A Penge Childhood in the 1960s

Strictly speaking, I never lived in Penge. I was born in 1956 in Aylesford Avenue, Beckenham. In 1959 my family moved to Cator Road, in the shadow of the Holy Trinity church on the corner of Lennard Road, about a quarter of a mile from Penge East station. Penge became the focus of my life, but the postal address of Cator Road was SE26, and our telephone number began SYD, for Sydenham. And Cator Road was in the municipal borough of Beckenham (in the County of Kent, condemning me to a lifetime of supporting that county’s benighted cricket team), and not in the fiercely independent Urban District of Penge. All became moot in 1965, when the Greater London Council was formed, and Penge and Beckenham were swallowed up by the London Borough of Bromley, but perhaps such vagueness about our roots makes it easier for those of us born in suburbia to move away.

Anyway, it was the square mile of Penge (including Anerley), London’s smallest urban district, that I regarded as my home turf. My parents had been brought up within its boundaries and had met as members of a church in Anerley, where one set of my grandparents still lived. My mother worked in Penge and shopped on and around Penge High Street and, up to the age of thirteen – in other words, the 1960s - I went to school in Penge. So it is Penge that I will write about in this article, which is based on my memories of my childhood during that decade.

Unusually for me, this article contains no illustrations. I have no photographs of my own of Penge. There is a splendid online archive of historic photos of Penge andAnerley, but it is covered in stern messages stating that no one can reproduce them elsewhere, so I won’t. However, there is also online a fascinating 30-minute film profile of Penge, professionally made in 1964 by the Rotary Club. It has a patrician tone – at one point the chairman of the Rotary Club insouciantly drives his Rolls-Royce through an amber traffic light at the Pawleyne Arms junction, and while local residents are filmed speaking we can’t hear what they are saying, only the voiceover from the narrator. At the same time, there is genuine pride at the local council’s recent housing improvements, including the trim low-rise council flats that replaced Victorian slums, and there are some positive shots of black people, presaging Penge’s later multi-culturalism. It is also splendidly evocative, showing familiar and much frequented shops on the high street, a busy Maple Road market day, local parks where I played as a child, sensible pre-flower-power clothes and hairstyles, and splendid action shots of vintage cars, buses and trains.

Home

Our house in Cator Road was relatively new in 1959, having been built some ten years previously on land that had belonged to Holy Trinity church. It was supposed to have once been an orchard, as there were mature apple trees in the garden, but old maps cannot confirm this. It was a big, mock-tudor, middle-class semi, with a bathroom and separate inside toilet (as a child I had no idea that many London houses in the sixties had neither), a proper pantry and a large garden. It did not however have central heating until later in the decade and we relied on coal, delivered by coalmen who carried sacks on their backs through to the coal bunkers in our back garden. Once a year the chimney-sweep came and I waited in the garden for his brush to pop out of the tops of the chimneys. In those pre-supermarket days, my mother ordered groceries from a shop on Parish Lane, and they were delivered on a Saturday morning in a box, that a boy brought through a side alley to the kitchen door. At first, our house had no number, just a name (‘Little Garth’), but later all the houses in the road were renumbered. Across the road from us were other newish houses, including one built on a bomb site, where the only child of the family, a girl about my age, was picked up and taken to school each day by a chauffeur with a peaked cap. The road’s older houses were further north, towards Sydenham.

My bedroom was at the back of the house, facing west, with the massive Crystal Palace television transmitter mast central to the view. On summer Bank Holiday afternoons the drone of motor races from Crystal Palace Park came in through the open windows. My room overlooked Holy Trinity’s vicarage and its huge expanse of lawn, which was never used for anything. A sound of summer (along with the church’s single bell announcing services) was the old vicar mowing that lawn with an ancient petrol mower that cut out every few minutes, leading to long pauses as the vicar stamped on the starting lever to try to get it going again. When he retired, the new vicar bought a new lawnmower, but still never used the lawn for either church or family purposes.

As its name suggests, Cator Road was part of the sprawling Cator estate, established in the late eighteenth century by the wealthy timber merchant John Cator, whose country seat was Beckenham Place. The first dwellings to be built on Cator Road were grand detached houses with extensive gardens and rooms for servants, constructed in the late 1880s on the western side of the road. The first occupants included businessmen, solicitors, architects, senior civil servants and those mysterious folk who ‘lived on their own means’. At the time, there was still farmland between Penge and Sydenham, and the occupants of the houses would have looked out over the fields of Kent House farm, in the distance on Kent House Road. But by the end of the nineteenth century Kent House farm had become a nursing home, and its lands became housing estates and playing fields. In the 1960s, a schoolfriend of mine lived in one of the big houses, which his family afforded partly through his father’s job at the BBC, and partly by letting out rooms to lodgers. When I visited, I wondered at the extensive cellars, the old-style kitchen that retained the bell pushes that once summoned servants, and the huge garden with a gate that opened onto Alexandra Recreation Ground.

Our house had three bedrooms, sufficient for my parents, my sister and me. My father drove off each day in his Hillman Minx to his work as a research chemist in industry (in those days British firms still made things). Before I was born, my mother had taught at a primary school in Penge, and once my sister and I had started school did supply teaching before running a ‘pre-school playgroup’. I played with my toys in my large bedroom (Action Men, Tri-ang OO-gauge train-set, Airfix models, Corgi and Dinky cars and buses, Thunderbirds figures), read endless Enid Blyton adventure books, and played in the garden on swings and ropes that my Father set up on a large evergreen tree. On Saturdays, we usually went to one of the large selection of local parks – Alexandra Park, Beckenham Place Park, Kelsey Park, Sydenham Wells Park and, of course, Crystal Palace Park, among others. Each had its own features, whether distinctive swings and play apparatus, paddling pools, roadways to ride bikes around, ducks to feed, Victorian dinosaurs or simply grassy banks to run up and down. However, my favourite Saturday treat was to go to Waterloo Station while the express trains to Southampton and Bournemouth were still hauled by steam engines. We would watch some trains arrive and leave (the rest of the family bored to death), and then go to the station’s News Theatre to watch Bugs Bunny cartoons and the Pathe News.

And once a year we would have a traditional British seaside summer holiday on the Kent coast. We went to Folkestone, and spent a week or two building sandcastles on its small beach, swimming and playing cricket at the better beach at Greatstone, riding on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch miniature railway, watching Silver City’s Bristol 170 car transporter planes take off and land at Lydd airport, and singing along at the evening variety shows at the East Cliff Hall.

Church

The focus of my parents’ lives was the Anerley society of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church (known as the New Church), and its late Victorian building on Waldegrave Road, off Anerley High Street. I have written previously about my family’s involvement with this small, Non-Conformist denomination, which goes back to soon after the denomination’s foundation in the late eighteenth century. I noted above that my parents had met at the church in Waldegrave Road. Indeed, my Mother had been born and raised in Waldegrave Road, in an imposing house with a flat roof, from which the family watched the Crystal Palace, just a quarter of a mile away, burn down in 1936. My maternal Grandfather (Grandpop) was a clerk in a City insurance company, and took the train each day from Crystal Palace High Level station (now no more). His father, who always described himself as a cook and confectioner, never a baker, had owned a cake shop and bakery on Anerley High Street. My Grandma didn’t work, and she and Grandpop afforded the house by letting out the upper floor. Every Sunday afternoon my sister and I would go to Sunday School at the church, and then walk up Waldegrave Road for tea at our Grandparents house. We all sat round the big kitchen table, off the scullery, and ate sandwich spread, fish paste and chocolate spread sandwiches, followed by cakes. When we left for home, Grandma would give my sister and I a threepenny coin each.

My father, though born in nearby Norbury, was brought up in a big terraced house on Croydon Road, Penge. His father, who was the son of a New Church minister, had owned a small commercial art business in Holborn. By the time I was born he had retired and moved with his wife to Brightlingsea, on the Essex coast near Colchester, and next door to the local New Church building. Visiting them involved an early start and a 70-mile drive through the Blackwall tunnel and along the A12. We would get there to the smell of breakfast toast being prepared on the kitchen range, and later we would help Gan (as we called Grandmother) make scotch pancakes on the range, and would play clock golf on the lawn that Grandpa tended lovingly. Brightlingsea had a part-time fire brigade, summoned by the town’s former air-raid siren sounding the all-clear. It was not a sound I enjoyed.

My parents’ upbringing had been dominated by the New Church, as mine was to be, for my Grandparents had all been life-long members. The Anerley society, as with many Non-Conformist churches, was a one-stop-shop that catered for members’ social as well as spiritual needs (and also, of course, their romantic needs). There was a Sunday School, a youth club, a men’s group and a women’s guild, a church choir and regular Sunday School outings (Chessington Zoo was a favourite), and evening ‘socials’. Indeed, at the age of ten or so, my mother insisted that I took ballroom dancing lessons at Frank and Peggy Spencer’s ‘Penge Palais’ on Royston Road, so that I could join in the dances at the socials. I shuffled around the crowded dancefloor with a succession of unwilling girls, my chances of making it on to Come Dancing non-existent.

In the sixties, there were enough church members for two services each Sunday (morning and evening), and two Sunday School classes in the afternoon. My parents participated fully in the life of the church. My father served on the committee and taught a Sunday School class, as did my mother. Both played piano for Sunday School hymns. Mother was an enthusiastic caterer, and always took the lead with refreshments for socials and outings. The church was a central part of my life as well, until I drifted away in my twenties. By the late 1980s, membership had dropped sufficiently for the building on Waldegrave Road to become a burden, and the congregation moved to a new home in West Wickham, the original church becoming a block of flats.

School

I suppose I must have learnt some things at primary school, but I’m not sure what, or how. My only achievement was to learn my times tables quicker than the rest of my class, a feat attributed by classmates (rightly) to my schoolteacher mother making me recite them every morning at the breakfast table. Otherwise, I was an academic, social and athletic also-ran. However, when I took the eleven-plus exam (which in those carefree days for teachers before OFSTED and league tables, was not prioritised or prepared for), I did well enough to follow my father and uncle at Beckenham and Penge Grammar School for Boys.

But I am getting ahead of myself. My school career began in 1961 at Alexandra Infant School, at the bottom of Kent House Road. Although it wasn’t a particularly old building, my recollection is that the toilets were in an outside block. I received no preparation for going to school (I did not attend nursery, and there were no attempts at familiarising the five-year-old newcomers to their new environment), and I can remember crying on my first day – but not much else.

Today, the safety of pupils travelling to and from school is of overriding concern to parents, but I can remember walking home from the infants school on my own, at least as far as the junction with Lennard Road, where my mother would meet me. Traffic was, of course, much lighter in those days (lines of cars outside schools at home time were non-existent), and child abductors had not been invented. I had to cross Kings Hall Road, but at that time it was still unmade (a requirement of the Cator Estate), and so cars approached the junction slowly.

I also took myself to and from Alexandra Junior School, as it was on Cator Road, a couple of hundred yards from my house. My four years there drifted by. The Headmaster was reputedly a former wartime fighter pilot, and treated pupils misbehaving during assembly as ruthlessly as he would an irritating Messerschmidt – he brought them to the front, put them over his knee and pounded their bottoms with the palm of his hand. I enjoyed music and played in the school’s recorder group. The school had fine playing fields, but sports were not my forte. I collected bubblegum cards, that (like boys’ comics) depicted stories from World War II, and swapped them with classmates. Our playground games were competitive and sometimes bloodthirsty. A popular game was ‘Splits’, in which one boy would try to throw the point of a set of compasses into the grass, and another would attempt to reach it with one leg, while the other remained still. We also played ‘Killer’. A group of boys would stand line abreast while another boy pretended to shoot them dead. All the boys would die; the shooter nominated the boy who simulated being killed the best, and he would become the shooter for the next round.

In the Sixties, the Grammar School was still on Beckenham Road. It was designed and run like a poor boys’ public school (which, of course is what it was), and sported a quadrangle and cloisters (that were out of bounds to pupils). The Headmaster was a Classicist who led the whole school in the hymns at morning assembly. Several of the teachers wore gowns and boys were known only by their surnames – we often did not know each others’ first names. One old teacher took pride in remembering past pupils and asked me if my father had attended the school, which he had, over twenty years previously. My uncle, a few years younger than my father, accurately remembered and mimicked the mannerisms of another teacher, who was still given the same (invertebrate) nickname.

I played the flute (badly) in the school’s junior orchestra and developed a taste for Latin, which pleased the Headmaster. Then, a term into my second year, the school moved lock, stock and barrel to its new site near Eden Park, next to the girls’ Grammar School. Although it remained selective throughout my time there, it took on the egalitarian name of Langley Park School. A year or so after the move, the Headmaster left to become Head of a proper public school. The new Head had little interest in Latin, and did away with the hymns at morning assembly. He also did away with prizes for academic achievement, which I had won two years running. As the seventies went on, my school career slowly sank without trace.

Out and About

My mother had an intimate knowledge of Penge’s pubs. Not that she ever went into them; for her they were destinations on bus routes. A familiar sound of my childhood was mother asking for “One and two halves to the Pawleyne Arms” – or the Robin Hood, or the Rising Sun (on Anerley High Street, near Waldegrave Road). Then, of course it would be “One and two halves to the Crooked Billet” on the return journey. I loved buses as a child, particularly ones that were a bit different. When we went to Beckenham (“One and two halves to the Regal” – cinemas were landmarks too), I gazed wistfully at the Green Line coaches that went to exotic places like Gravesend (where my father worked), though I don’t think I ever travelled on one. I do however remember riding on a trolley bus, perhaps the one that once glided up Anerley High Street to Crystal Palace Parade. Trains were even better; mother told me that she took me at the age of three to see the last steam-hauled ‘Golden Arrow’ boat train roar through Penge, and the next day the first one hauled by an electric locomotive. Sadly, I don’t remember either experience.

But mostly we walked into Penge for routine shopping trips, visiting the same familiar shops: Kennedy’s butcher and fishmonger, Woolworths for bits and pieces, Fosdicks for books and stationery, and if I was very lucky, Irene Stockwell for toys. At the age of nine I bought my first record from Art Nash music shop (‘The Last Time’ by the Rolling Stones, unaware that a year or two before, Bill Wyman had lived in Penge and whiled away time in Art Nash’s). The first supermarkets had opened on the High Street (rather smaller that a modern Tesco Express), but mother did not shop in them.

We would cross the bomb site near the corner of Maple Road (the result of a 1944 doodlebug strike, and still waste land at the end of the Sixties), and go to the market. The main thing I remember mother buying there was slabs of a grim-looking meat and jelly concoction called Fidomeat, which she fed to our cat. Perhaps it was made at the smelly pet food factory on Parish Lane.

Our trips also took in shops away from the High Street. Mother often bought vegetables from a greengrocer on Kent House Road, and we would call into the newsagents on Parish Lane to ‘pay the papers’. A little general store on Parish Lane had a special appeal once a year, for it stocked fireworks in the run up to Guy Fawkes night. In those pre-health and safety days, the fireworks were laid out in open boxes in a back room, and my sister and I would excitedly choose our selection.

We would go out and about with our father too. On Saturday mornings we would go into the family’s bank branch on Anerley High Street, where father took out the cash he needed for the week. Then we would call in at the garage further down the road to fill the Hillman Minx with petrol. Father would say, “Four please”, and the attendant would measure out four gallons.

Penge

‘She dragged herself back to New Zealand, with threats of High Court and revenge,

While his eye it did stray, to the ample bustier, of a novelty dancer from Penge’.

- Richard Thompson

‘I'll see you there, You'll be seeing me
Early morning in the fog, The depth of misery
Welcome to Penge’

- John Lydon and Public Image Ltd

If outsiders think at all of Penge, they think of it as these lyrics do, as a caricature of a boring and lifeless suburb, with a silly name. And as the Rotary Club’s 1964 film showed, there was nothing special about Penge, and nothing to keep me there as an adult. But as a child in the Sixties, Penge was my world and had everything I needed, including the freedom to roam its streets on my own. I remember its roads, parks, shops, little factories and peaceful suburban way of life with fond nostalgia. And, best of all, its buses and trains.

The Day Grandpa gave away a House: Laurence Pulsford, Ernest Trobridge and ‘Haylands’

 

My Grandfather, Laurence Helier Pulsford, was a generous man. He was a spendthrift in the cause of others, and loved to give presents and to donate money to good causes. My Grandmother, Laurence’s second wife, Ellen, despaired at times of having to try to run the household on the remainder of Grandpa’s income. He ran a successful commercial art business for some 35 years, yet left little money after his death, apologising in his will for not providing better for his beloved wife.

 

Few believed Ellen, however, when she would say with indignation that Laurence once gave away a house. Laurence never mentioned this supposed act, and no documentary evidence was passed down to their children. Surely even this most generous of men would baulk at giving away the family property. But it turns out that he did, when in 1922 he donated ‘Haylands’, the house in Kingsbury, North West London that he had intended to move into with Ellen on their marriage, to his sister and brother-in law, Jennie and Ernest Trobridge. Ernest, an original and locally celebrated architect, had designed and built Haylands as part of a progressive housing estate for servicemen returning from the Great War, but the project ran into financial difficulties, and he had to be rescued by Laurence and others. In this article I will explore Ellen’s claim, and will show that, yes, Grandpa did indeed give away a house.

'Haylands' Kingsbury, the house that Grandpa gave away. Link to photo

 

Laurence and the Family Pulsford

Laurence was born in St Helier, Jersey in 1880, the third of five children. His father, Rev Edward Miall Pulsford was a minister of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church (New Church) and his mother Ruth (nee Presland) came from a prominent New Church family. When Laurence was just a few months old, the family moved to Alloa, Scotland, where his father became minister to the local New Church society. On leaving school, Laurence moved to Edinburgh to take up an apprenticeship as a lithographic writer in one of the city’s map making firms.

 

Rev Edward Miall Pulsford died in 1899, when Laurence was 19, and Ruth returned to London, where she (and her husband) had been born. She took a four-floor, six-bedroom terraced house in Crayford Road, Holloway, which for many years was ‘Pulsford Central’, being home at various times to a large and changing cast of family members. In 1901, four of her five children were living there: Emily (25), a millinery stock keeper; Edward (23), an architectural draughtsman, but soon to become a New Church minister like his father; Elsie (17) who had learning difficulties and was cared for by her mother, and Jennie (14). Laurence remained in Edinburgh, lodging with an aunt and cousins, while completing his apprenticeship.

 

By 1906, Laurence had married Margaret Jenkins, and they had moved to Crayford Road. Laurence had established his small commercial art business, with a Samuel Garner, producing advertisements for magazines and hand-crafting certificates for trade guilds, among other work (in the 1920s the newly-founded Radio Times was a customer). In 1908, Margaret and he had a son, Edward Lincoln, who died soon after birth. In 1910, their second son, Laurence Garth was born.

 

In 1911, ‘Pulsford Central’ was occupied by Ruth, now aged 65; Emily and her husband Arthur Hardy, assistant manager of a laundry; Laurence, Margaret and young Garth; Elsie and Jennie, now 24 and a school teacher, and, for good measure, Ruth’s nephew Alfred, who was working as a commercial artist with his cousin Laurence (Edward was now married and a New Church minister in Whitefield, Manchester). In 1912, Jennie moved out when she married the architect Ernest Trobridge, of whom more later.

 

In 1913, tragedy struck when Laurence’s wife Margaret died at the age of 33, giving birth to their third child, who also died. In 1916, Laurence was conscripted into the army at the age of 36, joining the Royal Engineers in France in his former profession of map maker. After the war, he returned to London and resumed his commercial art business, and in the early 1920s he got engaged again to Ellen Hill, fourteen years his junior and daughter of a sheet-metal worker in the motor trade and a New Churchman (her younger brother George would become another New Church minister). But where would Laurence, Ellen and Garth live?

 

An edited Pulsford family tree

Ernest Trobridge, the Fern Dene Estate and Haylands

Ernest Trobridge was born in Belfast in 1884. His father, George Trobridge, was a prominent artist and a New Churchman. Ernest trained as an architect in Belfast, then moved to North London, setting up in private practice and pursuing his interests in Swedenborgianism and vegetarianism. In 1912 he married Jennie Pulsford, Laurence’s younger sister, and they quickly acquired a young family. In 1915, with demand for his architectural skills limited by the Great War, Ernest moved his family to Haydon House, a farmhouse and smallholding in the then sleepy village of Kingsbury, between Edgware and Harrow, where they grew fruit and vegetables for sale (Ernest successfully applied for exemption from conscription, on the grounds that his work was of national importance).

By 1921, 'Pulsford Central' had moved to Haydon House, with Laurence and Garth, Ruth and Elsie and Emily and Arthur Hardy all living there with Ernest and Jennie Trobridge and their four children - and a servant and gardener for good measure! Arthur emigrated to the United States in 1922, and his wife Emily joined him six months later.

 

Ernest Trobridge, 1884-1942. Link to photo

 

Kingsbury was within the network of expanding suburban towns that would become known as ‘Metroland’, and the end of the war spurred its development. Ernest was keen to seize the opportunity to play his part in the government’s ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ initiative to expand and improve the nation’s housing stock. He was influenced both by the legacy of William Morris and the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, and by his Christian Socialist principles. He devised a novel method of wooden house construction, the ‘Compressed GreenWood Construction Method’, in which timber-framed houses were built of newly-felled and cut elm wood, which shrank as it dried, forming a strong, watertight and fireproof – and cheap - building. The houses had thatched roofs, as thatch was light, cheap, aesthetically pleasing and (in Ernest’s view) healthy. Ernest successfully exhibited a prototype of his ideas at the 1920 Ideal Homes exhibition, and in the same year embarked on building an estate of 32 houses, to be known as the Fern Dene estate, on a field he purchased off Kingsbury’s main street. The houses would potentially attract government subsidies, which would make them still cheaper to purchase, and they were aimed at ex-servicemen and their families – Ernest employed disabled former servicemen among his workforce, paying them Union rates. The project was financed on a co-partnership basis; an early form of crowdfunding in which investors, including the purchasers of the houses, put money upfront to fund the building works, deriving a profit (or a house) when the project was completed. Ernest claimed that all 32 houses were taken up before construction began, and one potential purchaser was his brother-in-law Laurence Pulsford, newly engaged to Ellen Hill. Laurence took an option on a house, to be named ‘Haylands’, at the top of the estate, at the junction of Kingsbury Road and Slough Lane (by the way, the local history sources that I have used in compiling this piece consistently refer to Laurence as Ernest’s father-in-law and state that he was a builder, though as we have seen, neither is correct). 

Ernest set up a large saw-mill on his site and work began. However, the project quickly ran into difficulties. There was ‘Nimbyism’, in the form of objections by local landowners to the introduction into the neighbourhood of working-class ‘affordable housing’. The local council required extensive modifications to the plans, on fire and safety grounds, and Ernest had to reduce the number of proposed houses from 32 to 24. Then in 1921, the government took away the promised subsidies, effectively doubling the price of each house from £300 to £600. Many potential purchasers withdrew, and in early 1922 Ernest was declared bankrupt.

 

Some investors kept faith in the scheme, however and 10 houses were completed, including Haylands. Laurence and Ellen married in August 1922, and Haylands is their address on their wedding certificate. But by the end of 1922, Ernest and his family were living in Haylands, while Laurence and Ellen (and Laurence’s son Garth; his mother Ruth and disabled sister Elsie) were living south of the river in Norbury. Laurence had given away Haylands to Ernest Trobridge.

 

With the protagonists long gone, and no surviving documentation, it is hard to reconstruct what actually happened. It is not clear whether Laurence and Ellen actually moved into Haylands, or why Ernest and his family moved from Haydon House. Also, we don’t know what the actual financial arrangements of the transfer were – all we have is Ellen’s later exasperated complaint that her husband had given away a house when he could ill afford to do so. My best guess is this: in summer 1922, Ernest and Jennie Trobridge, faced with a growing family and financial problems, had to leave Haydon House. Laurence and Ellen moved into Haylands on their marriage in August, along with Garth, Ruth and Elsie, and Ernest and his family moved in with them (Emily and Arthur had by then moved away, prior to emigrating). Then, in his most quixotic act of generosity, Laurence gave up his claim on Haylands, allowing Ernest and his family to stay there, while he (Laurence) found a new home for his family. Laurence probably did not pay for Haylands, but it is likely that the house that he and Ellen moved to in Norbury was more expensive than Haylands would have been, hence Ellen’s complaint.

Ernest and Jennie Trobridge and family at Haylands. Link to photo

 

Aftermath

Ernest Trobridge was not defeated by the Fern Dene estate debacle. He continued to work on the Elmwood estate, another estate of green-wood houses in Kingsbury, having been bailed out financially by David Wynter, a wealthy commercial laundry owner and New Churchman. He and Jennie continued to live in Haylands until Ernest’s death in 1942 from complications of diabetes (Ernest, a committed vegetarian, refused to take insulin as it was derived from cattle). In the twenty years between the move to Haylands and his death he designed and built several hundred distinctive houses in the Kingsbury area and elsewhere. Many, including Haylands, are still standing and some are Listed Buildings. His green-wood construction idea did not catch on – other developers were presumably put off by the difficulties he had experienced in obtaining planning approval – but Ernest continued to make wooden houses throughout the 1920s, until brick became cheaper than wood and he abandoned the medium. Later designs included blocks of flats with frontages that looked like castles, and in 1938, with war looming, he put forward a design for houses with air-raid shelters in their basements, though these were not built. His youngest son, Brian, became yet another New Church minister, and apparently one of his grandchildren lives in Haylands today.

 

Laurence and Ellen had two children in Norbury, Beryl in 1923 and Raymond (my father) in 1927. After Ruth died in 1929, aged 84, Elsie went to be cared for by another family and Laurence, Ellen and the children moved to Croydon Road, Penge. Laurence’s commercial art business folded during World War Two, and he took a job helping to resettle families made homeless by bombing, a role for which his generous and empathic nature made him eminently suitable. Following retirement, Ellen and he moved to Brightlingsea in Essex, to a large house next to the local New Church, where Laurence tended the garden and (rather incongruously) taught elocution to student New Church ministers. Laurence died in 1974, aged 94 and Ellen died in 1979, aged 85. As we noted at the beginning of this piece, Laurence left little money in his will – a legacy in part of the day that he gave away a house.

 

Laurence and Ellen Pulsford with their children, Beryl (standing) and Raymond - photo taken in 1927

 

Sources Used

Genealogical information avalable at The Genealogist.co.uk and Scotland's People.gov.uk

1921 census available at Findmypast  

Newspaper articles available at britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ 

Grant P (2012) Ernest Trobridge, Kingsbury’s ExtraordinaryArchitect. Brent Archives.

Grant P (2012) From Cottages to Castles. A walk aroundTrobridge’s Kingsbury. Brent Archives.

Grant P (2020) Celebrating the architecture f Ernest Trobridge in Kingsbury. Wembley Matters: 7th February 2020.

Grant P (2020) Take a Trobridge Walk in Kingsbury. Wembley Matters, 14th March 2020. 

Hewlett G (2013) Kingsbury Through Time. Ambersley Books. 

Leonard H & Birchall E (2021) Grandpa: A Biography of a New Church Minister. 

Trobridge E (1920) “The Compressed Green Wood Construction”leaflet. Brent Archives.

My Great-Grandfather, the Clerical Anti-Vaccinator

 The coronavirus pandemic has made virologists of us all. We have learnt a whole new language of virus-related terms: test and trace, lockdown, social distancing, PPE, self-isolation, delta variant, lateral flow, double-jabbed and pingdemic. At the time of writing the UK government’s main (in England, only) strategy for countering the threat is to promote blanket vaccination. And this has introduced us to another new term: anti-vaxxer.

 

For those of us who got our jabs as soon as we could, the phenomenon of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ (yet another new term) is hard to understand. Why would people consciously decline to have a medical treatment that could save their lives, or the lives of those close to them? But opposition to vaccination is as old as vaccination itself, dating back to the beginnings of smallpox vaccination in the late 18^th century. It touched my own family too, as my Great-Grandfather, the Reverend Edward Miall Pulsford, achieved modest fame in Scotland in the late 1880s by refusing to allow his youngest daughter to be vaccinated, and campaigning against compulsory smallpox vaccination. I have spoken of my Great-Grandfather in a previous article, in the context of my family’s involvement with the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church. In this article I will consider smallpox vaccination and its opposition in the 19^th century, and my Great-Grandfather’s role as Scotland’s ‘Clerical Anti-vaccinator’.

 

Smallpox and its Treatment

Smallpox is caused by the variola virus, and like COVID-19 its transmission is airborne, passed on by close personal contact, or from infected surfaces. It is fatal in around 30% of cases, and many survivors are left disfigured by scars from the scabby blisters that are its most prominent feature, though they do receive lifelong immunity. Smallpox was endemic worldwide for hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years.

 

From medieval times, a process known as variolation was the only effective treatment for smallpox. This involved deliberately infecting a person with a small amount of the virus, to try to induce mild illness and subsequent immunity. Variolation was highly risky, and many died from over-infection. The theory behind variolation did however provide the basis for vaccination, which was developed by British physician Edward Jenner in the late 18^th century. Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had been infected with cowpox, a much milder disease, appeared to be immune to smallpox, and reasoned that introducing the cowpox virus into healthy individuals might protect them from smallpox. In a highly unethical experiment (by modern standards), Jenner gave a small dose of cowpox virus to a young boy and then exposed him to the smallpox virus. The lad did not fall ill, and the principle of vaccination (from the Latin for cow) was born. Smallpox vaccine proved highly effective, offering full protection to 95% of those who received it – an ample number to achieve ‘herd immunity’ (another virology term), and by the 1970s, smallpox had been eradicated worldwide. Edward Belognia and Alison Naleway have called the elimination of smallpox by vaccination, “one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century, if not one of the greatest human accomplishments of all time”.

 

Despite its evident benefits, however, smallpox vaccination always had its opponents, and ‘anti-vaxxers’ flourished throughout the 19^th century. Paula Larsson has identified four broad arguments used by Victorian anti-vaxxers, which are still being used by the vaccine-hesitant today:

Minimise the threat of the disease: As late as October 2020, former American President Donald Trump was comparing COVID-19 to seasonal flu, despite ample evidence that it was much more likely to lead to hospitalisation and death. 19^th century anti-vaxxers similarly downplayed the threat that smallpox held for the population as a whole, inaccurately claiming that outbreaks were smaller than they actually were, and that the fatality rate was lower than the 30% of victims that died from the disease.

Claim vaccine causes illness, is ineffective, or both: In the late 1990s, panic was caused by claims by British doctor Andrew Wakefield that the MMR vaccine caused autism in some children who received it, leading to parents refusing to have their children vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella. Wakefield’s claims were found to have been based on fraudulent studies, and he was struck off the medical register. Despite this, concerns persisted. In the 19^th century, anti-vaxxers had somewhat greater reason to be wary of smallpox vaccination, as medical practice was sometimes slapdash and lacking in concern for hygiene, leading to some who received the vaccine acquiring secondary infections. Also, the vaccine itself could cause severe (and sometimes fatal) side-effects in a small minority of those who received it. Overall, however, the smallpox vaccine was highly effective and safe, and claims of high rates of smallpox or vaccine-induced illness in places where most people were vaccinated were misrepresentations, deliberate or otherwise.

Declare vaccination is part of a larger conspiracy: Internet-spread conspiracy theories have been rife during the COVID pandemic, and many have refused to be vaccinated on the grounds that mandatory vaccination takes away personal freedom, and leaves the person open to becoming a victim of whatever conspiracy they believe in. Such concerns were also prevalent in the 19^th century, with suggestions that compulsory vaccination was designed to increase government control over the poor, or to enrich the medical profession – among other more far-fetched conspiracy theories.

Use alternative authorities that legitimise your argument: As we noted above, the current pandemic has made virologists of us all, and not all pronouncements by those in a position to influence others have been constructive. Social media has provided a platform for prominent anti-vaxxers to promulgate their views. The 19^th century equivalents of the internet were pamphlets, public meetings and advertisements and letters in local newspapers, and anti-vaccination views gained a wide audience. In England, Leicester became a particular centre for anti-vaccination feeling, stoked by the efforts of the Leicester Anti-vaccination League, established in 1869, and its Secretary, J. T. Biggs. Biggs was a Sanitary and Waterworks Engineer and was an active member of the Leicester Board of Guardians, responsible for public health, and was therefore in a prime position to influence those wary of vaccination. In 1871, following a severe smallpox breakout, mandatory vaccination in England was confirmed and strengthened with new penalties for vaccine refusal. Despite this, high numbers in Leicester declined to have their children vaccinated, or to pay the fines for non-compliance, leading to some being marched off to prison, accompanied by cheering crowds. In response, a new approach to smallpox was introduced in the town, which became known as the ‘Leicester method’. This involved public health strategies to promote cleanliness and improved sanitation, and early identification and quarantine of cases of smallpox and those they were in contact with – a 19^th century version of ‘test, trace and isolate’.

 

Overall, just as today, there were as many reasons for 19^th century ‘vaccination hesitancy’ as there were anti-vaxxers. Some also objected on religious or moral grounds, including some among the growing number of vegetarians, who were concerned that the smallpox vaccine was taken from the lymph glands of calves. However, the majority of the population accepted vaccination, and by the end of the 19^th century, smallpox had declined markedly the UK. But those against compulsory vaccination persisted, and in 1898 a ‘conscientious objection’ clause was added to the legislation in England (the first time this term was used), allowing parents to legally refuse vaccination for their children on grounds of conscience.

 

Rev. Edward Miall Pulsford – Scotland’s Clerical Anti-vaccinator

My Great-grandfather was born in Islington, north London, in 1844. His father, also Edward, was a self-employed map engraver, and was a member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church (New Church) at Argyle Square, Bloomsbury. Young Edward Miall (hereafter abbreviated to EMP) became an apprentice to his father, but by his mid-twenties had become a New Church minister. Significantly for his later anti-vaccination stance, his first ministry was to the New Church Society in Leicester, arriving there in 1871, when opposition to vaccination was gathering force in the town.

 

Edward Miall Pulsford, 1844 - 1899

In 1874, EMP married Ruth Presland, whom he had known at Argyle Square, and became minister of the New Church in Jersey. His eldest three children were born in Jersey: Emily in 1876, Edward in 1878 and Laurence (my grandfather) in 1880. That year, with Laurence just a few months old, the family moved to Alloa in Scotland, where EMP became minister, remaining in that role for the rest of his life. He and Ruth had two further children in Alloa, Elsie in 1883 and Jennie in 1886.

 

EM Pulsford's wife Ruth (nee Presland)

A New Church contemporary described EMP as “a quiet, somewhat reticent, very courteous gentleman and acknowledged to be a very good pastor because he knew how to look after his people”. In Scotland, he became a pillar of the local community, becoming a member of the Alloa Liberal Committee and the Alloa Society of Natural Science and Archaeology, and playing chess competitively. But in 1887 he started to appear in the local press for his public opposition to smallpox vaccination, and his refusal to allow Jennie, his youngest daughter to be vaccinated.

 

Compulsory vaccination was introduced in Scotland in 1864. Responsibility for organising vaccination and chasing up, and if necessary prosecuting, ‘defaulters’ was given to local Parochial Boards, responsible for administrating Poor Law provisions. All infants had to be vaccinated soon after birth, and the penalty for refusal was a fine of up to £1, with expenses, or up to 10 days imprisonment. If parents continued to refuse vaccination, they could be prosecuted again after six months – and more times if necessary.

 

The Inspector reported to the Alloa Parochial Board in March 1887 that EMP had not had Jennie (who by then was seven months old) vaccinated. The Board instructed the Inspector, Mr Bowie to write to EMP to remind him of his responsibilities. EMP failed to respond, and proceedings were brought against him. In April 1887 EMP appeared before the Sherriff Summary Court; the first prosecution for non-compliance with vaccination that the Court had had to address. He pleaded guilty, and asked leave to state his reasons for refusing to have Jennie vaccinated. Sherriff Tyndall Johnstone told him that he was not permitted to make a detailed statement to the court. As a first offence, he fined EMP the minimum amount of 5 shillings, with 1 shilling expenses, with an alternative of 5 days imprisonment. EMP readily paid the fine.

 

The Sheriff said that he hoped EMP would now comply with the law, but he did not, and in November 1887 he was prosecuted a second time. He again received the minimum 5 shilling fine, but with £1 expenses. In December, he gave a public ‘vindicatory lecture’, in which he set out his concerns with vaccination and his reasons for not allowing Jennie to be vaccinated. His argument focused on health matters – as a good Liberal he was unconcerned with broader matters of personal freedom and he ascribed to no conspiracy theories. He pointed out that there were a number of different vaccines used, and that most doctors who administered the vaccine had little idea what they were putting into infants’ arms, and with what consequences. They had been told that vaccines were effective and failed to look closely at the evidence. That evidence, he thought, was far from conclusive, and he cited figures for smallpox cases in Scotland before and after the introduction of compulsory vaccination, finding little evidence of a decline. He told his audience that there was at the present time a considerable epidemic in Sheffield, England, despite that city having a high rate of vaccination, with many vaccinated people affected. He also cited Leicester, where the local cleanliness and quarantine strategy had reduced case numbers despite low vaccination rates.

 

EMP went on to tell of the severe consequences of vaccination for some children, leading them to contract diseases such as syphilis, among others. In conclusion he stated that “he intended, for his children’s sake…to have nothing whatever to do with it”.

 

He was as good as his word, and in May 1888 was prosecuted for the third time. The local authorities were clearly uneasy about having to take him to court again, feeling that the point had been made and that EMP would never comply with the law. Fining him 5 shillings again, Sheriff Johnstone remarked, “I have no choice in this matter. I must just act as a machine”. Following this, the Parochial Board consulted the National Board of Supervision, requesting that they be allowed to drop the matter, but the response was that EMP should continue to be prosecuted. So in March 1889 he made his fourth appearance in court. His fine was just 1 shilling. A tenacious barrack room lawyer, EMP argued that he should be spared expenses, but the Court told him that to be fair to other ratepayers, he should bear the costs of the prosecution, and billed him one guinea (at another public address EMP helpfully told his audience that for an annual subscription of 5 shillings, the London Anti-vaccination league would pay all fines and expenses of those prosecuted for non-compliance).

 

Not everybody in Alloa supported his stance, however. Following his third prosecution, an opinion piece appeared in the Alloa Advertiser commenting on his case and offering a more positive view of vaccination, concluding, “There has been so much said during the past few weeks against vaccination that people will be rather astonished to learn that there really may be some good in the thing after all”.

 

In June 1889, EMP was prosecuted for the fifth time. Following this, the Parochial Board appears to have taken matters into its own hands, and instructed Mr Bowie, the Inspector, not to add Jennie Pulsford’s name to the list of those who had not been vaccinated. The prosecutions ceased, but EMP continued to campaign against vaccination, giving public lectures into the 1890s.

 

How justified was EMP in his stance against vaccination? His argument about the nature of the vaccine and doctors’ lack of knowledge about what they were administrating was somewhat pedantic – how many medical men really know the nature of the medicines they are prescribing? In citing figures regarding the vaccine’s lack of effectiveness, he followed the time-honoured practice of using statistics selectively and without full understanding. There was, in fact, no inconsistency in there being high infection rates in areas with high vaccination rates, as the disease can still spread readily among the unvaccinated. The suggestion that many vaccinated people in Sheffield had subsequently become infected is likely to have been plain wrong, given the proven high success rate of the vaccine. The ‘Leicester method’ of identifying and quarantining cases of smallpox and their contacts certainly did reduce the prevalence of the disease, but (like today’s test, trace, isolate approach) it relied on successfully finding all cases and enforcing the quarantine strictly. It proved difficult to achieve full compliance and (as anyone ‘pinged’ by the NHS COVID app will testify) was highly inconvenient to those who had to quarantine – and did not offer the permanent solution that vaccination did.

 

As for EMP’s fears of the dangers of the smallpox vaccine: it could certainly present risks if administered in a sloppy or unclean way, and there are known severe side effects that can affect a small minority of those who receive it. But syphilis was not one of them, though it was a common misapprehension at the time, having been promulgated by a Doctor Moseley, an early vaccine opponent.

 

So modern knowledge, and mainstream 19^th century opinion, could refute EMP’s arguments. But where did he get his views from? Doubtless his qualms about vaccination had their roots in his time in Leicester in the early 1870s, when that town was in the forefront of anti-vaccination feeling. But it is likely that the real driver of his anti-vaccination stance was closer to home. His prosecutions were for refusing to have Jennie, his youngest child vaccinated. But what of his other four children?

 

His eldest three children, Emily, Edward and Laurence were all born in Jersey. At that time, there was no compulsory vaccination in Jersey, despite the island experiencing a significant outbreak of smallpox in 1875, the year after EMP arrived. We do not know if his Jersey-born children were vaccinated. But his fourth child, Elsie, was born in Alloa in 1883, and because there is no record of EMP being prosecuted at that time, she presumably was vaccinated. Unfortunately, she turned out to have learning difficulties, and needed life-long care. It seems highly probable that EMP attributed this misfortune to the smallpox vaccine, leading to him turning against it when his youngest child, Jennie was born.

 

Was EMP justified in this belief? Sadly, it is possible. A rare side effect of smallpox vaccination is post-vaccinia encephalitis, which can cause death in infants and children, and can leave survivors with neurological damage. We do not know if this is what happened to Elsie, but it was extremely rare (12 cases per million vaccinated), and there are many other possible genetic and environmental causes of learning difficulties.

 

Another question that arises is, if EMP believed that Elsie had been brain-damaged by the vaccine, why did he apparently not use this powerful argument in his public pronouncements? It could, of course simply have been his desire to protect his family’s privacy. But there was also at the time a residue of stigma around having a learning disabled child, even in a liberal household such as EMP’s. While Elsie was not sent to an asylum, as many others were, she remained a shadowy figure within my family, being looked after by her mother Ruth, until Ruth’s death in 1929, when she went to be cared for in another household.

 

Conclusion

EMP kept his anti-vaccination views until his early death in 1899. The year before, the ‘conscientious objection’ clause had been added to English vaccination legislation, but a similar clause was not introduced in Scotland until 1907. By then, smallpox was in retreat across the UK, ironically through the success of vaccination. Jennie Pulsford did not suffer from her father’s obduracy, growing up to marry the architect Ernest Trobridge and having six children of her own. And judging by the eagerness with which his descendants have embraced the COVID vaccine, EMP’s anti-vaxxer stance died with him.

 

Jennie Trobridge (nee Pulsford) with her husband Ernest and their family in the 1920s. Link to photo

Sources Used

Genealogical information avalable at The Genealogist.co.uk and Scotland's People.gov.uk

Newspaper articles available at britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ 

Beaveridge K (2021) From syphilis to autism: how the anti-vaccination movement of today is an echo of the past. McGill Journal of Medicine 19(1)

Belongia E & Naleway A (2003) Smallpox vaccine: the good, the bad and the ugly. Clinical Medicine and Research 1(2): 87-92

Larsson P (2020) COVID-19 anti-vaxxers use the same arguments from 135 years ago. The Conversation.

Ross D (1968) Leicester and the Anti-vaccination movement, 1853-1889. Leicester Archaeological and Historical Society

University of Glasgow: Scottishway of birth and death: Vaccination

Valentine S (2020) Meet the vegetarian anti-vaxxers who led the smallpox vaccination backlash in Victorian Britain. The Conversation.

St Bernard’s Hospital and the Last Days of the Asylums

 In the early 1980s I was a student psychiatric nurse at St Bernard’s Hospital, in Southall, West London. St Bernard’s had dominated the area since it opened in 1831. It was originally known as Hanwell Asylum, and was one of the many huge state-run institutions for mentally ill people that were constructed in the first half of the 19^th century. These asylums formed the basis of mental health services for 150 years, but by the time I worked at St Bernard’s, the winds of change were starting to blow through their echoing corridors. By the end of the decade, many former asylums had closed down, and St Bernard’s, though still standing, was radically changed as ‘Community Care’ became the dominant philosophy for the mentally ill.

Hanwell Asylum as originally built in 1831

I was an indifferent student nurse, although I did manage to gain my Registered Mental Nurse (RMN) qualification. Soon after, however, I left St Bernard’s (and left London) and never again worked in a psychiatric hospital. But I was a witness to the last days of the asylums and the early days of care in the community. In this article, I will consider the 150-year history of St Bernard’s up to my time there between 1981-1985, to commemorate a mode of health care – and a way of life – that has now disappeared.

 

Names change as times change. St Bernard’s started out in 1831 as the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, or Hanwell Asylum, after the then small rural village that stood nearby. In 1929 it became Hanwell Mental Hospital, and then St Bernard’s Hospital in 1938. By the time I worked there it was awkwardly named the St Bernard’s Wing of Ealing Hospital, having been swallowed up, following some NHS reorganisation or other, by the brutalist, multi-storey District General Hospital (DGH) that was built next to it in the 1970s. Today it is the St Bernard’s Hospital site of West London NHS Trust, a large mental health and community services organisation. The original asylum buildings, extended in the 1850s, all still stand and are grade 2 listed, but few now echo with the voices of patients or staff, the rattle of keys or the crash of trolleys. Indeed, most are converted into that ubiquitous city feature, the luxury apartment block, and are hidden among the housing estates and office blocks that have been built on the former hospital grounds.

 

The Rise of the Asylums

Prior to the 19^th century, very few mentally ill people were cared for in asylums. Most with long-term difficulties received a primitive form of community care, by families or the parish, under Poor Law arrangements. A few lunatic asylums (or ‘mad houses’) existed, funded privately and catering for the well-off, or run by religious charities. They had a poor reputation, typified by a famous 1735 image by William Hogarth of the Bethlem hospital in London (Bedlam), showing inmates in degrading poses, sometimes restrained by chains and gawped at by society ladies on an afternoon out.

 

Hogarth's 1735 depiction of 'Bedlam'

By the late 18^th century, however, some attempted a more humane version of the lunatic asylum. In the 1790s, Phillipe Pinel introduced ‘moral treatment’ (moral meaning emotional) to the Bicetre and Salpetriere asylums in Paris. Basing his approach on the insight that much of the violent or difficult behaviour that asylum inmates demonstrated was caused by the fact that they were being treated in a coercive and degraded way, Pinel and his Head Attendant removed physical restraints and introduced a regime of respect and meaningful activity. Violence, distress and difficult behaviour were all reduced. At the same time, William Tuke founded an asylum in York, England (the York Retreat), which also followed ‘moral therapy’ principles, combining a peaceful, semi-rural environment with a humane, respectful regime and the provision of work and leisure activities. Such initiatives reflected the original meaning of ‘asylum’ as ‘a place of safety’ – a calm and positive environment where mentally ill people could achieve relief from distress and hopefully, improvement in their condition.

 

This upbeat perspective caught the imagination of 19^th century governments, and across Europe asylum care became the norm for the mentally ill. In Britain, an 1808 Act of Parliament allowed local authorities to fund asylums from the rates, and a further Act of 1845 required counties that had not already done so to establish a ‘county pauper lunatic asylum’ (‘pauper’ in this context meaning paid for by the state under Poor Law provisions). In 1850 there were 24 publically funded asylums in England and Wales, with an average population of 297 inmates. By 1900, there were 77 asylums, and their average population had grown to 961.

 

Hanwell Asylum in the 19^th Century

The Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell opened in 1831. Its design reflected best practice in asylum architecture at the time. At its centre was a chapel, offices and accommodation for the asylum’s medical superintendent and other senior staff. Wards stretched out along either side (male to the east and female to the west) in long, continuous corridors, with right-angled bends to reduce walking distances. Around the wards were ‘airing courts’ and in front of the site were pleasure grounds (male and female). Towards the rear of the site were washhouses, workshops, a gas works and a farm and market garden – 19^th century asylums were to a large extent self-contained and self-sufficient communities, with more able inmates (from the lower classes) put to work. The Grand Junction canal ran along the back of the site, and the asylum had its own dock for bringing in coal and supplies. Finally, there was a burial ground for deceased inmates.

 

The first Medical Superintendent was William Ellis; later Sir William, the first person to be knighted for services to psychiatry. He was succeeded in 1839 by Dr John Connolly. Connolly was a firm advocate of the principles of moral therapy and abolished all physical restraints, in the face of opposition from both within and outside the asylum. Connolly’s association with Hanwell asylum lasted until 1852, after 1844 as visiting physician, and he was succeeded by Dr William Begley, who was medical superintendent for over twenty years.

 

A Plan of Hanwell Asylum in 1843, when Dr John Connolly was Medical Superintendent. Note the extensive farm buildings and fields

A constraint on moral therapy in asylums such as Hanwell was that demand for admissions quickly outgrew supply. From the outset, some queried whether the size of Hanwell asylum was compatible with moral therapy principles, and by the 1850s it had grown still larger, with an extra storey being added to the male and female wings. Recruiting sufficient nurses and attendants was a challenge, and the attitudes of staff often leant more towards ‘control’ of inmates rather than ‘care’ (a tension that still exists today). A further issue was that moral therapy rarely led to a cure for madness, and inmates frequently spent the rest of their lives in the asylum. By the end of the 19^th century, physical restraints had found their way back into Hanwell asylum, and most others.

 

The standard mechanism by which a person was admitted to an asylum was through the issuing of a ‘Certificate of Insanity’, applied by a magistrate on medical recommendations. Prior to 1930, asylums only took certified patients; after the Mental Treatment Act of that year, patients could enter a ‘mental hospital’ (as the asylums were by then called) on a voluntary basis. The legal mechanism of Certification of Insanity lasted until the 1959 Mental Health Act, and in the 1980s, long-stay patients’ case notes still contained light-blue cardboard Certificates of Insanity that had in some cases been issued fifty or sixty years previously.

 

Today’s classifications of mental disorders did not emerge until the early twentieth century, and it would be invidious to apply modern labels to those deemed to be insane in the 19^th century. However, it seems safe to assume that most inmates of Hanwell asylum would today be diagnosed as having schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder. There were, however, other conditions common in the 19^th century that are rare today, in particular General Paresis (or General Paralysis of the Insane), a degenerative neurological condition that was at the time both mysterious and incurable, but which was subsequently discovered to be an outcome of tertiary syphilis. Other conditions that lead to dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, were rare in the 19^th century, as relatively few people lived long enough to contract them, but as life expectancy increased in the 20^th century, dementia became more common, and people with dementia often ended their days as long-stay patients on the growing number of ‘psychogeriatric’ wards.

 

There were no effective medical treatments for mental illness until after the Second World War, but a variety of more-or-less drastic therapies were tried. In the 19^th century, cold water baths, centrifuges and sensory deprivation devices were used in attempts to quieten the agitated, or rouse the apathetic. In the 20^th century, convulsive therapy and psycho-surgery were introduced, along with tranquilising drugs such as paraldehyde and chloral hydrate. In the 1980s I nursed patients who had had lobotomies many years before – didn’t work, then.

 

The 1871 census return for Hanwell asylum provides a snapshot of those who lived and worked within asylums at that time. 984 inmates were listed, 312 male and 672 female. They were identified by their initials and ages, with their previous occupations if they had had one. These reflected the times, with male inmates having mostly been tradesmen or labourers and females having been domestic servants. There were sixteen resident ‘officers’, with their families and servants, including the Medical Superintendents, William Begley and James Lindsey, three Assistant Medical Officers, the Apothecary, the Storekeeper and his clerk and the chief Civil Engineer. Female officers included the Matron, Isabella Hicks and her deputy, Mary Pace; an Assistant Matron, a Housekeeper and Superintendents of the Workroom, the ‘Bazaar’ and the Laundry. There were 136 resident unmarried attendants, 46 male and 90 female, and a Gate Porter and his wife. Other members of staff lived in Hanwell village. The tradition of staff living on site in Nurses’ Homes or rented houses lasted long in the asylums. When I lived in the Nurses’ Home at St Bernard’s in the 1980s, most residents were young student or staff nurses, but some unmarried nurses had lived there for many years, almost as institutionalised as their patients.

 

Ordnance Survey maps show the growth of Hanwell asylum/St Bernard’s hospital. The original 1831 buildings were soon added to. As mentioned above, a third floor was added to each wing in the 1850s, and by the turn of the century, additional buildings had grown out of the wings and a new, larger chapel had been constructed. Early in the 20^th century, new ‘villa-style’ wards were built in the grounds to the west of the main buildings, and these were added to by the 1930s. The Nurse’s Home, which seemed to me to be timeless, was actually not built until after the Second World War. By the 1960s, St Bernard’s had reached its peak size, and then the new Ealing District General Hospital was built on part of its grounds to the east of the main buildings.

 

St Bernard's hospital circa 1960. NB: this map is the other way up to the previous 1843 plan. The original buildings still stand, with extenions built into them. To the left of the picture are 'villa' wards that housed acute patients. The empty areas at the top of the site were playing fields. The bow-shaped building in the top left-hand corner of the site was the nurses' home.

Post-war Challenges to the Asylums

By the 1930s the terms ‘lunacy’ and ‘asylum’ had disappeared from official usage (though as stated above, the concept of ‘Certification of Insanity’ lasted until 1959). The 1930 Mental Treatment Act replaced the 1890 Lunacy Act, and among other things, decreed that Lunatic Asylums should be renamed Mental Hospitals. Patient numbers continued to increase until the early 1950s. Then a series of factors slowly came into play that were to lead, some forty years later, to the demise of the old asylums. First was a change of attitude that led to greater acceptance of the mentally ill as part of the broader community. This led to increased integration of mental hospitals with their neighbourhoods. Some that had been surrounded by high walls demolished those walls and allowed patients more access to their local communities. Then drug treatments began to be developed that for the first time offered relief of the symptoms of severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder, at least while the person continued to take the medication. This meant that many newly diagnosed individuals who would have previously been ‘certified as insane’ for life could now receive hospital treatment for acute distress but then return to the community with long-term medication, reducing drastically the need for long-stay mental hospital beds. This led to the beginnings of community care, with community mental health nurses visiting people in their own homes to give long-lasting injections of anti-psychotic medication, and some acute mental health words being sited within district general hospitals. The 1959 Mental Health Act finally did away with certificates of insanity, replacing them with a system of time-limited compulsory detention for those who were a danger to themselves or to others.

 

In 1961 the Health Secretary, Enoch Powell delivered a famous speech to the National Association for Mental Health that became known as the ‘Water towers speech’, from this extract:

“There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside – the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day”.

The significance of the speech was that for the first time a UK government aspired to close down the Victorian asylums and replace them with a comprehensive system of community care – though it would take another twenty-five years for it to begin to happen.

 

During the 1960s and 70s, the old mental hospitals came under increasing fire. Some of the criticisms were intellectual, from what became known as the ‘Antipsychiatry’ movement. In 1961, the American sociologist Erving Goffman published Asylums, in which he wrote of ‘institutionalisation’, the process by which living in an institution such as a mental hospital, with its impersonal size and authoritarian regime led to the loss of initiative, individuality and independence on the part of inmates. It was closely followed in 1962 by Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set in an American psychiatric hospital, which made an anti-hero of the domineering and unfeeling Nurse Ratched. The implication of both books was that asylums, far from being benign and therapeutic places, of themselves led to worse outcomes for patients. Later in the 1960s, anti-psychiatry writers such as Thomas Szasz and R D Laing criticised the nature of medical psychiatry itself.

 

Further blows to the reputations of mental hospitals in the UK came in the form of a series of official inquiries into abuse of patients by staff within psychiatric hospitals, beginning with Ely hospital in Cardiff in 1969, and continuing throughout the 1970s. It was pointed out that the closed nature of the large hospitals, often still self-contained and on out-of-town sites, could lead to a culture in which nursing and other staff felt invulnerable to scrutiny or criticism. Many instances of physical, sexual and financial abuse of patients were reported in many different hospitals. St Bernard’s was however spared from being the subject of an inquiry. By 1980, the feeling that large psychiatric hospitals were at best anachronistic and at worst abusive had become dominant in the UK and elsewhere in the western world.

 

St Bernard’s Hospital in the 1980s

This was the environment that I entered when I began my RMN training at St Bernard’s in 1981. I had previously worked in a couple of other psychiatric hospitals, so I knew in principle what to expect. Today, student nurses are educated to degree level in universities and are supernumerary when on clinical placements, but my training was under the former ‘apprenticeship’ model, in which we were salaried employees of St Bernard’s and contributed to the ward’s staffing numbers while on placement.

 

Despite the growing feeling that community care was the future, my training course was almost exclusively hospital based. I spent a total of two weeks in the community, including a few days with an inarticulate Community Psychiatric Nurse who did nothing but give former patients injections of antipsychotic drugs. For the rest of the three years, I went from ward to ward in eight week spells, with weeks in the training school in between and two unseen examinations at the end of the course.

 

When Hanwell asylum opened in 1831, it was situated, as were most public asylums, in countryside. 150 years later, London had swallowed it up, and it sat between the dense suburbs of Ealing and Southall. It still had its grounds, however, which were peaceful and well-kept, and there were extensive sports fields where there had once been farmland. Previously, these might have been enjoyed by patients, for leisure activities were a constituent part of moral therapy. By my time, however, they were used exclusively by staff. St Bernard’s had a cricket team, a football team, a tennis team, a hockey team and a bowls team, and there were also squash courts in the staff social club. What the patients made of all this sporting activity, from which they were excluded, is a matter for conjecture.

 

Although it was officially a ‘wing’ of Ealing DGH, St Bernard’s was a world apart from its supposed partner. It had its own management structure, culture and mores and the RMN nurse training school was separate to the Registered General Nurse (RGN) School. Nurses rarely wore uniforms - though I still possess a St Bernard’s issue male nurse’s white coat. Student nurses, RMN and RGN, did a placement in the ‘other’ hospital (and there was a fair amount of nocturnal exchange between the two nurses’ homes) and the main route to career development was to become ‘dual trained’ (RMN and RGN), something I never achieved. However, St Bernard’s had a laid back, informal feel that the DGH never had. It was also determinedly anti-intellectual. On more than one occasion, old ward sisters complained to me about student nurses who were graduates – “full of theory but can’t actually do the job”. I took it as an indirect compliment that they were saying this to me, as I was a graduate myself, but had learned to keep that fact quiet while on placements. However, the ’job’ often seemed to consist of little more than giving out medication, supervising meals, and stamping down on trouble.

 

My surviving St Bernard's issue white coat, now rather paint-stained

There were four broad types of ward at St Bernard’s. There were ‘acute’ wards, for those living in the community who had had an onset, or relapse of mental illness. There were ‘long stay’ wards, for those who had been in the hospital for many years, some still with their certificates of insanity in their case notes. There were ‘psychogeriatric’ wards for older people with dementia, and a range of more specialised wards, including a locked ‘psychiatric intensive care unit’ for the most disturbed acute patients, a treatment unit for those dependent on alcohol, and a ‘therapeutic community’ (named Connolly ward, after St Bernard’s most famous medical superintendent) for those with personality disorders. The acute wards were situated in the ‘villas’ away from the main building, while the long stay and psychogeriatric wards were in the depths of the Victorian asylum. The original system of wards joining onto each other in continuous corridors still prevailed, meaning that to get to one ward you often had to walk through another, and porters with trolleys crashed through at all times of the day – hardly a homely environment for patients, and unsafe for those with dementia, who often followed passers-through out of their ward and had to be retrieved.

 

Psychiatric hospitals have long had multi-ethnic staff complements, and St Bernard’s, being close to London, was perhaps more diverse than many. The intake of student nurses of which I was a member came from Ireland, Malaysia, India, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Sri Lanka, as well as a handful from the UK. A few years before, there had been a mass input of people from the island of Mauritius into mental health nursing in the UK, and some of these were now in senior positions in psychiatric hospitals across the country; the majority of our tutors were Mauritian. There was diversity among the patients too, especially on the acute wards, whose catchment areas included Shepherds Bush and Notting Hill, with large West Indian populations, and Southall, with an extensive Indian community (and some excellent curry houses).

 

St Bernard’s had an extensive management structure, but one rarely saw nurse managers on the wards. The culture among ward staff was largely to ‘get on with it’. Even when a patient absconded from a ward I was placed on and committed suicide, the Nursing Officer responsible for the ward only felt the need to give the nurse in charge a brief phone call rather than come to the ward to offer support. We had to ‘get on with it’ when it came to ward supplies as well. There was often a shortage of bed linen, and on psychogeriatric wards, with patients who were sometimes incontinent, beds had to be made up with counterpanes, due to a shortage of sheets.

 

The hospital's senior manager was the Principal Nursing Officer (PNO), who later, following yet another NHS reorganisation, became General Manager. One odd decision that he made during my time was to close the hospital’s psychiatric intensive care unit, on cost grounds, meaning that disturbed patients had to be nursed on open acute wards, with no extra staff support. The result was increased stress all round, with some acutely ill and vulnerable patients spending long periods alone in ‘seclusion rooms’. I only met the PNO once. This was when community care was starting to get underway and rumours were starting to spread that St Bernard’s was earmarked for closure. The PNO decided to hold meetings on each ward to try to reassure the staff about the future of the hospital and I attended a meeting on the ward on which I was doing my placement. After haranguing us for fifteen minutes or so the PNO left, with none of us much wiser, or reassured.

 

So this was my experience of St Bernard’s. By mid-1985 I had left, and so I missed the upheaval that ensued in the late 1980s, when the Thatcher government finally began to close the asylums and ‘community care’, after a fashion, became the norm.

 

The End of the Asylums

‘Community care’ began in Italy in the early 1980s and was adopted by other western countries as the decade progressed. In the UK, it was driven by an unholy alliance between professionals, who were either idealistic or opportunistic, and the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, who saw an opportunity to save public money, while pursuing its agenda to increase the role of the private sector in health care. The first Victorian asylum to close, Banstead hospital in Surrey, did so in 1986, and by the turn of the last century all had either closed or been drastically reduced in scale.

 

Closure meant relocating acute and specialised mental health services and resettling long-stay and psychogeriatric patients. Acute in-patient wards moved to specialised units, often attached to district general hospitals, while specialised services were often re-established on a community care basis – rightly or wrongly. The residential alcohol treatment and personality disorder wards at St Bernard’s were phased out. As time went on, Community Mental Health teams were established, to support people with mental health difficulties in the community and – in theory – reduce the need for in-patient beds.

 

The closure of the Victorian asylums meant that the long-stay and psychogeriatric patients living within them had to be ‘decanted’ to other settings. It was with these groups that the community care changes became most controversial. Those with dementia were of course vulnerable and lacked the capacity to make choices or to agree to being moved. Many long-stay patients were in a similar position. Where they ended up became a matter of controversy, as did the fate of those newly diagnosed with severe mental illness and for whom living in the community was difficult.

 

As stated above, mental health professionals tacitly colluded with the Thatcher government to promote community care. While it was difficult to argue that the Victorian asylums were the best settings for people to live, or provided a first-class standard of care, it was unclear that community care was better for the most disabled former patients. The prime motivation for the government was to save money – the asylums were very expensive to run – and it largely failed to fund comprehensive community alternatives. Some professionals were motivated by idealism, believing that community care would provide freedom and dignity and a better quality of life for individuals. Others saw opportunities to improve their work situations, by ‘moving on’ tiresome, old and smelly long-term patients and concentrating on more interesting area such as counselling and psychotherapy. Still others recognised the opportunities that community care gave them to make money. The government’s main alternative for long-stay and psychogeriatric patients was to encourage the establishment of private sector care homes, and many psychiatric nurses and doctors became care home proprietors, taking in older people with dementia or elderly long-stay patients. In the late 1980s, the General Manager of St Bernard’s (who as PNO had controversially closed the hospital’s psychiatric intensive care unit) was suspended and subsequently resigned when it emerged that a group of 20 former long stay patients had been removed 200 miles away to Lytham St Annes, to a care home set up as a business venture by former St Bernard’s nurses.

 

There were undoubtedly other casualties of the move to community care, among both patients and staff. Some former asylum staff lost their jobs, or lacked the skills to adapt to working in the community. Some who had lived in hospital accommodation for many years lost their homes. And while some former patients were successfully resettled, others fell between the cracks of community care and ended up on the streets, in prison or dead.

 

Mental Health Care – and St Bernard’s Hospital – Today

By the turn of the century, the Victorian asylums were gone and today there is a more diverse structure of services for people with mental health needs. St Bernard’s, or what remains of it, is now the St Bernard’s site of West London NHS Trust, which provides mental health services (and some other community services) to the London boroughs of Ealing, Hammersmith and Fulham and Hounslow, along with some regional and national specialisms. There have been few medical advances in the treatment of mental illness since the 1950s. Medical treatments for schizophrenia, severe depression and bipolar disorder still provide symptom relief only, and the person must take the drugs (and cope with their side effects) long term, or risk relapse. The life expectancy of people with schizophrenia today is around 15 years less than that of the population as a whole. There are no effective drugs for Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia, and numbers of people with dementia are growing with an ageing population. There is a vast and growing need for treatment for so-called ‘common mental health problems’ – depression and anxiety – but no breakthroughs in psychotherapy. Drug and alcohol dependency, eating disorders and personality disorders are still treated in the same ways as they were when St Bernard’s had specialised wards for such issues, and with similarly indifferent success rates. Finally, many expect major consequences for mental health of the current coronavirus pandemic, with children and adolescents particularly vulnerable.

 

To respond to these challenges, West London NHS Trust’s web site lists a range of services that reflect current best practice in mental health care. There are acute inpatient wards – and psychiatric intensive care units. There are a number of different community mental health teams, which together are supposed to provide a comprehensive service for those with severe mental health problems who are not actually in hospital. One can get counselling on the NHS through the Trust’s ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapy’ service and specialisms include an eating disorder and a child and adolescent psychiatry service.

 

There are other mental health services that the Trust does not provide. There are no alcohol or drug services, as these have been privatised. And sometime during the 1990s, dementia was quietly reframed by the government from being a health issue, with long-term care provided for free by the NHS, to a social care issue, provided for by private care homes and means tested, with many having to sell their homes to pay for residential care.

 

The entrance arch and the chapel are among the listed buildings still standing at the St Bernard's site

What role does St Bernard’s play in West London’s mental health services today? Well, the Trust’s website lists a variety of mainly community-based services that have their bases at the St Bernard’s site. But its main role is to provide secure in-patient wards, for people with mental health problems who have committed offences. There has been an explosion of secure provision since the closure of the large psychiatric hospitals, and around 20% of the NHS’s mental health budget goes on providing high-medium- and low-secure units. The original idealistic philosophy of community care was to give people with severe mental health needs greater freedom and a better quality of life. As time has gone on, concern has shifted to reducing the risk, perceived and actual, that severely mentally ill people might cause harm to others. Some people with severe mental illness commit offences, and end up in prison. Others are diverted from prison by the courts to secure mental health facilities, such as those at St Bernard’s.

 

Images of St Bernard's today. Top left: some of the original ward buildings. Top right: the site is now hemmed in by modern office and housing blocks built on the former grounds. Bottom left: Three Bridges Medium Secure Unit was built in the late 1980s on the former asylum inmates' burial ground. Bottom right: The Orchard is one of the secure mental health units that take up the bulk of the remaining site

So in a way, St Bernard’s has come full circle. When it opened as Hanwell Asylum in 1831, its doors were locked and its inmates were legally obliged to live within it due to having been certified as insane. Today, those patients who occupy the locked secure units that have been formed from some of the original buildings are similarly obliged by the Mental Health Act to remain there. They are also legally required to take anti-psychotic medicine and some have become ‘new long stay’ patients, incarcerated for many years. What would Dr John Connolly make of it all? He would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that his regime of moral therapy was as humane as, or possibly more so than that faced by the inmates of St Bernard’s today.

 

Additional Sources Used

Andrews J (2004) The rise of the asylum in Britain. In: Brunton D (ed) Medicine Transformed: Health, disease and society in Europe, 1800 - 1930. Manchester: Open University Press

The King's Fund (2014)  Service Transformation: Lessons from Mental Health.

Turner J et al (2015) The history of mental health services in modern England: Practitioner memories and the direction of future research.

 https://www.countyasylums.co.uk/st-bernards/