It would appear, however, that only in exceptional instances was any systematic attempt made in 1892 to carry out the new duties imposed by the Legislature upon the Vestries and District Boards.
In several instances the Medical Officers of Health drew attention to the impossibility of undertaking workshop inspection with their existing staff. Thus the Medical Officer of Health of Hackney:—
“Inquiry has revealed the presence of something like 2,000 workshops and dwellings of outworkers which, under this Act and Order, should be inspected to ascertain the presence or otherwise of any insanitary condition. With the present staff it is impossible that this can be attempted.”
In St. Marylebone the Medical Officer of Health stated, in 1894, that the number of workshops and workplaces in his parish amounted to 3,550. And in 1895 he wrote: “The workplaces are so numerous in the parish that it is not practicable for them all to be inspected regularly with the present staff.”
“Increased duties,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Fulham in 1893, “having been placed on the sanitary staff by the ‘Factory and Workshop Act’ of 1891, relating to outworkers; but with the existing number of inspectors it is not possible to attend to them thoroughly, so that the Act in Fulham is almost ‘a dead letter.’”
“In Islington,” reported the Medical Officer of Health in 1895, “neither the factories nor workshops in the district, nor the smoke nuisances receive any attention worth mentioning, and so far as this district is concerned they may be said to have been entirely neglected.
“I look upon the inspection of factories and workshops as one of the greatest necessities of the present day, not only from a health point of view, but also from the social aspect.”
The manifest solution of this difficulty was the appointment of additional inspectors, but the local authorities had a sort of horror of such appointments, though by this time they must have known that the benefit to workers and to the community generally would have been very great.
A report in 1892 of the Medical Officer of Health of St. George-the-Martyr shows the grievous need there was for inspection of one very important class of workshop:—