the inclusion of the borough centres in the "compulsory" part of the scheme
rendered it possible to frame a scheme whereby practically every school was
systematically inspected and brought into touch with a remedial centre.
These arrangements remain substantially as they were in 1911; alterations have
from time to time been made in the agreements with the boroughs (more particularly
in the direction of enlarging the stations) and, as occasions demanded, the Council
itself established more centres to deal with those districts where there was pressure
or a gap in the borough scheme. In the earlier years it was necessary to build up
a scheme whereby verminous bodies and clothes could be dealt with at the same time
as verminous heads, but it became evident that children with verminous bodies
and clothing were being eliminated, following in the wake of the class of child with
encrusted heads. In order better to deal with the cases where infestation was