Dr. Frank Crompton is a Research Fellow for the Charles Hastings Education Centre, Worcester.
In his own words, he has worked “obsessively” for almost 20 years to ensure that the Patients’ Notes from the Worcester City and County Pauper Lunatic Asylum are secure for future use by historians. When he helped to establish the George Marshall Medical Museum, with generous funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, he ensured that the 35,500 pages of notes were digitised and he then worked with the University of Birmingham Medical School to produce a search engine to make these notes available online to the general public. He did this because he felt it important that these notes, about mentally ill paupers (the poorest members of society), were made available, and also because it was also very personal to him.
Frank was born into a large lower working-class family in Birmingham in 1944. His paternal grandparents were both dead before Frank was born, and his mother’s side of the family was very important to him. Frank’s grandfather William Newman, who was born in 1874, migrated to Birmingham to Worcester in 1895 to work as a barrow boy on the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. He married Ellen Stone in 1895 and they set up house in Balsall Heath. They were members of Socio-Economic Group 5, the poorest level in society. They had 11 children of whom eight survived. Frank’s grandmother was a very important person in his upbringing. Ellen Stone was born on 2nd April 1873 in Haden Street, Balsall Heath, in a fast growing working-class area. She attended elementary school, which she left at the age of 10 years, having passed a leaving examination. She was literate, but not erudite. She undertook menial work, with her first job being peeling onions in a pickle factory. She married William Newman at the age of 21 years. The family lived in a newly developing area of Balsall Heath in a ‘two up, two down’ rented house in Brighton Terrace, Wenman Street in King’s Norton Poor Law Union. This was an area where individuals often entered the Union Workhouse, because they were destitute and where some individuals were committed to a Pauper Lunatic Asylum if they became mentally ill. It was therefore no surprise that Frank’s grandmother was fearful of workhouses and pauper lunatic asylums. However, whilst her fear of workhouses was based on actuality, his grandmother’s fear of lunatic asylums was based on rumour and hearsay that related to pre 1845 madhouses - not to the institutions created after 1845 where moral treatment of insanity was used.
At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 Frank’s oldest uncle, Raymond, was 19 years old. He had previously worked with his father in the wholesale vegetable market. He was sent to join the Royal Flying Corps, where he was appointed batman to a senior officer, who had been Managing Director of the Kalamazoo Printing Works in Birmingham. He was sent to Southern Ireland where the Royal Flying Corps flew from to France. Meanwhile Frank’s grandfather joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment early in the War. He was invalided out of the War in August 1916 when he was seriously injured whilst working as a ‘battlefield labourer’. He was returned to hospital in England. Personally Raymond had a relatively uneventful War in Ireland. However when he was demobilized the man who he had been batman to thanked him for being a good ‘servant’ to him and he suggested that if he contacted the Kalamazoo Company he could have a job there. This was an avenue to upward social mobility. Raymond got work in the printing industry, as did my grandfather and five of Frank’s uncles and aunts, including his mother. From being in the lowest status group amongst the working classes they aspired to be part of the ‘working class elite’. Frank’s mother left school when she was 14 years old and she gained an apprenticeship as a book binder. However after about a year, in 1927, she contracted peritonitis when her appendix burst. Significantly, she was sent for treatment to the King’s Norton Workhouse Infirmary in Selly Oak, where a new workhouse was built in the 1890s. The Poor Law was replaced by the Public Assistance Board in 1929. Given the virulence of peritonitis Frank’s mother was probably lucky to survive, but importantly her committal to the workhouse infirmary indicated that a working class individual would still be treated by the Poor Law in these circumstances, demonstrating the continuing closeness of the Poor Law to ordinary people quite late in the twentieth century.
Frank’s grand-mother continued to be frightened of workhouses and lunatic asylums and she quite willingly shared these fears with Frank in the 1950s when he was between eight and 15 years old. Indeed, if Frank visited Worcester, which he often did because his grandfather’s extended family still lived there, he caught a bus to Malvern with his grandmother and Frank virtually had a bag put over his head as they passed the mental hospital. His grandmother told him not to even look at the institution, because even that could cause him mental harm. This inevitably had an impact on an impressionable child. However, what it also eventually did was to instill an interest in Frank that led him to choose to undertake a PhD relating to children in the workhouses of Worcestershire in the nineteenth century. His thesis was eventually the basis for his book Workhouse Children (Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1998). What Frank has always aimed to do is to write ‘History From Below’, with a bottom up perspective but he quickly discovered that attempting to use Poor Law Guardian’s minutes to investigate a small minority of the workhouse population was extremely time consuming and difficult. Whilst he was working to achieve this end he discovered the vast amounts of evidence about pauper lunatics in the Pauper Lunatic Asylum that served the City and County of Worcester.
Thus the digitisation of the Powick patients’ records, the creation of a means of interrogating these records, the indexing of the 9,600+ Patients’ Notes and the creation of a facility to search these records fulfills one of Frank’s long term aims. It has also enabled him to research various aspects of Powick Mental Hospital, formerly the Worcestershire City and County Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
He has investigated the work of James Sherlock, as Medical Superintendent, but also groups of patients with specific mental ailments including housewives, those with epilepsy and recently patients with General Paralysis of Insanity (GPI). What Frank hopes is that he can help to dispel the many misconceptions about asylums, and that a mental hospital was as necessary as a general hospital to the population of Worcestershire.
Dr. Frank Crompton has published three books on the topic of patients at Powick Hospital, two of which can still be purchased fromGeorge Marshall Medical Museum.
Doctor Sherlock's Casebook: Patients Admitted to the Worcester City and County Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Powick - August 1854 to March 1881, 2016 £12.00
Pauper Lunatics at Powick Asylum, Worcester 1852-1918. An exploratory monograph by Frank Crompton and Katie Leach, 2020 £7.00
DOWNLOADABLE RESOURCES
Dr. Frank Crompton has also written various articles and monographs about patients at the Worcestershire City and County Lunatic Asylum. We are very fortunate that Dr. Crompton wishes as many people as possible to use these resources, and we are working together to put them online for free.
Click the links to download as a .pdf file which will open in a new window.
PUBLISHED WORKS
Lunatics – The Mad Poor of Worcestershire in the Long Nineteenth Century. Frank Crompton, 2011
OTHER WRITTEN ARTICLES & RESOURCES
Planning and building the new Worcester City and County Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Powick, Frank Crompton, 2023.
If you are interested in the General Paralysis of Insanity, Frank has written a paper and also provided details of patients at the asylum with this condition.
Male patients with GPI (text taken from the asylum’s patients’ notes).
Male patients who died from GPI (text taken from the asylum’s patients’ notes).
Female patients with paralysis - possibly GPI (text taken from the asylum’s patients’ notes).