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School trialled sedative on boys
A NATIONWIDE search has been launched to find a new voice for the Speaking Clock.
The winner will be just the fifth person in 80 years of the 123 service to give the time “at the third stroke”.
BT in partnership with BBC1’s The One Show is looking for a successor to Sara Mendes da Costa, who has been giving the time since winning the last contest in 2007.
Telephonist Ethel Jane Cain was first in the role, from 1936 until telephone exchange boss Pat Simmons took over in 1963. She in turn was replaced by actor Brian Cobby in 1985.
The Speaking Clock gets 12 million calls a year, is accurate to within 30 microseconds – and even Big Ben relies on it to keep time.
David Hay of BT Heritage said: “The BT Speaking Clock is a national treasure.”
HOME Office doctors gave the go-ahead for experimental drug trials on “explosive” children at two approved schools in the 1960s.
Pupils at one facility were given an anticonvulsant drug to see if it calmed them down, National Archive files have revealed.
They showed “impulsive, explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive” youngsters were targeted – without parental consent.
Campaigners are now calling for a public inquiry amid fears children may have been used as guinea pigs nationwide.
In the files Dr JR Hawkings, a psychiatrist attached to Richmond Hill Approved School in North Yorkshire, wrote to the Home Office for permission to run the trial on boys.
He wanted to give them epilepsy drug beclamide to try to calm them down. It is no longer widely in use.
Approved schools were usually filled with neglected or delin- quent children sent there by juvenile courts. The institutions no longer exist.
Home Office psychiatrist Dr Pamela Mason said she would “recommend maximum support” for the trial.
She wrote: “These are the boys that can produce considerable problems within a school and this sort of research into possible drug treatment is to be welcomed.”
Notes on the file show the trial ran for six months in 1968. A trial of a sedative on girls at a school near Leeds did not proceed. Carl Sutcliffe, brother of Yorkshire Ripper Peter, attended Richmond Hill in the mid-1970s. He told us: “I was there for two years and it was horrendous, so I’m not surprised something like that happened.
“The whole time I was there I felt a bit lethargic, really drowsy, but when I left I was fine. I bet they were drugging us.”
Carl, now 55, added: “The boys used to joke about not drinking the tea there because they put bromide in it.” The papers, uncovered by BBC Radio 4’s Today show, revealed how pupils were targeted at the former army barracks, home to 80 boys aged 15 to 17. Three doctors, now deceased, discussed the plans in 1967. Dr Hawkings said it would be “a perfectly legitimate therapy for certain types of disturbed adolescent”. And the school’s headmaster told the Home Office its managers “had decided there was no need to consult the parents”. Bob Hammal, a teacher at Richmond Hill from 1968 to 1972, said: “What really did shock me more than anything was that parental consent was not sought.” He added he and other colleagues would have tried to stop the trial had they known about it. Campaigner Teresa Cooper, 49, was forcibly sedated at Kendall House children’s home in Gravesend, Kent, in the 1980s. She said: “We do need to hold an inquiry into the misuse of drugs on children in care. I am convinced it is still going on today.”