Annals of Occupational Hygiene Advance Access originally published online on October 26, 2004
Annals of Occupational Hygiene 2004 48(8):723; doi:10.1093/annhyg/meh063
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© British Occupational Hygiene Society Published by Oxford University Press;
Obituary |
Obituary: Bryan Harvey
Bryan Harvey, CBE, who was president of BOHS in 1976–77, died on 22 February 2004 at the age of 89. For many years he was one of the most influential figures in health and safety in Britain. He contributed to the formation of the Health & Safety Executive and Commission through the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974. The underlying principle this embodied, that health and safety should be governed by consensus amongst social partners, had a world-wide influence.Bryan read philosophy, politics and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, leaving there in 1936 to become a management trainee at a Bristol firm of printers and envelope manufacturers. He was sacked, ‘probably for telling them how to run the business,’ and joined the Factories Inspectorate. His wartime service was in the Armament Branch of the RAF, working at Boscombe Down, for a short while with Barnes Wallis of bouncing-bomb fame.
His first Factories Inspectorate appointment after the war was as District Inspector at Oldham, where his interest turned to occupational hygiene. Like other British postwar pioneers, Bryan benefited from being able to study industrial hygiene at Harvard on a Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship. For the next few years he combined a position as honorary lecturer in occupational health at Manchester University with various Inspectorate posts, rising to become Deputy Chief Inspector in 1965.
In 1971 he was offered the newly created chair of occupational health and safety at Aston University, but chose instead to accept the appointment as Chief Inspector. This was a time when the future of occupational health and safety in Britain was being shaped by the Robens Committee, and Bryan was in a crucial position to influence this. With the formation of HSE in 1974, Bryan became Deputy Director-General. He had retained an interest at Aston University as Visiting Professor, and following his retirement he was able to put more time and effort into this, as well as becoming president of BOHS. His influence on British occupational hygiene extended still further when, in 1980, he became Editor of the standard Handbook of Occupational Hygiene, which is still in print and regularly revised.
Looking back, he said that there were two things which he would most like to be remembered for. The first was the formation of the HSE's Occupational Medicine and Hygiene Laboratory, now part of HSL. On this he worked with Stuart Luxon, another former president of BOHS, and Kenneth Goodall, a pioneering scientist with the Inspectorate. The second was his chairmanship of HSC's Advisory Committee on Major Hazards, which continued for some years after his retirement from HSE. Bryan once famously remarked to a BOHS conference that an explosion was a quick way to ill-health, and it was his pleasure to have made substantial contributions in both the health and safety fields.
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