The warTIme baTTle fOr brITaIn’s healTh
Forget bombs – the most dangerous enemies were air-raid shelter bugs, diseased child evacuees, a nation in shell shock and liberated women
hospitals with senile dementia his report reached “generally very positive conclusions”.
Another report, by the Mental Health Emergency Committee, was less sanguine however. According to Dawes: “Nearly a third of the residents of the bombed streets told the committee’s investigators they had anxiety symptoms, including heart flutters and stomach problems, depression and loss of appetite. Some even had classic hysterical or shell-shock symptoms.” She concludes, however, that the home front faced the bombing raids “with mental fortitude, by and large keeping calm and carrying on”.
While the country may have remained of sound mind, threats to the body were legion. Minister for health Malcolm MacDonald did not pull his punches in a wireless broadcast in 1940: “There seems a fair chance that the most potent threat to us in the months that lie immediately ahead will not be from the bomb and the parachute but from the bug and the parasite, not from marauding German airmen or troops but from influenza, diphtheria, fevers and other ailments which we can generally hold back in peacetime but which may sally forth like bandits… to harry and pillage and slay under the abnormal conditions of war.”
The main problem, he argued, would lie with disease running rampant in large communal air-raid shelters, which were overcrowded, insanitary and poorly ventilated. As there was an air-raid alert every 36 hours for five years this was a big problem.
Against the wishes of the authorities, London Underground stations became some of the most popular and safe shelters. Deep, quiet and warm they may have been but initially they didn’t have any lavatories as the platforms were far below the levels of the sewers. The problem was solved by installing “pail closets” – essentially buckets covered by seats in cubicles – and disposing of the waste in steel cylinders powered up to sewer level by bursts of compressed air.
Despite the health challenges the anticipated epidemics failed to materialise and many came to the conclusion that this was due to the fact that the two most vulnerable groups – children and the aged – were under-represented because so many of them had been evacuated to rural areas.
This policy had its perils of course. “City children lived in a microbial and viral soup that had been stewing for centuries,” writes Dawes. “Polio, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough – all childhood killers of the early 20th century before vaccination – were endemic in urban areas.”
Many feared that the thousands of children decanted to the countryside under Operation Pied Piper in 1939 would infect their new communities with this toxic array of diseases. Again, outbreaks did not occur on the scale predicted.
Some attributed it to the unusually “splendid autumn weather”. Others to the stop-go nature of the three phases of wartime evacuation that peaked and waned depending upon the intensity of urban bombing.
PERHAPS the most lasting change ushered in by the Second World War was the sexual revolution. As Dawes puts it: “Psychologists opined that increased sexual activity was a life-affirming response to the lifethreatening atmosphere of wartime. When high explosives were making the earth move, why not follow suit?” The Committee On Amenities And Welfare Conditions in the Three Women’s Services reported in September 1942 that “the reticences and inhibitions of the Victorian period have been swept away”. The consequences were only too obvious. The number of new cases of venereal disease – popularly known as ladies’ fever or Cupid’s measles – in that year was 9,000, double the pre-war figure. But the battle against VD was one of the government’s few failures. Given the successes of the medics it was somehow appropriate that it was from the buntingswagged balcony of the Ministry of Health that Churchill hailed the German surrender on May 8, 1945.
To Order Fighting Fit: The Wartime Battle For Britain’s Health by Laura Dawes (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99) call the Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 with your credit/debit card details. Alternatively send a cheque or postal order made payable to The Express Bookshop to: Fighting Fit Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth, Cornwall, TR11 4WJ or visit expressbookshop.com UK delivery is free