The speaker at our 6 Sep meeting was Jude Rhodes.
Jude introduced herself by telling us she was a qualified Genealogist interested in family and local
history and in the history of health; she informed us that the talk would include terminology
unacceptable today.
We were told that way back in history it was monasteries who cared for people who were unwell
either physically or mentally but when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, that care disappeared
and this was the case for almost 300 years. Bethlam (Bedlam) was the only hospital for the
mentally ill and Henry VIII seized this too and control was transferred to the Corporation of London.
People were looked after by their families and villages. From the 15th to the 19th century, the Old
Poor Law dealt with pauper lunatics but there were many mentally ill people in workhouses and
prisons; the wealthy could pay for relatives to go into private lunatic asylums and these were
known as madhouses. The 1845 Lunacy Act instructed Poor Law Unions to build asylums.
Jude went through what was considered mental illness in the 1600s which included intriguingly
‘refusal to pray and an inability to feel pious’ and ‘hatred of spouse’! She also shared the
categories – idiot, imbecile and lunatic. She showed us some admission registers from Stanley
Royd and told us that epilepsy was considered a mental illness and how subjective and open to
interpretation some of the causes of insanity were considered. Jude shared where we could see
records online but these did not contain a great deal of detail; about The Retreat in York founded
by the Quakers and the Wellcome Library website for information about asylums.
Other categories of insanity were shared with us and Jude shared their modern day interpretations
including the fact that dementia was not linked to old age and epilepsy was completely
misunderstood.
She told us when the different asylums were built and that they were more often built outside of
towns because they were huge. She then shared some images with us and told us that Stanley
Royd was one of the most forward thinking asylums in the country and included Turkish baths.
Jude went on to share her own story of her grandfather with us who was in Stanley Royd for most
of his life, from 1926 until he died in 1972; he was there as a result of his WW1 experiences. Once
she accessed his records she learned a great deal more about him. She told us how to access
records for ourselves and the process she had gone through to do this. West Yorkshire Archives
were brilliant and supportive.
The talk came to a close by Jude urging us to look at those gaps in our family tree – if someone
wasn’t where you expected them to be and you had exhausted all other possibilities, to look at
asylum records. She told us that people who lived in asylums should never be forgotten.
