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10
administrative county of Essex whereas the Ilford Division of the St. John
Ambulance Brigade is in the London District which covers the Metropolitan
Police area. Perhaps this arrangement may reflect their differing
outlooks.
Another voluntary body, the British Medical Association, covers in
its local division East Ham, West Ham, Barking and Ilford, except for
Claybury Hospital. The statutory body that represents the interests of the
local doctors is the Local Medical Committee which, in spite of the adjective
local, covers the administrative county of Essex, i.e., excludes East
Ham and West Ham (and Southend); no arrangement seems officially to
take cognizance of the fact that co-operation should take place locally in
Ilford between the medical officer of health and the doctors.
The Ilford and Barking Hospital Management Committee, although it
has no official catchment area, has an administrative area which includes,
besides Ilford and Barking, part of Dagenham but excludes part of North
Ilford. Catchment areas and administration for mental deficiency hospitals
are quite different from those of general hospitals and mental hospitals;
none are related to local authority health areas, or local authority mental
health areas or general medical service areas (i.e., general practitioners).
People state you can prove anything by statistics, and so you can, if
you manipulate your statistics wrongly, or your source is incorrect; but not
otherwise. The Ministry of National Insurance by means of new claims
for sickness benefit can give useful information as to the course of a widespread
epidemic, such as influenza. For some time past they have been
helpful to many authorities in this matter and send us weekly returns
(7 to 14 days late, as the information must first go to Chelmsford in the
case of Essex). On the weekly return figures are listed for North and
South Ilford, and we have faithfully plotted these figures on a graph for
some time, imagining that they did refer to North and South Ilford. Since
this present investigation started, I have found out that although there are
three offices of the Ministry in Ilford. the figures for North Ilford include
part of Chigwell, South Ilford includes part of East Ham and Dagenham,
and part of South Ilford. i.e.. Goodmayes and Mayfield Wards, are not in
the Ilford statistics at all, but appear, with parts of Dagenham and
Barking, as Becontree.
The Ministry of Health are doubtless impressed with the statistics given
to them by the local health authority, i.e.. Essex, with respect to diphtheria
immunisation, but do they consider to what community, if any. the
statistics refer? Barking and Billericay are all there, in one big pudding,
although socially and economically they are oceans apart.
Comparisons of, say, the causes of death in different communities, by
age and sex, can be very helpful to medical officers of health and others.
However, as in Table 20 (and others) of the Registrar General's Statistical
Review of England and Wales (1951) we have these figures for metropolitan
boroughs and county boroughs and they are not given for other
communities, but only as urban and rural aggregates made for each county.
That is, we can compare East Ham with Finsbury, but not Ilford with
Harrow (each of the latter is much larger than each of the former and
quite as important).
There are many other functions that I have not mentioned, such as
Telephones, Gas, Transport (if local authorities had more say in London
Transport the allegations made in the House of Commons with respect to
lack of co-ordination in planning the Central London Line could not have
been made), Ministry of Pensions, that would make confusion worse confounded
in this administrative jungle. I would like to congratulate my
staff who have carried out the investigations from which these details are
derived. They have met co-operation, some indifference and a little
hostility, and a large amount of ignorance from officials who sometimes
seemed to think that it was an impertinence for Ilford to find out how
Ilford was managed. These details are the result of what can only be
termed a battle of wits, largely successful, but with some gaps that even
our utmost persistence has been unable to fill.