Health Overhaul by Tyrrell Burgess

Review of ‘The Peckham Experiment’, republished 1985.

Creative influence in institutions is not a matter of size, status or longevity. This truth is demonstrated by the Peckham Experiment, which flickered briefly for four years before the Second World War, and for another four years after it. Yet it created hope at the time, its name is remembered and its principles have been rediscovered.

The experiment was a centre, purpose built, concerned with the nature of health. It was run by George Scott Williamson and the authors of this book as, in effect, a combined community and medical centre. It was open to all families within pram-pushing distance, on payment of a small weekly fee. Its facilities included a swimming bath, dance halls, a gym, nurseries for babies and small children, and a cafeteria.

The centre of the experiment was the periodic ‘health overhaul’ and the family consultation about its findings. Scott Williamson and his colleagues believed that it was possible to promote positive health, if people had the knowledge and opportunity to manage their own environment.

This book is a reprint of the one written to describe the experiment in the wartime gap between its two periods of life. That it is reprinted is evidence of the power of the Peckham idea: there is still a demand for the book.

The secret of this continuing influence derives from the centre’s belief in individuals acting together. There was little direction or organization of activities (organized swimming classes and time-tabled gym instruction were found to put children off: left to their own devices, they flooded back). The object was to help people to master their own circumstances. The main resource was the family.

The belief in personal autonomy and collaboration has become the more attractive as publicly organized provision has grown beyond any imagining of the 1940s. The health, education and social services involve large bureaucracies under increasingly central control yet the consequences still seem to carry little conviction. Dependence on people, not systems, becomes increasingly attractive, and the thought that it is practicable and the knowledge that it was tried, even briefly, is extremely heartening.

Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, despair is unnecessary. We have to look again for what will work today. The Peckham Experiment did find something to work with. The lesson is quoted in a small folksy parable at the beginning of this book: ‘Always have a good look before you cry’.

This article was first printed in The Times Education Supplement on 24^th January 1986.