‘Some children and young people were not
afforded any dignity or humanity’, Ruth Innes KC, Senior Counsel to the
Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, said that last October, closing the
evidence on the institutions where disabled and chronically ill children
were sent to live. England and Wales ran institutions of the same kind,
and some of the children sent to them are still alive.
Scotland is asking what happened in them. In April, the Inquiry published research it had commissioned
into the abuse of disabled children in residential institutions, and
the finding was that the evidence barely exists: patterns of failure can
be traced across the UK and internationally, but the record is too thin
to establish what happened, or to draw the lessons that would protect
such children now. England and Wales are not asking.hart
Phase 9 of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry’s investigations
examined residential care for children and young people with long-term
healthcare needs, additional support needs, and disabilities. There were
forty-three days of hearings, 133 witnesses, seventeen institutions,
with care provided by the National Health Service, local authorities,
and voluntary and private bodies. The emergent themes include failures
to listen to children, inadequate training, excessive restraint and
sedation, and leadership that was ‘autocratic, dysfunctional or absent’.
Sixteen volumes of findings have been published. Those relating to Phase 9 are still to come.
Northern Ireland covered comparable ground
earlier. The Hart Inquiry’s remit ran from 1922 to 1995 and expressly
included hospitals. It produced an apology delivered in the Assembly
Chamber in March 2022, and a redress board that had received 5,496 applications by the time it closed to new claims on 2 April 2025. England and Wales have neither asked nor apologised.
The absence is not for want of a subject.
Between 1900 and 1950 bovine tuberculosis, contracted from infected
milk, killed more than 800,000 people in England and Wales and disabled
many more, working-class children disproportionately among them. Those
with osteoarticular disease could spend years in orthopaedic
institutions, immobilised in plaster, on unheated open-air wards, with
parents allowed an hour’s visit once a month. In 1937 a
two-and-a-half-year-old boy was taken from his mother’s arms in
Sheffield to the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children
in the Rivelin Valley. He spent much of the next five years there. He
described the ward in the plainest terms: ‘Hospital life was organised,
but crude. There was nothing to soften it. It was lonely, but I couldn’t
name the feeling then.’ A nurse had told him that when the hands on the
clock reached a certain place, his mother would come. ‘Of course,’ he
said, ‘she never did.’
He was one of thousands, and his childhood
is not the point. The point is that nobody has ever asked, formally,
what happened to those children.
Some are still here to say so. Two
survivors, both in their eighties, have recently written to me. Bob Shaw
spent his childhood hospitalisation at St Cuthbert’s Convalescent Home
in Malvern and at St Gerard’s Orthopaedic Hospital in Coleshill,
admitted in 1948, just before the founding of the National Health
Service. He wrote: ‘I still cannot take it in that this happened to
thousands of children. I always thought it was just the hospitals I was
in.’ Valerie Muncer, née Poole, was five when she was taken to the
Princess Elizabeth Children’s Hospital in Hackney in January 1946. She
spent the five years that followed at Hackney, then at Tehidy Sanatorium
in Cornwall until 1951, when Tehidy was sold to the NHS, and finally at
Falmouth Hospital until she was ten. Writing her own account for her
family, she stopped short at what she was recovering: ‘Was this me? This
poor child.’ Their institutions differed. The regime did not.
None of this requires hindsight. The Platt
Report of 1959 was itself an official acknowledgement that the regime
it replaced had harmed children. John Bowlby’s 1951 monograph for the
World Health Organization, and the 1952 film A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital
by James Robertson, a pioneering psychiatric social worker and
psychoanalyst who studied childhood separation alongside Bowlby at the
Tavistock Clinic, made the case in terms policy-makers understood while
children like these were still on the wards. Implementation was glacial:
a survey in 1982 still found forty-eight per cent of children’s wards
without unrestricted parental access.
England and Wales have examined a version
of this problem once. The Ely Hospital Inquiry of 1969, chaired by
Geoffrey Howe QC, looked at a long-stay NHS institution in Cardiff whose
wards included children, established that isolation from outside
scrutiny had allowed harm to persist, and led directly to the Hospital
Advisory Service in 1970. That logic was never extended to the
orthopaedic and tuberculosis cohort of the pre-antibiotic decades. The
Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse addressed only sexual abuse.
The Cumberlege Review addressed medicines and devices, but its framing
of historical harm through acknowledgement rather than criminal fault is
the model that fits here. Most of what was done to these children was
lawful and medically endorsed. The case for looking is not to apportion
blame. It is to recognise and learn.
Pre-NHS institutional records survive
unevenly. Some admission registers and annual reports remain. But the
clinical record barely exists as a body of material, and what does
survive records the treatment rather than the child. A statutory inquiry
under the Inquiries Act 2005 needs a minister to initiate it, and
members of the pre-Platt cohort are now in their eighties and nineties.
That bar may not be cleared in time. Lower ones are within reach. The
Health and Social Care Committee could take historical evidence. The
action plan for tuberculosis in England expires this year and its
successor, for 2026 to 2031, is being drafted now.
The Department of Health and Social Care or the UK Health Security
Agency could take the opportunity to commission a historical annex to
it. Either would begin what Scotland and Northern Ireland have accepted
is warranted: securing the records of institutions that no longer exist,
gathering the testimony that survives while those who hold it are
alive, and acknowledging that these children were the state’s
responsibility.
The Sheffield boy was Harry Drabble. He
died in 2022, aged eighty-seven. Shortly before his death he was asked
whether he wanted his story kept within the family. He replied:
‘Publish.’ He feared that without the evidence of survivors the mistakes
of his era would be made again. The question is not whether the country
cares. It is whether it will do what Scotland and Northern Ireland have
already done.
About the author
Helen Parker-Drabble
is an author, speaker, and independent scholar who recovers ordinary
lives from the traces they leave behind. She writes under the series Who Do I Think You Were?®, and her book ‘Yet’: A Story of Triumph over Childhood Separation, Trauma, and Disability
(2025) reconstructs her father’s five years in a Sheffield hospital for
children with tuberculosis. Her peer-reviewed writing has appeared in Genealogy and The Local Historian. She can be contacted at helen@helenparkerdrabble.com.
https://historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/not-afforded-any-dignity-or-humanity-the-childrens-hospitals-england-has-not-examined/
