Shoplifters, single mothers and ‘moral imbeciles’
condition of release. These are the words of Winston Churchill.
The law came into effect on April Fool’s Day 1914, despite there being no clear agreement on what constituted “feeble-minded” or a “moral” deficiency. “Defectives” were dispatched to a workhouse or asylum, then, increasingly, to mental-deficiency colonies. By 1942, about 70 of these dotted Britain, housing 46,000 children and adults – but discreetly, Wise notes, “just as Victorian lunatics were kept ‘round the bend’… at the end of a long curving driveway”. Fortunately, sterilisation was never permitted, although defectives were sex-segregated and forbidden to flirt.
Like many social policies, the Act suffered from underfunding. Costly world wars didn’t help, and the presence of intelligent defectives soon proved essential. The Committee on Mental Deficiency reported in 1929 that “high-grade patients do the work and make everything”, both for themselves and “lower grades”. An internal memo at the Board of
Control cited one (unnamed) colony run by inmates, its only civilian the superintendent. At another colony, Dora Thorpe, a persistent truant who had been locked up at 12, was finally released aged 26, after working from 8.30am to 4.30pm as a weaver for six shillings per year.
Luckier defectives remained in the wider world, billeted on guardians or under supervision. They, too, supplied cut-price labour: remember that stock Agatha Christie character, the simple-minded housemaid? But conditions could be dire. The writers Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner exposed two Dorset women for neglecting a shed full of trainee servants – then narrowly avoided bankruptcy after the crooks sued for libel and won.
By the late 1940s, the National Council for Civil Liberties claimed that 50,000 were incarcerated. The NCCL’s lobbying eased the path to 1959’s Mental Health Act, which abolished the Board of Control, and the categories “moral defective” and “feeble-minded”.
But many of the 1913 Act’s victims remained in buildings they had called home their entire adult lives. A nursing sister at Starcross Hospital, which was closed in 1991, recalled hundreds of old ladies, there perhaps because “Mum was simple and she had a baby and [the council] didn’t know where to put them… Mentally handicapped? No, no, they were environmentally handicapped – by the environment around them.”