British Social Hygiene Council

The National Council for Combatting Venereal Diseases was established as a result of the appointment of a Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases in 1913. A number of members of the commission and others concerned about the problem of sexually transmitted diseases came together to set up this Council, which was concerned with propaganda and education as well as the investigation of the problem. A leading motivating figure who continued to be a major figure in the Council's activities was Mrs Sybil Neville Rolfe (formerly Gotto). In 1917 as a result of the recommendations of the Royal Commission the NCCVD was given the task of conducting the educational and propaganda work deemed desirable by the Commission, with funding from central government. In 1929 this funding was devolved to local authorities by the Local Government Act of that year, but although local authorities were supposed to undertake educational work as well as the treatment of venereal diseases not all of them contributed to the work of the British Social Hygiene Council as it had become known. The resulting financial stringency had a serious effect on the Council and its work and it does not seem to have managed to find sources of funding equivalent to the amounts it received from the Ministry during the 1920s.

The archive is very far from being complete. It is predominantly the minutes which survive, with a little correspondence and other papers which had been inserted into the volumes, a few financial records from the later period of the Council's activities, and an incomplete set of the new series of the journal Health and Empire, 1926-1940. There are some noticeable gaps even among the surviving minutes: no minutes of the Financial Comittee survive, there are no records of the early Civilian Committee which was the counterpart of the Military Committee, and there were over one hundred branches of which only the records of the London and Home Counties Branch are represented here, probably because it was reconstituted as a Committee of the Council in 1922.

In spite of its lacunae this is an important collection of a body which played a significant public role in the determination of policy on venereal disease control, the provision of facilities for its treatment, and in particular for the dissemination of propaganda and public health education in this field. As a concomitant of the latter task it became a leading provider of sex education and the teaching of biology, and training for teachers and others for this purpose. The change of name in 1925 reflected the Council's perception of its wider remit in the promotion of 'social hygiene' in the broader sense. There was a strong overseas and imperial dimension to its work, and port welfare and the Mercantile Marine were particular objects of concern. A glance at the various committees, subcommittees, advisory boards, joint standing committees, etc, indicates the range of interests of the Council.