A special guest post by Philip Grant
In recent months, vaccines have been in the news –
both the quest for a vaccine to protect against Covid-19, and the threat to the
fight against common diseases across the world caused by the pandemic’s
disruption of vaccination programmes. The news sometimes reminds me about
stories from local history that may not be well known, and this is one of them.
Some readers may find parts of this article upsetting, but I hope the
information in it will help your understanding of issues around science and health.
Smallpox was an infectious disease of humans, which
had existed since prehistoric times. Caused by a virus, it killed up to 30% of
people who caught it, and left those who survived badly scarred and often
blinded. It is estimated to have killed around 400,000 people across Europe
every year in the 18th century. At the time, it was usual for
scientists to give discoveries names derived from the Latin language. Vaccine
comes from the Latin word Vacca, a cow.
1. A milkmaid at work, in the 1890s. (From an old book of pre-WW1 country
photographs)
Edward Jenner was a doctor in Gloucestershire, who
realised a rumour, that milkmaids who had caught cowpox did not get smallpox,
was not just an “old wives’ tale”. He experimented in 1796, by giving pus from
a cowpox blister to an 8-year old boy, then exposing him to smallpox. The boy
was immune to the more serious disease. Further tests of this method also
proved successful, and vaccination was born. Many were horrified by the practice
and opposed it, as this satirical cartoon from 1802 (supposedly published by
the Anti-Vaccine Society) illustrates.
2. A cartoon, lampooning Edward Jenner's inoculations,
and their imagined results! (From the internet)
Moving on a century, Sudbury was a small village
with a number of farms. Some of these had become dairy farms during Victorian times, but one small farm,
Poplars, was to have a different use. The British Institute for Preventive
Medicine had been set up as a charity in 1891, and its first laboratory was in
Great Russell Street. German medical researchers, the previous year, had found
that antibodies to fight human diseases could be made by infecting guinea pigs.
To produce these in quantity required larger animals, and by 1894 the Institute
had bought Poplars Farm, quite easily reached by train from Euston, to Sudbury
and Wembley Station.
3. A postcard view of the centre of Sudbury
village, c.1900. (Brent Archives
online image 10831)
The Institute undertook scientific research into
the causes, prevention and treatment of disease (like that set up by Louis
Pasteur in Paris, in 1887), and produced vaccines and antitoxins to help
prevent or cure diseases. In Sudbury, they kept healthy horses in the fields,
which were infected with disease bacteria. As their bodies produced the antibody
serum, it was drained from them. The horses were put down when they became
unwell from the infection. Tom the pony (pictured below) was used in this way
to help produce Britain's
first diphtheria anti-toxin.
4. Tom the pony, at Poplars Farm, and a vial
of diphtheria anti-toxin, c.1895. (Images from the internet)
Diphtheria was once a common contagious
disease, which particularly affected the young, and could be fatal. When
Willesden’s Medical Officer reported ‘a most decided improvement in the
matter of Infant Mortality’ in 1887 (only 55.2% of total deaths in the
district had been infants aged 0-5, compared to 62.5% the previous year!),
measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever and diphtheria had been significant
causes of death. Alfred Salter was a bacteriologist who worked at Poplars Farm
in the 1890s, and wrote a paper for “The Lancet” on the diphtheria antitoxin.
Salter had been a brilliant young
medical student at Guy’s Hospital, and had to defend the work that he did for
the Institute (renamed the Jenner Institute for Preventive Medicine in 1898).
It’s activities at Sudbury brought protests from the National Anti-Vivisection
Society, but his response was that thousands of human lives were saved through
the use of their anti-toxins, and that the horses were put out of their misery
quickly once symptoms developed.
Although this is an “aside” from my
main theme, Alfred Salter left the Institute after he got
married in 1900. He set up a medical practice in Bermondsey, and worked with
his wife to fight against poverty and poor living conditions in that area. He
served as a Labour M.P. for West Bermondsey between 1922 and 1945, and his
wife, Ada, became the first woman Mayor in
London, actively using her role to promote green socialist policies in their
borough.
5. The site of Poplars Farm, on an extract
from George H. Ward’s map of Wembley, 1908. (Brent Archives)
The work of the Institute continued in Sudbury,
including the production of the first anti-rabies vaccine, but change was
coming to the area. The District Railway (now Piccadilly Line) opened in 1903,
and the Great Central Railway began building a branch line that would run
through the Poplars Farm fields. In 1903, the Institute moved to a different
farm, in Elstree, where it was renamed the Lister Institute for Preventive
Medicine, after one of its founders, Dr Joseph Lister. The land and its main
house, The Poplars, was sold.
6. The Poplars, with a "For Sale"
sign outside it, c.1904. (Brent
Archives online image 528)
Now, I have to correct the normally reliable local
history book, “A History of Wembley” (written by Wembley History Society
members, and published by Brent Libraries in 1979)! It says that the house was ‘once
used by Dr Martin, a vivisectionist, and the home of the Epizootic Abortion
Committee.’ Dr Charles Martin was appointed Director of the Institute in
1903, so would have been involved in selling Poplars Farm. There were probably
reports in the “Harrow Observer” of anti-vivisection protests then (during lockdown,
I can’t check that), but there is no evidence that Dr Martin was a
vivisectionist. He may have been a member of the Government’s Board of
Agriculture committee, which investigated the tick-borne cattle disease of that
name!
The Poplars was bought by Edwin Butler, who had a
small shop and sub-post office near “The Swan”. He converted the ground floor
of the house into “Butler’s Emporium”, and lived on the first floor above it.
He served as a Wembley councillor for 40 years, representing Sudbury. In 1920
he campaigned for the Council to buy the last remaining part of the old Sudbury
Common for public recreation. When Wembley became a borough in 1937, he served
as its first Mayor, and after his death in 1945, the open space he helped to
save was named Butler’s Green.
7. Edwin Butler, proudly wearing his regalia
as Charter Mayor of Wembley, 1937. (Brent Archives no. 7653)
By 1911, new shops had been built on either side of
The Poplars, as part of a parade called Canterbury Place. If you compare the
photo of The Poplars above with the one below, taken in 2015, you can still
identify the upstairs windows and chimneys of the original farmhouse! This is
one of many pairs of images from the “Sudbury – Then and Now” project, which you can still see online, to
discover more about the local history of this part of Brent.
8. What was The Poplars, but by 2015 the
Sudbury Supermarket, and a hairdressers, with a flat above.
Although the Institute was producing the diphtheria
anti-toxin from the 1890s onwards, medicine would be mainly “private” in this
country for another 50 years. When Kingsbury (popn. c.800) U.D.C.’s Medical
Officer made his report for the last quarter of 1902, there had only been one
infectious disease case. A child, Samuel Noad, had died of diphtheria at
“Poplars”, a house that was part of a cluster of buildings at Blackbird Farm.
Luckily, as ‘every precaution as regards disinfection of all articles and
room was taken, … no further case has occurred.’
9. The families of Thomas Noad and his
brother, in the garden of "Poplars", Blackbird Farm, c.1898.
By chance, a photograph of the Noad family in the
late 1890s was shared with me a few years ago. Although I don’t know the names
of everyone shown, Thomas Noad, the farmer, is the man standing in the centre,
with his wife, and youngest child Gertrude, in front of him. His younger
brother, who lived at “Poplars”, is on Thomas’s left. It may be his wife,
sitting with their baby (quite possibly Samuel). Every sudden death from
disease has its own tragic story.
When Kingsbury merged with Wembley in 1934, the newly
combined Council brought in a scheme for immunising people against diphtheria,
free of charge to the patient. There was still no immunisation at this time
against measles, chicken-pox or whooping cough, which were all prevalent among
children at local schools. Then, in 1941, Britain’s wartime government
introduced free immunisation against diphtheria for everyone.
10. A boy being immunised, and a poster for a
diphtheria immunisation programme. (From the internet.)
I was a
post-war baby, born after the N.H.S. was set up in 1948. The note of my medical
history, that my Mum gave me when I first left home, shows that I had
injections against diphtheria, whooping cough and smallpox when I was a baby,
with boosters for the first two before I started school in 1954. It also shows
that I caught measles and chicken-pox in 1952/53 (after my older sister started
school) and mumps in 1955! There were no vaccinations against those then.
After
global efforts, co-ordinated by the World Health Organisation, smallpox has
been eradicated, with the last reported case in 1977. Similar efforts have
reduced diphtheria to just 4,500 reported cases worldwide in 2015, although
2,100 of those were fatal, mainly in children. While we wait for a vaccine that
can have the same effect against Covid-19, I hope that this look at vaccines
and health, through local history, has given you some food for thought.
This is
my last “local history in lockdown” story for a while, but a new series, by a
friend from Willesden Local History Society, will begin next weekend. Please
join her, to find out which area from the south of the borough you can discover
more about!
Philip Grant.
Thank you Philip. Your lockdown local histories have been very popular and I am sure have led many people to take more of an interest in the area in which they live. I look forward to publishing many more of your well-researched and informative articles in the future.
Martin Francis
