Mike Esbester – författare

What do seat belts, life jackets and anti-jack knife technology have in common? They were all the subjects of campaigns run by the British Safety Council since its inception in 1957. James Tye, its charismatic founder and leader for nearly 40 years, created the British Safety Council to bring about a transformation in how Great Britain viewed safety and health. In 1957, hundreds, if not thousands, of workers were killed in accidents and James marshalled every conceivable technique to save lives, including PR stunts, training, lobbying for better laws and, crucially, what he called ‘propaganda’, in the form of posters and other communication tools.

In 2014, a long-lost collection of posters, papers and letters were found gathering dust in a warehouse. The British Safety Council, wanting to mark its 60-year history and its role in reducing deaths at work, decided to preserve the collection and commissioned historian Mike Esbester to trace the history of health and safety in Britain from the late 1960s through the posters and photographs of the time.

Transformative Propaganda: Opening the Archives of the British Safety Council offers a fascinating and vivid insight into the social and political realities of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s through a wealth of historical documents, press cuttings, correspondence, photographs and posters. It offers a truly extraordinary window onto the evolution of health and safety within the UK and richly deserves a place on the bookshelf of every safety professional.

What do seat belts, life jackets and anti-jack knife technology have in common? They were all the subjects of campaigns run by the British Safety Council since its inception in 1957. James Tye, its charismatic founder and leader for nearly 40 years, created the British Safety Council to bring about a transformation in how Great Britain viewed safety and health. In 1957, hundreds, if not thousands, of workers were killed in accidents and James marshalled every conceivable technique to save lives, including PR stunts, training, lobbying for better laws and, crucially, what he called ‘propaganda’, in the form of posters and other communication tools.

In 2014, a long-lost collection of posters, papers and letters were found gathering dust in a warehouse. The British Safety Council, wanting to mark its 60-year history and its role in reducing deaths at work, decided to preserve the collection and commissioned historian Mike Esbester to trace the history of health and safety in Britain from the late 1960s through the posters and photographs of the time.

Transformative Propaganda: Opening the Archives of the British Safety Council offers a fascinating and vivid insight into the social and political realities of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s through a wealth of historical documents, press cuttings, correspondence, photographs and posters. It offers a truly extraordinary window onto the evolution of health and safety within the UK and richly deserves a place on the bookshelf of every safety professional.

For more than 200 years, everyday life in Britain has been beset by a variety of dangers, from the mundane to the life-threatening. Governing Risks in Modern Britain focuses on the steps taken to manage these dangers and to prevent accidents since approximately 1800. It brings together cutting-edge research to help us understand the multiple and contested ways in which dangers have been governed. It demonstrates that the category of ‘risk’, broadly defined, provides a new means of historicising some key developments in British society. Chapters explore road safety and policing, environmental and technological dangers, and occupational health and safety. The book thus brings together practices and ideas previously treated in isolation, situating them in a common context of risk-related debates, dilemmas and difficulties. Doing so, it argues, advances our understanding of how modern British society has been governed and helps to set our risk-obsessed present in some much needed historical perspective.