Tag: accident prevention

  • Looking backwards – and forwards

    Looking backwards – and forwards

    In this post, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, outlines student and staff work with an external partner to mark a significant anniversary. Mike’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, particularly on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention, and on the history of mobility. 

    When people hit a big milestone age – 40 is a common one – it seems that for many the mind starts to think with greater focus about the past, as well as turning to the future. In some respects organisations are no different: big anniversaries are often used as a moment to pause and take stock, as well as to consider next steps. And so it was that in 2016 I was contacted by the Herefordshire Health and Safety Group. They were alive to their past, and had identified that 2018 would be 50 years since they were founded, a date they wanted to mark in some way.

    The Group’s President, Roger Bibbings, was someone that I’d known for some time, as a result of my research into the history of health and safety and accident prevention groups, and particularly my efforts to work with current organisations. As a result, when the Herefordshire group were looking for someone to help them with marking their history, Roger suggested my name. I was keen to do it for several reasons. It fitted happily with my wish to see the past brought into current practice, as well as opening up a new – and as yet unresearched – group that would fit in with my interests.

    In addition, the timing was fortuitous – this was an ideal project on which to involve a student, and it was possible to arrange it so that the role would work inside one of our placement units. Through it we recruited an excellent candidate, Josh Bassett, at that point a 2nd year student. This would work to the advantage of both Josh and the Group, so it was a win-win situation; Josh gained experience of working in an environment beyond the University and particularly dealing with external stakeholders, and the Group gained a great researcher contributing to their anniversary.

    Between us, Josh and I spent time meeting with the Group’s Executive Committee, to understand the Group, their knowledge of its past, and what they were looking for from our collaboration. The key output was to be a booklet, but beyond that we were given free rein about content, design and direction – all of which were going to be dependent on what we found. One of the points I was keen to contribute was the importance of contextualising the Group’s activities over the years: this needed to be a booklet that looked wider than just the Group. Fortunately they were enthusiastic about this idea.

    Josh and I sifted through the Group’s archival material, split between the Herefordshire Archive and Record Centre (a lovely new building, climate neutral too – very impressive) and an industrial estate where one of the member firms of the Group was based. Much of it was in hardcopy, though of course the more recent records were digital, so we ran up against the questions that have been confronting archivists for some time now, about retention and preservation of ‘born digital’ records. Fortunately between the various sources we had a reasonable run of material, apart from a gap in the 1980s (a point at which the Group was in a low of membership).

    As part of the archival work, we introduced one of the Committee members, Peter Smith, to the archives, to familiarise him with the work we were doing – an interesting experience for all concerned, as his questions forced us to think carefully about why we did things in a particular way! Josh and I also carried out an oral history interview with Ron Aston, the longest serving Committee member, who had joined the Group in the late 1970s. That was useful in getting both a sense of the personal within the Group and its work, and in addressing some of the gaps in the documentary record. This didn’t cover everything, of course – the ‘one that got away’ was the poster competition held in the early 1970s: sadly we were unable to find images of the entries!

    Having gathered as much evidence as possible of the Group’s activities since 1968, Josh and I came up with a structure for the booklet. We’d initially thought we’d have enough for a relatively slim volume, but it grew and grew, until we’d enough material for 68 pages. We worked closely with the Group on these stages in particular as we wanted to ensure they were going to be satisfied with the end product – helped by the fact that they were true to their word and gave us complete independence in terms of the content. We worked with a design student from the University, Jasmine Kenney, as she handled the design and production side of things – a good thing too, as we ended up with a nice looking booklet, and that wouldn’t have been the case had design been down to me! This was also another great example of how we try to embed practical experience across the various degree programmes at Portsmouth, working with our external partners.

    The booklet launch was held earlier this year at Hereford Town Hall, a good opportunity to mark the anniversary, to catch up with the Group and to meet some of their members. Feedback on the booklet has been very positive, with copies distributed widely in Herefordshire, across a range of sectors – industrial, retail, education, regulation, health care and more. Thankfully the Group has been well satisfied with the booklet – and are now moving into their next 50 years!

    If you want to read more about the Group’s activities and ethos over the years, you can download the booklet here!

     

     

     

     

  • (Un)safe heritage?

    (Un)safe heritage?

    In this post, the third in our series of blogs looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, explores what might be learnt from an apparently unexceptional piece of the city’s built environment. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents in modern Britain.

    Not far from my office, there’s yet another mundane object that for most of the time, most people don’t notice – for 140 years it was part of the background to life around Burnaby Road. For a week or so earlier this year, however, it became very noticeable – particularly its absence, which left a hole in the eyeline. And then, once replaced and the shock of the new subsided, it has once again become a part of the background.

    This post is about a bridge. To be precise, the railway bridge over Burnaby Road, on the final trundle from Portsmouth & Southsea station to the Harbour station. Erected by the London & South Western Railway in 1876, the bridge was certainly functional – yet also not without a faded decorative element, at least by the time of its removal. I like these everyday things; if we stop and notice them, they tell us all sorts about the societies that produced them and the society of the present moment.

    The bridge was life-expired. It looked a little the worse for wear if one remembered to look up whilst walking underneath (not advised when it was raining!). It was also in need of strengthening, as age and changing technology had taken their toll on the original design – not unreasonable given it was carrying well over 100,000 trains a year. It might have been a relatively straightforward decision to remove the bridge and replace it with a plain girder bridge. But this isn’t quite the way it worked out.

    The process of removing the bridge and installing the new one required extensive planning, preparation and a road closure for a week. The new bridge was assembled nearby and moved into place – no mean feat given the physical constraints around the site and the need to move the 88-tonne structure around 200 metres. Over the course of a week in February the old bridge came down and the new one went in.

    A decision was taken – and I don’t know where or by whom – that the replacement bridge show mirror the aesthetic of the original. So, whilst never particularly ornate, the look of the bridge – including its new paintwork – at least referred back to its predecessor. This bridge wasn’t a heritage asset in the way that say the nearby Mary Rose or HMS Victory might be. But it was a part of the working heritage of the area. That was reflected in the colour scheme used on the new bridge, which referred to Portsmouth’s city colours. This was a relatively subtle marker of civic belonging, a means of siting the bridge in its locale.

    So clearly the bridge might not be ‘just’ a bridge: it can be used in particular ways. This raises questions pertinent to transport museums and the preservation movement more widely: how do you retain the essence of things that are functional? Did the original bridge have some sort of intrinsic worth or value ‘just’ because of its age? Remove it from its context and purpose and does the bridge retain that value? Just like trains that are preserved in museums, as static exhibits: they were designed to move, so when still have they lost their raison d’etre? Or has the value and meaning changed? What values do we, as a society, place upon these mundane artefacts – particularly infrastructure, like the bridge – without which our world would be very different, but for most of the time we don’t notice because they function smoothly?

    There’s another element to the story, which ties in with my research: safety. A quick glance at the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images flags up some prominent differences between the old and new bridges. There’s the yellow and black hazard warning bar and the height limit notice, obscuring some of the paintwork replicating the original but designed to deter bridge strikes (a major problem on the rail network). Of greater interest to me, for my work on the history of workplace safety & accidents (particularly in the rail industry), there was additional consideration: safe access across the bridge for railway workers.

    The old bridge was narrow, without adequate provision for workers to cross at track level. This meant they had to watch carefully and squeeze past when there were no trains coming: hardly safe in anyone’s imagination. Indeed, some of the cases of railway worker accidents coming out of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project I co-lead with the National Railway Museum are of exactly this scenario: narrow bridges and workers being struck by passing trains, sometimes with fatal results. This was either the original engineers being blind to the workers, who were not high up in their considerations especially when weighed against extra cost, or a deliberate decision to put worker lives at risk. This might (hopefully!) seem shocking by today’s standards but it was not surprising for the 19th century.

    In a sign of how times have changed, proper access routes were built into the new bridge, seen in the walkway (including safety rail) on either side of the bridge, away from the moving trains. It changes the look of the bridge, certainly, but this again relates to the discussions about how far built heritage can or should be adapted for modern standards. Given this was a new installation the debate was, hopefully, minimal; it would have been a much easier proposition than trying to adapt an original structure. Thankfully we have a higher regard for safety now than 140 years ago – which isn’t to suggest that things are perfect today, but to acknowledge that priorities and who is valued have shifted.

    So, via a number of routes, an initially unpromising structure can be interrogated to reveal interesting glimpse of the values of the societies which both produced the original and the replacement bridges. If we look closely at such objects we can see where particular concepts and values are built into the fabric of any mundane item.

  • If you go down to the Archives today …

    If you go down to the Archives today …

    In this post, Mike Esbester brings us up to date on the book he wrote earlier in the year, marking the 60th anniversary of the British Safety Council – now picked up by The National Archives and health and safety professionals.

    2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the British Safety Council, one of the leading organisations aimed at improving health, safety and wellbeing in the workplace, in the UK and beyond. Fortunately the BSC is an organisation attuned to the value of the past, and – as discussed in an earlier post  – has been prepared to put its money where its mouth is, including creating an excellent digital archive , freely available to all.

    In the lead up to this anniversary, the BSC called upon me to advise and work with them. They drew upon my research in the field of modern health and safety, including work funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health. One of the things I was involved in was writing a book marking the anniversary; it was launched at the Regent St Cinema in London in March 2017 – I’d never been to a launch quite like that!

    The book was aimed at professionals and practitioners, drawing on the BSC’s archive and particularly the poster collections, but also grounding the imagery with a detailed contextual discussion. It was an interesting exercise in pitching the tone correctly, selecting engaging images and providing a sturdy analytical approach – but it’s been well received.

    And now, if you’re visiting The National Archives at Kew (perhaps as part of ‘Explore your Archive’  week, running this week), you might see a copy of the book in the ‘new books’ display in the Map Room! It was selected for the library and for display, which (as the author) is always pleasing. The Friends of The National Archives also put together a feature for the current issue of Magna, their journal – available here.

    In addition, the book was picked up by Safety & Health Practitioner magazine, a monthly publication aimed at health and safety professionals in the UK and received by all 35,000 members of the Institution of Occupational Safety & Health, the UK’s largest professional organisation in the field. The SHP piece was based around an interview about the book, drawing out its origins, the role I played in uncovering the BSC’s archive and then the process of writing the book itself. It’s available here.

    The book’s reach hasn’t been confined to the UK – it’s been sent worldwide, reflecting the BSC’s connections and interests beyond our shores. I was recently told – though must follow it up! – about favourable feedback on the book from Portugal, and I hope there’s more out there.

    All told, it’s great to see academic research reaching out well beyond higher education institutions – and that there is huge scope for and interest in this. There’s no doubt it takes time and effort – I’ve been working with the BSC for 7 or 8 years now – but it bears fruit, and that can only be to the good for the historical community. And a taster: watch this space, as it looks likes there is a lot more to come…

     

    All images courtesy of the British Safety Council

     

  • The dangers of railway work documented

    The dangers of railway work documented

    In this blog, Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history, provides an update on the ‘Railway, Life & Death‘ project he has been working on in conjunction with the National Railway Museum. A database that details the stories of nearly 4,000 individuals who were killed or injured at work, including 16-year old James Beck, who Mike discussed briefly in an earlier blog (http://history.port.ac.uk/?p=315), is now available online.  Mike’s research focuses on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    The ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project has just made available the database of nearly 4,000 individuals killed or injured at work on the railways between 1911 and 1915. In it you’ll find details of railway worker’s stories, taken from state accident reports: you’ll see men and women from across the UK and Ireland, aged between 14 and 75, and from all grades of the railway industry.

    The database is a key outcome of the project, and was only possible thanks to the hard work and dedication of the team of volunteers responsible for reading the original accident reports and transcribing the data. The project, which is jointly led by Portsmouth’s Mike Esbester and the National Railway Museum’s Karen Baker, has been a great demonstration of the success and possibilities of crowd-sourcing historical research. The volunteers have found some fascinating material, and have been asking some penetrating questions which will be invaluable in shaping the next stages of the project and research. And just as importantly, their feedback suggests that they’ve enjoyed the work and benefitted from it – as one volunteer noted ‘I am looking forward to seeing the spreadsheets on the website. I believe this is an important project which will benefit a range of audiences and shed light on working life in an industry which touched the lives of many people and their families.’

    Through the database we can see how varied railway work was – and we’ve got a flexible tool, searchable by grade of employee, type of accident, location, railway company, details of the accident, who was held responsible, and any recommendations made to prevent a repeat occurrence.

    Many cases were relatively ‘mundane’ – single incidents that resulted in relatively minor injuries like bruises. But some were much more severe involving multiple casualties, like two separate incidents which each injured eight men at once, or the group of workers maintaining the tracks at Battersea on 19 January 1911, three of whom were killed and two injured when they were hit by a train at 45mph.

    This resource exposes to our view something of the experiences of the 3,911 individuals involved in accidents that were investigated by the state inspectors. We hope it will put at least a little bit of the human story on what otherwise might seem a large and unmanageable figure.

    Now that the database is available we want people to make use of it! We’re promoting it widely, across all the audiences interested in the project – health and safety professionals, museums and archives specialists, academics, family historians, the current railway industry, and more. We’re keen to gather your feedback, particularly as we develop the next steps and try to make even more data available – so do please tell us what you make of it: there’s a feedback form on the project website, or you can contact us via railwayworkeraccidents@gmail.com.

    In the short term, we’re continuing to update the project website regularly, including details of some of the cases found in the database and what they say about life, death and disability on the railways – do be sure to keep checking back (www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk).

     

    Image courtesy of the author.

  • What use is the past?

    What use is the past?

    In this blog Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history, tackles a question that has long been discussed by historians and reveals how, if used carefully, the past can sometimes provide illumination for the present. Mike’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, particularly on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention, and on the history of mobility.

    It’s not an original question, and historians have been wrestling with it for years. Is it possible to learn from the past, given circumstances and context change and no two situations are ever precisely the same? Do we risk hollowing historical study out by trying to ‘apply’ it to the present? Must the past be ‘useful’?

    These are all issues which have become increasingly pressing in recent years, as attempts have been made to apply metrics to the arts, humanities and social sciences which are, it might be argued, constructed around and better applied to the hard sciences. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that debate, it’s clear that in some form ideas about measuring the impact of our work is here to stay. The idea of impact itself doesn’t simply equate to ‘monetising the past’, of course, and it is taking the discipline into some interesting areas – though this isn’t new, as historians have been engaging with diverse audiences for many years, changing views and enhancing society in a huge range of ways. It does mean that we’re now being rather more careful about recording these impacts.

    One place where all of these aspects are tied together is in some of my research into the history of health and safety. I’ve recently been co-principal investigator on a project called ‘The Changing Legitimacy of Health and Safety at Work, 1960-2015’, funded by a practice-based organisation, the Institution of Occupational Safety & Health (IOSH). One of the key things they were interested in was understanding how we’ve ended up today ridiculing ‘elf n safety gone mad’ when, fundamentally, no one truly objects to the idea that we should try to ensure people (at work and beyond) remain free from injury or ill-health. It was also important to IOSH that the project, which was jointly run with Professor Paul Almond at the University of Reading, should produce recommendations to try to influence future policy and practice.

    To be clear – no-one’s talking about somehow ‘predicting’ the future. But it is worth exploring how the past is useful in understanding the present and how this might help to shape the future.

    It was a fascinating project – you can find our final report here – and I’ll be writing more about it in the future. But for now I wanted to say a little about what we’ve done to reach professional and policy audiences – and to address any concerns they might have about why the past should be relevant to them.

    In addition to the report, which was made freely available by IOSH and promoted amongst its nearly 40,000 members, we’ve given presentations at health and safety events and written for various publications speaking to the health and safety profession. One of the recent spin-offs was a ‘webinar’, aimed at IOSH members, giving an overview of some of the key aspects and recommendations of the project – as well as continuing our dialogue with current practitioners.

    As you can imagine, this was a rather different kettle of fish to your standard academic written text or presentation. We had to boil down two years’ work to around 45 minutes, making sure it was accessible (though not dumbed-down) – and we tried to provide some positive steps that the participants could take back into their diverse workplaces and apply.

    We had around 100 participants with us for the webinar, and the Q and A following was lively – sufficiently so that we continued for 15 minutes beyond our allotted hour, and produced a written document responding to the questions we still didn’t have time to answer. The webinar is now available on IOSH’s YouTube channel.

    How was it received? According to the post-event feedback, 98% of people felt the content was either good or excellent, which I think is pretty successful – and allays any concerns I might have had about making my ‘pitch’ that the past was indeed relevant to current practitioners. Now we want them to go and give our recommendations a try!

    And what about those questions we started with, about learning from the past and applying it? Provided we retain the scope to explore the past for its own sake, I don’t see any harm in looking to see where it might provide illumination for the present – delicately done, of course. The past doesn’t have to be ‘useful’, but if there are aspects we can see that are relevant to current debates, surely it makes sense that we try to have that conversation and see where it might lead?

  • ‘Do it the safety way!’ 100 years of accident prevention.

    ‘Do it the safety way!’ 100 years of accident prevention.

    In this blog Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history, discusses how he has been working with the British Safety Council in order to create an online archive of their material. Mike draws upon his research interests in his 3rd year Special Subject strand. Mike’s wide-ranging take on the history of accident prevention touches upon accidents at work, in the streets and at home, and examines how the state has interacted with its citizens – and how the messages found in safety education were not neutral, but contained some very distinct ideas about who could prevent accidents. This is just one aspect of Mike’s research, which has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and supported by the University of Portsmouth.

    Get it dressed, beat the germs

    Earlier this year, the British Safety Council (BSC) put their archive online, covering 60 years of accident prevention activity. The BSC is a charity, now focusing mainly on workplace safety but over the years it has been involved in pretty much every aspect of accident prevention imaginable – including things like consumer safety, healthy beaches, DIY, women’s safety, AIDS, fireworks, children’s playgrounds and more. All of these issues reflect the changing concerns of British society since 1957 – and it’s now possible to access virtually all of the existing material online.

    Lashed ladders

    The BSC’s digital archive was brought about in part by Mike Esbester, one of the History team here at Portsmouth. Mike’s long-standing research on the history of accidents, safety and risk in modern Britain led him to make contact with the BSC several years ago. Initially things didn’t look promising: he was told they didn’t have any archival material. However, in a stroke of good luck, Mike ended up speaking with one of the senior management whose interest was spurred. He went away and made some more enquiries, and eventually discovered that there was some material from the past stored at a warehouse in Derbyshire. Cue a trip there, to find (in amongst the leaking roof, pigeons, fork lift trucks and day-to-day business of the warehouse) around 20 pallets of material.

    Derbyshire warehouse conditions

    In the years that followed, Mike headed back to the warehouse with BSC colleagues, helping to work out what they had on the pallets and to advise on plans for long-term solutions. As a result, the BSC has improved the storage of its archive and has had everything digitised – now made publicly available. The archive contains a good run of the BSC’s posters from the 1970s to the present, a complete run of the BSC’s newspaper and magazine publications, from 1957, minutes of the BSC’s meetings, reports produced by the BSC and press coverage. It’s a fantastic resource for historians, for health and safety practitioners and indeed for anyone interested in Britain’s social and cultural history.

    Mike’s been helping the BSC to prepare for its 60th anniversary, including writing articles for its monthly magazine, advising on activities and writing a book drawing on the archive – the feature of a post here in the coming months.

    If you want to have a look, you can access the archive at: https://services.storetec.net/?u=public@bsc.org&p=FreelyDeal42

     

    Expect the unexpected

    (Images courtesy of British Safety Council)