John Tomley and the WNMA Archives – the first ever ‘national health service’

Blog feature by Cardiff University student Anthony Lee Smith, June 2024 – summarised from ‘The First NHS’ by Emma Snow (see RH).

John Tomley’s Beginnings:

John Tomley was born in a small town of Montgomery and lived in the countryside. He enjoyed playing football and cricket at the nearby community pitches. He also sang in the local chapel choir and learned to play the harmonium, and the flute. Fast-forwarding John was sent to secondary school up until the age of 17 which opened a great range of career opportunities for him. 

Tomley and his exposure to ‘the Five Giants‘:

Whilst John slowly matured in secondary school ‘the Five Giants’ were taking their toll on the lands John inhabited:

• want (caused by poverty)
• ignorance (caused by a lack of education) 
• squalor (caused by poor housing)
• idleness (caused by a lack of jobs, or the ability to gain employment)
• disease (caused by inadequate health care provision)

This exposure to these five giants would fuel a fire in Johns mindset concerning how to deal with health in his local area. John’s father Robert worked in a local workhouse in Montgomery and the surrounding area where he gave out poor relief. The workhouse was one of the only places in the area were poor people could access healthcare if they couldn’t afford to pay. A flaw in this system though was that the dedicated staff at the workhouses were always severely underfed. John also worked in the workhouse with his father and was exposed to this. John would seek to change this unhealthy environment for staff and patients.

These actions by John would not be in vain as it would later culminate in the Beveridge report of 1942 (below) which John had influence in.

John’s life post Secondary School:

After John was done with Secondary school he applied for a job at a local solicitors clerk and got it, it was with Sidney Price who knew john before hand. John was tasked with helping people with house sales, court cases and so on. John’s second and most important job however (Which was instrumental in building a foundation for John’s expertise in the future) was his role as a clerk to the board of guardians of Forden Workhouse. The board of guardians was the group of people who made all the important decisions about running the workhouse. This gave John first hand experience with the dealings of running a health service. A third job John had was him being a finance clerk to the local Montgomery town council, where he would collect all bills that needed paying, arrange for them to be paid, then write a report on spending.

Tomely’s first big public outcry about health:

When john was 19 He stood for his first Oddfellows appointment, as secretary of his local branch in Montgomery, and won the election by 48 votes to 16. This would lead him on to his first public speech on the five giants. He talked about friendly societies at Berriew Mutual Improvement Society in the Assembly Rooms at Efel Fach where he hoped to start a pension scheme. This was successful for John as the scheme was voted in, a first big policy win for John. John in his 20s would go on to push this agenda of tackling the five giants and had great strides propelling health services in his local area.

An Antidote to Pauperism 1906 -1911:

At the start of John’s 20s when he was 32, he had an avid involvement in growing local friendly society membership in his local area of Montgomeryshire. from this growth John decided to highlight the growing poverty in his local area and on the 14th of February 1906 he wrote “Pauperism and its Anecdote in Montgomeryshire”. An article which took several weeks to construct as the assembling of statistics was the main bulk effort. Inspiration for the article came when John listened to a speech by Tom Mills, an Oddfellows leader who was campaigning for Tuberculosis sanatorium treatment. The paper summarized the extent of funds held by the friendly societies, along with the cooperative and building societies. It further shows  that the friendly societies in their current form, providing affordable and reliable health insurance and unemployment insurance for low-paid workers, were a key part of the solution to eradicate the depredations of the Five Giants. Johns paper was so successful that it started to gain national recognition and put John and his work on the map.

Welsh National Memorial Association (WNMA)

In 1910 John set up the first national health service for Tuberculosis in wales, leading on from this John then set up and ran a region of the second national health service. These two establishments led John to become an official advocate and official exponent of national health service.  In May 1912 John started a permanent role, leading on administering the new National Health Service across Montgomeryshire, working for the county council. This is a similar role to modern NHS professionals today (akin to ICBs) Integrated Care Boards. All of this work by John would then be recognized by the Chancellor of the exchequer (Lloyd George). The 1911 Insurance Act would aid the new WNMA service.