The Boyd Orr Survey of the Nutrition of Children in Great Britain 1937–9

Abstract

If the first great social question of interwar Britain was unemployment then the second, closely related, was poverty: how to define it, and where to draw the 'poverty line'. This was an intensely political issue. Moving the line five shillings up increased the numbers of people considered poor, heaped criticism on government and brought pressure for reform. Moving it five shillings the other way evidenced progress from the dark days of the late Victorians and made state benefits look bearable, if not generous. So the debate over the minimum income needed to maintain a family at a tolerable level of existence was fiercely fought. The emerging science of nutrition, which came of age during this same period, played an ever-larger part in the poverty debate, especially in the 1930s. Arguments within nutritional science over what represented a diet necessary to sustain a person in health fed back into the poverty line question. When the New Survey of London Life and Labour in 1929 revisited the great poverty survey of Charles Booth, who had published his first findings some forty years before, it concluded that the proportion of Londoners in poverty had fallen from 30.7% in Booth's day to just 6.6%. But that reassuring picture was quickly disturbed. In November 1933 the British Medical Association (BMA) published its own estimates of the nutritional needs of individuals and the minimum weekly expenditure needed to satisfy them. When this new component of the poverty line was worked back into the New Survey's findings, researchers concluded that 9.3% had an income insufficient for health, enlarging the numbers of Londoners in poverty by forty per cent.' So nutrition thrust the medical profession into prominence in the poverty debate. In general, they were pessimists, decrying the inadequacy of income to purchase a proper diet, especially in childhood, when poor nutrition constrained the life chances of the adult to come. They recognized, too, that poverty was not the only obstacle to healthy nutrition, and discovered that even families with comfortable incomes had an unsatisfactory diet through ignorance and tradition. And they were critical of their own colleagues, especially in the public service, who complacently characterized over ninety-five per cent of schoolchildren as having 'normal' nutrition, when 'normal' meant one thing in Hoxton, say, and something very different in