Peckham Revived? By Colin Ward

Review of ‘The Peckham Experiment’, republished 1985.

Its founders called it a ‘laboratory of anarchy’. Could it happen again?

We came to the fiftieth anniversary meeting this week in the unfamiliar surroundings of the Royal Society of Medicine from a variety of motives. For Lord Donaldson in the chair – one of the few survivors of the early days of the Peckham Health Centre – it was one of the major influences in a long and busy life.

For other veterans, who thought that the National Health Service would cost progressively less as the backlog of ill-health inherited in 1948 continually declined, our single experimental investigation of the nature of health, rather than of disease, becomes more and more relevant.

For people like me, curious about the pre-conditions for resourcefulness and independence in individuals and communities, Peckham was an empirical verification of our deepest convictions. The founders – a husband-and-wife pair of doctors, Innes Pearse and George Scott Williamson – wrote in 1938 about their Family Health Club, ‘It seems that ‘a sort of anarchy’ is the first condition in any experiment in human applied biology. This condition is also that to which our members most readily respond…’

It began much earlier, in 1926, when, involved in welfare work in south London, they concluded that most urban dwellers were so ‘de-vitalised’ that babies were born deficient in health: ‘the youth of the nation is threatened before it is born’.

To study the characteristics of health, they devised the idea of a family club, to be joined on two conditions: first, that the whole family must join; and second, that families must agree to a periodical medical examination.

They started in a small house run as a club until 1929. The next step was to raise the money from charitable trusts to move to a purpose-built family club big enough to be self-supporting from subscriptions. By 1935 they had raised the cash, and built the Pioneer Health Centre, designed for them by Sir Owen Williams.

It was glass-walled inside and out, as the Peckham biologists needed to observe what members actually did. The centre of the building was a swimming pool, at one time the second largest in London. There was a theatre, a gymnasium and a children’s nursery on the ground floor, with dance halls, a cafeteria, a library and medical rooms.

It ran from 1935 to 1939, and after the war from 1946 to 1950. The experiment finally ended in 1951, after all efforts to overcome its financial difficulties had failed. Since ‘health centres’ had become part of the official doctrine after the passing of the National Health Service Act in 1946, the directors approached the Ministry of Health to find a formula to incorporate it into the official provision. They failed for five reasons:

1. It was concerned exclusively with the study and cultivation of health, not with the treatment of disease.

2. It was based exclusively on the integrated family, not on the individual.

3. It was based exclusively on a locality; it had no ‘open door’.

4. Its basis was contributory (2s 6d – twelve and a half pence per week per family), not free.

5. It was based on autonomous administration, and so did not conform to the organisational structure of the NHS.

Scott Williamson died in 1953. Innes Pearse went on propagating the Peckham findings until her death in 1978. Proposals for a repeat run in the postwar world have continually arisen, linked to other kinds of community self-organisation. I remember a Family Health and Housing Society at Dronfield in Derbyshire in the 1950s, and a similar aspiration in Glenrothes in Scotland in the 1970s.

When the original centre closed, members tried to keep alive some of its functions themselves. One of them recalls, ‘My husband was earning a £5 wage at the time. Where else could the children have gone swimming every day, and enjoyed roller skating, and all the other fun, for half a crown a week?’

But the alternative to the promotion (or even just the investigation) of health is attempting to catch up with sickness. We have a barrage of complaints about the inadequacy of the NHS. We are endlessly reminded that it is the biggest employer in Europe, and that its estimated cost for 1985-1986 is the sum of £17,500,000,000 – ie about £350 for every man, woman and child in Britain.

The nutritionist, Barbara Griggs, has written that ‘The practice of medicine or therapy has its own science of pathology. The practice of health demands its own science of living, the laws which govern the processes are the natural power of growth and development. Peckham is still the only preface to such a science: we know of no other.

But it was only a beginning, and the re-establishment of a laboratory to consolidate the research already begun and to pursue the fulfilment of its promise would seem to be not only reasonable but urgent. Before we dismiss such a vision of society as hopelessly utopian, we surely owe it to ourselves and to our children to give the Peckham experiment what in half a century it has never had: a further, lengthy, competently run and comprehensive trial. What alternatives are left to us?’

She was introducing a new edition, published this week, of the key Peckham book which first came out in 1943, The Peckham Experiment: a study of the living structure of society, by Innes Pearse and Lucy Crocker (Scottish Academic press, £5). It’s an important testimony, with lessons we should all have learned years ago. Isn’t there something, for example, in the conclusion of the Peckham biologists, applicable to those who want to save the inner cities?They said:

‘Our failures during our first 18 months’ work have taught us something very significant. Individuals, from infants to old people, resent or fail to show any interest in anything initially presented to them through discipline, regulation or instruction which is another aspect of authority. (Even the very ‘Centre idea’ has a certain taint of authority and this is contributing to our slow recruitment.)

We now proceed by merely providing an environment rich in instruments for action – that is giving a chance to do things. Slowly but surely these chances are seized upon and used as opportunities for development of inherent capacity. The instruments of action have one common characteristic – they must speak for themselves. The voice of the salesman or the teacher frightens the potential users.’

We failed to grasp this when we conceived postwar welfare in terms of bureaucracy and hierarchies. Nobody in authority thought that there was any importance in the Peckham concern with the sources and origins of spontaneous action. Can we at last learn the patience and humility to accept that the only kind of social organisation worth striving for is community self-organisation?

This article first printed in New Society 20/27 December 1985.