Starcross History Society
History in Starcross, Devon UK
Sunday 20 October 2024
Celebrating The Restoration of The Peacock Cookson Memorial
Monday 26 August 2024
Starcross Church and Churchyard
Wednesday 26 June 2024
Starcross Hospital. What the voices Tell Us. Instalment 8.
Part II What the voices tell us... about:
Sunday 26 May 2024
Starcross Hospital. What the voices tell us. Instalment 7.
PART II What the voices tell us… about:
Starcross as seen from the outside
By June 1877, the original house for 40 children gave place to the first central section of the new institution. Built for £7,000 of lime stone brought by barges into the estuary of the River Exe, the stones were moved at low tide to sheds where masons “nobbled” them into their intended shapes and sizes to erect an elegant structure.Going inside – first impressions
When I went there first [about 1930] it took a bit of getting used to… to start with, having to sleep with the patients…. You had to live in, at least for three years, and then after that if you wanted to get married you had to get permission from the superintendent.When I came to Starcross [1964] I was very surprised, comparing [it to] Hensol Castle [Hospital, Wales, where he said patients were marked with numbers]*. I would say Starcross was 15 to 20 years more advanced. Especially when I saw the patients with knives and forks. Nobody intelligent enough to introduce them [at Hensol]. I could feel there was a lovely atmosphere…that extra special atmosphere. A happy atmosphere.
Saturday 27 April 2024
Starcross Hospital. What the voices tell us. Instalment 6.
Most importantly, the voices and words of one-time Starcross Hospital residents were recorded. Staff however, especially senior staff, were easier to engage and more forthcoming.
The interviews explored how people (staff and patients) came to be at the hospital, and the pros and cons of life there.
They are presented objectively, in the hope that they are an honest reflection of the realities of institutional life and the varied experience of transition.
The interview extracts gathered here cannot, of course, claim to be fully representative of the range of views held at the time.
There is far more material in the interviews than has been selectively reproduced here; what has been left out is no less important, but found no place in the format of this compilation.
The time-consuming work of recording and transcribing the interviews failed to continue for long enough to capture experiences of community care as it developed in later years, or to show how views may have changed over subsequent years.
Nor are there the voices of those who know community care now, but never experienced institutional living.
However, the project captured voices and words at an important milestone.
Please note appendices will be published at a later date.
This completes Part I of the book, the next instalment will commence Part II.
Thursday 4 April 2024
The Undesirables by Sarah Wise review — Britain’s own ‘Magdalene Laundry’ scandal
THE TIMES - Saturday, 30th March 2024
The book that puts the Starcross Western Institution into its context.
The Undesirables by Sarah Wise review — Britain’s own ‘Magdalene Laundry’ scandal
Under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, unmarried mothers were classified as ‘moral imbeciles’ and had their babies taken away
Alice O’Keeffe
Saturday March 30 2024, 12.01am, The Times
Dolly, who had a baby aged 14, spent her life in Moor Park psychiatric hospital
IAN BEESLEY
You will have heard about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, in which “fallen women” were incarcerated and put to hard labour between the 18th and late 20th centuries. The Irish government issued a formal state apology for these institutions in 2013 and set up a compensation scheme for survivors. The laundries have since been the subject of many books and films, including Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted novella Small Things Like These.
How surprised would you be to discover that a comparable system operated in Britain during the 20th century? A system that has not been acknowledged nor apologised for, let alone compensated for? If the answer to that is “very surprised” then brace yourself for The Undesirables, Sarah Wise’s sprawling, shocking study of the impact of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act.
This appalling piece of legislation, which remained in force until 1959, involved a system of institutions in which anybody judged to be “feeble-minded” or a “moral imbecile” could be incarcerated indefinitely, with no recourse to appeal. Its targets were almost invariably poor people. In the late 1940s, 50,000 were detained in such institutions, with no psychiatric diagnosis, no treatment, no conviction and no time limit to their detention. About 30 per cent of these people had been detained for 10 to 20 years; 5 per cent for more than 30 years. Some of those featured in this book were detained when they were toddlers as young as three; some were released only in the late 1990s, having been effectively institutionalised and locked up for their entire adult lives.
Take David Barron, who was sent to the Mid Yorkshire Institute for the Mentally Defective (later known as the Whixley Colony) in the late 1930s, when he was in his early teens. There was nothing wrong with Barron other than rotten luck: he was an orphan, and had been mistreated by his foster mother. The solution was to classify him as mentally defective and lock him up.
Since he was intellectually perfectly normal, he was classified as a “high-grade defective”, meaning that he could do the hard labour of maintaining the building and caring for the more disabled inmates. He worked in the “sewing room” and looked after a boy called Trevor who was disabled and needed intensive personal care, “more or less a full-time job”. He was not allowed to fraternise with the opposite sex or form a relationship. Barron was not released until he was 30.
Having been judged incapable of leading independent lives or contributing to society, inmates of the residential “mental deficiency colonies” such as Whixley were, paradoxically, found to be useful labour. In Whixley’s laundry, they worked six days a week cleaning linen and clothes for the local community and earned between halfpence and fourpence, which they could spend on sweets. Other colonies supplied cut-price labour to the agricultural sector, picking fruit. During the Second World War, when many staff were redeployed elsewhere, one colony ended up being entirely run by the inmates. “In theory this should be full of pitfalls; in practice, it seems to work amazingly well,” an internal memo recorded. When convenience dictated, these people weren’t apparently so deficient after all.
Many of those detained — it is unclear from this book how many — were poor women who had given birth out of wedlock. Indeed, under the terms of the act “any female in receipt of poor relief at the time of giving birth to an illegitimate child” could be classified as a moral imbecile, separated from her child and locked away. In 1972, three women in their sixties and seventies were found at St Catherine’s Hospital for the Mentally Handicapped near Doncaster. Each had been put away in adolescence in the 1920s for having a baby out of wedlock under the same “moral imbecile” clause. All three had lost contact with anyone on the outside who once knew them. “All I want now is a little job doing domestic work,” one of them said on her release.
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“Dolly”, a lady who spent her life in Moor Park psychiatric hospital, had been detained under the same legislation because she had a baby aged 14. She was still there, an elderly lady, when Moor Park closed in 1996.
There was a reason why mothers were particularly targeted by the act: its origins lay in the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. Alarmed by the poverty in the slums of Britain’s big cities, a group of keen social Darwinists decided that the best solution would be to prevent the poor from breeding. The concept of “survival of the fittest” was taken to mean that they had landed at the bottom of the social heap for a reason. As the eugenicist George Mudge put it: “The stunted individuals are not the product of a one-roomed tenement, but the one roomed-tenement is an expression of [their] inherent incapacity.”
The Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 and found a sympathetic ear in Winston Churchill, who once wrote that “the improvement of the British breed is my aim in life”. Influenced by an American book called The Sterilisation of Degenerates, Churchill, when he was home secretary in the Asquith government, advocated “a simple surgical operation so the inferior could move freely in the world, without causing much inconvenience to others”.
Sterilisation was mercifully rejected by Whitehall, so the society lobbied for permanent detention of the feeble-minded into sex-segregated colonies to “regularise the lives, and if possible, prevent the increasing propagation of half-witted people”. The 1913 bill found support in some surprising quarters. The working-class Labour MP Will Crooks observed that such people “are almost like human vermin. They crawl about … polluting and corrupting everything they touch”.
Such debates were an inspiration to Nazis in Germany, who compulsorily sterilised 200,000 to 400,000 “defective” Germans between 1934 and 1939. As Leon Whitney, of the American Eugenics Society, observed: “Many far-sighted men and women in both England and America have been working earnestly towards something very like what Hitler has now made compulsory.” Ironically, considering its parallels with the Irish system, one consistent opponent to the mental deficiency legislation was the Catholic Church, which always argued against its “gross materialism”.
Wise’s is in some ways a frustrating book. The author of well-received social histories of the Victorian period, she has made a first foray into the more recent past here and seems — understandably, perhaps — overwhelmed by the material. I longed for her to focus more sharply on, for example, unmarried mothers and bring their stories to life. Instead, she roams far and wide, from eugenics experiments in America to the detention of autistic people today.
Part of the problem seems to have been that the inmates of mental deficiency colonies were detained for so long and were so effectively silenced and marginalised that it has not been easy for her to access their stories. “I have only been able to scrabble together a few of these case histories,” she writes. “The rest is silence.”
The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away a Generation by Sarah Wise (Oneworld, 352pp; £22). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Wednesday 27 March 2024
Starcross Hospital. What the voices tell us . Instalment 5
The oral history’s intended purpose
In April 1986, I wrote about the aims of the oral history, as David King was going to send a letter about it to the Principal Medical Officer at the Department of Health and Social Security in London:
The project will give a refreshingly telling, new approach to the recording of a service at the point of change.
Both staff and residents will, in their own words, be able to record their personal experience of change itself, and of life before and after the change. What more fitting memorial to the lives of these people?
The project achieved much of this, but fell short when it came to following up on experiences in the years after the change. Nevertheless...
By presenting the words of the staff and the residents themselves, rather than impersonal and dehumanising facts and figures, a unique impression of the reality of Starcross will unfold. Supporting documentation will be preserved so that points of fact may be substantiated.
This was done. (See the appendices for details.)
Such an archive will not be one researcher’s analytical viewpoint – with all the bias that that inevitably carries with it. This will, instead, be a vehicle for these people to present themselves for what they really are; a series of snapshots or portraits of people at this fascinating point in history.
This is the evidence we need to bring to people who continually put the point that “they” would be better off in hospital. Documentation relating to management and committee work would only serve to put “them” over even less as people. We do not want to promote the idea of people with mental handicap [today I would prefer to say learning difficulties or special needs] merely being statistics.
My view, looking back, is that the later interviews, carried out in collaboration with the university, were conducted from a more analytical viewpoint. Instead of being quite so simple and objective as the early ones had set out to be, they focused to a greater extent on the management of change.
The project will, in the exciting and well-received mode employed by the best of America’s current researchers, be a revelation to the many people who have no idea what has transpired behind the walls of institutions like Starcross, and it will illuminate the plight of people who lived there.
Overly-grandiose words! It was really to try to preserve a first-hand record of reality, before time distorted it.
The tape-recorded interviews will be a valuable resource of candid first-hand accounts for future researchers, historians, other health authorities, and the public to benefit from. Much interest in the project has already been expressed, both by the people who will be the subjects and by academics here in Exeter, London, Essex and even Canada.
I also saw it as a gift back to the village of Starcross, because the institution had been central to life there, to employment, to family life, and the building was such an imposing landmark. I anticipated creating access to the stories, through exhibitions, open days...
Today, we wonder what went on in the minds of the Starcross builders. However, future generations will know through this project what was on the minds of people now [at the time of closure in 1986 and the subsequent demolition of the building]. The intentions of carrying through change to care in the community should not be lost along the way.
The recording of impressions at the moment of change, as distinct from a written evaluation, surely has its place.
This is a story of Starcross Hospital which could not be told so colourfully or so memorably in any other words, or by looking in the records.
Although many documents were preserved [see Appendices], this oral history, as with any, is arguably more truly representative of the realities, and at the very least balances, or contrasts with, the written evidence.
Please note appendices will be published at a later date.
Tuesday 12 March 2024
Powderham Event Wednesday April 17th 2024
KENTON PAST & PRESENT and STARCROSS HISTORY SOCIETY [SCHS]
Wednesday 17th April 2024 7.00-8.30 pm
The Music Room, Powderham Castle, Kenton by kind permission of the Earl of Devon
David Holland explores:
The Exeter Conspiracy Through The Eyes Of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell
ADMISSION FREE
|
Introduction to an historical whodunnit In the 1520s Henry Courtenay, King Henry VIII’s cousin and very close friend, was the most likely male heir to the throne. However, during 1536/37 the mood music dramatically changed.
Henry Courtenay and his family, staunch Catholics, were suddenly in deadly danger from Henry VIII’s all-powerful minister, Thomas Cromwell, a Protestant. Cromwell accused the Courtenays and their powerful Catholic allies of plotting, The Exeter Conspiracy, to depose King Henry VIII, and replace him with a Catholic monarch… David Holland now takes up the story.
Please note the change in venue from the SCHS’s and Kenton Past and Present’s usual ones.
HILARY MANTEL’s WOLF HALL TRILOGY OF NOVELS and the TWO HENRYS: KING HENRY VIII & HENRY COURTENAY
Prelude to David Holland’ talk on 17th April 2024 in the Music Room, Powderham Castle: The Exeter Conspiracy Through The Eyes Of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell
The Courtenay connection
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived [just!] (1) is the well known chant to help remember the sequence of Henry VIII’s wives: that clutch of unfortunate, largely doomed ladies. Beside them sit other, less well-known victims like Sir Thomas More of Henry VIII’s psychopathic paranoia. In Henry’s paranoid mind his victims were possible threats to his throne and dynasty. So, anyone whose head popped above the successional parapet was liable to have it involuntarily removed. None more so than the family members [Plantagenets] of Queen Elizabeth of York (d.1503) wife of Henry VIII’s father, the Lancastrian Henry VII (r.1485-1509),
A Courtenay Story
A starting point for a Courtenay Story is the marriage of Queen Elizabeth’s youngest sister Catherine to William Courtenay of Tiverton Castle, at this time Powderham Castle was not the family’s main residence. The Yorkist curse fell on the shoulders of their son, Henry Courtenay, Henry VIII’s cousin, childhood buddy and then close friend. The Courtenays were the most powerful family in the West of England with extensive estates from which it could raise its own private army that could even threaten the king’s. For Henry C. all was well throughout the 1520s; he was Henry VIII’s leading courtier. And, as Henry VIII’s oldest male relative, he was a heartbeat from the throne. But note Henry C’s wife, Gertrude, was devoutly religious, a companion and friend of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s ageing, infertile wife whom Henry VIII hoped easily to replace with the fecund, doe eyed Anne Boleyn.
Hilary Mantel’s First Two Novels in the Trilogy and Henry Courtenay
Wolf Hall Fate now cast its long, deadly shadow over Henry Courtenay. Henry VIII’s bitter divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the split from Rome saw Henry VIII replace the Pope as head of the Catholic Church in England so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. From c. 1530 Gertrude Courtenay, Catherine of Aragon’s staunch supporter, became closely involved with her and the Pope’s backers: Henry VIII’s enemies whom he hung, beheaded or burned. Hilary Mantel details how Gertrude’s religious fervour pointed to Henry Courtenay’s possible entanglement in this fevered poisonous web of rumour, accusations and duplicity but without any evidence of a conspiracy against Henry VIII. So, Henry C. survived, just, as a leading courtier.
Bring Up The Bodies continues the tale, with the Courtenays perhaps surprisingly in 1536 playing a major role as Henry VIII’s allies in getting rid of their hated enemy Anne Boleyn once Henry VIII’s love for her turned to loathing and his eye latched on to a younger, more fertile possible queen. So, in 1536 Henry had Anne decapitated and he married Jane Seymour. A year later Jane bore Henry VIII his greatest wish: a baby Lancastrian son - Prince Edward. Yorkist Henry Courtenay was now in deadly danger - a potentially murderous wicked uncle who on Henry VIII’s death would kill Prince Edward and seize the throne as had a Yorkist uncle Richard III some 50 years ago.
Note: wicked uncle Richard III, line 2, Catherine, line 4, fifth person along - second sister of Elizabeth of York who married the Lancastrian Henry VII
Henry Courtenay
Henry is ranked second in the kingdom in the pecking order the procession reveals.
The three oval red circles on his surcoat are taken from the Courtenay coat of arms.
Monday 11 March 2024
Please join us on Saturday afternoon
A STARCROSS HISTORY SOCIETY WORKING PARTY: STARCROSS CELEBRATES THE 1920S
§ We need your help to plan and manage a Starcross Celebrates the 1920s project. Starcross History Society is establishing a working party in liaison with Devon History Society to review what the Starcross programme might entail.
The project will happen in 2025.
§ If you are interested in the Starcross Celebrates the 1920s project and might like to join its working party, we would be delighted if you could attend a public meeting on:
Saturday, 16th March at 3.00 p.m. in
Starcross Pavilion, Generals Lane, Starcross, EX6 8PY
If you cannot attend, but are interested in participating in Starcross Celebrates the 1920s, please let us know at starcross.history@gmail.com and we will keep you informed.
Thursday 8 February 2024
Meeting at Powderham Castle Wednesday 17th April
STARCROSS HISTORY SOCIETY [SCHS)
with
KENTON PAST & PRESENT
Wednesday 17th April 2024
7.00-8.30 pm
The Music Room, Powderham Castle, Kenton
by kind permission of the Earl of Devon
David Holland explores:
The Exeter Conspiracy Through The Eyes Of
Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell
ADMISSION FREE
Introduction to an historical whodunnit In the 1520s Henry Courtenay, King Henry VIII’s cousin and very close friend, was the most likely male heir to the throne. However, during 1536/37 the mood music dramatically changed.
Henry Courtenay and his family, staunch Catholics, were suddenly in deadly danger from Henry VIII’s all-powerful minister, Thomas Cromwell, a Protestant. Cromwell accused the Courtenays and their powerful Catholic allies of plotting, The Exeter Conspiracy, to depose King Henry VIII, and replace him with a Catholic monarch… David Holland now takes up the story.
The connection with the Courtenay family and hence their relevance to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy is previewed in A TALE OF TWO HENRYS - Henry Courtenay and Henry VIII on the Starcross History Society’s website https://starcrosshistory.
David Holland is kindly giving this talk as a prelude to the “Wolf Hall Weekend” event he is arranging in June at Cadhay House - https://wolfhallweekend.com/
Please note the change in venue for the 17th April meeting from the SCHS’s and Kenton Past and Present’s usual ones.
Prelude to David Holland's talk on 17th April 2024 The Exeter Conspiracy Through The Eyes Of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell
HILARY MANTEL’s WOLF HALL TRILOGY OF NOVELS and the TWO HENRYS: KING HENRY VIII & HENRY COURTENAY
Prelude to David Holland’ talk on 17th April 2024 in the Music Room, Powderham Castle: The Exeter Conspiracy Through The Eyes Of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell
The Courtenay connection
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived [just!] (1) is the well known chant to help remember the sequence of Henry VIII’s wives: that clutch of unfortunate, largely doomed ladies. Beside them sit other, less well-known victims like Sir Thomas More of Henry VIII’s psychopathic paranoia. In Henry’s paranoid mind his victims were possible threats to his throne and dynasty. So, anyone whose head popped above the successional parapet was liable to have it involuntarily removed. None more so than the family members [Plantagenets] of Queen Elizabeth of York (d.1503) wife of Henry VIII’s father, the Lancastrian Henry VII (r.1485-1509), Fig. 1.
A Courtenay Story
A starting point for a Courtenay Story is the marriage of Queen Elizabeth’s youngest sister Catherine to William Courtenay of Tiverton Castle, at this time Powderham Castle was not the family’s main residence. The Yorkist curse fell on the shoulders of their son, Henry Courtenay, Henry VIII’s cousin, childhood buddy and then close friend. The Courtenays were the most powerful family in the West of England with extensive estates from which it could raise its own private army that could even threaten the king’s. For Henry C. all was well throughout the 1520s; he was Henry VIII’s leading courtier. And, as Henry VIII’s oldest male relative, he was a heartbeat from the throne. But note Henry C’s wife, Gertrude, was devoutly religious, a companion and friend of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s ageing, infertile wife whom Henry VIII hoped easily to replace with the fecund, doe eyed Anne Boleyn.
Hilary Mantel’s First Two Novels in the Trilogy and Henry Courtenay
Wolf Hall Fate now cast its long, deadly shadow over Henry Courtenay. Henry VIII’s bitter divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the split from Rome saw Henry VIII replace the Pope as head of the Catholic Church in England so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. From c. 1530 Gertrude Courtenay, Catherine of Aragon’s staunch supporter, became closely involved with her and the Pope’s backers: Henry VIII’s enemies whom he hung, beheaded or burned. Hilary Mantel details how Gertrude’s religious fervour pointed to Henry Courtenay’s possible entanglement in this fevered poisonous web of rumour, accusations and duplicity but without any evidence of a conspiracy against Henry VIII. So, Henry C. survived, just, as a leading courtier.
Bring Up The Bodies continues the tale, with the Courtenays perhaps surprisingly in 1536 playing a major role as Henry VIII’s allies in getting rid of their hated enemy Anne Boleyn once Henry VIII’s love for her turned to loathing and his eye latched on to a younger, more fertile possible queen. So, in 1536 Henry had Anne decapitated and he married Jane Seymour. A year later Jane bore Henry VIII his greatest wish: a baby Lancastrian son - Prince Edward. Yorkist Henry Courtenay was now in deadly danger - a potentially murderous wicked uncle who on Henry VIII’s death would kill Prince Edward and seize the throne as had a Yorkist uncle Richard III some 50 years ago.
Figure 1 Yorkist Family Tree : showing Catherine – sister of Elizabeth of York, wife of William Courtenay
Note: wicked uncle Richard III, line 2, Catherine, line 4, fifth person along - second sister of Elizabeth of York who married the Lancastrian Henry VII
S
Figure 2 Henry Courtenay, in a royal procession in 1535
Henry is ranked second in the kingdom in the pecking order the procession reveals.
The three oval red circles on his surcoat are taken from the Courtenay coat of arms.
Monday 6 November 2023
Villages in Action Archive
Wednesday 25 October 2023
Talk on Armistice Day
His talk will be at the Starcross Pavilion on Saturday November 11th, from 3pm until 5pm. ADMISSION IS FREE but to cover costs we sell teas and coffees and have a raffle. Please bring a raffle prize.
Starcross’s war memorial does not stand alone – there are some 2,000 in Devon, a network of memorial beacons that uniquely recognise and light up the collective identity of each community. Each memorial was the outcome of its community’s local committee that discussed, argued, rowed, debated and decided upon what kind of memorial it wanted and the form it would take, and then built it.
When you pass Starcross Station, do you ever stop to look at the war memorial at the bottom of the station’s steps, A and B, see page 2? If so, have you thought how it, and similar memorials, relate in the past to your family or friends who died in World War I, 1914-18? ‘Our family roots are now our branches’ applies to our own family members, some four generations ago, who were killed in the World War I fight for national survival against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
What had the deaths of that generation of our relatives achieved? And today,
what memories of what they fought for do we remember, recognise, honour and meditate upon annually during the 11th of November commemorative national Remembrance Day two minutes of silence on the 11th minute of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 that marks the end of World War I?
From 1918 to the mid 1920s the British government supported every community in Britain, be it a hamlet, village, town or city to create, design and build its own war memorial to remember and honour men and women who ’Died For King and Country’ in World War I, some 12,000 in Devon alone.