If decisions on the types of bog paper that Civil Servants should use have been kept a secret for 30 years and only just been released under the new FOI act, just think what else must be hidden away in the archives!

BTW I never knew that bumf stould for bum fodder.

Bottom line on the envoy's loo roll
By Ben Fenton
(Filed: 04/01/2005)

The nether regions of a British ambassador provoked a protracted battle in the Civil Service over whether hard or soft paper was better for the bureaucratic bottom.

Eighteen years of scientific inquiry and penny-pinching followed a letter from a Harley Street doctor to a friend who was the medical adviser to the Treasury.

Previously secret files released as part of an exercise to promote the new Freedom of Information Act show that the campaign began in 1963.

Dr John Hunt wrote to his friend Dr Cornelius Medvei, describing the piles that afflicted his patient, Sir John Pilcher, GCMG, Her Majesty's ambassador to Austria and later Japan.

His letter said: "[My patient] thinks that the government lavatory paper is out of date and extremely bad for his complaint and he has asked me if there is any chance of it being changed to a softer type."

Dr Medvei discovered that money lay at the root of the objection to softer paper, which was bought for the entire government - by Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

He replied to Dr Hunt that if lavatory paper purchases rose by as little as "half a farthing daily" it would cost the government an extra £130,000 a year.

The file is one of about 50,000 between seven and 29 years old which have been chosen for release to co-in‐cide with the first full day of the Freedom of Information Act. Under the previous regime, all of the files would have stayed secret until the 30th anniversary of their closure.

The Treasury document shows that the baton of the soft tissue brigade, once taken up, was not dropped easily. Other Foreign Office staff urged Dr Medvei to become their champion.

It took years for official action to follow and in 1967 there was a setback for the campaigners when the public health labs ruled that soft tissue paper was "distinctly more pervious to infections such as dysentery".

In 1969 a representative of the Treasury's typing pool wrote to Dr Medvei asking him to help "us poor females" to avoid "damage to our delicate parts".

This time "Tommy" Thomson, the chief medical adviser to the Civil Service, took charge. He referred the matter to Prof Sir Gordon Wilson at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who ruled in 1970 that the hard, shiny paper was healthier.

The following year an accountant at HMSO warned the Civil Service Department: "If we switched to soft tissue for government purchases our annual expenditure on this item would shoot up from about £170,000 to between £500,000 and £835,000."

Staff unions were beginning to mobilise, but in 1972, a time of austerity, Dr Thomson refused to help them.

"The prevailing philosophy is that we each stand on our own feet; so I take it that the adjunct to that is that we each sit on our own bottoms - and don't expect the state to mollycoddle them!" Then in 1974 the rebels' cause was taken up by a Dr Ian Taylor, who said: "The nub of the matter is that the soft paper gives a clean wipe."

In 1975 the British Standards Institute gave advice for the first time on large purchases of what it called "crêped paper" and throughout the Seventies the department headed by Dr Thomson, by now Sir Tommy, came under heavy pressure to change its advice.

There was a financial motive too, as hard paper was becoming more difficult to find and the price advantage to HMSO had disappeared. Then on June 30, 1980, the advice came from the epidemiological research laboratory that Prof Wilson had been wrong.

Dr Mair Thomas wrote: "I think HMSO and other providers should now be encouraged to supply the soft tissue variety of toilet paper." She concluded that, for reasons that might not be appropriately described in a newspaper without risk of offence, hard paper was less hygienic than soft.

The laboratory's findings were not passed on to the long-suffering civil servants but the soft lavatory rolls at last were: in 1981.



The bottom line
(Filed: 04/01/2005)

It is a story that might have been dreamt up by the authors of Yes, Minister - except that most viewers would have found it too far-fetched to be believed. For 18 years, according to documents published today under the new Freedom of Information Act, civil servants pushed papers around Whitehall as they grappled with one of the great policy issues of the late 20th century: should government departments be supplied with hard lavatory paper, or soft?

The saga began in 1963, when a Foreign Office mandarin complained that the hard paper issued for the use of civil servants exacerbated his piles. By the time it ended in 1981, with the issue of soft paper throughout Whitehall, it had involved not only the Foreign Office, but also the Treasury, the Home Office, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, the Civil Service Department, the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the government's Epidemiological Research Laboratory.

The papers released today are not only a useful reminder of the derivation of the word bumf, explained thus by the Concise Oxford Dictionary: "bumf n. (also bumph) Brit. colloq. 1 usu. derog. papers, documents. 2 lavatory paper. [abbr. of bum-fodder]." They also throw bright light on the workings of the civil service mind - and perhaps on its anatomical location, too.