[BITList] BBC News - Why state surveys asked about bras and haddock

[HUGH]

Mike,

That's a fascinating survey. Unfortunately, students doing social history will now lose marks for not quoting it in essays.  And they'll not get bonus marks for quoting it, now that it's out in the open.  I was writing an essay for the OU on  aspects of social history that revolved around public health in Victorian UK. One important feature was the introduction of adequate sewers and relatively safe drinking water, particularly in London after the Great Stink and a cholera epidemic. The first sand bed water filter was developed there at that time, or so we were told in the literature. While working up my local side of things I found an unpublished source in a Greenock Library that showed the sandbed filter had been developed and introduced in Greenock by Robert Thom, some years before the London one.  Not, however, to stop the inhabitants dying of typhus, etc, (as they were doing in droves) - it was to take the peat out of the water from the moors used by the mills for treating the cloth they made. So I got a bonus mark or two.

I remember the children who had to get bananas - some rare digestive complaint as far as I recall.

Hugh.
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