Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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county rate, but this was an optional procedure and dependent upon privy
council approval. Not all towns were municipal boroughs, but those that were
varied enormously in size. Consequently, national legislation for most of the
nineteenth century could not necessarily be devolved upon municipal boroughs,
in the way that it would be entrusted to county boroughs after . Instead,
legislation designed to tackle particular social needs spawned various ad hoc local
authorities: guardian boards under the Poor Law Amendment Act (in
Scotland parish boards of management under legislation of ), school boards
under the Education Act ( in Scotland). To complicate matters further,
the Public Health Act allowed communities to petition for the formation
of a local board of health, though boroughs already incorporated could also
adopt the act. Scotland saw the progressive extension of the right to adopt the
general municipal powers – including sanitary powers – previously conferred
upon individual towns by local Police Acts, to royal burghs in , burghs of
barony in , places with , inhabitants in and with inhabitants
in .
7
Most of these ad hoc local bodies had ad hoc central authorities to watch
over them: the Poor Law Board in England and Wales (the Board of Supervision
in Scotland), the Education Board in England and Wales and the Scottish
Education Department in Scotland and, initially, the General Board of Health
in England and Wales. Some established departments also supervised specific
local authority functions, most obviously the Home Office in its regulation of
police forces and the Board of Trade in authorising municipal gas, water, light-
ing and tramway operations.
8
To recite this catalogue (which would be still more complex if extended to
cover county administration, particularly in Scotland) is to advertise the danger
inherent in any generalisation about Victorian central–local relations. Different
departments, different local authorities, different types of local authority differed
in their attitudes and priorities. The Scottish system differed from the English
one. Some patterns none the less stand out. First it is clear that though bound
by statute, Victorian local authorities enjoyed in practice considerable freedom
to indulge in municipal experiments, as Webb’s fable shows. Much was achieved,
as John Prest has recently shown, by means of private local acts, particularly after
procedure was made cheaper and easier by the Clauses Consolidation Acts of the
s,
9
but central government also actively encouraged local enterprise by pro-
moting permissive acts, notably the housing legislation of and the two
measures emanating from the Board of Trade which allowed municipalities to
buy up private tramways () and electricity undertakings ( and ) on
John Davis
7
G. S. Pryde, Central and Local Government in Scotland since (Historical Association Pamphlet
no. , London, ), p. ; cf. the useful historical survey of central administration ‘Scottish
administration’ compiled in the Scottish Office in : Scottish Record Office, HH /.
8
Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , pp. –.
9
J. Prest, Liberty and Locality (Oxford, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
terms so advantageous that they were held to have discouraged private invest-
ment.
10
The modern observer is struck by how little concern is expressed by the
central state, at least until the s, at the rapid expansion of the local sphere.
It is true that parliament, at the behest of some public utility companies, included
in the Borough Funds Act a clause making municipal promotion of private
bills dependent upon the prior approval of a meeting of owners and ratepayers
– an irksome constraint but one which did not greatly inhibit local enterprise.
11
It is also true that the Treasury worried that the growth of local borrowing might
imperil national credit. This was why the Local Government Board (LGB) was
empowered to approve local authority loans,
12
but this power was clearly not used
so stringently as to choke off local borrowing, which increased almost fivefold in
the last quarter of the century.
13
It is also clear that central government was not
especially anxious to goad local bodies into developing prestige projects like street
improvements, town halls or public libraries, or into municipalising public utility
services which would otherwise be provided privately. ‘Gas and water socialism’
was still considered a local option, as it would not be after .
What was not considered optional was the maintenance of minimum stan-
dards in those services which had been the subject of national legislation, and in
which wide variations in the quality of local services were intrinsically undesir-
able. This was where central–local friction was most likely to arise in the
Victorian period. The potential for conflict was accentuated by the functional
division of the central agencies: the ad hoc central agencies were, of course, par-
ticularly preoccupied with the quality of local provision of their particular ser-
vices, but the Home Office was no more likely to look benignly upon an
inefficient borough police force. National legislation concerning education, san-
itation or police had been passed because wide local disparities in these services
were considered intolerable. Though the Public Health Act was so framed
as to encourage local initiative, and spawned a variety of local authorities, its core
principle – that there was ‘no prescriptive right to be dirty’
14
– applied to all of
them. Whatever the educative value of local self-government, the authorities
themselves accepted that ‘a town cannot be allowed to learn by experience the
Central government and the towns
10
H. Finer, Municipal Trading (London, ), pp. –, –.
11
For this episode see the memorandum in PRO HO// ( and ), also C. Bellamy,
Administering Central–Local Relations, – (Manchester, ), p. . The act was &
Vict. c. .
12
Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , pp. –; Bellamy, Administering Central–Local Relations,
p. .
13
Total local authority indebtedness (England and Wales) rose from £. million in – to
£. million in –. Within this total town council indebtedness rose much more rapidly,
from £.m to £.m: PP – , Return Showing the Total Amount of the
Outstanding Balances of the Loans of Local Authorities. LGB approval was not necessary for loans
raised under the provisions of private acts.
14
PP – , First Report of the Royal Sanitary Commission, Q (E. H. Pember).
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results of pleuro-pneumonia or smallpox’,
15
and contagious disease had no
respect for local authority boundaries, as Victorian sanitary reformers never tired
of pointing out. Likewise the public elementary education system had been
created in to fill gaps in the voluntary network; once created, the greater
financial strength of the board schools underlined the deficiencies of the volun-
tary schools, leading to their transfer to a form of local authority control in .
The aim of central government in the Victorian period was not so much to
bully local authorities into conforming with centrally prescribed policies as to
ensure the observance of minimum standards in what were seen as national ser-
vices at a time of otherwise undirected municipal expansion. This might involve
the coercion of penny-pinching authorities, but over the course of the century
‘bumbledom’ became less of a menace. By Redlich believed that a recalci-
trant police committee was less likely than an apathetic Home Office.
16
The main
problems were less obvious: that an authority exercising public health powers
under a local act might consider them discretionary – ‘powers to be used or laid
aside at the pleasure of the Authority on whose petition they were granted rather
than . . . accompanied by a duty to put them in force’
17
– or that the expense of
prestige projects might lead an authority to skimp on basic services.
18
Whatever shortcomings they uncovered, central agencies had to be aware that
the local bodies concerned were almost always elective, deriving a legitimacy
from their election that could not be claimed by a quango like the Poor Law
Board. This consideration worked to discredit the model of central control pre-
scribed by Edwin Chadwick for the Poor Law Board (PLB) and later the General
Board of Health. Founded on Benthamite suspicion of the motives and compe-
tence of local government, the poor law system rested upon a statutory
code of ‘astonishing definiteness’,
19
augmented by similarly minute central
Orders and enforced by an active inspectorate. Redlich believed that their aware-
ness of the Board’s powers induced local guardians to seek its advice and follow
it rather than risk provoking peremptory ordinances,
20
though one suspects that
the relative absence of central–local conflict in nineteenth-century poor law
administration owed something to shared attitudes at both levels. The Local
Government Board, successor to the PLB, found much local support for its
crusade against outdoor relief in ,
21
while both central and local agencies
followed public opinion in humanising the poor law from the s.
John Davis
15
E. Jenks, ‘Central and local government (concluding article)’, Local Government Review, (Feb.
), .
16
Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , p. .
17
PP , Second Report of the Sanitary Commission, p. .
18
R. G. Hetherington, the inspector appointed by the Local Government Board to review the
Leeds and Bradford extension applications in , considered that ‘Bradford had devoted more
attention to the more showy elements of City administration while Leeds had struck deeper at
the root causes of unsatisfactory conditions’: report in PRO HLG /.
19
Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , p. .
20
Ibid., p. .
21
K. Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty (London, ), pp. –.
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Attempts to implement the Chadwickian model in public health administra-
tion would, though, produce a local furore and an eventual central climb-down
that had lasting effects. The General Board of Health, created by the Public
Health Act, arrived as a prescriptive and rather bossy central body in an area where
central coercion was probably less necessary than the sanitary lobby claimed.
Several towns had secured sanitary powers by private act before , while rate-
payers in around towns and districts would petition under the and suc-
cessor acts to establish local Boards of Health by .
22
They may have been
induced to do so by knowledge of the reserve powers possessed by the General
Board,
23
but it is significant that in Scotland, spared the General Board of Health,
24
local voluntarism worked in much the same way, inducing communities to adopt
the general municipal powers conferred by the Police Acts under the general stat-
utes of and . The prospect of ‘sewage boiling up from inadequate
sewers’
25
usually provided incentive enough to adopt the acts and the rating
powers that came with them. In any event the General Board had few admirers
in a parliament already sensitive to state dirigisme and it was blown away in .
26
The lessons of this episode proved enduring. Central government conspicu-
ously avoided entanglement in the education question once the act had
regulated the terms of sectarian conflict. The Education Department was
capable of enormously fastidious regulation of such uncontentious issues as class-
room dimensions and even the colour of the ink used by examiners,
27
but steered
clear of disputes with school boards over sectarian questions, potentially more
explosive even than public health. It was happy that the electoral system for
school boards ensured the local representation of religious minorities, shifting
‘the conflict from Whitehall to the various board offices throughout the
country’, and its spokesmen before the Cross Commission in called for
further devolution.
28
As a result it was largely reactive in its dealings with local
authorities,
29
a feature considered a weakness by educational reformers at the
turn of the century.
Central government and the towns
22
PP – , First Report of the Royal Sanitary Commission, Q (Trench). It should be
admitted that some parishes adopted these powers ‘although they had no intention in fact of ever
building a sewer or providing a drain’, in order to protect themselves from amalgamation by the
county justices into highway districts under the Highways Act: V. D. Lipman, Local
Government Areas, – (Oxford, ), pp. –.
23
To impose the act in areas where the death rate exceeded twenty-three per thousand: &
Vict. c. , s. .
24
Scotland had no central health authority before the establishment of the Local Government Board
for Scotland in .
25
F. McKichan, ‘A burgh’s response to the problems of urban growth: Stirling, –’, SHR,
(), .
26
S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London, ), pp. –.
27
G. Sutherland, Policy-Making in Elementary Education, – (Oxford, ), p. . The
Education Department was replaced by the Board of Education in .
28
E. Lyulph Stanley, quoted ibid., p. .
29
Ibid., p. .
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This combination of detailed intrusiveness and strategic weakness was still
more characteristic of the Local Government Board, created in . The LGB
represented the first attempt to rationalise central administration of local govern-
ment – the first step away from ad hockery – by combining poor law and public
health supervision in one department. In theory it did so by extending the poor
law system to public health, turning the poor law inspectors into general inspec-
tors, and the creation of the LGB was shortly followed by the overhaul of sani-
tary law to reach a state of ‘formal perfection’
30
in the Public Health Act of .
But the Royal Sanitary Commission, whose report provided the blueprint
for the LGB, had steered well clear of ‘the rock on which the General Board of
Health was wrecked’.
31
The purpose of the reform was ‘not to centralize admin-
istration, but on the contrary to set local life in motion’, recognising that there
were ‘limits to the power of any Central Authority to remedy the evils produced
by local inefficiency’.
32
The central body should exercise default powers only
when an authority showed persistent neglect, and then through financial penal-
ties, in the hope that the ratepayers would be induced to elect more diligent rep-
resentatives in future.
33
In practice limited docking of grants-in-aid would mean
little to the larger boroughs.
34
Much the same applied to the poor law, where
the LGB ‘was rarely a force for change in the late nineteenth century’,
35
apply-
ing the elaborate poor law code in detail, but only rarely offering strategic direc-
tion to the local bodies.
There thus emerged that hybrid form of central control that characterised the
late nineteenth century: highly detailed statutory codes applied with a light hand.
Operating a mountain of statutes and empowered to issue provisional orders in
several areas, the Local Government Board’s ability actually to get things done
remained limited. The danger that its processes would become congested by
detail, dismissed by the Sanitary Commission in ,
36
had become real enough
to warrant a departmental inquiry by .
37
By the s, when the assistant
secretary of the LGB’s successor, the Ministry of Health, defended his depart-
ment’s right to oversee local regulation of such details as pleasure boat charges
and hackney carriage fares before the Royal Commission on Local
Government,
38
such fussiness had become part ofoffice culture, but its real value
John Davis
30
Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , p. .
31
PP , Second Report of the Sanitary Commission, pp. –.
32
Ibid., pp. , .
33
Ibid., pp. , .
34
Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , p. .
35
M. A. Crowther, The Workhouse System, – (London, ), p. .
36
‘This is rather a question of the extent of staff than of principle’: PP , Second Report
of the Sanitary Commission, p. .
37
PP , First and Second Reports of the Local Government Board Inquiry Committee;
Bellamy, Administering Central–Local Relations, pp. –.
38
Evidence of I. G. Gibbon, assistant secretary to the Ministry of Health, before the Royal
Commission on Local Government, minutes of evidence, part , Apr. , Q. .
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remains unclear. It is hard to doubt that such preoccupations limited the LGB’s
ability to act in a strategic manner. Even its more meaningful powers – the right
to audit local authority accounts (excepting municipal corporations, whose audi-
tors were popularly elected), to approve by-laws and to sanction local authority
loans – were reactive rather than directive. ‘The Local Government Board is
emphatically not a motor engine’, Redlich observed, contrasting it with what he
believed to be the business-like operations of English provincial corporations.
39
Not the least of its problems was that of having to deal directly with an enor-
mous number of local authorities. The Royal Sanitary Commission had consid-
ered witness suggestions that intermediate bodies be created at county level to
relieve the Board of much administrative detail, but had determined that ‘direct
communication between the Central and Local Authorities will keep up system-
atic administration better than an Intermediate central power in every county’.
40
The creation of the county councils in was in part an acknowledgement
that this view had been misguided. Many motives lay behind the decision of
Lord Salisbury’s Conservative administration to democratise county government
– most obviously the need to prove to the party’s new Whig allies that
Conservatives could pass reformist legislation and the need to legitimise the
intended increases in rate support for rural ratepayers
41
– but it is clear that once
the decision had been taken to proceed with county legislation, the Salisbury
government wished to create county authorities which could act as the primary
units of local government. C. T. Ritchie, the responsible minister as president of
the Local Government Board, envisaged the county council as ‘a great engine
of reform’.
42
It was intended both to take up some of the direct administrative
duties of central government departments and to oversee the performance of
secondary authorities within its area.
The bill as introduced would have created a uniform two-tier system across
England and Wales, broken only by the ten largest provincial towns and cities,
whose borough councils were given full county powers in their own right and
classified as ‘county boroughs’. It made administrative sense but was weakened by
two political flaws. In the first place it was too large to pass intact in one session.
By the s central government no longer faced a bloc of unpredictable inde-
pendent backbenchers, but the urgency of the parliamentary process still gave
considerable blocking power to opponents of specific provisions in a large bill.
Central government was probably less beholden to parliament than Redlich’s
analysis implied, but it still faced substantial parliamentary obstacles to any major
structural reform of local government. In the event it proved necessary to jettison
Central government and the towns
39
Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , pp. , .
40
PP , Second Report of the Sanitary Commission, p. .
41
J. P. D. Dunbabin, ‘The politics of the establishment of county councils’, HJ, (), .
42
Quoted by Lipman, Local Government Areas, p. .
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proposals for second-tier district councils and the projected devolution of powers
from central departments.
43
The second flaw lay in its insouciant disregard of tension between urban and
rural communities.
44
The distinction between urban and rural local authorities
had been evident in law and practice since the reform of municipal corpora-
tions in ; the Boundary Commission appointed after the Municipal
Corporations Act stressed the need separately to delineate town and country,
45
and much Victorian political rhetoric was devoted to emphasising the social and
political differences between them. Strong as the administrative case was for
creating a supervisory tier at county level, as proposed in it implied an
unwelcome degree of shire interference in urban affairs. This is shown most
clearly by the ill-fated devolution proposals. Although many of the powers con-
cerned were trivial – reminders of how bureaucratic the Victorian minimal state
could be
46
– others touched the central pillars of urban municipal enterprise.
The counties would have acquired from the Board of Trade regulatory powers
under the gas and waterworks legislation, the Tramways Act and the Electric
Lighting Act, and from the Local Government Board powers under the Baths
and Washhouses Act and the (Torrens) Artizans’ Dwellings Act, along with
default powers over sanitary authorities.
47
Even when the devolution schedule
was dropped, the counties retained some default powers, along with the power
to lend to second-tier authorities and to approve boundary changes. Above all
the boroughs – excepting the ten projected county boroughs – would remain
subject to the county rate. None of this was very tactful. The sharp separation
of urban and rural authorities was probably undesirable in any case, but if it was
necessary to pick sides it would have made more sense to link the larger towns
to their rural hinterlands than to force them back into their historic counties.
This was, though, a Tory measure designed to relieve rural ratepayers, and it
would have been inconsistent to subject large numbers of them to the higher
rating levels of the towns. The result was an inelegant scramble by borough MPs
to secure county borough status for their towns as the bill passed through the
John Davis
43
All that remained of the devolution proposals was an indeterminate and discretionary power for
the LGB to transfer functions from itself and other government departments to the counties and
county boroughs by Provisional Order. This power was apparently never used, remaining ‘no
more than a theoretical acknowledgment by Parliament that central control over local govern-
ment stands in need of decentralisation’ – Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , pp. –.
44
Douglas Ashford speaks not of insouciance but of a more culpable concern ‘with projecting the
dogma of town versus country into the twentieth century [rather] than with strengthening local
democracy’, D. E. Ashford, British Dogmatism and French Pragmatism (London, ), p. .
45
Lipman, Local Government Areas, pp. –.
46
E.g. ‘power to appoint officer to determine the question as to sufficiency of bridge to sustain loco-
motive’ under the Locomotive Act, and ‘power to revoke sanction by sanitary authority of
use of steam whistle or steam trumpet in a manufactory’ under the Factories (Steam
Whistles) Act, both powers enjoyed by the LGB: PP , Local Government (England and
Wales) Bill, First Schedule.
47
Ibid.
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Commons, which ended with sixty-one towns and cities being lifted out of the
county network.
48
The consequences of these parliamentary retreats would be enormous. In the
first place the LGB was denied the chance to lighten its load.
49
Secondly, the act
introduced a form of apartheid into urban government, by which the boroughs
satisfying the , qualifying population requirement for county borough
status (along with a clutch of cathedral cities given this status for elusive histor-
ical reasons) retained full powers of self-government, while other municipal bor-
oughs were subject to their county councils. Thirdly, the local government map
was frozen in a rather anomalous state. The piecemeal admission of towns to the
county borough schedule during the Commons committee stage meant that a
county borough was inevitably defined by its existing municipal boundaries
(often set down in the s) regardless of the town’s connections with its rural
hinterland and its potential for future expansion. The problems thus created
would bedevil twentieth-century attempts to widen the scope of local govern-
ment, and did much to make the expansion of the central state probable.
In retrospect this was important because represented the last occasion on
which central government actively pursued decentralisation for its own sake. The
idea that decentralisation could provide a hedge against radical statism had
appealed to many of those on the Liberal right who had defected from the
Gladstonian party in the mid-s.
50
It became one of Salisbury’s hobby-
horses.
51
The financial settlement which accompanied the act was intended to
give the local authorities an independent source of income – in the form of a
share of the revenue from excise licences and probate duties – which was rela-
tively safe from parliamentary erosion.
52
Subsequently, though, although the
central state did much to empower local government, its purpose was generally
to enlist local bodies to implement central policies. The democratisation of
national politics drew central government to concern itself more with social
policy, which generally required detailed administration at the local level. The
resource disparities within Ritchie’s first tier necessitated increasing levels of
central subsidy to get the work done. The choice between public services and
economy in administration became prominent in both national and local politics,
encouraging the use of national party labels in local politics. The party politicisa-
tion
of local government gave, in turn, an extra edge to central–local relations.
Central government and the towns
48
Waller, Town, p. ; for more details of the ‘scramble’see Lipman, Local Government Areas, pp. –.
49
Though Redlich suggested in that ‘the transference of even the smallest power to a County
Council is regarded with the utmost jealousy, however overloaded the central department may
be’, Redlich and Hirst, Local Government, , p. .
50
See, e.g., Goschen’s Edinburgh address of on ‘Laissez faire and government interference’
cited in T. A. Jenkins, Gladstone,Whiggery and the Liberal Party, – (Oxford, ), p. .
51
R. A. Shannon, The Age of Salisbury, – (London, ), p. .
52
G. C. Baugh, ‘Government grants in aid of the rates in England and Wales, –’, Bull.
IHR, (), .
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For all the book’s progressive tone, the municipal nirvana represented in
Webb’s Socialism in England is best seen as the high point of Victorian local auton-
omy. His imaginary local authority was clearly well resourced, but local auton-
omy implied varying levels of provision overall. For many small or medium-sized
authorities the financial and legal obstacles to effective sanitary provision were
enormous,
53
and could not be diminished merely by central chivying. Another
influential book published in , Sir John Simon’s English Sanitary Institutions,
illuminated the considerable shortcomings in public health administration half a
century after Chadwick’s Sanitary Report, providing telling evidence of the
failure to guarantee minimum standards in basic services.
54
Twentieth-century
governments would be less tolerant of local underperformance. Moreover, their
definition of an acceptable minimum would tend to rise, as would the number
of services to which it was applied. Under these circumstances the protection of
local autonomy would become more difficult.
(iii) ‘ ’
The weaknesses of the first tier did not deter governments after from con-
ferring powers and duties upon it,
55
and the financial autonomy envisaged in
was undermined almost from the start by the proliferation of new percent-
age grants intended to encourage the adoption of permissive powers.
56
It was
probably only the unambitious attitude of the Salisbury governments towards
domestic policy which concealed the shortcomings of the system in its first
decade. The Conservatives were, though, moved by an ideological eagerness to
confer education powers upon the counties and county boroughs, in order to
legitimise rate subsidies for the voluntary elementary schools and to prevent the
further aggrandisement of the school boards, many of which had been colon-
ised, in the Tory view, by nonconformist educational faddists. The counties and
county boroughs became recipients of the ‘whisky money’ which they were
empowered to spend on technical education.
57
In they were authorised to
John Davis
53
C. Hamlin, ‘Muddling in bumbledom: on the enormity of large sanitary improvements in four
British towns, –’, Victorian Studies, (–), –.
54
Sir J. Simon, English Sanitary Institutions, Reviewed in their Course of Development, and in Some of their
Political and Social Relations (London, ), pp. –, –, –, etc., though Simon did
acknowledge signs of recent improvement.
55
Parliament conferred twenty new powers upon the first tier in the ten years after the act,
but virtually all were adoptive. The most substantial related to intermediate education, technical
instruction, the housing of the working classes, isolation hospitals (county councils only) and small
holdings: from Statement with the LGB’s memorandum to the Royal Commission on Local
Taxation, PP , pp. –.
56
Baugh, ‘Government grants in aid of the rates’, .
57
By , sixty-one out of sixty-four county boroughs had done so, according to Gorst (speech
at Bradford, April , School Board Chronicle, May ). For the ‘whisky money’and its appli-
cation see E. P. Hennock, ‘Technological education in England, –: the uses of a German
model’, History of Education, (), –.
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assume control of all secondary education in their areas, to the chagrin of the
school boards.
58
In the school boards were abolished and the counties and
county boroughs assumed responsibility for both the former board schools and
the voluntary schools in their areas. The disappearance of the school boards
ended one of the most important experiments in urban municipal enterprise,
and the new responsibility for the voluntary schools burdened urban authorities
with a substantial obligation.
For the towns these developments epitomised the turn-of-the-century move
from local voluntarism to national obligations. Elementary education was not,
of course, a new local authority function when the county boroughs acquired it
in , but it was already the fastest growing item of unremunerative expendi-
ture in the local budget,
59
and the new responsibility for the financially strait-
ened voluntary sector increased the burden.
60
It may have deterred further
investment in secondary education, in the form of the higher grade schools,
which many of the larger urban school boards had developed, in response to
demands from lower-middle- and working-class parents, since the first experi-
ment in Leeds in .
61
The Conservative education ministers had been set on abolishing the School
Boards since their return to office in ,
62
but the fact that the reform was
eventually delayed until meant that it was passed in the astringent climate
of national introspection generated by military embarrassment in the Boer War.
Education and health – both key local authority services – were central concerns
of the ‘national efficiency’ movement prominent in Edwardian politics. In many
ways these years formed a pivotal period in the development of central–local
relations – years in which the local authorities experienced an intense fiscal crisis
while coming under growing public pressure to improve their performance.
H. A. Tennant’s demand, in the course of the debate over school medical inspec-
tion in , that ‘we ought not to allow the local authorities to differ from the
nation in a matter in regard to which the nation has already decided’
63
was a sign
of the times – of a much diminished public tolerance of local diversity. So was
Lloyd George’s pillorying in the Commons of allegedly negligent sanitary
authorities during the debate over national health insurance (in order to
Central government and the towns
58
By Clause of the Directory of the Department of Science and Art: N. D. Daglish, ‘Sir John
Gorst as educational innovator, a reappraisal’, History of Education, (), .
59
Bellamy, Administering Central–Local Relations, p. .
60
Particularly in towns like Stockport where the strength of Catholic voluntarism had obviated the
need to establish a school board: Waller, Town, p. .
61
N. D. Daglish, ‘The politics of educational change, the case of the English higher grade schools’,
Journal of Educational Administration and History, (), –; R. Barker, Education and Politics,
–:A Study of the Labour Party (Oxford, ), p. .
62
According to Gorst, School Board Chronicle, May .
63
Quoted by N. D. Daglish, ‘Robert Morant’s hidden agenda? The origins of the medical treat-
ment of schoolchildren’, History of Education, (), .
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