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The Corporation of the City of London are about to appoint a Public Analyst, and by advertisement have invited applications for the post. It is obviously desirable that the person appointed to this office should not only possess the usual professional qualifications, but that he should be a scientific man of high standing and of good repute, whose name would afford a guarantee of thoroughness and reliability in regard to the work entrusted to him, and whose opinion would carry weight and command respect. Far from being of a nature to attract a man of this stamp, the terms and conditions attaching to the office as set forth in the advertisement above referred to are such that no self‐respecting member of the analytical profession, and most certainly no leading member of it, could possibly accept them. It is simply pitiable that the Corporation of the City of London should offer terms, and make conditions in connection with them, which no scientific analyst could agree to without disgracing himself and degrading his profession. The offer of such terms, in fact, amounts to a gross insult to the whole body of members of that profession, and is excusable only—if excusable at all—on the score of utter ignorance as to the character of the work required to be done, and as to the nature of the qualifications and attainments of the scientific experts who are called upon to do it. In the analytical profession, as in every other profession, there are men who, under the pressure of necessity, are compelled to accept almost any remuneration that they can get, and several of these poorer, and therefore weaker, brethren will, of course, become candidates for the City appointment.

At a recent inquest upon the body of a woman who was alleged to have died as the result of taking certain drugs for an improper purpose, one of the witnesses described himself as “an analyst and manufacturing chemist,” but when asked by the coroner what qualifications he had, he replied : “I have no qualifications whatever. What I know I learned from my father, who was a well‐known ‘F.C.S.’” Comment on the “F.C.S.” is needless.

At the Royal Society of Health annual conference, no less a person than the editor of the B.M.A.'s “Family Doctor” publications, speaking of the failure of the anti‐smoking campaign, said we “had to accept that health education did not work”; viewing the difficulties in food hygiene, there are many enthusiasts in public health who must be thinking the same thing. Dr Trevor Weston said people read and believed what the health educationists propounded, but this did not make them change their behaviour. In the early days of its conception, too much was undoubtedly expected from health education. It was one of those plans and schemes, part of the bright, new world which emerged in the heady period which followed the carnage of the Great War; perhaps one form of expressing relief that at long last it was all over. It was a time for rebuilding—housing, nutritional and living standards; as the politicians of the day were saying, you cannot build democracy—hadn't the world just been made “safe for democracy?”—on an empty belly and life in a hovel. People knew little or nothing about health or how to safeguard it; health education seemed right and proper at this time. There were few such conceptions in France which had suffered appalling losses; the poilu who had survived wanted only to return to his fields and womenfolk, satisfied that Marianne would take revenge and exact massive retribution from the Boche!

The earliest law of the adulteration of food imposed divisions among the local authorities of the day in functions and enforcements; most of the urban and rural sanitary authorities possessed no power under the law. Provisions dealing with unfit food — diseased, unsound, unwholesome or unfit for human food — were not in the first sale of food and drugs measure and there duties were wholly discharged by all local authorities. Rural sanitary authorities were excluded from food and drugs law and boroughs and urban authorities severly restricted. Enforcement in the rural areas was by the county council, although local officers were empowered to take samples of food and submit them for analysis to the public analyst. Power to appoint the public analyst for the area was the main criterion of a “food and drugs authority”. The Minister had power to direct an authority with a population of less than 40,000 but more than 20,000 to enforce the law of adulteration.

At the passing of the Fair Trading Act, 1973, and the setting up of a Consumer Protection Service with an Office of Fair Trading under a Director‐General, few could have visualized this comprehensive machinery devised to protect the mainly economic interests of consumers could be used to further the efforts of local enforcement officers and authorities in the field of purity and quality control of food and of food hygiene in particular. This, however, is precisely the effect of a recent initiative under Sect. 34 of the Act, reported elsewhere in the BFJ, taken by the Director‐General in securing from a company operating a large group of restaurants a written undertaking, as prescribed by the Section, that it would improve its standards of hygiene; the company had ten convictions for hygiene contraventions over a period of six years.

Food—national dietary standards—is a sensitive index of socio‐economic conditions generally; there are others, reflecting different aspects, but none more sensitive. A country that eats well has healthy, robust people; the housewife who cooks hearty, nourishing meals has a lusty, virile family. It is not surprising, therefore, that all governments of the world have a food policy, ranking high in its priorities and are usually prepared to sacrifice other national policies to preserve it. Before the last war, when food was much less of an instrument of government policy than now—there were not the shortages or the price vagaries—in France, any government, whatever its colour, which could not keep down the price of food so that the poor man ate his fill, never survived long; it was—to make use of the call sign of those untidy, shambling columns from our streets which seem to monopolize the television news screens—“out!” Lovers of the Old France would say that the country had been without stable government since 1870, but the explanation for the many changes in power in France in those pre‐war days could be expressed in one word—food!

The duties of the Public Analyst necessarily bring him more or less into contact with the members of his local authority. His work, like that of the other chief officers, is dealt with by one or more Committees before the results as a whole are submitted to the Council. The actual part played by the Committee or Committees depends on the will of the Council, and is in no way laid down by law. One thing is quite clear, namely, that the jurisdiction of the Committee and of the Council only extends the proceedings prior, and subsequent to the analysis of the samples. The nature of the analyses, the scientific methods employed, and the opinions based on the analytical results are entirely in the hands of the Public Analyst himself. The authority may not agree with him, and may not follow his advice, but unless there is very strong reason for doubting his competence, it is their duty to avail themselves of his expert knowledge and experience, and he is obliged to place his services at their disposal in these directions however inadequately he may be paid.

The next month or two behind us and this decade will have passed, to merge in the drab background of the post‐war years, part of the pattern of frustration, failure and fear. The ‘swinging sixties’ some called it, but to an older and perhaps slightly jaundiced eye, the only swinging seemed to be from one crisis to another, like the monkey swinging from bough to bough in his home among the trees; the ‘swingers’ among men also have their heads in the clouds! In the seemingly endless struggle against inflation since the end of the War, it would be futile to fail to see that the country is in retreat all the time. One can almost hear that shaft of MacLeodian wit christening the approaching decade as the ‘sinking seventies’, but it may not be as bad as all that, and certainly not if the innate good sense and political soundness of the British gives them insight into their perilous plight.

It tends to be called the corner shop, mainly because it occupied a corner building for extra window space, but also due to the impetus given to the name by television series seeking to portray life as it used to be. The village grew from the land, a permanent stopping place for the wandering tribes of early Britain, the Saxons, Welsh, Angles; it furnished the needs of those forming it and eventually a village store or shop was one of those needs. Where the needs have remained unchanged, the village is much as it has always been, a historical portrait. The town grew out of the village, sometimes a conglomerate of several adjacent villages. In the days before cheap transport, the corner shop, in euphoric business terms, would be described as “a little gold mine”, able to hold its own against the first introduction of multiple chain stores, but after 1914 everything changed. Edwardian England was blasted out of existence by the holocaust of 1914–18, destroyed beyond all hope of recovery. The patterns of retail trading changed and have been continuously changing ever since. A highly developed system of cheap bus transport took village housewives and also those in the outlying parts of town into busy central shopping streets. The jaunt of the week for the village wife who saw little during the working days; the corner shop remained mainly for things they had “run out of”. Every village had its “uppety” madames however who affected disdain of the corner shop and its proprietors, preferring to swish their skirts in more fashionable emporia, basking in the obsequious reception by the proprietor and his equally servile staff.

The March issue of the Journal of Chemical Technology contains the following article, with every word of which we cordially agree. It is gratifying to find that there is one—if only one—of our scientific Journals which has the courage and the patriotism to speak out and to do so in vigorous terms. The indictment of the flabby persons belonging to the Chemical Profession who by their ineptitude and inertia are condoning the bestial crimes of the modern Huns is well‐timed and thoroughly deserved.