Chris Upton: A little spit of history revived
Dec 17 2008 By Chris Upton
Buses used to display a long list of things one was not allowed to do. So long, in fact, that it seemed there was little left that one could do.
It began: “Do not stand on the stairs, or on the upper deck, or forward of this notice, or distract the driver, or eat, or drink, or play a musical instrument, or smoke on the lower deck, or recite Latin verse (I made that one up), or spit...”
It was the last of this catalogue of crimes which always puzzled me. Though I could conceivably commit most of the other offences, I could not imagine spitting. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine anyone I knew spitting either. The only time I ever saw anyone performing an expectoratory act in a public place was on a football field.
This was regrettably common. George Best would go on a mazy dribble down the wing and then, just in time for a camera close-up, dribble once more.
That notice on the bus was a legacy of earlier days when spitting was all the rage. As the spittoon in the corner of the public bar indicated, it was once perfectly acceptable (perhaps obligatory) behaviour, at least among men.
The tables began to turn in the Edwardian era. Men who had been spitting throughout the whole of the 19th century, from Waterloo to the Crimea, suddenly found themselves the subject of chastisement, arrest or an on-the-spot fine. An on-the-spit fine, in fact. So what had changed?
Medical knowledge (and the power of the doctor) had changed. Tuberculosis had been felling large numbers of the population for centuries and doctors had simply held up their hands, collected their fee and filled in the death certificate.
Then came the microscope, and medical research, and soon TB was seen to be transferred from one person to another by droplets of water in the breath. And what better way to effect that transfer than by spitting?
Armed with such knowledge, the country’s medical officers of health went on the offensive. Spitting, like smoking a century later, became public health enemy No. 1.
It fell to Dr John Robertson. Birmingham’s MOH in 1909, to scrutinize the local evidence.
Dr Robertson handed the dirty work to his deputy and like all good deputies, Dr Higgins found someone else to do it for him. A group of labourers with scoops and test tubes collected deposits which would be mapped, colour-coded and tested.
Dr Robertson declared that of the 100 samples of spit collected, no less than seven per cent contained TB germs. It was a fair cop.
Whither the medical officer of health leads, a bye-law usually follows. Notices went up on Birmingham lamp-posts and on tram cars and in factories. “Persons are required,” they said, “not to spit on the pavement”.
And thus an ancient British tradition was outlawed, at least for two generations. Unfortunately, as far as I can see, it’s now back.
* Dr Chris Upton is treading warily at Newman University College in Birmingham.
