INSTITUTIONAL PROVISION FOR THE FEEBLE-MINDED IN EDWARDIAN ENGLAND
Sandlebridge and the scientific morality of permanent care
I
At the turn of this century, in a pamphlet entitled The Importance of Permanence in the Care of the Feeble-Minded, Mary Dendy suggested that the main aim of the newly founded Lancashire and Cheshire Society for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded was ‘to force upon the public a great, new principle of right-doing’.1 This ‘great, new principle’ comprised the permanent segregation of a section of the population identified as ‘feeble-minded’.2
In both this pamphlet and in a number of other pamphlets and articles published in the first decade or so of this century,3 Mary Dendy argued that permanent segregation of the feeble-minded held several benefits both for society at large and for the individuals to be segregated. First, it would prevent a large proportion of crimes supposedly being committed by the feeble-minded. Second, it would relieve the over-crowding of workhouses, gaols, and asylums which were thought to be inappropriately filled with ‘mental defectives’4 of all varieties. Third, it would prevent the feeble-minded from transmitting their condition to future generations. Fourth, and as result of the above benefits, permanent care would be ‘ultimately a very great saving of money to the community’.5 Finally, Mary Dendy argued, permanent segregation would serve to protect the feeble-minded both from themselves and from society.
In Mary Dendy’s opinion, the great principle of permanent care constituted a form of ‘scientific morality’:6 scientific because it relied upon the results of scientific enquiry and medical expertise in identifying and resolving the perceived problems of mental deficiency; moral because it took into consideration both the good of society and the good of the individual. In the first decade of this century, Mary Dendy and others made considerable efforts to put this principle into practice. In 1902, after several years of campaigning for support, the Lancashire and Cheshire Society opened the Sandlebridge Boarding Schools at Great Warford in Cheshire. As a result of both charitable and state funding, the Schools and the associated Colony rapidly expanded. By 1914, when the Mental Deficiency Act came into force, there were 265 children and young adults resident in the Colony.7
Significantly, the belief that the feeble-minded should be permanently segregated was predicated upon a particular, and professedly novel, construction of the nature of feeble-mindedness. For Mary Dendy and other medical and social workers involved in establishing permanent institutional provisions, the feeble-minded constituted a distinct and inherently degenerate subset of society. Life-long segregation was thus legitimated by a belief that mental defectives were categorically different from the normal population, that is, that they were essentially pathological.
In this chapter, I shall explore in detail both the form of the institutional provisions created at Sandlebridge and the rhetoric employed by Mary Dendy and others to legitimate those provisions. The first section sets the scene by charting briefly both the emergence of special provisions for mental defectives in the last half of the nineteenth century and the manner in which those provisions were founded on a perception of mental defectives as educable and improvable variations from the normal population. The second section describes the development of an alternative form of institutional care by focusing on the establishment and maintenance of the Sandlebridge Boarding Schools and Colony between 1899 and 1914. In the third section, I shall examine the manner in which Mary Dendy and other writers legitimated their arguments for permanent institutional care by reference to a particular construction of the feeble-minded as physically and mentally abnormal. The final section critically examines both the extent to which the Sandlebridge Boarding Schools constituted a departure from previous institutional practices and the extent to which Mary Dendy’s ‘great, new principle’ of permanent segregation was endorsed in the first decade of this century.
In the last half of the nineteenth century, changing educational policies and the experiences of doctors involved in the management of prisons, asylums and workhouses combined to draw attention to both children and adults with mental deficiency. Specific legislative changes in the field of education initiated and facilitated the process of recognising that a certain proportion of school-age children was defective. The introduction of ‘payment by results’ in the Revised Code of 1862, the spread of educational opportunities that followed the creation of School Boards by the Elementary Education Act of 1870, and the burdening of parents with a duty to ensure that their children received ‘efficient elementary instruction’ in 1876 effectively exposed those children who, for a variety of reasons, were either incapable of attending school or unable to benefit from a standard elementary education.8
In addition to disclosing the existence of children requiring special instruction, the administration of the Elementary Education Acts afforded a means by which those children could be counted and assessed. The subsequent accumulation of information about the prevalence of mentally deficient children itself generated further and more detailed studies. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, surveys conducted by the Charity Organisation Society, the British Medical Association, and the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, together with reports from the Department of Education further categorised, and exposed the problems thought to be caused by, mentally defective children.9
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, adults with mental deficiency were also perceived as problematic in a number of areas. Mentally deficient inmates of workhouses and asylums were regarded as undesirable companions even for the poor and the insane. And as Janet Saunders has pointed out, doctors in the prison medical service also ‘saw the mentally handicapped as a problem’.10 Accordingly, from the 1860s, prison surgeons, such as J.B. Thomson of Perth General Prison and William Guy of Millbank Prison in London (which at that time was being used as an observation centre for assessing prisoners suspected of being of ‘weak or unsound mind’), began to collect information about mentally disordered offenders. Guy’s conclusion that separate penal institutions should be provided for mentally deficient offenders was reiterated in the report of the Commission on the Penal Servitude Acts published in 1879 which concluded that, as a result of their erratic behaviour and irritating effect on other inmates, mentally deficient prisoners posed special disciplinary problems.11
Changing perceptions of the special problems created by mental defectives in schools, workhouses, asylums and prisons, encouraged philanthropists and social reformers to develop institutional provisions designed specifically for mental defectives. Voluntary idiot asylums, established on a charitable basis in the last half of the nineteenth century, demonstrated the plausibility of providing accommodation and training for the mentally deficient in their own institutions.12 In 1897, convicts thought to be feeble-minded began to be incarcerated at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight.13 And, in the 1890s, special schools for educating mentally defective children were established in a number of cities and towns, notably in Leicester, London, and Birmingham.14
Significantly, voluntary idiot asylums, special schools and special prisons were established and maintained according to a belief that there was no sharp divide between normal and abnormal mental processes and that the mentally deficient population could therefore be successfully educated and restored to independent social life.15 Accordingly, voluntary idiot asylums admitted inmates, usually children, for a set number of years only, during which time they were to be trained for some form of productive labour to be continued after their release. At the end of the century, education in special schools was similarly intended to facilitate the development of self-sufficiency in preparation for adult life. In 1898, this belief in the continuity of normal and abnormal mental abilities, and in the educability of feebleminded children, was expressed in the Report of the Departmental Committee on Defective and Epileptic Children:
From the normal child down to the lowest idiot, there are all degrees of deficiency of mental power; and it is only a difference of degree which distinguishes the feeble-minded children, referred to in our inquiry, on the one side from the backward children who are found in every ordinary school, and, on the other side, from the children who are too deficient to receive proper benefit from any teaching which the School Authorities can give.16
One of the consequences of this report was the passage, a year later, of the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act. This legislation empowered school authorities to ascertain the number of children in their district who ‘by reason of mental or physical defect are incapable of receiving proper benefit’ from ordinary elementary education but who would benefit from ‘instruction in special schools or classes’. The Act further permitted (but did not oblige) school authorities to ‘make provision for the education of such children’ by establishing special classes or special schools, or by boarding children out in houses suitably close to a special school or class.17
III
In 1898, even before the passage of the 1899 Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act permitted school authorities to establish special schools and classes, Mary Dendy questioned the validity of educating mentally defective children in special schools and classes without providing some form of institutional after-care. Her involvement in the Collyhurst Recreation Rooms in Manchester (founded by her uncle, James Rait Beard) and her experience as a member of the Manchester School Board18 led her to insist that, even if local authorities did successfully establish special classes, further provision was needed if the problems associated with mental defectives were to be avoided:
Granted, however, that the special classes are started everywhere, and that they are worked in the most efficient way possible, still, after the children have passed out of them, there remains something to be done. There will always be a considerable number who are quite unable to guide and guard themselves, and these ought to be detained for life. Given a proper place to put them in, this is by no means a difficult thing to do. They are so weakly that if they are caught fresh from school, before they are habituated to a street life, they will be easily managed by anyone who will take the trouble to dominate them. They are generally very affectionate, and readily attach themselves to their teachers and rulers. It is only in this way that the evil can be cured – by preventing it.19
The evil to which Mary Dendy referred in this and other pamphlets on the subject encompassed a number of issues. According to Mary Dendy, mental defectives were destined to become paupers, to commit crimes, and to transmit their mental and social ineptitude to their offspring: ‘So he grows up through a pitiful and degraded youth to a pitiful and degraded manhood, and dies, leaving behind him offspring to carry on the horrible tradition.’20 Although such a fate awaited all types of mental defectives, Mary Dendy was particularly concerned about the problems posed by high-grade defectives or the feebleminded, who by virtue of their physical and mental proximity to the normal population could evade immediate recognition and, therefore, more successfully transmit their feeble-mindedness to future generations. As Mary Dendy explained in a pamphlet published in 1910, in which she spelt out the multiplicity of social problems caused by the feeble-minded, it was
not the very severe cases which are the most dangerous; it is the mild cases, which are capable of being well veneered, so as to look, for a time at any rate, almost normal, against which there is most need to protect society.21
In 1898, having examined nearly 40,000 Manchester school children,22 Mary Dendy formulated and began to advertise her plans to control the problems associated with the feeble-minded in the Manchester region. Although she recognised that providing special schools was a ‘step in the right direction’,23 she insisted that further provisions were urgently required:
Now it is well known by those who have, in existing homes, undertaken the care of the feeble-minded, that they can be easily detained. But we, in Manchester, have no place in which to detain them. When I finished my work with Dr. Ashby, I consulted him as to a scheme I had been turning over in my own mind for some time, for providing boarding schools for those children who, when they left the special classes, should still be a danger to the community and to themselves, and was glad to find that it met with his approval.24
In the absence of state legislation at that time, Mary Dendy was aware that any initiative in this area would ‘have to be carried out by private effort’.25 Accordingly, she set about mobilising both local and national support for a society aimed explicitly at establishing permanent institutional care for the feeble-minded. The success of the campaign depended to a large extent on Mary Dendy’s inherited network of wealthy contacts in the Manchester region. Having been brought up and educated in Manchester as part of a socially, educationally, and politically active group of nonconformist Unitarians, Mary Dendy had access to a group of friends and relatives involved in both philanthropic and municipal activities, that is, in local health services, education, in the media and in many branches of local government and charity work.26 Many of these people donated money, time and effort to the project. The successful mobilisation of interest and financial support was, however, also a product of Mary Dendy’s tireless efforts to advertise the work by presenting papers and publishing pamphlets for local, national and international audiences. Mary Dendy’s efforts and those of her associates were immediately productive. The Lancashire and Cheshire Society for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded was inaugurated on 26 October 1898.27 Its constitutional aims, adopted at a meeting held at the School Board Offices in Manchester on 21 March 1899, were to collect funds and establish an institution for the care, education and welfare of ‘Feeble-minded Persons’, and to promote the welfare of such persons.28 The campaigning work of the main Lancashire and Cheshire Society was facilitated by the establishment of branch societies in Eccles (1900), in Altrincham, Bowdon and Hale (1901), and in Southport (1904).29
The Society’s plans to open an institution for the feeble-minded were realised in 1902, when six boys were admitted to the Sandlebridge Boarding Schools (built on a plot of land donated by the David Lewis Trustees near Alderley Edge in Cheshire)30 in May of that year. The first girls were admitted to a separate house in September of the same year.31 By virtue of continued donations and subscriptions from individuals, local education authorities and Poor Law unions, both the fabric of, and the facilities available at, the Schools were rapidly expanded. In 1904, a separate school house was built.32 In 1906, a new building for sixty-five children was constructed and Warford Hall was purchased for adult female residents. In 1913, a new hospital building (referred to as the Ashby Hospital in commemoration of Dr Henry Ashby’s services to the Colony from its conception until his death in 1908) was completed.33 In the first decade of this century, the Lancashire and Cheshire Society also purchased farm land, gardens and livestock both as a means of supplying food for the residents and for occupying and educating young men once they had left the Colony’s school.34 As a result of this expansion, the Sandlebridge Schools and Colony accommodated increasing numbers of children and young adults identified as feeble-minded (see Table 8.1).
Significantly, Mary Dendy’s efforts were not limited to dealing with the problems in Manchester. Although the majority of children admitted to Sandlebridge came from Lancashire and Cheshire, the Society was asked to consider admitting children from all over England.35 Acknowledging the difficulties involved in providing for the whole country, however, Mary Dendy hoped that Sandlebridge would serve as an example of what could be achieved through private effort, as a model for the establishment of similar institutions elsewhere, and as a means of showing ‘that it is possible for Government to take in hand a preventive measure which will spare future generations much of the vice and misery and degradation which are amongst us now’.36
Table 8.1 Numbers of residents at Sandlebridge, 1905–1914
Sources: Annual Reports of the Lancashire and Cheshire Society for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded, 1905–1929
Mary Dendy’s endeavours to promote institutional care for mental defectives at a national level also included pressure to change the law. She was convinced that the 1899 Act was unsatisfactory in at least two ways: first, the Act did not make the provision of special schools and classes compulsory; second, it did not make provisions for mental defectives over the age of 16. Accordingly, in her addresses and published articles, and in her evidence before the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded, she argued, like many others, for state intervention in the matter.37 Eventually, these arguments proved successful. In 1913, the Mental Deficiency Act obliged local mental deficiency committees either to provide suitable supervision for persons identified as mentally defective or to send them to institutions or place them under guardianship.38 Significantly, this legislation ensured state support for institutional care previously provided almost exclusively by the voluntary sector. The following year, the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act extended the 1899 Act by obliging local education authorities to provide educational facilities for mentally defective children between the ages of 7 and 16.39 Together, these Acts enabled local authorities to segregate mental defectives for life. Mary Dendy’s personal contribution to this process was officially recognised in her appointment as one of the commissioners to the newly established Board of Control.
IV
Mary Dendy’s campaign to establish permanent institutional care for feeble-minded children and adults depended, to a large extent, on her ability to exploit a variety of contemporary concerns about law and order, public health, poverty, unemployment, declining imperial strength, and racial degeneration.40 She exploited these fears in two ways. At one level, she insisted that the feeble-minded were not simply part of a wide spectrum of social problems (encompassing crime, unemployment, poverty, inebriety, prostitution, disease and so on) but the root cause of those problems: feeble-mindedness, she argued, was ‘an evil which brings all other evils in its train’.41 At another level, she supported her arguments for permanent segregation by asserting, in contradiction to many earlier commentators and in opposition to the conclusions of the 1898 Departmental Report, that the feeble-minded constituted a distinct, inherently pathological subset of society. This assertion, adopted by a number of commentators in this period, was substantiated in a number of ways.
In the first instance, Mary Dendy (and other writers) argued that feeble-mindedness was an inherited condition. In 1898, for example, she stated that:
As to the cause of feeble-mindedness, it is, in the main, undoubtedly heredity … It has not been possible for me as yet to get at the family history of all the feeble-minded children I have seen, but very often when the parents put in an appearance their statements bore out the theory of heredity.42
In its strongest form, the hereditarian theory of mental deficiency assumed that the defect was transmitted as a simple Mendelian recessive character.43 While this controversial form of the theory was eventually rejected, the hereditarian approach was reproduced in a number of early twentieth-century texts and reports on mental deficiency.44 Significantly, it was often employed in a manifestly circular fashion: when a child was diagnosed as possibly feeble-minded, its family was scrutinised for evidence of deficiencies elsewhere; once found, those deficiencies were used to solidify the original diagnosis. Moreover, in the course of constructing genealogies in this way, Mary Dendy and others included not only a family history of feeblemindedness, but also evidence of ancestral and descendant insanity, inebriety, epilepsy, and syphilis. Thus, feeble-mindedness was regarded as one member of a family of inherited and pathological conditions.
The inherited and permanent taint of feeble-mindedness was thought to be evident not only in family histories but also in the lives of individual defectives. Thus, by virtue of an inherited and predetermined biography of deficiency, a feeble-minded boy or girl was, according to Mary Dendy, destined to become a burden on society on leaving school:
He knows no skilled work, and cannot keep a situation if he gets one. He comes upon the streets, sells matches, shoe-laces, papers, and generally ends by turning up in gaol. By this time he has become used to a vagrant life, and as he can only move along the path of least resistance, and as it is made so much easier for him to go wrong than to go right, he goes wrong persistently and becomes a confirmed criminal.45
The belief that educational disability and social ineptitude were two manifestations of the same hereditary tendency led Mary Dendy to conclude that feeble-mindedness constituted a permanent, and immovable, feature of an individual’s life. significantly, this conclusion was reinforced by the findings of a number of other writers who contended that feeble-minded children and adults were not simply quantitatively removed from the norm, as earlier writers had suggested, but that they were qualitatively different from the rest of the population. Thus, the continuum that had previously stretched from the lowest to the highest intelligence was categorically broken into two distinct and incommensurable groups, the normal and the pathological. In 1910, for example, Dr Alfred Tredgold, renowned for his works on mental deficiency, stated:
As is well known, normal individuals differ greatly in the degree of their mental capacity, and consequently it might at first sight appear that the feeble-minded were merely the least intellectually gifted – the inferior members – of normal mankind. This is not the case. They belong to a totally distinct and pathological group. They suffer from a deficiency of mind, a failure of mental development, which is of precisely the same kind as, and merely differs in degree from, the states of idiocy and imbecility.46
Tredgold and other medical writers substantiated this view of the feebleminded as belonging to a distinct and pathological group in several ways. First, mental deficiency in general was likened to organic disease. In 1911, at a one-day conference on the care of the feeble-minded held in Manchester, Tredgold insisted that ‘feeble-mindedness is not the lowest grade of the normal, but that it is a definite abnormality – that it is, in fact, a disease’.47 In particular, mental deficiency was likened to infectious diseases. Thus, when giving evidence to the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded in 1904, Mary Dendy alerted the commissioners to the moral and physical degeneration resulting from undetected mental deficiency among the upper, as well as the lower, classes and suggested that medical men should be required by law to report such cases as if they were ‘a notifiable disease’. The strength of this metaphorical link between mental deficiency and infectious diseases was reinforced by observations that mental defectives were more susceptible to infectious diseases than the normal population. According to Mary Dendy, the weak-minded were ‘peculiarly susceptible to disease, particularly consumption, and succumb more readily than normal persons to epidemics’.48
Belief in the distinct and pathological nature of the feeble-minded was also given credence by references to physical stigmata frequently found in mental defectives. The diagnostic significance of physical stigmata was discussed in a number of medical texts published around the turn of this century. In his Feeblemindedness in Children of School-Age, published in 1911, for example, Charles Paget Lapage, physician to the Manchester Children’s Hospital and a frequent visitor at Sandlebridge, listed a variety of ‘stigmata of degeneration’, some of which he illustrated with photographs of children from the Sandlebridge Colony itself: defects in the size and shape of the head; deformities of the external ear; deformities of the eyes, palate and jaws; and a defective expression.49 While medical writers acknowledged that the presence of physical stigmata was not pathognomonic of mental deficiency, they nevertheless noted that stigmata were more marked, more numerous and more often found in mental defectives than in the mentally normal population.50
The representation (by Mary Dendy and Alfred Tredgold in particular) of the feeble-minded as a distinct and pathological subset of society was closely linked to the contention that feeble-mindedness was not simply a transient phenomenon amenable to correction and cure but a permanent affliction. In Tredgold’s opinion, while ‘this defect may be ameliorated it can never be cured, and it is necessary to state most emphatically that by no method can the feeble-minded person be converted into a normal individual’.51 A similar view was forcefully expressed by Mary Dendy throughout the first decade of this century:
No one can promise to cure the sufferers who are such a curse to themselves and to society. No one can make the faulty brain into a perfect one, change the diseased rickety body for one glowing with health and beauty, strengthen the feeble will so that it has all the power of the highest and strongest of God’s creatures. These things are beyond the skill of man.52
While she considered human skill incapable of curing the feebleminded, she insisted that there was nevertheless ‘a scientific method of dealing with the feeble-minded’,53 which could prevent the spread of social problems caused by the condition:
But science has shown us what we can do if we only will. We can develop the faulty brain in those directions in which it has power; we can minimise the bodily weakness and suffering; we can give the feeble will right guidance and support, so that for every sufferer who comes under our care life shall be made as pure and holy and happy as his physical limits will permit. More, far more than this, we can so guard and protect that life, that those terrible physical limits shall not be handed down to a second and third generation. This is the meaning of the word Permanent, in the title of the Lancashire and Cheshire Society.54
In the first decade or so of this century, then, the representation of the feeble-minded as essentially pathological and distinct from the normal population was closely linked to a belief that the feeble-minded were incurable educationally and socially inept. This construction of feeblemindedness was in turn used to legitimate claims that the only rational way of coping with the problems supposedly caused by mental defectives, in general, and the feeble-minded, in particular, was to segregate them permanently in institutions built specifically for that purpose.
V
In the last decade or so of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this century, ‘the problem of feeble-mindedness’ (as it was frequently called) became an increasingly central focus for a number of professional groups. Medical practitioners, in particular, were prominent contributors to debates on the matter. A number of doctors, many of whom worked in institutions for the mentally deficient, published textbooks and articles and presented papers on the subject.55 In addition, editorials, articles and short notices on feeble-mindedness and on the urgent need for legislation appeared frequently in journals directed at medical practitioners in a variety of situations: for example, in The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, The Medical Officer, and The Journal of State Medicine.
A variety of other professional groups also contributed to discussions on the matter. Although most of the witnesses giving evidence to the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded were medically qualified, evidence was also presented by lawyers, teachers and school inspectors, charity workers, and those involved in Poor Law administration.56 Similarly, local conferences on the subject, such as the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association’s conference in 1911, were attended by a mix of charity workers, medical practitioners, Poor Law guardians, teachers and local philanthropists.57
Mary Dendy made considerable efforts to convince these various audiences that she had devised a new form of institutional care, based on scientific principles, that was guaranteed to solve both the immediate and the long-term problems thought to be caused by feeblemindedness. To what extent did Mary Dendy’s initiative constitute a departure from previous approaches to people labelled as mentally deficient and to what extent did these various professional groups endorse both the principle of permanent care and the practices developed at Sandlebridge?
One of the ways in which Mary Dendy promoted the project at Sandlebridge was to stress that it offered a very different approach to that adopted at the voluntary ‘idiot’58 asylums in the last half of the nineteenth century. On occasions, this amounted to direct criticism of asylum policies. Thus, in a pamphlet entitled The Problem of the Feeble-Minded, she made a direct attack on the policies and practices of the Royal Albert Asylum in Lancashire:
The Royal Albert Asylum keeps its patients for seven years, the longest period devoted to training at any such institution. At a meeting of the supporters of this asylum in 1906 it was reported that since the foundation of the institution 1,502 patients have been discharged from it. It is worse than useless to deal with idiots and other weak-minded persons in this way.59
In spite of such explicit criticism of voluntary idiot asylum policy and in spite of her claims to have established a permanent colony for the feeble-minded, it is not clear that the policies and practices adopted at Sandlebridge differed substantially from those of the asylums. Indeed, similarities between the establishments are evident both in the length of stay of residents and in the mix of custodial and educational purposes served by both voluntary idiot asylums and Sandlebridge.
In the first instance, there is evidence to suggest that those involved in running, and subscribing to, voluntary idiot asylums were prepared, from the outset, to consider the possibility of admitting people for life.60 Conversely, the records of the Sandlebridge Boarding Schools and Colony indicate that many of the children admitted to Sandlebridge did not remain permanently in the institution. Thus, of nearly four hundred children admitted to the institution between 1902 and 1914, only 265 were still at Sandlebridge in 1914.61 The remainder were removed by Poor Law Guardians to work on Union farms, were discharged to other institutions or to their families, or were forcibly removed by their relatives. Thus, Mary Dendy’s claim in 1910 that ‘we have lost very few either by death or removals since we opened our first building’ is unsupported by evidence from the Colony’s records.62 Even after the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act had facilitated the retention of mental defectives beyond the age of 16, this pattern persisted. Indeed, many residents of Sandlebridge were released when their certificates were not renewed under the terms of the 1913 Act.63
Similarities between voluntary asylums, on the one hand, and Sandlebridge, on the other, are also evident in the practical running of these establishments. Although proponents of asylum care publicly emphasised the educational and training aspects of their institutions, it is likely that asylums were also used to exert a discrete custodial power over the disorderly and the socially deviant. Many of the ‘motley group’ of inmates first admitted to Park House, Highgate in 1848 posed considerable problems to the authorities, not on the basis of their educational deficits but because they were loud, violent and unruly. In 1850, in their annual report, the managers of Park House were as pleased, if not more so, at their success in taming the mob as at their ability to educate them in the classroom:
Bad habits have been overcome; power has been created for the care of the person; the body has been brought under the control of the will, and both have become subject to mild authority. The power of imitation has been fostered; music and drawing are beginning to find a place in the school: reading, writing, and even figures, which are the severest test to the weak mind, are now claiming general attention. And above all the moral affections have been exercised, and the effects are found in the harmony of the family, and the greater readiness of the mind to recognise and worship an invisible and gracious Presence. There is now order, obedience to authority, classification, improvement and cheerful occupation.64
More pertinently, case histories from the Royal Albert Asylum suggest the potential social, rather than purely educational, utility of the institution. Of six children discussed by Michael Barratt in his thesis on the Royal Albert Asylum, four appear to have presented problems of conduct, temperament and disposition, as well as instruction. For example, one boy, admitted in June 1878 at the age of 7, was described as ‘a wild, uncouth boy, rushing about and doing mischief. After a year or so in the asylum, both his educational ability and his behaviour had improved. Significantly, he was ‘now gentle and well-conducted, and very obedient to his teachers’.65 Such cases challenge Barratt’s own claims that voluntary idiot asylums ‘were remedial, not palliative, in intent’66 and that ‘they did not have a clear-cut societal function’.67
Conversely, although Mary Dendy and others involved in Sandlebridge emphasised the social importance of permanently segregating the feeble-minded, they were also aware of the importance of appropriate education and training both as a means of assisting the Colony’s financial survival and as a means of occupying the residents in productive and fulfilling work. Accordingly, education in the school rooms at Sandlebridge (which was run by teachers without a resident medical practitioner for nearly forty years) was geared both to the individual abilities of the residents and to the belief that it was through practical work (rather than intellectual endeavour) that the moral reclamation of the feeble-minded would be achieved.68
It would appear, then, that in spite of Mary Dendy’s claims, the principles and practices adopted at Sandlebridge did not differ substantially from those that had been adopted by the voluntary idiot asylums over the preceding half-century. What appears to have changed, however, around the turn of this century, is the nature of the rhetoric employed to legitimate institutional custody for mental defectives. While the proponents of asylum care in the late nineteenth century had echoed the therapeutic optimism of the period in their slogan ‘educate the idiot’, the proponents of colonies such as Sandlebridge increasingly exploited contemporary fears about crime, poverty and racial degeneration by publicly advocating the permanent segregation of the feebleminded on the basis of their pathological and degenerate nature.
In many ways, Mary Dendy, Alfred Tredgold and others advocating permanent segregation of the feeble-minded were successful in promoting their cause. The campaigning efforts of Mary Dendy and her associates in Manchester succeeded in attracting considerable local, national and international interest in developments at Sandlebridge. This interest was evidenced both in the number of visitors to the Colony and in the continued financial support to the Lancashire and Cheshire Society.69 Her initiative at Sandlebridge also elicited support from witnesses and commissioners participating in the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded between 1904 and 1908. On questioning Henry Ashby about arrangements at Sandlebridge, for example, Henry Burden, a manager of inebriate reformatories, stated that, ‘Sandlebridge strikes one as almost an ideal place for these young children’.70
In addition, the main tenets of Mary Dendy’s arguments were taken up and discussed elsewhere, most notably in medical journals. Thus, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the first decade of the twentieth century, The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, The Journal of Mental Science, The Journal of State Medicine, and The Medical Officer regularly published articles, letters, editorials and conference reports in which Mary Dendy’s ideas were sympathetically received and in which arguments both for permanent segregation and for changes in the law were forcibly made.71 Eventually, such arguments (propagated in particular by members of the Eugenics Education Society, of which both Mary Dendy and Alfred Tredgold were members) proved influential in the framing and passage of the Mental Deficiency Act in 1913.72
The passage of the 1913 Act should not, however, be taken as evidence that either Mary Dendy’s construction of the feeble-minded or the policy of permanent segregation passed unchallenged in the early years of this century. On the contrary, her arguments were contested at a number of levels. In the first instance, belief in a clear divide between normal and pathological mental processes, which underwrote policies for permanent segregation, was challenged by a growing anthropometric and biometric trend characterised both by the work of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson and by the introduction of intelligence tests into the medical inspection of school children.73 Based on quantitative, statistical methodologies, biometry not only rejected accounts of mental deficiency that described its transmission as a Mendelian recessive unit character but also stressed the continuous distribution of both physical and mental qualities within the population. Thus, in 1914, after studying the results of intelligence tests applied to groups of supposedly normal and supposedly mentally deficient children, Karl Pearson and Gustav Jaederholm drew the following conclusions:
In truth there is no such intellectual boundary between the normal and mentally defective. The distribution of intelligence in both normal and mentally defective is absolutely continuous, and in purely psychological tests of intelligence there are no rigid and limited categories of normal intelligence and feeble-mindedness. There is a continuous gradation of intelligence, and it appears to us perfectly idle to speak of Mendelian units and lack of determiners in respect of such a character.74
Although they acknowledged that there may be ‘a pathological type of mental defect’ responsible for a small proportion of mental deficiency,
Pearson and Jaederholm insisted that this type could not ‘be directly differentiated on the basis of intelligence from the remainder of the tail of the mentally defective population’.75 They further argued that, since there was ‘no sharp division’ between mentally defective and normal children, the drafting of children into special classes and schools must be the result of a variety of factors related more to social efficiency, and to the personal opinions of teachers and medical officers, than to intelligence.76 While accepting the need to segregate the socially inefficient, these authors insisted that segregation should not be determined by intelligence tests and warned that the ‘pseudo-scientific dogma which supports an absolute differentiation between the normal and the mentally-defective child is bound to do incalculable social harm’.77
Some commentators also questioned whether the feeble-minded were quite as incurable as Mary Dendy and Alfred Tredgold insisted. The Board of Education’s persistent ameliorist and environmentalist stance, for example, challenged the assumption that feeble-minded children were beyond redemption and supported the continuing contribution of special day schools to the education and improvement of defectives.78 And at a conference on child hygiene in 1910, Dr Helen Boyle was reported to have responded to Alfred Tredgold’s assertion that feeble-minded children could not be cured, by stating that ‘her experience showed that feeble-minded children were more curable than Dr. Tredgold thought’.79 Nevertheless, even she argued for ‘a more prolonged control of these children, such as was obtained in the colonies at Manchester and Tunbridge’.80
Although many medical practitioners, social workers and teachers accepted the need for some form of care, Mary Dendy’s insistence on permanent care was not unequivocally accepted. For example, the National Association for Promoting the Welfare of the Feeble-Minded refused to include the word ‘permanent’ in its tide.81 Moreover, even when the need for permanent care was increasingly acknowledged, institutional care was not the sole form of permanency under discussion. ‘After-Care Committees’ such as that in Birmingham continued to consider the possibility of some form of guardianship or supervision of defectives in the community after discharge from an institution.82
Finally, it is clear from reports of debates about the passage of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act that some commentators, notably the Liberal Member of Parliament Josiah Wedgwood, objected to legislation empowering the detention of mental defectives on the grounds that it constituted ‘a monstrous interference with individual liberty’.83 In spite of such objections, it is evident that by 1913, many politicians, medical practitioners, charity workers and educationalists were convinced that segregation, sanctioned by the state, offered the most effective means of ‘putting an end to this terrible evil of our society’.84
VI
At the turn of this century, Mary Dendy began to insist that feeblemindedness was ‘a problem which lies at the root of all others, and until we deal with it in a rational manner there is little hope indeed of bettering the general condition of our people’.85 The rational solution that she had in mind comprised early recognition of feeble-minded children and their subsequent segregation for life in colonies built specifically for the purpose. The magnitude of the problem, she argued, was even sufficient to justify ‘over-riding the responsibility of the parent for his child’.86
For Mary Dendy, the benefits of permanent segregation were clear. The multiplicity of social problems supposedly attributable to the feeble-minded would be prevented and the feeble-minded themselves would be guaranteed a secure and safe environment in which they could fulfil their limited potential. Significantly, representations of the feeble-minded as essentially pathological and arguments for their permanent segregation served discrete professional and personal interests as well as professedly humanitarian ones. Thus, in claiming that feeble-mindedness was a pathological state analogous to organic disease, medical writers such as Alfred Tredgold were creating and protecting a role for themselves as experts in mental deficiency. In this way, they could ensure that medical practitioners rather than teachers were considered the most appropriate professionals to be given the responsibility of diagnosing feeble-mindedness and of administrating new legislation. Similarly, by acclaiming arrangements at Sandlebridge as the most effective way of dealing with a multiplicity of social problems, Mary Dendy was carving out a niche for herself in a public arena from which women were often excluded. Her success in this endeavour is evidenced not only by her notoriety as the matriarch of a family of feeble-minded children at Sandlebridge but also by her appointment as a paid commissioner to the newly created Board of Control in 1913.
NOTES
1 M. Dendy, The Importance of Permanence in the Care of the Feeble-Minded, (n.d), p. 2. This pamphlet was originally published in 1899 in the Educational Review.
2 The term ‘feeble-minded’ was used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe people with a mild degree of what was at that time referred to as ‘mental deficiency’ but would now be referred to as ‘learning disability’. Quotation marks will no longer be used for the terms ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘mental deficiency’.
3 M. Dendy, Feebleness of Mind, Pauperism and Crime, Glasgow Provisional Committee for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded, 1901; ibid., Feeble-Minded Children, Manchester, 1902; ibid., ‘The Feeble-Minded and Crime’, The Lancet, 1902, vol. 1, pp. 1460–3; ibid., The Problem of the Feeble-Minded, Manchester, 1910; ibid., ‘The Feeble-Minded’, The Medical Magazine, 1911, vol. 20, pp. 686–98; ibid., ‘Feeble-Minded Children’, The Journal of State Medicine, 1914, vol. 22, pp. 412–18.
4 On the use of this term, see Note 1 above. Quotation marks will no longer be used.
5 Dendy, The Importance of Permanence, p. 6.
6 This phrase appears in Dendy, Feebleness of Mind, Pauperism and Crime, p. 8.
7 Figures relating to the number of admissions to, and the number of residents in, the Colony are taken from the Annual Reports of the Lancashire and Cheshire Society for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded [hereafter referred to simply as Annual Reports], 1900–1929.
8 The legislative provisions were Elementary Education Act, 33 & 34 Vict. c.75, (1870); and Elementary Education Act, 39 & 40 Vict. c.53, (1876). For contemporary comments on the importance of these Acts, see Annual Report for 1908 of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education, Cd. 4986, London, 1910, pp. 107, 114; and Annual Report for 1909 of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education, Cd. 5426, London, 1910, pp. 157–8.
9 See, for example Training Schools and Permanent Asylums for Idiots, London, 1875; Report of a Special Committee of the Charity Organisation Society on the Education and Care of Idiots, Imbeciles, and Harmless Lunatics, London, 1877; The Feeble-minded Child and Adult, London, 1893; F. Warner, ‘Abstract of the Milroy Lectures on an Inquiry as to the Physical and Mental Condition of School Children’, The Lancet, 1892, vol. 1, pp. 567–8, 623–4, 680–2, 738–9. On investigations into the circumstances of feeble-minded girls and young women, see the discussions in K.Jones, A History of the Mental Health Services, London, 1972, p. 186; and J. A. Barclay, ‘Langho Epileptic Colony: 1906–1984: A Contextual Study of the Origins, Transformations and Demise of Manchester’s “Colony for Sane Pauper Epileptics”’ PhD thesis, Manchester, 1988, pp. 37–42.
10 J. Saunders, ‘Quarantining the Weak-Minded: Psychiatric Definitions of Degeneracy and the Late Victorian Asylum’, in W. F. Bynum, R. Porter, and M. Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. 3, London, 1988, p. 275.
11 Discussed in Saunders, ‘Quarantining the Weak-minded’. See also Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Prisons Under Local Government (first published 1922), London, 1963, pp. 201–31.
12 For more details on the voluntary idiot asylums, see Gladstone in this volume.
13 Webb and Webb, English Prisons, pp. 225–6, fn.
14 J. S. Hurt, Outside the Mainstream: A History of Special Education, London, 1988, p. 127. See also Annual Report for 1908 of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education, p. 114.
15 Indeed, the development of self-reliance and self-sufficiency was sometimes acknowledged by asylum administrators on both sides of the Atlantic to be the raison d’être of such institutions. See, for example, John Charles Bucknill, Address on Idiocy, Lewes, 1873, p. 14. On the importance of educability in selecting inmates, see also the bye laws of the New York State Idiot Asylum reproduced in G. E. Shuttleworth, Notes of a Visit to American Institutions for Idiots & Imbeciles, Lancaster, (n.d), p. 5.
16 Report of the Departmental Committee on Defective and Epileptic Children, vol. I, Cd. 8746, 1898, p. 3.
17 Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act, 1899, 62 & 63 Vict. c.32.
18 For further details of Mary Dendy’s involvement in the Collyhurst Recreation Rooms and the Manchester School Board, see H. McLachlan, Records of a Family 1800–1933, Manchester, 1935, pp. 144–8.
19 Dendy, Feeble-Minded Children, p. 10.
20 Ibid., p. 8
21 Dendy, The Problem of the Feeble-Minded, p. 19.
22 Mary Dendy was assisted by Charles H. Wyatt, clerk to the Manchester School Board, Mr Burke, an attendance officer for the School Board, Dr George Shuttleworth, until 1893 the medical superintendent of the Royal Albert Asylum at Lancaster, and Henry Ashby, physician to the Manchester Children’s Hospital.
23 Dendy, Feeble-Minded Children, p. 9.
24 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
25 Ibid., p. 19.
26 For an account of Mary Dendy’s family and close friends, and of their activities in Manchester, see McLachlan, Records of a Family.
27 An account of the events leading to the Society’s inauguration can be found in the first Annual Report, 1899, pp. 3–4.
28 Constitution of the Lancashire and Cheshire Society for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded, (n.d), p. 1.
29 Annual Report, 1900, pp. 4–5; ibid., 1902, p. 5; ibid., 1904, p. 4.
30 The David Lewis Trust was founded in 1893 with money left by David Lewis, the founder of the Lewis chain of stores. The Trust originally donated twenty acres of land to the Lancashire and Cheshire Society for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded to be used when they were ready. For further details of the Trust, see ‘The David Lewis Story’, a fact sheet published by the David Lewis Centre.
31 Annual Report, 1902, p. 3.
32 Annual Report, 1904, p. 7. This temporary construction was replaced by a more substantial building in 1907.
33 Dr Henry Ashby had served as Honorary Consulting Physician to the Lancashire and Cheshire Society from its inception until his death. For comments on the new hospital building, see Annual Report, 1913, p. 14.
34 Comments on the work done in the gardens and farms, and accounts of the farm income and expenditure, appeared regularly in the Society’s Annual Reports.
35 Annual Report, 1902, p. 5.
36 Dendy, Feeble-Minded Children, pp. 19–20.
37 See her comments, for example, to the Royal Commission in the Report of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded [hereafter simply referred to as the Royal Commission], vol. I, Cd. 4215, 1908, pp. 40–41. See also Dendy, The Problem of the Feeble-Minded, pp. 28–9.
38 Mental Deficiency Act, 1913, 3 & 4 Geo.5, c.28.
39 Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act, 1914, 4 & 5 Geo.5, c.45.
40 For general discussions of these concerns, see D. J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, Harmondsworth, 1986; G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900–1914, Leyden, 1976; G. Jones, Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain, London, 1986.
41 Dendy, The Importance of Permanence, p. 2.
42 Dendy, Feeble-Minded Children, pp. 5–6.
43 E. Sayer, ‘Mentally Defective Children and their Treatment’, The Journal of State Medicine, 1914, vol. 22, p. 157.
44 See Tredgold’s discussion of ‘morbid heredity’ and ‘neuropathic stock’ in A. F. Tredgold, Mental Deficiency (Amentia), London, 1908, ch. III. See also C. P. Lapage, Feeblemindedness in Children of School-Age, Manchester, 1911, ch. XI; and the evidence presented by Dr Henry Ashby to the Royal Commission, vol. I, Cd. 4215, 1908, p. 580.
45 Dendy, Feebleness of Mind, p. 5.
46 A. F. Tredgold, ‘The Feeble-Minded’, The Contemporary Review, 1910, vol. 97, p. 718.
47 Proceedings at a Conference on the Care of the Feeble-Minded, Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, 1911, p. 6. While accepting his assertion that feeble-mindedness was a definite abnormality, Charles Paget Lapage challenged Tredgold’s reference to feeble-mindedness as a disease: ‘I think to call it a disease is a little misleading. Feeble-mindedness is a definite abnormality. It is a developmental defect. It is a failure of the brain to develop. To many people disease rather implies something that is progressive and something which may be curable. Everything depends upon the fact that feeble-mindedness is not curable.’ Ibid., p. 28.
48 Royal Commission, vol. I, Cd. 4125, 1908, p. 45. Dendy, The Importance of Permanence, p. 2.
49 Lapage, Feeblemindedness, pp. 46–63. This work was a version of Lapage’s MD thesis and contained an appendix by Mary Dendy.
50 Ibid., p. 49.
51 Tredgold, ‘The Feeble-Minded’, p. 718.
52 Dendy, The Importance of Permanence, p. 4.
53 Dendy, Feebleness of Mind, Pauperism and Crime, p. 1.
54 Dendy, The Importance of Permanence, pp. 4–5.
55 See for example G. E. Shuttleworth and W. A. Potts, Mentally Deficient Children: Their Treatment and Training, London, 1895; Tredgold, Mental Deficiency, Lapage, Feeblemindedness.
56 Royal Commission, vol. I, Cd. 4215, 1908, pp. viii-xi.
57 See the contributors to the Manchester and Salford Association’s conference in Proceedings at a Conference on the Care of the Feeble-Minded, passim.
58 The term ‘idiot’ was used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to denote people with severe mental deficiency. Quotation marks will no longer be used.
59 Dendy, The Problem of the Feeble-Minded, pp. 25–6.
60 D. Wright, ‘The Study of Idiocy: The Professional Middle Class and the Evolution of Social Policy on the Mentally Retarded in England, 1848–1914’, unpublished MA thesis, McGill University, 1990, p. 106.
61 Details of the admissions to Sandlebridge are taken from the School’s Admissions Register, housed in the Cheshire Record Office (CRO), classmark NHM 11/3837/42. Details of discharges can be found in the Sandlebridge Special Schools Album, CRO, NHM 11/3837/43. Details of the numbers resident at the Colony are taken from the Annual Reports.
62 Dendy, The Problem of the Feeble-Minded, p. 30.
63 See comments on individual cases in the Sandlebridge Special Schools Album, CRO, NHM 11/3837/43. After 1914, details of discharges were recorded in a Register of Discharges, CRO, NHM 11/3837/49.
64 Quoted in C. Brady, The Training of Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Children, Dublin, 1865, pp. 10–11.
65 M. A. Barratt, ‘From Education to Segregation: An Inquiry into the Changing Character of Special Provision for the Retarded in England, c. 1846–1918’, PhD thesis, Lancaster, 1986, p. 59.
66 Ibid., p. 66.
67 Ibid., pp. 80–1.
68 For Mary Dendy’s opinion on the importance of particular types of occupation, see particularly, Dendy, ‘On the Training and Management of Feeble-Minded Children’, Appendix 1 in Lapage, Feeblemindedness.
69 The steady stream of local, national and international visitors to Sandlebridge is recorded in the Warford Hall Visitors Book, CRO, NHM 11/3837/19.
70 Royal Commission, vol. I, Cd. 4215, 1908, p. 585.
71 See, for example, Mary Dendy’s article and the discussion it received in The Lancet in May and June, 1902: Dendy, ‘The Feeble-Minded and Crime’, The Lancet, 24 May 1902, pp. 1460–3; The Lancet, 1902, pp. 1477–8; ‘The Feeble-Minded and Crime’, a letter to the editors of The Lancet, 1902, pp. 1643–4.
72 Searle, Eugenics and Politics, pp. 106–11.
73 George Newman, Chief Medical Officer for the Board of Education, advocated using the Binet and Simon tests in his Annual Report for 1911 of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education, London, 1912, pp. 313–15. For discussions of the work of Galton and Pearson, and of intelligence testing in general, see Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, London, 1984; and N. Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869–1939, London, 1985.
74 K. Pearson and G. A. Jaederholm, Mendelism and the Problem of Mental Defect II: On the Continuity of Mental Defect, London, 1914, p. 17.
75 Ibid., pp. 29–30.
76 Ibid., p. 18.
77 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
78 See, for example, George Newman’s opinion on the importance of education, discussed in R. A. Lowe, ‘Eugenicists, Doctors and the Quest for National Efficiency: an Educational Crusade, 1900–1939’, History of Education, 1979, vol. 8, pp. 293–306; and Hurt, Outside the Mainstream, p. 148.
79 The Medical Officer, 1910, vol. 4, p. 162.
80 Ibid.
81 See Helen Bosanquet (Mary Dendy’s sister), Social Work in London, 1869–1912, (originally published 1914) Brighton, 1973, p. 202. The Glasgow Provisional Committee for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded and the Yorkshire Society did, however, include the word ‘permanent’ in their titles.
82 On the importance of After-Care Committees, see Annual Report for 1909 of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education, Cd. 5426, London, 1910, p. 163. See also Lowe, ‘Eugenicists, Doctors and the Quest for National Efficiency’.
83 The Medical Officer, 1913, vol. 9, p. 132. See also J. Woodhouse, ‘Eugenics and the Feeble-minded: The Parliamentary Debates of 1912–14’, History of Education, vol. 11, 1982, pp. 133–7.
84 Dendy, Feeble-Minded Children, p. 9.
85 Dendy, The Problem of the Feeble-Minded, p. 6.
86 Ibid.