Vital workers who led the war on waste

Binmen and women play a vital but often overlooked role in society. Chris Burn looks at how the profession has changed.

THE CORONAVIRUS crisis has led to a new-found appreciation of the importance to society of all sorts of different professions; not least our refuse collectors who have ensured that bins have been emptied despite the immense challenges caused by the pandemic.

The organised collection of rubbish from streets dates back to late 18th century London, but from the mid-19th century the system became more formalised following increasingly devastating cholera outbreaks leading to a push for formal legislation.

The Public Health Act 1875 finally made it compulsory for every household to deposit their weekly waste in ‘‘moveable receptacles’’ for disposal – the first concept for a dust-bin.

Collecting the bins was and remains a male-dominated profession but as one of these pictures illustrates, during the Second World War some of the UK’s first dustwomen were employed, given many men were away at war.

The job changed as supermarkets and consumerism led to a throwaway culture that greatly increased the amount of waste each household was producing and in 1968, the modern plastic wheelie-bin was invented in Slough.

However, it did not gain widespread usage until the late 1980s as refuse collection lorries with automatic mechanisms to pick up and empty the bins were introduced.

In between that time, not all was happy with a strike by waste collectors in early 1979 as part of wider public sector trade union action demanding larger pay rises one of the most remembered parts of the socalled Winter of Discontent as rubbish piled up in the streets. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that dispute, we can all be thankful that such scenes have not been repeated so far in the age of the coronavirus lockdown.

PICTURES: CENTRAL PRESS/FOX PHOTOSKEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES. PICTURE: FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES. GONE TO WASTE: From top, Mr. Jim Whitehead,62, a Leeds dustman in September 1970; a group of London dustmen wearing tail coats, top and bowler hats, and even a bow tie, which they found discarded in Hounslow in May 1958: a dustman at work filling his dustcart in Wembley, London, as well as taking part in the housewives’ salvage scheme; a pedestrian walks to work amid piles of rubbish during a strike by council dustmen in 1970. STREET STYLE: A group of four Islington dustmen walk down the road wearing their new smocks in September 1930.

PICTURE: CENTRAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGES. IRON LADY: Margaret Roberts, later to be better known as Margaret Thatcher, Conservative candidate for Dartford, Kent and youngest woman candidate in the election, talking to dustmen during her election campaign.

PICTURES: KEYSTONE /TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES. BIN AND GONE: Wandsworth Borough Council dustmen about to get a lift home on one of their lorries during a strike by bus and tram workers in 1921; one of the first dustwomen in Britain in Ilford, England, during the Second World War in 1941.