New mass graves child care scandal

Dozens of disabled youngsters in vast cemetery plot

‘Notorious for neglect and abuse’

DOZENS of severely disabled children were buried in mass graves by the state, it was claimed yesterday.

Youngsters from the infamous Lennox Castle Hospital in Lennoxtown, Dunbartonshire, were laid to rest as recently as 1975 in a sprawling paupers’ plot alongside adult patients.

The only memorial is a small carved inscription on the wall of an abandoned churchyard.

Last night, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said it could not comment on ‘historic’ claims and pointed out that the hospital had been under the jurisdiction of a predecessor health board.

But the revelation adds weight to calls for the disturbing history of common burials for children in care to be examined by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI).

Last week, research revealed that up to 400 children who died at Smyllum Park Orphanage in Lanark had been buried in an unmarked grave in the town.

The most recent burial by the nuns who ran it, the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, was in 1964.

It also emerged last week that Police Scotland is reinvestigating claims of abuse at care homes, including Smyllum Park.

Alan Draper from the In Care Abuse Survivors campaign group said: ‘It is imperative that Lennox Castle Hospital is included in the child abuse inquiry.

‘Who was authorised to carry out these burials and why were very young children in an adult institution in the first place?’

Lennox Castle Hospital was the largest mental hospital in Britain after it was opened by the old Glasgow Corporation in 1936.

At its peak, it housed 1,500 patients aged from ten to 80. However, it eventually became notorious for the neglect and abuse suffered by many of its patients and finally closed in 2002.

Patients who died with no family to take care of funeral arrangements were buried in a large plot at Campsie Cemetery in Lennoxtown, alongside the now derelict Campsie High Church.

It is marked only by a faded inscription on the cemetery wall. Burial records are kept by East Dunbartonshire Council and further hospital records are held at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, including a death register containing the names of dozens of children.

According to a Sunday newspaper, the given causes of death included ‘organic brain disease’ and even ‘congenital idiocy’, while many youngsters had been in the hospital for several years when they died.

Lennox Castle was linked to Waverley Park Hospital in Kirkintilloch, Dunbartonshire, which was opened in 1906 by the Glasgow Association for the Care of Defective and Feeble-Minded Children. It closed in 1991 and the council records also show a number of children were buried in the town’s Auld Aisle Cemetery.

An SCAI spokesman said: ‘So far, more than 100 locations where historical abuse of children is said to have taken place have been identified and the inquiry is currently investigating 69 residential care establishments for children.

‘As the important work of the inquiry continues, we would encourage anyone with relevant information, where they have been abused themselves or know others who have, to get in touch.’