6 of 24 - Safety culture in 1960's Cornwall

Later in life I remember seasoned tradesmen scoffing when it was suggested they receive formal training in the use of ladders. “Used one since I was a lad,” they’d say, as if repetition were equivalent to rigour. And to be fair, if you've been using ladders without instruction for a few decades, you’ve likely learned the hard way what constitutes a safe angle and what doesn’t. Pain is a thorough teacher.

But for the uninitiated—for the apprentice on his first rung—a few minutes of training could be the difference between a confident descent and a broken spine. Ladders are involved in more falls than any other workplace equipment, and falls from height remain the leading cause of fatal injuries at work.

It’s remarkable, really, how much hazard hides behind common design. Take the bedpan—another simple tool. Misusing a bedpan might not kill you, but it can leave a dent in your pride that never quite buffs out. In hospitals, injuries aren’t always marked by broken bones; sometimes they come in the form of quiet humiliation, a botched instruction, a moment of confusion met with disdain. Ladders and bedpans—different rungs on the same truth: simplicity demands respect.

Over the next few weeks, as I recuperated at home from my encounter with the rear wheels of the school bus, my mother, who was an active member of the Women’s Institute and held regular WI meetings at home, would summon me into the lounge where the ladies of the parish would gather for tea and cakes, and instruct me to drop my shorts to show off the progress of my tyre-tread bruises. A mortifying experience that seemed to me even worse than being run over in the first place.

They gasped, of course. Not just at the bruises themselves—though they were quite impressive by then, multi-coloured zigzags across my thighs—but at the sheer horror of the thing: a boy, in the care of a transport company, being allowed to exit a moving coach. One of the WI ladies leaned in and said, “You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.” That phrase. Luck. As if the accident had been prearranged by some deity who had decided to give me a break.

But of course, accidents aren’t divine tests. They are systemic, historical, almost baked into the fabric of organisations. The bruises weren’t just mine—they belonged to a lineage of mishaps, from the mill girls with crushed fingers to the railway men with missing limbs. I was a statistic with a pulse, a cautionary tale in shorts.

But it takes time for safety culture to change and for design to properly address significant hazard. The driver of my coach chose not to impose strict controls to prevent reckless children stepping off his moving vehicle, and interlocks on bus doors simply didn’t exist back then despite the fact that Victorian ingenuity had invented interlocks in the mid 1800’s for railway signalling and for steam presses. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that door interlocks began appearing on urban buses in Europe and they weren’t common in the UK until the 1990’s.

Another example of how slow change can take is the case of Lucy Deane, a pioneering female factory inspector working for the British Home Office in 1898. She became the first person to formally warn of the health dangers posed by asbestos. Britain’s asbestos heyday spanned roughly from the 1950s to the late 1970s, with particularly intense use in the post–World War II reconstruction boom. During this time Asbestos was ubiquitous in building materials, insulation, shipyards, and manufacturing. The 1950s–70s saw widespread occupational exposure, especially among construction workers, engineers, and factory staff. The latency period for asbestos-related diseases is typically 20–50 years, so the surge in deaths lagged behind the heyday of exposure. There are now over 5,000 deaths annually from asbestos-related diseases. But Asbestos wasn’t fully banned in the British building industry until 1999, 100 years after Lucy Deane’s warning.