Finding the voices of women with learning disabilities in the First World War was the subject of a project on which I recently worked with charity My Life My Choice.
Researchers Dawn Wiltshire, Gina Regan and Pam Bebbington scripted words for the women, and I supported them to share their thoughts here.
We were inspired by finding that some men with learning disabilities had been released from institutions to fight in the First World War. Money from the National Heritage Lottery allowed us to start work.
First, we looked at records from munitions factories. Lots of women worked in these, making bombs. But there were no records of women with learning disabilities. We reckoned that if they could do the job, there was no need to record their disability.
We went to Oxfordshire History Centre to look at the minutes of the new Mental Deficiency Committee for Oxford, set up to decide how to manage people reported to be “mentally defective” – horrible words they used back then.
The committee would ask a woman called Miss Haig to visit and report on a suspected case
of “mental deficiency”. The committee then asked their doctor to examine her.
These records helped us build a picture of their lives – but always told by other people.
One woman was Mary Sloper. She was 36 in 1914 and lived with her widowed mother. A Dr Good described her as “a low grade imbecile”, odd looking, who did nothing all day.
He was looking for bad things to say about her. But it may have helped because the committee agreed that Mary’s mother should be her official guardian, and they paid her 8 shillings (40p – about £41 today) a week. Not much but better than nothing.
We wanted to know how Mary might have described her life. Dawn thought she might say: “I look into the fire and I imagine how my life might have been, teaching little children their numbers and letters.”
The runaway
Another woman we followed was Ellen Beale. Her story was horrible. Her stepmother threw her out when she was 12, and she had had two children (not married). One was adopted but another was stillborn – they sent her to jail for that. Her nickname was Odd Nell. She kept losing her job as a servant for staying out at night. We might have done the same.
The doctor was not impressed with her: “Her facial aspect was dull and heavy and without expression… at times very troublesome and inclined to be violent. I also have now the history of Ellen Beale’s past life and from it I have confirmed my opinion that she is of feeble intellect and owing to this feebleness is not capable of properly taking care of herself or managing her own affairs.”
Pam thought Ellen might have said: “But when me jail sentence was over, they didn’t let me out. Sent me to Malvern, Home of the Good Shepherd it were called, run by nuns. They was strict there. And what did I do? I ran away. I’d done my time, they had no business keeping me under lock and key any longer. There was some nice friendly soldiers in Malvern.
“I was doing fine till they took me back to Oxford in a police van and they put me with a stuck-up old woman called Miss Procter. The doctor came to see me at ’er house. Asked me lots of silly questions… Anyways, they sent me off to London, in a police van again, to Shepherd’s Bush. But I ran away from there. And I’ve made sure they will never find me again.”
It’s true – Ellen did run away and they could not find her. The committee book says so. So in the end she won.
We are pleased we did this research, and found out about some women who people said had “mental deficiency” and gave them a voice of their own after all this time.
