Accessibility and Archives: “Being a help and not a burden to others”
Accessibility and Archives: “Being a help and not a burden to others”
In this blog, Philip Milnes-Smith shares some aspects of the story of the National Industrial Home for Crippled Boys, which was operating in Kensington for fifty years or so before local education authorities were required to extend provision to physically disabled children. It contains historic language which now gives offence.
In a recent post in this series we met the forgotten philanthropist Caroline Blunt and her charitable institution, the Cripples Home and Industrial School for Girls. People wanted her to accept boys in such numbers that she described the home as “much troubled with applications” to take them. She acknowledged the unmet need but urged her male colleagues to put in the work. A public meeting to develop the idea was sparsely attended but, in 1866, a core team of three founded a home in “some rooms over a grocer’s shop at Kensington, into which were taken two deformed boys from St. Giles’s.” That last geographical detail is telling: the parish had been synonymous with the degrading poverty of ‘the Rookery’. Deemed “a rendezvous of the scum of society” who existed in “the lowest conditions under which human life is possible” it had even inspired missionary work like Ellen Ranyard’s London Bible and Domestic Female Mission. In the words of advertisements encouraging donations, “Left to take their chance in their own dwellings in poverty and sickness, their case [was] almost hopeless.”
By the time of the 1911 census, the Home (now long established in multi-storey premises adjacent to the Tube station at High Street Kensington), was looking after more than eighty boys, between the ages of 14 and 21. Beyond offering accommodation, the aim was to teach one of several trades over the course of three years to boys (described as “variously deformed and maimed, some without legs, others completely paralysed, and obliged to crawl along the ground”). At the completion of their training, they were helped to enter each trade as improvers and thus support themselves in life (and save the ratepayer money). Although the boys had a theoretical choice between trades, carpentry or saddlery and harness making were physically beyond some trainees who undertook more sedentary work.
It was an explicitly Christian venture – the first Master of the House wrote a letter to a Baptist minister, subsequently published as a pamphlet entitled The hunchback crossing sweeper's conversion and death. More specifically, it was perceived as a Protestant institution (Roman Catholics were reluctant to place boys there, and later raised funds to set up a distinct denominational provision). Boys across the country were eligible, but they needed dedicated sponsorship (which might be advertised for in newspapers).
Mr Knipe, the Honorary Secretary (in an 1888 article in the journal The Charity Organisation Review) writes of the importance of “matrons and ladies' committees, the members of which make themselves acquainted individually with the boys, and are able to enter into their little troubles”. Someone particularly suited to such empathy was Lady Victoria Campbell (1854-1910), pictured in the preview image. A Polio survivor, who herself had experience of “complete lameness” she had learned to walk again and did so with two sticks for the rest of her life. A philanthropist, her first charitable work as a young woman was going weekly to read in the workshops to the boys. She would go on in the last decade of her life to be President of the Edinburgh Cripple and Invalid Children’s Aid Society[1], at the time it started boot-repairing workshops for boys.
Also important to the welfare of the boys and life in the Home was physical exercise and recreation (including cricket, football, tree-climbing, a drum and fife band, and table games like Bagatelle). On rations, Mr Knipe notes:
“What would be sufficient for a healthy able-bodied boy would be wholly insufficient for a cripple... In a large percentage of cases, more than half their infirmities have arisen from insufficient food. This necessity of good and sufficient food adds greatly to the expense, but it is an expense which must be incurred, or an industrial home would soon become little more than a hospital.”
The other part of the article grapples with the tension between acknowledging that “charity organisers… too often forget the value, as an influence for good, of the family life in the home”, and the reality that parenting of disabled children could be injurious through ignorance, neglect, and exploitation (directly as ‘freak show turns or beggars, or indirectly as pitiable mascots for business), but also indulgence (creating ‘learned helplessness’ and physical weakness). As charity propaganda, it is perhaps not surprising that Mr Knipe notes:
“When you get a great many cripples together, their union begets a sort of boldness in them; their work and their play give them a feeling of manliness, and they soon get to act and feel and think the same as able-bodied children. In this we see the great advantage of having homes especially for cripples, and not sprinkling them about in other institutions.”
However, there is little doubt that this was a place of disability community where old boys came in large numbers for annual dinners and all were sent updates about the provision and encouraged to sponsor other boys. Old boys who set up successfully in business sought to recruit others like themselves from the home. There are also psychological insights (albeit articulated by a non-disabled person) about the boys’ perspective:
“There is nothing which affects them so acutely as having their physical defects laughed at... Their suspicions, no doubt, are to some extent morbid, but there is no question that they have some good grounds for them... [T]hey will in course of time have to go out into the rough world and fight their own battles, and little chance they will stand of holding their own if they have not overcome their sensitiveness... Certainly it is best in all dealings with cripples to refer as little as possible to their crippled condition...”
Lady Victoria’s sister and biographer similarly noted: “Her lameness was a heavy cross to a spirit so energetic and impatient, and few… realised… how much suffering was involved in the constant double exertion all movement cost her. Fortunately, the disablement came early, and became a second nature, but it never ceased to be a conscious trial; one she rarely spoke of as a thorn in the flesh, but it was one, and she could never forget the difficulties which encompassed her.”
Like many such charities, the Home seems to have had financial problems throughout its history. In the 1921 census there were fewer boys and fewer trades being taught to them than the previous decade, and the administrators sought a move to more suitable premises in cleaner air on the outskirts of London at Stanmore. The Crippled Boys’ Training College opened at the country branch of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in 1937.
Guest blogs are welcome. Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk. We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.
[1] East of Fife Record, 23 June 1905