Stephen Taylor
"During the war a great deal of experimental and research work has been done in connection with the application of science to human beings by Government Departments. This i really the beginning the the science of applied ociology, which is the study of groups of human beings, their interactions and relationship to their own environment. Particular work has been done by the Army Directorate of Psychiatry who have developed very largely the technique of personnel selection both with regard to testing the mechanical ahptitudes of workers of Service purposes, and also in the selection of what may be termed as managerial personnel or officer. This work has an immediate and direct application to industry." Hansard 30-11-1945
Munk's Roll : Volume VIII : Stephen James Lake, Baron Taylor of Harlow Taylor
Stephen James Lake, Baron Taylor of Harlow Taylor
b.30 December 1910 d.1 February 1988
BSc MRCS LRCP(1934) MB BS Lond(1934) MRCP(1937) MD(1938) FRCP(1960) FRCGP(1960) FFCM(1979)
FIRST DIRECTOR OF WARTIME SOCIAL SURVEY
DIRECTOR OF HOME INTELLIGENCE
Stephen Taylor had a curiously split career in medicine and politics. His father was a civil engineer but his uncle, James George Taylor was a Fellow of the College [Munk’s Roll,Vol.V,p.406] and his paternal grandfather was a surgeon. He married Charity Clifford, herself a successful doctor who, from the Prison Medical Service, became Governor of Holloway Prison.
Stephen James Lake Taylor had a very full and varied life and contributed significantly to general practice, industrial medicine, psychiatry, medical research, the formation of a medical school, the design of health services in two countries, party politics and government. He was educated at Stowe School and St Thomas’s Hospital medical school, where he held junior posts after graduation. He first specialized in psychiatry, going on to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the Royal Free, and the Maudsley. Briefly, before the second world war, he was an assistant editor of the Lancet. He had obtained his doctorate and his membership of the College before seeing service in the RNVR as a specialist in neuropsychiatry. He had also written on ‘Suburban Neurosis’ (Lancet 1938; 1,759). In 1941 he was invited to serve in the Ministry of Information as director of home intelligence. In this capacity he set up the wartime social survey, forerunner of other national surveys which continue today. After joining the Labour Party, he contributed a number of articles to The Spectator on health service matters which influenced the shape of the National Health Service, and in 1945 he resigned from the Ministry to stand as Labour candidate for Barnet and was elected. He was not directly involved in the preparation of the NHS, though he had some indirect influence, and he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Herbert Morrison from 1948-50. He lost his seat to Reginald Maudling in the 1950 election and returned to industrial consultancy, and to the Harlow New Town Corporation of which he was vice-chairman. It was at Harlow that he founded the Industrial Medical Service and he acted as its first director from 1955-67. He was also responsible for the important pioneer development of health centres, one for each neighbourhood, at a time when the NHS was inactive in this important area. No other ‘New Town’ even planned for such an important initiative and, although Stephen was later to recant some of his original belief in health centre development by public authorities, he deserves much credit for this insight into the needs of new housing developments.
In 1951 he was invited by the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals trust to carry out a survey of general practice, provoked by the very critical report of J S Collings (Lancet 1950,1,555-890). Stephen Taylor’s book Good general practice, London, Oxford University Press, 1954, is perhaps his most important contribution to the future of British medicine coming, as it did, at a time when general practice was depressed and under attack, and much needing signposts for the future. If the evolution of better primary health care is, at least, one of the two most important features of the first 40 years of the NHS, Stephen Taylor deserves some of the credit.
Taylor declared himself a socialist as a child . .
