First Person Narratives 7

Gail Hornstein, Professor of Psychology at Mount Holyoake College and sometime visitor to the Archives & Museum, makes passing reference to our modest displays (though not to her visit) in her recent book Agnes’ Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness. She is also the author of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World, a biography of the psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Fromm-Reichmann is most well-known today for being the real-life “Dr Fried” in Joanne Greenberg’s fictionalised autobiography, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, about which we have previously blogged. A Jewish psychoanalyst, who emigrated to America in the 1930s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann controversially – but apparently, at least in some cases, successfully – treated schizophrenia with psychotherapy (and not medication).

Dr Hornstein has recently made the latest edition of her bibliography of ‘first person narratives of madness’ available on her website. We think we have spotted at least one unchecked (and uncheckable!) reference in this bibliography. Alas, as far as we know the existence of a 1620 Petition of the Poor Distracted Folk of Bedlam is no more than a rumour. Naturally, we would be delighted to be proved wrong about this! The bibliography is nevertheless an extremely valuable resource for those interested in first person narratives of mental distress.

Moving from first to third person narratives, we are glad to say that a short e-book entitled Illustrious Company: Authors, Artists and Other Adventurers in Bethlem Hospital is now available for download onto Kindle e-readers at Amazon and Amazon UK. It has been written by our Archivist with contributions from Canadian authors Aislinn Hunter and Lesley Krueger. Regular readers of this blog may recognise some but not all of its text. The book is already cheap to download, but watch out for special promotions to make it even cheaper over the summer.

In the Spotlight: Angus Mackay

A couple of months ago guest blogger Aislinn Hunter drew our attention to Robert Cowtan, a nineteenth-century Bethlem patient whose claim of personal acquaintance with Queen Victoria was taken by his doctors to be indicative of a dissociated mental state, but whose professional and social connections lent at least a remote feasibility to the claim. In this, the last of our year-long series of In the Spotlight posts, we highlight a Victorian patient who, along with Cowtan and many others, made a claim to intimate royal acquaintance.

Angus Mackay was admitted to Bethlem twice, first in February 1854 for a stay of eight months, and then in November of the same year, this time for fifteen months. According to the notes of his first admission, he initially occupied himself by writing letters to senior officers of the Royal Household and ‘interfering’ with the affairs of other patients on his ward, but by the summer had recovered sufficiently to be granted leave. According to the notes of his second, he harboured ‘delusions regarding plots to destroy the Queen and Royal Family’, indeed ‘numerous and dangerous delusions respecting the Queen and Prince Albert’. After his second discharge from Bethlem, he was transferred to Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, whose doctors provided further details of the ‘most prominent’ of these delusions, ‘that Her Majesty is his wife and that Prince Albert has defrauded him of his rights’.

So far, so unexceptional, as any student of Bethlem’s nineteenth-century casebooks used to reading accounts of imagined celebrity attachments might say. Yet Mackay’s case was a little different, as from 1843 until the onset of his illness Mackay was in fact Household Piper to the Queen. His 1838 compendium of piping history and tunes, A collection of ancient Piobaireachd or Highland pipe music, was destined to remain a standard work of reference for generations. For as long as Mackay enjoyed royal patronage, it must have seemed that his own life was destined to be as settled as his piping reputation. Yet by the time the Queen published Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands in 1868, Mackay’s post had been filled by another, Her Majesty shortly observing that he was ‘considered almost the first [piper] in Scotland…he unfortunately went out of his mind in the year 1854’.¹

Mackay’s story ends sadly, for in 1859 he escaped from Crichton Royal, but drowned in attempting to cross the river Nith at Glencaple. Victoria heard of his death, though she got its date wrong in her Journal, and may well have recalled him to mind, however fleetingly, when inscribing and sending a copy of it to Bethlem, where it remains in our library to this day.

¹ Arthur Helps (ed.), Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands (London, 1868), p. 132.

In the Spotlight: Wilhelmina Geddes

Last month’s caveat against presuming that the wards of Bethlem and the Maudsley were overloaded with writers and artists notwithstanding, this month’s post is devoted to an Arts and Craft Movement-era designer and stained glass artist of distinction. Irish-born Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955) was acclaimed by contemporaries for “producing the finest, the most sincerely, passionately religious stained glass of our time”, and even won grudging admiration from those critics who thought her work “too modern” or “experimental”.¹

Most of Geddes’ works in stained glass are (unsurprisingly) to be found in churches – principally in England and Ireland, but there are also windows in each of Wales, Belgium, Canada and New Zealand. Her treatment of her subjects, whether sacred or secular, is rugged, heroic, monumental. Geddes’ move from Ireland to England at the age of thirty-eight could be considered the hinge of her career. She had previously visited London on study trips and commissions, but her relocation there in 1925 was permanent.

The move had been contemplated for some time, but in the event it was brought about by a doctor’s referral to the Maudsley Hospital from Downpatrick Asylum, County Down, to which Geddes had admitted herself out of fears concerning her own mental health. For six months the Maudsley provided her with the medication, psychotherapy, refuge and space for the recovery she sought. Yet Geddes was not idle during this time. Having brought a commission from a Surrey church for a stained glass window with her from Ireland, she began design work while still in hospital. Following her discharge in November 1925, she rented a studio in Fulham which was to become her working base for the remainder of her life.

This post is the penultimate in the In the Spotlight series, which we launched at the start of 2011. As the accompanying picture is of Geddes’ The Angel Appearing to Joseph (now in Ely Cathedral’s Stained Glass Museum), we take the seasonal opportunity to wish the readers of this blog all the best for Christmas and the New Year.

¹ Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘A Window with Punch’, Apollo Magazine (September 2008), pp 74-79. Nicola Bowe’s biography of Geddes is scheduled for publication in 2012 by Four Courts Press in Dublin. We will let our readers know when it is published. Bowe is giving a lecture on Wilhelmina Geddes in Monaco on 26 January 2012; details of how to how to book are online here.

© Stained Glass Museum, Ely. Used with permission.

In the Spotlight: Christopher Long

Reading a series of posts such as these is almost bound to give rise to the false impression that Bethlem and the Maudsley have been solely populated by writers, artists and architects. We anticipated and cautioned against this from the outset. A truly representative notion of the people the hospitals treated could only be gained by trawling through the records of the bank clerks, mechanics, clergymen, farmers, engineers, dress makers, teachers, doctors, governesses, domestic servants, housewives and unemployed people who spent time as patients. For the most part, knowledge of the character and achievements of these and many others remained within the circle of their acquaintance, and did not prove enduring. There must be many stories of extraordinary courage, endeavour, fortitude and weakness, hope and disappointment, virtue and vice contained in the records of these ‘ordinary’ people of the past.

One story of which we recently became aware is that of Christopher Long (1902-1924), whose undergraduate studies at Cambridge University were cut short by psychotic illness and hospitalisation at the Maudsley in 1923. Long had been reading medicine at Cambridge but his real passion was speleology, or caving. In his first year, he spent all his time outside term exploring, extending and surveying Stump Cross Caverns near Pateley Bridge in Yorkshire, and in 1922 founded the University’s first caving club, the Troglodytes, into which he apparently herded all his friends.

Long’s admission to the Maudsley took place on 7 April 1923, a day after a suicide attempt which his friends and doctors put down to overstrain, depression and nervous breakdown. He came to the Maudsley as a voluntary patient but, perhaps not finding his time there therapeutic, discharged himself after three weeks and made for the Mendip and Quantock Hills in Somerset. There Long extended and surveyed Holwell Cave. Maybe work of this sort was more restorative to him than hospital treatment – or maybe his labours were fuelled by manic energy? Certainly by then he was self-medicating on the sedative chloral hydrate to combat his insomnia.

In the summer of 1923, Long returned to Yorkshire, where he was the first to discover White Scar Caves near Chapel-le-Dale. His preparations to open it to tourists were tragically cut short, along with his promising career, by his death at the age of 22 by overdose of chloral hydrate. At the subsequent coroner’s inquest, according to Dr Stephen Craven, “no evidence was presented that Long had intended to kill himself at that time” –the overdose may well have been accidental. In any event, caving had lost someone described by friends and colleagues as “a genuine enthusiast”, a “fine character” and “an indefatigable worker”. ¹

¹ S.A. Craven, ‘The chronic illness of Christopher Francis Drake Long (1902 – 1924), who extended Stump Cross Caverns and discovered White Scar Caves, in England’, Cave and Karst Science, vol. 37 no. 2 (2010), pp. 59-64.

Christopher Long (centre) and fellow cavers in 1922. Photograph first published in Cave and Karst Science, volume 37, no.2 (© 2010, British Cave Research Association), and reproduced with the permission of the Editors.

In the Spotlight: Edward Oxford

At the outset of this series of posts, we explained that In the Spotlight would feature “people of previous generations who spent time as Bethlem or Maudsley Hospital patients …whose lives became defined … by their achievements rather than by that experience”. In July and August we departed from this principle slightly by introducing patients with noted relatives, and this month we feature someone who was obliged to go to the greatest lengths to distance himself from his time in the Hospital and the circumstances that led to his admission.

On Constitution Hill in 1840, Edward Oxford (1822-1900) laid in wait for Queen Victoria’s carriage to pass, and fired two pistols (whether or not they were loaded was a point of later dispute) in its direction. No-one was hurt, but Oxford was apprehended and put on trial for his attempt on the life of the Sovereign. The jury was presented with copious evidence in support of the defence plea of insanity, and despite the confusing and sometimes contradictory nature of that evidence, returned a verdict of ‘guilty but insane’. Consequently Oxford avoided both prison and the noose, and was instead sent to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum (which was maintained at Bethlem until the opening of Broadmoor Hospital in 1863-64), where he was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. From the outset, he showed no sign of mental derangement, and employed his time at Bethlem by learning a succession of trades and foreign languages. Put simply (in the words of the scholar F.B. Smith), “Bedlam was his university”.¹

In 1867, after Oxford’s transfer to Broadmoor, Her Majesty made her pleasure known courtesy of the Secretary of State: he was pardoned and released on condition of his permanent emigration from the British Isles. Relocating to colonial Australia, Oxford quite literally made an entirely new name for himself as John Freeman, journalist (we may presume for the Melbourne Age or Argus) and author of Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life (London, 1888).

A short biography of Edward Oxford is available online, courtesy of Berkshire Record Office. The Australian author Jenny Sinclair has a fuller treatment in preparation, and a popular history of all the would-be assassins of Queen Victoria is being written by Paul Murphy, a University of Colorado professor. We’ll make blog announcements when these are published.

1 F.B. Smith, ‘Lights and Shadows in the Life of John Freeman’,Victorian Studies, vol. 30 no. 4 (Summer 1987), p. 468.