According to an editorial in The Times (13 February 1936), “One half of the population is living on a diet insufficient or ill-designed to maintain health”. Assuming this generalisation applies to the whole of the country, there is ample justification in the regional distribution of causative factors of inadequate diet to assess the proportion in the North and Wales at, if not above, three-quarters. That such a supplementary estimate is well grounded is evident from the cited facts which illustrate poverty resolved into the unnecessary and untimely deaths of 150 men, women and children every day in the North and Wales throughout at least the ten years to 1938, culminating in a total social waste of over 500,000 human beings. These figures not only confirm the opinion expressed by The Times but, as the expectation of life at birth and at all ages is considerably lower in the North and Wales than in the South East, read in conjunction with all the other relative indices, they point to the fact that the incidence of inadequate diet must be extensively above that for the whole of the country.

Remember that these are not just statistics but the lives of men, women and children. These conditions applied in 1936, a year of relative prosperity. The fact that premature deaths to the extent of 54,000 should occur during such a period is a condemnation of past complacency and a reflection of our disregard for human life. If these lives had been suddenly and sensationally terminated in some tremendous catastrophe, revulsion would have swept the country. We have seen that, if one child is cruelly maltreated by its parents, great newspaper publicity ensues and questions are quite rightly asked in Parliament. But allow these men, women and children, through poverty and a revolting environment, to sink slowly from one stage of degradation to the next and ultimately to take prematurely their allotted places in the Registrar-General’s return, then nothing stirs to ruffle the insulated calm of the nation.

It is not only those who die but the thousands clinging to a precarious existence who, wracked by poverty and aged before their time, will contribute in the years ahead to the total of premature mortality.