‘Enlightened employers of labour?’: 1 oral health in the British factory, 1890–1930

Oral health is a much-maligned topic in the historical scholarship of occupational and public health. Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, it formed an important focus of the welfare provided by employers in at least three manufacturing industries in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. The provision of industrial dentistry took similar forms in match making, confectionery and biscuit making: dental surveillance by professionals and the promotion of self-regulation of the mouth through oral hygiene. And while each industry was prompted into providing this welfare for different reasons, it is clear that it provided a way to regulate the industrial worker’s mouth and by extension, the wider population. Through this regulation, employers aimed to improve the productivity of their firm, but also to create a compliant workforce, which was enhanced by the professionalisation of industrial welfare and industrial dentistry. Thus, the aims of companies with dental welfare provision to control the worker’s body cannot be divorced from the wider state frameworks of disciplinary knowledge and power. However, as this chapter will also demonstrate, the extent to which these firms succeeded in regulating the mouths of their workers is more mixed. While making visits to the company dentist compulsory for workers ensured oral health surveillance some degree of success, oral hygiene practices were rejected by some workers, particularly those who had not already been exposed to such practices by school dentists. Indeed, toothbrushing in particular did not become a common practice among workers, as among the British population more broadly, until at least the 1940s.