A [February] 1941 British film about how coughs and sneezes spread diseases. Some masks that can be worn to help stop the spread of diseases are shown. Produced by Verity Films for the Ministry of Information.
"For the countless Londoners driven into
communal shelters by nightly German air raids, personal space had become a luxury. This was particularly so for those who sought shelter in the
London underground. For its perceived subterranean safety, by the blitz’s peak, some 150,000 citizens were sleeping in tube stations.
Though the dangers of close personal contact were not the only thing on the minds of concerned public health officials,
preventing epidemic disease in the overcrowded spaces of the tube stations was a major concern. The mask emerged as a
common-sense solution to the problem of thousands of shelterers suddenly using the
tube’s damp, poorly ventilated spaces as their nightly abodes.
Eager to prevent an epidemic before it started, the
Ministry of Health set up an advisory committee to investigate conditions in air-raid shelters, with special reference to health and hygiene. The
official call for masks came in December 1940, two months into the blitz and just as flu season was getting underway, in a
white paper that recommended their use alongside a raft of other preventive health measures. British scientists conscripted to the
Medical Research Council’s Air Hygiene Unit were
convinced: the “principle of wearing masks for
protection against droplet infection” was a sound practice.
The Ministry of Health endorsed
three types of mask: the
standard gauze type (similar to today’s homemade masks); a
cellophane screen (like today’s visors, but only covering the mouth and nose); and the
commercially available “yashmak” (in the style of the Muslim veil), for the “fashion conscious”. The ministry ordered
500,000 masks to be distributed as needed in the event of an epidemic and commissioned an instructional leaflet for shelterers.
British newspapers publicised the government’s new policy.
On February 5 1941, the
Times reported that Sir William Jameson, the chief medical officer, had endorsed the new masks, and, more colourfully,
Ritchie Calder, a journalist for the Daily Herald tried one out in public. “After ten minutes yesterday my anti-flu ‘windscreen’ ceased to be a source of ribald remarks,” he reported. “People round me became used to seeing me working in what looked like a transparent eye-shade which had slipped down my nose.”
Predicting that masks would become “as commonplace as horn-rim glasses”, Calder wrote that he could even blow his nose with his mask on. The only thing he couldn’t do “in comfort”, he reported, was “have a cigarette”.
Sharp contrast
A
short propaganda film commissioned by the Ministry of Information and released in
February 1941 also saw the mask message as self-evidently good sense. “If the shelter doctor or nurse gives you a mask,” the narrator exhorted, “well, wear it!”
.....
Despite protests to the contrary, the source of the COVID-19 mask controversy is not rooted in longstanding concerns about
individual rights or
British character. We need to look elsewhere to find its source: to the
general breakdown in communication and trust between experts, the government and [wrong-wing] members of the public, that became a
mainstay of contemporary life well after the blitz had passed and has been
exacerbated by the pandemic."
https://theconversation.com/why-londoners-in-the-blitz-accepted-face-masks-to-prevent-infection-unlike-todays-objectors-142021 .
