Normansfield: Past, Present, Future

On Saturday 5 May, the new Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability hosted a conference focused on the Normansfield Hospital. Founded in 1868 by John Langdon Down – the physician after whom Down’s Syndrome is named – the Hospital remained superintended by the Down family for over 100 years. Originally a private home “for the backward and feeble minded”, Normansfield was incorporated into the NHS in 1951, and eventually closed in 1997. The building is now home to the Down’s Syndrome Association.

The day provided a wide variety of papers around the topic of Normansfield: from medical and local history, to personal reminiscence and theatrical display. Held in the beautiful original entertainment hall (pictured below), the morning focused directly on the Hospital. Professor Conor Ward, author of Dr John Langdon Down and Normansfield, talked about Dr Langdon Down and his work at Normansfield and Earlswood – focusing on his relationship with James Henry Pullen (1835 – 1916), whose Ships of Reality and the Imagination will form the subject of a new exhibition. Brian Rix then focused on twentieth century Normansfield, through memories of his daughter Shelley, who came to live at Normansfield in 1956, sparking his own involvement in Down’s Syndrome campaigning. Finally, Jan Pimblett from the London Metropolitan Archives told the audience about the Normansfield archiving project: shedding some light on the fascinating array of materials in the collection.

In the afternoon, topics ranged a little wider. Medical historian Sarah Chaney portrayed Normansfield as part of a wider context, by looking at the way in which nineteenth century asylums of all kinds focused on occupation, entertainment and environment. These were regarded as having direct medical and general psychological and social benefits, as well as being a means of maintaining order: distinguishing between the three is often impossible. Local historian Ray Elmitt then examined Normansfield in relation to the local community; during the late nineteenth century, the Hospital formed the biggest single grouping of people within Hampton Wick and South Teddington. Surprisingly, however, it seems to have had little impact on the local area, operating as a fairly closed community. One audience member, who worked at Normansfield a century later, noted that such continued to be the case, with staff having to be recruited hundreds of miles away: perhaps because of local hostility to the site. Finally, theatre historian David Wilmore related the story of the Gilbert and Sullivan Ruddigore portraits lining the walls of the theatre, speculating as to whether these had ever been used for a performance at Normansfield, and concluding that it is almost certain that these paintings were six of the original portraits from the 1888 Savoy Theatre production.

While clearer involvement with people with learning disabilities would have been appreciated – something that was raised in discussion and seems to be planned for future events, in particular an oral history project – overall the conference provided a wide range of perspectives on an interesting and often ignored topic. Ground-breaking events continue at Normansfield in the near future: this Saturday 26 May, the Blue Apple Theatre Company’s new production of Hamlet will take place in the theatre. This company, which includes performers with and without learning disabilities, was formed to challenge pre-conceptions and raise the ceiling of expectation for learning disabled performers. The Pullen exhibition, featuring the artefacts made by “the Genius of Earlswood Asylum”, opens in July.

Curatorial Conversations X

The point of departure for the article by David Wright and Nathan Flis that formed the basis of posts to this blog in February and March is the recent trend of reclamation and memorialisation of asylum cemeteries in countries such as Canada, Australia and the USA. At one level, they write, such cemetery projects ‘provide a necessary and dignified service…to clean up and properly designate graves’ and ‘provide a forum for collective action which provides meaning and helps define new patient advocacy groups’. At another level, ‘the new cemeteries afford an opportunity where survivors can “speak” to the dead’, as it were. In the words of a Canadian project volunteer, ‘By recovering these headstones we’re saying, “They will no longer be forgotten”’.¹

Wright and Flis go on to argue that both remembering and mis-remembering are inextricably linked in this process of memorialisation. First, they say, ‘the public…often misattributes the medical experimentation of the early to mid-twentieth century with the first two generations of the asylum in the nineteenth’. Second, a focus on asylum cemeteries brings the strictly singular but immensely powerful ‘cultural tropes’ of war and holocaust, displacement and victimisation, to bear upon the history of mental health treatment, and tends to obscure ‘the permeability of the mental hospital, one factor of which was the discharge of many patients back into the community where they largely disappeared from the public record’..²

Part of our work here at the Archives & Museum is to respond to genealogical enquiries. In doing so, we are conscious that patients who died while in hospital care are far more ‘visible’ to posterity than those who did not, for the simple reason that death certificates form one of the sources of information that is most readily accessible to the modern genealogist. Confining one’s attention to people who died at Bethlem might give rise to the unwitting impression that lifelong residence was the experience of the majority of its patients, an impression as erroneous for seventeenth and eighteenth-century practice as it would be for nineteenth and twentieth, to say nothing of twenty-first. We are keen that our Archives & Museum service does all it can to assist efforts at remembering, but we cannot be expected to support exercises in mis-remembering. The history of British mental health treatment is not an unvariegated chronicle of brutality and genocide.

¹ D. Wright and N. Flis, ‘A Grave Injustice: The Mental Hospital and Shifting Sites of Memory’, in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display (Routledge, 2011), pages 101 and 111.

² ibid, pp. 111-113.

See Miss X’s “Art in the Dark” as part of Museums at Night this Friday, 5 – 7pm

As part of this years Museums at Night – when hundreds of museums around the country open their doors after hours – Bethlem Archives and Museum will be open until 7pm for a chance to see Miss X’s “Art in the Dark”. The exhibition of intricate red biro drawings is viewed by torchlight, turning the viewer into a voyeur: the torch illuminating the most private and intimate areas of the pictures.

The set of drawings, previously exhibited in 2000, was completed following a six month psychotic episode. “When I came round”, Miss X says, “my delusions offered a clue as to why I was suicidal and why I wanted to sleep all the time and why I felt so guilty. I wanted to draw out the problems before I forgot them. I used biro because it was cheap. I wasn’t drawing so that the pictures would one day be treasured, I just wanted to cure the here and now.”

The densely crowded images thus have a direct and visceral quality, incorporating a complex array of symbols: religious, medical or sexual. Arrows direct the flow, but are also penetrative. Question marks question the artist’s sense of selfhood, while the persistent “z” symbol represents the fatigue caused by prescribed medication and lack of motivation. Seeing and being seen are regular themes, and the voyeuristic nature of viewing the work by torchlight reminds us of the uncomfortable nature these ideas often hold within and beyond psychiatric practice.

As Miss X concludes: “In my psychotic period I had “owned” the world banks and I’d discovered Earth and fire. I was 30 different people. When I came round I wanted to be a nobody, so I chose X as a name.”

The Museum will be open from 5 – 7pm for this special event on Friday 18 May. Items from the general collection will also be on display, and staff will be on hand to give regular short talks on the history of the hospital and its art collection. The Bethlem Gallery will also open until 7pm, for a chance to see Steph Bates’ “Thursday’s Child Has Far To Go”.

Just Visiting: Charlotte Bronte (1 of 2)

This month’s post (and another one to be published in July) on Charlotte Brontë in the Just Visiting series is written by our guest blogger, the Canadian author Lesley Krueger.

My small quest began with a plan mentioned in one of Charlotte Brontë’s letters, written on January 19, 1853 while she was on a visit to London from her home in Haworth, Yorkshire. “Being allowed to have my own choice of sights this time—I selected the real rather than the decorative side of Life—I have been over two prisons ancient & modern—Newgate and Pentonville—also the Bank, the Exchange ‘the Foundling Hospital,’—and to-day if all be well, I go with Dr. Forbes to see Bethlehem Hospital.”¹

Did Charlotte Brontë actually go to Bethlem? I scribbled a note at the time to check whether the visit came off, little knowing how crooked a trail I would walk before satisfying myself—more or less—of the answer.

It’s such a tiny detail, of little importance to most of the biographers who have excavated the life of Charlotte Brontë from her birth in 1816 through her authorship of Jane Eyre to her death in 1855, about two years after the planned visit. Most of those who mention her January sightseeing tour skim over the details while using it to speculate about Brontë’s psychology and perhaps her intentions. Did she plan to write one of the social-issue novels so popular at the time? Was she drawn to prisons and hospitals for the insane because of the mental and physical breakdown of her brother, Branwell Brontë, before his death in 1848?

My focus was different. I had dipped into Margaret Smith’s magisterial three-volume compilation of Charlotte Brontë’s letters while starting research on my fifth novel, ranging over mid-nineteenth century sources to get a feel for the texture of the period. I knew that my novel would be centred on a notorious member of my husband’s family who was incarcerated in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum at the Bethlem Royal Hospital during the 1840s and 50s. Drawn up short by reading that Brontë might have visited Bethlem at the time, I wanted to confirm the visit and, more important, discover whether she had left any record of her impressions of the hospital and its inmates.

I quickly found that there is no further reference to Bethlem in any known Brontë letter, and the many biographers whose books I consulted wrote that the visit had come off without saying how they had confirmed this. In a footnote, Margaret Smith writes that on January 28, Brontë presented a copy of her new novel, Villette, to Dr. John Forbes, the physician who was supposed to take her to the hospital, inscribing it personally “in acknowledgment of kindness.”² This could be taken as confirming the visit, but I wondered if it was enough.

Forbes was a distinguished lung specialist, a friend of Brontë’s publisher George Smith and a former schoolmate of Smith’s father in Scotland. In 1849, at Smith’s suggestion, Brontë had consulted Forbes about the care of her sister, Anne Brontë, who was dying of tuberculosis. It seemed possible that the visit to Bethlem had not come off, but that Brontë wished to thank Forbes for agreeing to take her, and for his help with Anne. After all, she signed books on January 28 for several friends and acquaintances.

Why was I sceptical? Brontë was often ill and painfully shy, and it was common for her to cancel visits. In her biography, Elizabeth Gaskell records a rather charming incident during a visit Brontë made to her house in Manchester in April, 1853.

“One evening we had, among other guests, two sisters who sang Scottish ballads exquisitely. Miss Brontë had been sitting quiet and constrained till they began “The Bonnie House of Airlie,” but the effect of that and “Carlisle Yetts,” which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the Piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose, and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them the next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked; and she promised gladly and thankfully. But on reaching the house her courage failed. We walked some time up and down the street; she upbraiding herself all the while for folly, and trying to dwell on the sweet echoes in her memory rather than on the thought of a third sister who would have to be faced if we went in. But it was of no use; and dreading lest this struggle with herself might bring on one of her trying headaches, I entered at last and made the best apology I could for her non-appearance.”³

A woman so highly strung, burdened with memories of her brother’s breakdown and facing the daunting edifice of Bethlem, might just as easily have paced up and down outside, got back in the carriage and asked to be driven home.

( to be continued )

¹ From The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, volume 3, 1852-1855, edited by Margaret Smith, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004. p. 108.

² ibid. p. 109.

³ The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1874 edition. p. 416.

The “Borderlands of Madness”: Jakob Lenz Debate

In 1835, Belgian social scientist Adolphe Quetelet introduced the idea of the “normal distribution” to the study of man, suggesting that many human traits followed a statistical Gaussian curve, with the bulk of the population situated within a centre block showing minimal deviation from each other, and smaller populations at either end. Such a model was eagerly adopted within medicine. Concepts of health shifted from a disease-based model (which regarded health and illness as entirely separate states) to a quantitative model, whereby health became the mid-point on a normal distribution. As this distribution was increasingly used to explain disparate human concerns, the very meaning of the word “normal” changed, from a mathematical term suggesting a median point, to something that was considered desirable. To be healthy was to be normal; not to be normal was to be pathological.

Such a paradigm shift had obvious ramifications for mental, as well as physical, health: the remit of which appears to have expanded ever since. Thus, a recent debate organised by the English National Opera encouraged some attention to the slippery distinctions between madness and sanity. How do the ideas of normality, madness, genius and sanity interconnect? What do we mean by these terms, and how do we judge them?

The debate was part of a series of events connected to the first performance in English of the opera Jakob Lenz, to celebrate the 60th birthday of German composer Wolfgang Rihm. The opera itself, a powerful Expressionist piece (with an impressively muddy set!), focuses on the real life mental breakdown of Romantic poet, Lenz. As Lenz hurls himself into pools after actresses we assume are phantoms, and his friends debate his state of mind, the overwhelming orchestra lends an ominous air to the short piece, which, the publicity claims, asks: Where does genius end and madness begin? How does it feel to cross the borderline between imagination and insanity?

Although these questions might appear somewhat clichéd (and presuppose certain possibilities of definition) the debate itself encouraged a more nuanced discussion. In addition to our Friends Secretary’s contribution around the history of the so-called “borderlands of insanity”, Radio 3 presenter Stephen Johnson reflected on his own experiences of bipolar disorder, and in what ways these did – and, perhaps more importantly, did not – relate to the questions posed. Journalist Jon Ronson, meanwhile, covered some interesting material from his recent book, The Psychopath Test, reflecting on his interview with Robert Spitzer (editor of DSM-III) about the massive expansion of classifications in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. A refreshingly un-dogmatic medical perspective was provided by Professor Gill Livingston, of the UCL Mental Health Sciences Unit, and encouraged very varied questions from the audience about a topic that one hopes will continue to inform discussion.