FACTUAL
2 February 2008
Saturday 2 February 2008 5:45-6:00 (Radio 4 FM)
Julian Putkowski presents a series on cases from the National Archives that show up Civil Service bureaucracy at its nonsensical and frequently hilarious worst.
In 1900, the North of England press began to report a mysterious epidemic that was affecting thousands of beer drinkers. The medical profession declared that it was an outbreak of peripheral neuritis provoked by excessive alcohol consumption, but a sceptical chemist, working alone from a makeshift laboratory, thought otherwise.
