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Contesting certification: mental deficiency, families and the state in interwar England

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 47; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00309230.2011.621199

1477-674X

Kevin Myers,

Historical Education Studies Worldwide

Abstract This article is an attempt to shed some further light on the people and the processes involved in the identification of mental deficiency in children and young people.∗∗ In order to do this, it turns away from the themes that have been most prominent in the historiography to date: elite and professional ideas, parliamentary and public debates and the formulation of policy. Instead, the paper is concerned with a single instance of diagnosis of imbecility in an 11-year-old schoolboy in a rural village in the English county of Hertfordshire. As far as is possible it reconstructs this diagnosis and charts and explains a remarkable and successful challenge to it in the High Court. In doing so, it draws on a variety of documentary records – educational, legal and medical – as well as the testimony of some of the surviving members of the family concerned. In employing these sources particular attention is paid to the actions of the people involved in diagnosis, and it seeks to explain and understand those actions with explanatory tools taken from cultural history. Keywords: childhoodpsychologyspecial education needs Notes 1Ellie Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (Knopf: New York, 2004). 2Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth-century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6–8. 3Thomson, Psychological Subjects, Chapter 4. 4Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds. Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in Postwar Britain and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Wellcome, 1998); Mathew Thomson, “Mental hygiene as an international movement”, in Paul Weindling, ed. International Health Organisations and Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5Mathew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy and Social Policy in Britain, c 1870–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 6Steve Humphries and P. Gordon, Out of Sight: The Experience of Disabilit,y 1900–1950 (Plymouth: Northcote House); Dorothy Atkinson, Mark Jackson and Jan Walmsley, eds. Forgotten Lives: Exploring the History of Learning Disability (Kidderminster: British Institute of Learning Disabilities, 1997). 7The North American literature on fatherhood is more developed than that for Europe. See, for example, Robert Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993). For Britain, Joanna Bourke, Working-class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London, 1994), 82–88 emphasises the increasing presence of men in the domestic sphere. Recent case studies have tended to complicate this picture. See, for example, Michael Roper, “Between manliness and masculinity: ‘the war generation’ and the psychology of fear in Britain 1914–1950”, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 343–362. See also, Tim Fisher, “Fatherhood and the British fathercraft movement, 1919–39”, Gender & History 17 (2005), 441–462. 8Peter Bartlett, “Reviews in History 289. Review of Mark Jackson: borderland of imbecility”, Institute of Historical Research, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews (accessed 23 October 2006). 9Alison Falby, Peter Barham and Graham Richards, “Reviews of psychological subjects”, History of the Human Sciences 20 (2007): 123–129. 10Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c. 1860–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2, 6–10. For a contrasting and provocative interpretation reached by way of a sociology of knowledge, see John White, Intelligence, Destiny and Education: The Ideological Roots of Intelligence Testing (London: Routledge, 2006). 11Mathew Thomson, “Psychology and the ‘consciousness of modernity’ in early twentieth-century Britain”, in Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, eds. Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 108. 12From an extensive literature, see Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose, “Gender, citizenship and subjectivity: some historical and theoretical considerations”, in K. Canning and S.O. Rose, eds. Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 6. Mathew Thomson, “Constituting citizenship: mental deficiency, mental health and human rights in inter-war Britain”, in Christopher Lawrence and Anna K. Mayer, eds. Regenerating England: science, medicine and culture in inter-war Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 13This kind of approach is advocated, in different ways, by, among others, Anne Borsay, Felicity Armstrong and Pieter Verstraete. See, for example, Pieter Verstraete, “Towards a disabled past: some preliminary thoughts about the history of disability, governmentality and experience”, Educational Philosophy and Theory 39 (2007): 56–63; Anne Borsay, “History, power and identity”, in Colin Barnes, Mike Oliver and Len Barton, eds. Disability Studies Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 98–119; Felicity Armstrong, “The historical development of special education: humanitarian rationality or ‘wild profusion of entangled events’”, History of Education 31 (2002): 437–456. 14Karen Hirsch, “Culture and disability: the role of oral history” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1998). 15Sheena Rolph and Jan Walmsley, “Oral history and new orthodoxies: narrative accounts in the history of learning disability”, Oral History 34 (1) (2006): 81–91. 16This section draws on the author’s interview with Marie Clarke and Peggy Gageley, Harpenden 25 January 2008. Transcript and correspondence in author’s possession. 17 Kelly’s Trade Directory of St. Alban’s, Harpenden and Hatfield 1938–39. 18William F. Bynum, “Tuke’s dictionary and psychiatry at the turn of the century”, in German E. Berrios and Hugh Freeman, eds. 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841–1991 (London: Gaskell, 1991), 169, 176. 19Arguably most significant was the degenerationist and globally significant work of Henry Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (London: 1867, 1868). See also, John C. Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke’s Manual of Psychological Medicine (London: John Churchill, 1858); W. Bevan-Lewis, A Textbook of Mental Diseases, with Special Reference to the Pathological Aspects of Insanity (London: Charles Griffin and Co., 1889). 20Nikolas Rose “Assembling the modern self” in Roy Porter, ed. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 224–248. 21Thomson, “Psychology and the ‘Consciousness of Modernity’”, 107–108. 22Bernard Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995). 23Louise Westwood, “Separatism and exclusion: women in psychiatry from 1900–1960”, in Pamela Dale and Joseph Melling, eds. Mental Illness and Learning Disability Since 1850: Finding a Place for Mental Disorder in England (London: Routledge, 2006). 24That a specialism in asylum building was possible – Hine called it “almost a distinct profession in itself” – owed much to the nineteenth-century conviction that architecture could contribute to the relief of madness. Hill End was a two-storey symmetrical building on a rural site near St Alban’s. It was so located in order to offer patients the fresh air and invigorating views necessary for recovery. See Jeremy Taylor, Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England 1840–1914 (London: Mansell, 1991), 150–154. Hine designed four major asylums with over 2,000 patients each for the London County Council (Claybury, Bexley, Horton and Long Grove). 25Hertfordshire Record Office (HRO), Hertfordshire County Lunatic Asylum, Abstracts of Minutes, 27 February 1900–25 March 1903. 27HRO, Off. Acc. 1025; B. Anderson, History of Hill End Hospital (n.d., n.p), 15. 26Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces (London: Hutchinson, 2005). 28Anderson, Hill End Hospital, 170–171. On the status of psychiatry, see Thomson, Mental Deficiency, 120–121. 29David Parker, “‘A convenient dispensary’: elementary education and the influence of the school medical service 1907–39”, History of Education 27 (1998): 77. 30Parker, “‘A convenient dispensary’: Henry Hyslop Thomson, Medical Doctor (Glasgow) 1898. Died 1950”, see obituary in British Medical Journal, 27 May 1950, 1274. 31Parker, “‘A convenient dispensary’”, 77. 32See, for example, House of Commons Debates, 17 July 1914 vol. 64 cc2382-6 and, in particular, William Wedgwood Benn’s objection to the “elaborate amount of inspection and control which we in Parliament decree”. On North American and continental European debates, see, for example, Alice Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children 1893–1935 (Yale, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Annemieke Van Drenth, “Van Koetsveld and his ‘School for Idiots’ in the Hague (1855–1920): gender and the history of special education in the Netherlands”, History of Education 34 (2005): 151–169. 331914 Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act, s.2. 34Pamela Dale, “Tension in the voluntary–statutory alliance: ‘lay professionals’ and the planning and delivery of mental deficiency services, 1917–45”, in Dale and Melling, Mental Illness and Learning Disability, 154–178. 35House of Commons Debates, 5 May 1914 vol. 62 cc166–227. 36Parker, “‘A convenient dispensary’”, 77. 37Jonathan Gillis, “Taking a medical history in childhood illness: representations of parents in pediatric texts since 1850”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79 (2005): 400, 412–15. 41James Kerr, The Fundamentals of School Health (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), 435. 38Jackson, The Borderland of Imbecility, 110–111, 251. 39Thomson, Psychological Subjects, 126–132. 40Gillian Sutherland, Ability, Merit and Measurement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 42The Hadow Report, Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity: Report of the Consultative Committee (London: HMSO, 1924) reflects this ambivalence but endorses the use of tests as an “aid to the discovery and special treatment of mentally defective and subnormal children”. See also, Ken Jones, Education in Britain: 1944 to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 20–23 on the enduring appeal of a neo-platonic philosophy of talents in which the existence of different types of children was a common sense claim that reflected wider and popular assumptions about inherited mental capacity. 43Deborah Thom, “Mental retardation”, in G.E. Berrios, E. German and R. Porter, eds. A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origin and History of Psychiatric Disorders (London: Athlone, 1995), 255. 44Murray K. Simpson, “Medicine vs psychology: the emergence of a professional conflict in developmental disability”, Journal on Developmental Disabilities 8 (2001): 45–60. 45Kerr, The Fundamentals of School Health, 381–82 notes that, “although a lawyer might object to the vagueness of the terms [for mental deficiency]” the definition set out in the 1921 Education Act “conveys the sense fairly”. 46Jackson, Borderland of Imbecility, Chapter 4. 47Ian Copeland. The Making of the Backward Pupil in Education in England 1870–1914 (London: Woburn Press, 1999) has no space for parental agency. 48Author’s interview with Marie Clarke and Peggy Gageley, Harpenden 25 January 2008. Transcript and correspondence in author’s possession. 49On changing notions of masculinity, see Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996); see also Martin Francis, “The domestication of the male? Recent research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British masculinity”, Historical Journal 45 (2002): 637–652. 50Michael Roper, “Slipping out of view: subjectivity and emotion in gender history”, History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 59. 51Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers, eds. Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 52Megan Doolittle, “Working class fathers, domestic authority and the poor law in England 1870–1910”, unpublished paper presented to the European Social Science History Conference, University of Lisbon, February 2008. 53Author’s interview with Marie Clarke and Peggy Gageley, Harpenden 25 January 2008. Transcript and correspondence in author’s possession. On the changing image and responsibilities of the school attendance officer, see Nicola Sheldon, “The school attendance officer 1900–1939: policeman to welfare worker”, History of Education 36 (2007): 735–746. 54HRO, HEd 5/13/3 Local Education Sub-Committee minutes 19 October 1937. 55HRO, HEd 5/13/3 Local Education Sub-Committee minutes 16 November 1937. 57HRO, HEd 5/13/3 Local Education Sub-Committee minutes 19 July 1938. 56HRO, HEd 5/13/3 Local Education Sub-Committee minutes 21 June 1938. 58HRO, HEd 5/13/3 Local Education Sub-Committee minutes 18 October 1938. 59HRO, HEd 5/13/3 Local Education Sub-Committee minutes 18 October 1938. 60Author’s interview with Marie Clarke and Peggy Gageley, Harpenden 25 January 2008. Transcript and correspondence in author’s possession. 61Rex v. Boycott and Others. [1939] 2 K.B. 651. 62Rex v. Boycott and Others. [1939] 2 K.B. 656-657. 63Rex v. Boycott and Others. [1939] 2 K.B. 665-666. For a short biography of Singleton, see Hodson, “Singleton, Sir John Edward (1885–1957)”, in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36111 (accessed 11 September 2009). 64National Archives, Education (ED), 50/268. “Mentally defective children 1939–43”; Board of Education to Hertfordshire and Kent Local Education Authorities, 17 May 1939. 65NA, ED, 50/268 “Mentally defective children 1939–43”. 66NA, ED 50/112. Minute by G.E. to Sir George Newman (Chief Medical Officer), 16 September 1920. 67Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds. Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (London: Routledge, 1993). 68For this argument – and the relative strength of philosophy and history in Europe as compared with the United States – see, for example, Dorothy Ross, “Changing contours of the social science disciplines”, in Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds. The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 69Marc Depaepe, “Educationalisation: a key concept in understanding the basic processes in the history of western education”, History of Education Review 27 (1998): 16–28; Stephen Petrina, “The medicalisation of education: a historiographic synthesis”, History of Education Quarterly 46 (2006): 503–531. 70Pamela Dale, “Special education at Starcross before 1948”, History of Education 36 (2007): 33. 71Ian Hacking, “Making Up People”, London Review of Books 28 (16) (2006): 23–26. 72Andre Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Development Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 120. 73Ezra Hasson, “Risk, modernity and history”, International Journal of Law in Context 1 (4) (2005): 315–334. 74M. Seligman, R. Ernst, J. Gillham, K. Reivich and M. Links, “Positive education: positive psychology and classroom interventions”, Oxford Review of Education 35 (3) (2009): 293–311. For a critique, see Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (London: Routledge, 2008).