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??? ???
OF HACKNEY
ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT
S /P
L/C
2
METROPOLITAN BOROUGH OF ???
To the MAYOR, ALDERMEN and COUNCILLORS.
Sir, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The report of the Health Department for 1939 is late, is mainly statistical, and
is curtailed to the point where it ceases to have much value at all. It is in fact a mere
interim report in order to record only the fundamental facts of the work done.
Figures for the full report have been collected and are being preserved, the hope being
that after the war it will be possible (and it will certainly be desirable) to publish
a complete report reviewing the work of the previous years.
The staff of the department had been provisionally allocated to war-time duties
some months before hostilities actually commenced. Many variations have been
made since, but the principle has been to spread war-time duties over as many
of the staff as possible, thus easing to some extent the work done by any one individual.
In practice, after the initial period of evacuation and subsequent devacuation,
only four of the permanent staff were engaged full-time on civil defence work. These
were Mr. Jackson, Mr. Grant and Mr. Walker of the sanitary inspection staff who all
acted as first aid commandants, and Mr. Newbold of the dental hospital who acted
as a stretcher party depot superintendent. I have always avoided the practice of
thanking individuals in the annual report because immediately one mentions names,
other names spring forward in one's mind almost demanding similar recognition;
but I feel I ought to place on record my appreciation of the excellent work put in by
these four members. When it is realised that we suddenly had to take on some 450
extra staff, very few of whom had had any training before, to adapt premises, some
of them not very suitable, for first aid posts and stretcher party depots, to arrange
for the supervision and specialised training of these staff, to arrange equipment,
canteens, sleeping accommodation, transport and the like, it will be appreciated that
the work was very heavy indeed. Most of the clerical work was taken by the permanent
staff in their stride, and at the end of the year we still had only one whole-time
clerk on civil defence duties.
After a mere two or three days' closure of clinics on the outbreak of war—due
mainly to the rush of mothers with children asking for evacuation—clinics opened
again in skeleton form and quickly returned to almost the pre-war number. This
continued throughout the whole standby period which went on to the end of August,
1940, and in fact during the summer of 1940 (which period should more properly be
dealt with in the next annual report) we had actually increased some of the health
and the maternity and child welfare clinics above the pre-war figure. At the time of
writing, however (early October), the outlook is gloomy. It is impossible to have a
settled policy in these circumstances other than the hand-to-mouth policy of providing
the clinics as required by attendances. The hygienic outlook is as gloomy as the
administrative. The cold of winter, the possibility of raids lasting throughout blackout
hours, damp shelters, overcrowded shelters, the mental anxiety of war conditions,
all combine to give a hygienic nightmare. Most of these conditions are not without