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13
EDMONTON URBAN DISTRICT.
report
of the
Medical Officer of Health
For the YEAR 1918.
RECENT HISTORY.
The district was divided into three Wards—Church Street, Fore Street and
Bury Street—by an order of the Middlesex County Council in 1903, and is
controlled by an Urban District Council of 27 members, nine of whom should
retire annually. But the elections have been suspended during the war, since
the last one in April, 1915. To fill vacancies Messrs. Geo. Rowe, E. T. Rhymer
W. F. Middleton, and Mrs. Norman Benjafield, have been co-opted. It
is represented on the Middlesex County Council by three members: Councillors
Cornish, Green and Barrass.
The population is almost entirely industrial, and a large proportion of
the workers travel daily by train and tram to their employment in the City
and other parts of London. During the past three years there has been a
great rush to munition works, old and new, in this area; many of the workers
have taken houses or apartments in Edmonton so as to be near their work.
Therefore overcrowding is common.
The Representation of the People Act, 1918, made Edmonton a Parliamentary
borough with one member of its own, although the population of 1914 was
estimated to be a little less than 70,000, viz., 68,203 (excluding refugees and
military).
Mrs. Benjafield, our first and only woman Councillor, at the Annual
Meeting of the Council in April, was appointed to serve on the Public Health,
Housing and Town Planning and Maternity and Child Welfare Committees
The Countv Medical Officer's report for 1917 was received on December
13th, 1918.
The Middlesex Insurance Committee, in November, asked for
copies of Minutes and Reports of the Council's work; they also suggested that
in preparing statistics for 1919 the Council should keep record of the persons
dealt with, specifying whether they were (a) insured persons, (b) dependents