Accessibility and Archives: “Girls who might have sunk into degradation”
In this blog for International Women’s Day, Philip Milnes-Smith introduces us to the gentlewoman philanthropist Caroline Blunt (1807-1882) who pioneered the first provision offering education and training to physically disabled girls and shares some experiences of those in its care and that of its successor institution. The blog quotes contemporary vocabulary choices which may now cause offence.
Like other Victorian wonen philanthropists, Miss Caroline Blunt’s census appearances give no clue as to her work. Although her portrait once hung in the Home she founded, none seems to have been preserved for posterity in, for example, The National Portrait Gallery, and there is no Blue Plaque in her honour. The story went that she had seen a physically disabled girl begging and been inspired to do more than give immediate alms, persuading her parents to admit her as the first recipient of an institution for ‘crippled girls’ that grew out of a refuge for homeless girls in Hill Street, Dorset Square, founded in 1851. One later (second-hand) account claimed the first beneficiary of Miss Blunt’s philanthropy to have been called Hannah Gooding.
In the 1851 census, we find a 14-year-old girl, Hannah Gooding, the oldest of six children, living with her parents in rooms at 12 Mitcham Street, Marylebone. The previous year she had been admitted for around a fortnight to the Infirmary of the St Marylebone Workhouse (perhaps as a result of an injury) at the end of October. The following year, she was brought back to the Workhouse but this time she was brought from Police Court, was now of no residence, and seemingly carer for her surviving siblings (all admitted with her). She was discharged shortly after, but the siblings remained behind. Seven months later she was back for around a month, being then discharged to what the register identifies as Hill Street School in May 1853.
Although not every detail seems to coincide, she seems potentially representative of the girls Miss Blunt wanted to help. Miss Blunt appears to have concluded that such girls would settle better in the company of other disabled girls and given the opportunity to be meaningfully occupied with a trade (straw bonnet, hat and basket-making). Although, unsurprisingly, we don’t hear directly from Hannah herself, she is represented as dying a good Christian two years later with her human saviour at her bedside, and as grateful to have been rescued from a life where she had needed “to lie and deceive”. It is not clear whether this includes the report that, when begging, she had “said that her mother would beat her if she returned without money” but it was certainly not an unbelievable story. Another source mentioning “sin” claims she had been making an average of three shillings and sixpence a day (not dissimilar to a labourer’s rates).
Miss Blunt’s initiative would evolve into a Cripples Home and Industrial School for Girls, established on the Marylebone Road in 1864. In 1891, the Census shows the superintendent and resident secretary of the Home, six matrons, eight monitors (including four with specialities in bonnet-making and one in dress-making) and 107 inmates. But if that was more or less what you might have expected, closer inspection shows that the monitors were all themselves disabled (“cripples from childhood” in the language of the day), and that their average age was 39 (with the oldest being 60). Next, those in training in the school included young women as well as teenage girls (e.g. 24, 28 and 32), and that one was listed, again in the language of the day, as imbecile and cripple). Reports in 1900 note that “although called a home for crippled girls, many of the inmates are women while some are mentally deficient”. Finally, not all the inmates were disabled (25 were formerly homeless girls being trained for domestic service, in part by helping look after the disabled inmates).
We hear somewhat vaguely that many girls “are now more or less assisting in their own maintenance, some of them entirely supporting themselves”, or that “numbers of them are living useful, self-supporting lives” or “earn a respectable living for themselves and are no longer burdens on their friends”. The successful placement of the non-disabled trainees perhaps offered the opportunity to be ambiguous. But for those who did leave, we also hear of an “Old Girls Dinner… when those who have benefited at the hands of the institution… testify to this fact by returning and joining in the proceedings”. Whereas other establishments ejected their trainees if they were never again going to be able to contribute meaningfully to their upkeep from exercising their trade, and on completion of their training, an account from 1889 reveals that, here, care was maintained for those who were physically unfit to become independent. One had “become a free inmate for the rest of her days”, and others had graduated to being monitors with several resident for thirty or more years.
Leisure was also part of the package: weather permitting there were morning excursions to nearby Regent’s Park before the start of the working day, creating somewhat of a public statement as a crocodile of disabled people, some ambulant with crutches, and some in wheeled chairs and perambulators threaded its way. A report from an 1874 witness to an outing to the zoological gardens, claimed to observe “all enjoying themselves… gaily and light-heartedly” and noted some “joyous laughter”. It also highlights the Home’s fund-raising effort for “their annual trip to the seaside”. By 1898 we read of a seaside home at St Leonards “to which the weak and diseased girls are sent.” In the Marylebone Home, it was said that, “[w]hen work is over, and they are Iree to amuse themselves, they begin to sing, and are sometimes so lively that it is necessary to keep them in check.”
Even if non-disabled people were running the establishment, that does not mean it could not also be a place of disabled community: a matron commented that “being all afflicted, they escape the constant reminder that they are different from other people” and “they share amongst them the use of their able members, and make the best of what they have… Some… deformed from birth or mutilated by accident, may enjoy ordinary health and spirits and help to cheer up the rest.”
However, unlike contemporary workhouses and asyla, the Home was publicly open for inspection across the middle of the day. In the Hill Street instantiation, we hear of the public attending an event being able to see the girls carrying each other out of the gallery to their dormitories at the end of the evening. While this openness doubtless helped promote their produce and maximise charitable giving, it is difficult not to feel there was an uncomfortable element of the ‘freakshow’ about the display of the girls themselves, “who acknowledge our entry with sundry furtive smiles.”
In 1911 when the Marylebone Home removed to a suburban ‘country house’ in its own grounds, disability could now be kept out of the public eye, and this was not necessarily to the benefit of the girls. By the 1930s, its successor organisation imprisoned Mary Baker, who later recalled:
"My number was twenty-nine and when I got up and went to wash, my towel and flannel had my number on them Twenty-nine - was engraved on all my hairbrushes and things with a red-hot poker-like thing. Everything I owned had a marking of twenty-nine so I can never forget that number and if matron wanted you, she just called you by your number. We never had names we were just numbers there…
When we were in the classroom, we used to write home every week... We had to put it that we loved it there, and everybody was happy, and everything that was really lies. We couldn't put any of our true feelings into a letter. If we had written anything bad about the place, they were bought back to us and we had to write them again, leaving out those bad things. Then they were sent back to the matron and sealed down and sent off. I used to write to my father and to my grandmother. And I used to get letters back saying they were so thrilled that I was so happy, but my letters were all lies."
This impersonal institutional approach seems quite different from what had been pioneered by the forgotten gentlewoman philanthropist Caroline Blunt.