In the Spotlight: Relatives 1

We are about halfway through our 2011 series of blog posts that put former patients of note In the Spotlight. This month and next we are taking a slight detour from the original rationale of the series in order to highlight a number of Bethlem patients who are rather less well known than one or more of their relatives. Their ‘celebrity’, such as it was, was unsought, and theirs was a reflected glory. This month we focus on relatives of four people associated with Bethlem or the Maudsley; next month we turn our attention to relatives of people who were otherwise in the public eye.

George William Dadd was admitted to Bethlem in the same year (1843) as his artist brother Richard, Richard being of course one of Bethlem’s most notable patients, the subject of an ongoing exhibition at Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham and a new book by Nicholas Tromans. Like his brother, George spent the remainder of his life in hospital, dying in 1868; unlike him, he had committed no crime and was not confined in Bethlem’s Criminal Lunatic Department. Security was such in this ward that it is unlikely that the brothers ever met in hospital, despite being under the one roof.

Anna Maria Haydon was admitted as a Hospital patient in 1866 and, like the younger Dadd, stayed there until her death in 1899. She was the sister of George Henry Haydon, long-serving Bethlem Steward, one-time colonial explorer and author of Five Years in Australia Felix (London, 1846). Anna’s thirty-three year stay in an institution that divested itself of most of its uncured patients on after twelve months is probably an index of the esteem in which her brother was held throughout the Hospital. There is more about Haydon (George, that is) in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography.

Frances Ada Hood, daughter-in-law to Dr W. Charles Hood, Bethlem’s reforming Resident Physician of the 1850s, was brought for admission to the Hospital by her husband Basil Hood on 31 December 1887. Like Anna Haydon, she did not recover at Bethlem. Unlike her, however, she did not remain there. Despite representations made by the Lunacy Commissioners for an extension to her stay in consideration of the services her father-in-law had rendered to the Hospital, she was discharged uncured after twelve months, and transferred to Berry Wood Asylum in Northamptonshire, staying there 26 years before a further transfer to Coton Hill Hospital in Stafford.

Mary Mapother was a Bethlem patient for two months at the age of thirty-five in 1908, and for a later three-year period. She also had periods of residence in Burgess Hill Hospital in Sussex and Coton Hill Hospital in Stafford. Her 1908 admission papers were signed by her younger brother Edward, then a medical student at University College Hospital. Later that year, Edward joined the staff of Long Grove Asylum, where he worked until the outbreak of the First World War. After distinguished service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Edward was appointed by the Ministry of Pensions to run the Maudsley Hospital, which had been requisitioned by the military. Then, when the Maudsley was turned over to civilian use in the early 1920s, he was re-appointed by London County Council as the Maudsley’s medical superintendent, a post which he held throughout the remainder of that decade and the entirety of the one that followed. Edward Mapother is generally credited with setting the new hospital on a course which led to an international reputation for excellence in psychiatric research and teaching as well as clinical practice. The fact of his sister Mary’s admission to Bethlem in the closing months of his medical training raises the intriguing possibility that the experience of mental distress within Edward’s own family had some bearing upon the trajectory of his eminent medical career.

Photograph of Sir William Charles Hood

Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives & Museum

Staff Change at the Archives and Museum

Our visit to the Imperial War Museum’s Dome Chapel a few months ago ago marked a major change in the life of the Archives and Museum: the retirement of the Head of Archives and Museum, J. Michael Phillips. Michael has headed the museum for over seven years, leading us through an increase in visitor numbers, education and outreach services, and ensuring the Archives and Museum became fully integrated into the Hospital’s efforts to increase public understanding of, and destigmatise mental illness.

Michael has also headed the Archives and Museum’s relocation Steering Group, raising funds for the new Archives and Museum. His successor, Victoria Northwood, will take over this project as we move towards our fundraising target and develop plans for the new museum. Victoria has previously worked at the Globe Theatre, where exhibitions around last year’s Bedlam play explored links between art, theatre and mental health. We are sorry to see Michael leave, and wish him a long and happy retirement, but look forward to a new and exciting era, with the relocation now seemingly in sight.

In the Dome, Michael kindly presented the Archives and Museum with a new addition to the collection – one of the few artists from the Hospital’s history not already represented – a sketch, by Dr Thomas Monro, which may appear in a future In the Frame post. Monro, the third of his family to occupy the position of Bethlem Physician, was physician from 1787 until his resignation in 1816, following the investigation of the Select Committee into Bethlem the previous year. However, Monro was also well-known as an art collector, being a patron of many well-known artists, as well as an amateur artist himself.

Dr Thomas Monro (1759 – 1833)

A Temple by a River

Richard Dadd Exhibition at Orleans House Gallery

Readers in West London will be pleased to take note of another opportunity to see the Richard Dadd paintings exhibited at the Bethlem Gallery earlier this year. From 28 May, Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham will host an exhibition on Dadd, showcasing his work while at Bethlem and Broadmoor. The exhibition will also include items from private collections, charting Dadd’s early career, travels to Europe and the Middle East, descent into madness and work created while at Bethlem and Broadmoor Hospitals.

To complement the exhibition, young people with disabilities who attend the gallery’s regular Octagon group have worked with a professional artist to create a collaborative work inspired by Dadd’s famous fairy paintings. This project has been generously supported by the Double O Charity.

Located near the river, in secluded woodland gardens, Orleans House Gallery is an eighteenth century building and the principal art gallery for the borough of Richmond upon Thames. The Gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, 1pm – 5:30pm, Sundays and Bank Holidays 2pm – 5:30pm, and the exhibition runs until 2 October.

Bethlem in the News… and an Open Day at Warlingham Park

The history of Bethlem, in relation to two of the Hospital’s former sites, has appeared in the news on several recent occasions. Many of our readers will, I’m sure, have seen the reports in early April on the discovery of as many as a thousand skeletons, unearthed by archaeologists close to Bethlem’s original site on Bishopsgate, outside the City walls. The Hospital was located here from 1247 until it moved to a new building in nearby Moorfields, designed by Robert Hooke, in 1676. This grand baroque building dominated the area until its closure in 1815

The BBC posted a map showing an area labelled “Bethlehem Churchyard,” located to the side of Moorfields (an unlabelled space between Moorfields and the red circle on the (later) map below), indicating this to be the site where the skeletons were found. While it was suggested that this formed the Hospital’s burial ground, this was not, in fact, the case. Research on the first Hospital, the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem, has indicated that this relatively open site was closely connected with the surrounding parish, which was built up around it. In Chapters in the History of the Insane (1882), Daniel Hack Tuke cites the creation of a new churchyard from part of the hospital’s grounds, on the Moorfields side, in 1569. This churchyard was used “for burial in case of such parishes of London as wanted ground convenient”: lack of space in City churchyards was a common problem by this time. Patients admitted to Bethlem were usually recommended by their local parish officer: that parish (or the patient’s family) was thus responsible for the burial of those who died in the Hospital. Although it is not impossible that some of these individuals were buried in the “New Churchyard near Bethlem” (as it was initially named), they were no more likely to be buried here than any other London resident. Moreover, the number of patients in the early Hospital was tiny: in 1598, there were just twenty inmates, so a thousand skeletons would be a somewhat surprising legacy!

The Hospital’s move in 1676 allowed for an expansion, with about 80 patients now admitted per year (there was always a waiting list, between about 200 and 320 patients). An article in The Australian recently suggested, rather misleadingly, that “England’s oldest psychiatric institution is up for sale.” The article refers to the sale of Salisbury House, built in 1901 on the side of Finsbury Circus, formerly the new Hospital in Moorfields. Having moved twice more since the early nineteenth century, Bethlem Hospital has, however, not been sold off, and remains in its current location in Beckenham, Kent.

What is not true of Bethlem – that it maintained a cemetery for its patients, and that it has been closed and sold off – is, however, true of one of its sister institutions, Warlingham Park Hospital. This hospital was opened in 1903 to accommodate the Borough of Croydon’s ‘pauper lunatics’, and closed in March 1999, by which time responsibility for Croydon mental health services had passed to the (then) Bethlem and Maudsley NHS Trust. Residential housing now occupies the site of the hospital, but not of the cemetery, which is now disused. This is not the place to recount the history of Warlingham Park Hospital – we hope that by the end of this year there will be a section of the Archives & Museum website devoted to doing just that – but blog readers may be interested to know that next Sunday, 15 May 2011, there will be an Open Day at Warlingham Park’s cemetery.

In the Spotlight: Antonia White

Philip O’Connor, the writer highlighted in last month’s In the Spotlight, wrote of his sense that “a thick glass pane…had been fixed between [him] and the world” upon his departure from the intense, even ‘intellectual’ environment of the Maudsley Hospital.

To another author of the same generation, who experienced the equally heightened atmosphere of the wards of Bethlem Hospital, the divider that mattered most was not a metaphorical one that separated her emotionally from others, but the window pane of her room at hospital, through which “she could see into a garden” in which “women and nurses were walking…like figures cut out of coloured paper”.

“And she could see birds flying across the sky, not real birds, but bird-shaped kites, lined with strips of white metal, that flew on wires. Only the clouds had thickness and depth and looked as clouds had looked in the other world. …They would take shape after shape to amuse her, shapes of swans, of feathers, of charming ladies with fluffy white muffs and toques, of soldiers in white busbies.”

Upon her departure from Bethlem, her perspective was reversed to that of someone on the outside looking in. “She no longer belonged to the world beyond the glass. There were moments when she almost wished she did. … Beyond the glass, however agonising the nightmare experiences, they had had a peculiar intensity.”

These quotations are from Beyond the Glass, the last novel in a trilogy of autobiographical fiction written by Antonia White (1899-1980). Nine months’ residence at Bethlem in 1922-23, when the hospital was located in Southwark, is vividly represented in this novel. This is not the place to attempt a summary either of the work or the life of its author. The dust-jacket of Jane Dunn’s 1998 biography of White promises a study of a “single parent and working mother” who “wrestled with the large questions of faith … Catholicism … being a woman and an artist”, not to mention “the threat of madness” (Antonia White: A Life). This is sufficient reason, we think, to read White’s novels (maybe Dunn’s biography too). In them White gives evocative, and at times searing, accounts of her experiences in and out of hospital.

Then for the short story ‘Surprise Visit’ (published in an anthology entitled Strangers), White drew upon her experience of returning, out of curiosity, to the Southwark site of her hospitalisation, some time after Bethlem had relocated to Beckenham and the Imperial War Museum had moved in. There White attributed to her protagonist the “peculiar satisfaction” she no doubt felt “to measure how far and how successfully she had travelled since that deplorably bad start”.

Used by kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery