Severalls HospitalOne of the abandoned rolls at Severalls Hospital

When I wrote the original Wikipedia article of Severalls Hospital I was left asking lots of questions. I wanted more details on the sorts of experiences people had there and the types of experiments which were performed on people over the many years that it was used as a ‘lunatic’ asylum (I use the word ‘lunatic’ with some trepidation as it seems somewhat offensive to the poor people who were incarcerated there). However, the fact is that people with mental health problems and some disabilities were referred to as lunatics until the middle of the 20th Century.

What happened to the patients who survived? What terror did people face inside Severalls Hospital? And was it really as bad as we are led to believe?

My Great Grandmother was a patient at the hospital once. Not because of mental illness but instead because Severalls was used in its last years as a temporary ward for patients (due to building work at nearby Colchester General Hospital). She had suffered a stroke and was in her dying days. I was about 17 when I went to see her at Severalls (1997) and I can still remember how imposing and dark that place felt, not because I knew it was once a mental hospital, but because it just had a genuinely eerie feeling about it. In 1997 my mother would remarry and hold her wedding reception in Severalls Social Club. This would be one of the very last parties to be held at the venue which would be ravaged by fire around 2007 (an act of vandalism).

I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in ghosts. There was, however, something very strange about that place. Something about the way it made you feel. A feeling as if 1000 people were hiding in the trees watching you; and a feeling I can’t fully explain.

After coming across these excellently detailed photos of Severalls my interest was renewed and I began to investigate more of what happened there. I did request a site visit of Severalls in 2009 but was refused.

Severalls Asylum: The Site

Severalls Hospital (then called ‘Severalls Mental Hospital’ or ‘Severalls Lunatic Asylum’) was built on a 1300-acre site which held numerous buildings. It opened in May 1913 and up to 2,000 patients were accommodated. Patients and staff were originally separated by gender.

The site was constructed using Echelon Asylum Architecture; pavilion blocks with large corridors interconnecting the buildings to prevent staff and patients ever needing to go outside. It was an impressive site as the aerial photograph shows. However, it is now abandoned and awaiting development for private dwellings. The buildings which remain have suffered vandalism and are in a very poor state of repair awaiting demolition.

Although things improved at Severalls from the 1970s, this was not a place that people when to get ‘better’. The site covered a huge area. It had locked cells, full padded cells, half padded cells and various areas for experiments such a frontal lobotomy to be performed.

An impressive overhead shot of Severalls Hospital shows the impressive Echelon site
An impressive overhead shot of Severalls Hospital shows the impressive Echelon site

The Patients of Severalls Hospital

A shelled shocked patient from WW1
A shelled shocked patient from WW1

Patients of Severalls Asylum were from a varied background and history. Some displayed characteristics of mental illnesses such a depression, psychosis and mania (still misdiagnosed at the time). In addition, there may be people sent to the asylum who suffered from other illnesses such as autism, suicidal feelings, and schizophrenia. You might even be condemned to a life in Severalls Hospital for suffering from epilepsy. Women were even sent there if they had been raped and many of the 80,000 shell-shocked soldiers were sent to the asylum after WW1.

Sadly not all people admitted to the asylum had a mental illness and some patients entered the asylum perfectly healthy but were turned mad by the environment. Around the turn of the millennium, my mother worked as a carer for people who had been moved from Severalls Hospital onto alternative accommodation. I’ll never forget one story he told me of a lady who, for the benefit of immunity, we’ll call Sarah.

Sarah was a perfectly normal 17-year-old girl who made the mistake of falling pregnant in the 1940s to an unknown man, out of wedlock and under 18. Her family was so embarrassed that she was placed in the asylum to keep her story away from friends and family. People were told that she had turned mad. In fact, she was perfectly healthy. Her child was removed from her as soon as he was born and given up for adoption. She never saw him again. Sarah (left in this environment and suffering deeply from grief) slowly began to develop mental illness as she fell into a spiral of deep depression, and would spend the rest of her life in mental health institutions.

Horrific Psychiatric Experiments

At its peak, there were countless Psychiatric experiments carried out on patients at Severalls Hospital including Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and Lobotomies (a surgical procedure involving incisions into the pre-frontal lobe of the brain). These experiments were rife in the 1930s to the 1960s, but continued as late as the 1970s in some hospitals (not Severalls) and were sometimes performed on patients whilst fully conscious.

Evidence shows that there were regular complaints from the hospital management of being unable to recruit enough staff. As a result, patients were often confined to their beds and sedated with Paraldehyde in an attempt to keep them quiet and ease pressure on staff (especially the case in the ’40s).

Imagine this if you will: You are a mentally unwell person or perhaps perfectly healthy woman sent to the asylum for having a child out of wedlock. You are in an asylum surrounded by strange people and strange noises. You are often locked in your room for hours on end. One day, someone comes along, straps you to a chair, passes electricity through your skull (sometimes 6 times at 40 seconds per shock) to knock you out and then sticks surgical equipment through your eyelids to remove part of your brain. Sounds like something out of a horror movie; yet it happened to hundreds of people every year in the name of ‘science’.

Advertisement for Severalls building tender

The so-called ‘father’ of this technique, Egas Moniz, would be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1949. Ironic, as if he tried this on someone now, he’d probably be locked up himself.

If your nerves can handle it, there’s a video which shows someone receiving ECT and then a frontal lobotomy. It shows just how scary the entire process was but be warned – it’s quite graphic.

Of course, most people who were the victim of a lobotomy ended up in a worse mental state after the procedure than before; unable to speak or in some cases dead. Possibly the most famous case of lobotomy was of Rosemary Kennedy, sister of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, whose father had her labotomised due to ongoing “concerns” surrounding her sexual activity which could jeopardise the career of her brother.

Severalls Became a Humane Place From The 1970s Onwards

I was recently contacted by a former trainee at the hospital:

“I was a student at Severalls between 1971-73 and still correspond with a couple of friends from that time. I am still interested in psychiatry and Severalls in particular. I find that many of the comments about treatment there were correct at the time – in the 50s apparently some very dubious practices occurred but that changed under Russell Barton. Unfortunately he had moved to the US just before I arrived in Severalls so I never met him but I had some dealings with Richard Fox. In the early 1970s treatment at Severalls was at least as good and in some cases a lot better than other hospitals of the same size and type. That doesn’t mean it was perfect but the nursing staff I worked with were very humane with the patients and definitely tried to make sure they were well treated – you can quote me on that!”

There is one man who went through the procedure and survived to tell the tale. Howard Dully was a perfectly normal 11 year-old-boy with a bit of a naughty streak. To cut a long story short, Dully’s stepmother convinced his father that Dully needed medical help for his temper and the pair had him admitted to a private hospital in his hometown of San Jose, California. At 1.30pm on 16 December 1960, Dully was wheeled into an operating theatre and given a series of electric shocks to sedate him. Dr Walter Jackson Freeman II would go on to perform a lobotomy on Howard Dully and no one person – not even his parents – would know until the procedure was over.

Now, of course, I’ve quoted two cases here would occurred in the U.S., not at Severalls Hospital. Sadly, there is so little information about what exactly happened at Severalls that it’s hard to find any evidence but we can be fairly sure that treatment was often just as brutal and almost always futile. This much I have been told by people who have contacted me who once worked there.

Many of the people who lived at Severalls did so for 30+ years and had absolutely no contact with the outside world (although it should be said that this was the choice of the patient’s families not to make contact, not Severalls). No letters, no telephone calls, no cards. The longer they stayed in the institution the more mentally ill they may become. If was a vicious circle in an Edwardian age.

Other Dubious Practices

My mother told me a story about a lady called Dorothy was a patient at Severalls Hospital for many years. Dorothy suffered from mental illness and had a habit of biting other patients and staff. This was dealt with by surgically removing all of Dorothy’s teeth.

Two residents of Severalls of where patients fell in love. Doctors at the hospital decided that it was too risky to allow a couple to have a baby as it would probably be born “mad”. The response was for the medical staff to subject the lady to a hysterectomy to prevent her from having a child. This wasn’t an uncommon practice at the time. My own aunt, who was blind from the age of three, was told by her family around 1940 that she was only allowed to marry her husband if she agreed to have a hysterectomy as her family decided that it would be unsafe for her to have children.

Another story she told me was of a lady we will call Liz. Liz suffered from tics, the kind we associate now with Tourettes Syndrome. Liz would make a clicking noise with her tongue against the roof of her mouth and this would become more frequent when she was scared or stressed. The health service’s way of dealing with this was to cut off her tongue to stop her making the noise. This sort of ‘treatment’ seems almost impossible now yet was occurring just 70 years ago.

My great-grandmother – Marjorie Hicks – was a nurse and occasionally worked at Severalls. She would tell stories of staff washing patients was carried out by lining them up, naked, and hosing them down. I’ve never been able to find out whether this was with warm or cold water but I presume that it was cold given the lack of heating facilities at Severalls (the hospital didn’t have central heating until 1973).

Cockroach Races

My Grandmother also told a story about staff having cockroach races when on the night-shift to kill time. Apparently, the place was riddled with them in the 50s and 60s.

Things did improve within time

Near the beginning of the ’60s a change in public opinion and treatment methods mean that new types of therapies were introduced, including music therapy. ECT continued and is even used today – but in a much milder form – and evidence shows it’s actually very effective to treat depression.

Occasionally, groups of patients were allowed to live in groups away from the main area of the hospital, such as in Ivy Villa. Eventually, houses were rented away from the hospital after social worker Joyce Beech recommended it may help people integrate back into society if they were given more independence. One particular house was in the nearby fishing town of Brightlingsea and would house 6 women who would pay their own bills, do their own shopping and cook their own food. Two of those women had been at Severalls for over 30 years before moving into their house yet managed perfectly well with only occasional visits from social services. ‘Care in the Community’ had begun.

Changes In Attitude Towards Mental Health

In 1972 an exhibition of equipment used at Severalls Asylum would take place. The exhibition would include equipment used in the early part of the 20th Century including locks, muffs, straps and poisons. Nowadays some of that might be a list for a sex dungeon but the equipment had many sinister uses at Severalls. Stories began to surface about the true horror of the experiments held at Severalls and the public would be widely disgusted.

Thankfully, mental health is now much more widely accepted and understood, perhaps a price that the early patients of psychiatric patients had to pay for the eventual good of others.

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By Richard

Businessman, camping enthusiast, Formula One fan and Real Ale drinker.

21 thought on “Severalls Hospital: the Evil Inside The Asylum”
  1. My grandmother was a patient in severalls for many years due to depression after loosing my grandfather at an early age, l would dread to think that she was subject to any experiments that were being carried out at the time she was a in there, when she came out in the early fifties she was such a gentle soul and I loved her dearly although she was never right after that and after reading what went on in there you can’t wonder at it.

  2. Hi, I think that quotes of £80+ pounds for this book are seriously taking the p***! I bought 2 copies on Amazon for £12 each – one for myself and one for a friend – we worked at Severalls in the early 1970’s and I at least was totally disappointed with the contents! Other reviewers seem to disagree judging by the published reviews – but I doubt that many had real daily contact with psychiatric work at that time.
    Why don’t you look for a document – q4890uguide – ” Madness in its place – interviews” which was easily available until recently but if you can’t find it I can send a copy. Some of the contents are quite revealing about the personal and political subterfuge inside a large psychiatric institution! Sometimes I wonder who the real lunatics were!!
    I don’t think I can attach a copy of q4890 so let me know.
    Regards,
    Hugh

        1. Hello Hugh. Unfortunately your email went to spam and I didn’t see it until today. The document you have send me is packed full of very interesting information and will help me continue to research this topic of interest, so thank you.

    1. Hi. Would you be able to send me a copy please? I am currently doing research for a project on severalls

      1. Hi, I apologise for not replying to your request but I seem to have overlooked your message when replying to Ritchie. I have 3 files which might be of interest but I can see no way to attach them – if you send an email address to q.doc@tiscali.co.uk I would be happy to send them on.
        Regards,
        Hugh

      2. My sender doesn’t hold a record of sent messages so don’t know if I sent a response to your message. I generated a pdf copy of ‘Madness in its place’ for Ritchie Hicks for his research so if you want a copy send your email address to q.doc@tiscali.co.uk and I can send a copy. Now Severalls has been reduced to dust not many people seem to be interested except those whose who were there!
        Hugh

  3. Dear Ritchie,
    In the interests of accuracy – your quotation above can be attributed to me – I was not a doctor – I tried very hard to become a nurse but in the end became an electronic technician working on electronic and electrical systems in hospitals around the UK. I think it was a good decision but I never lost my interest in the treatment of patients – psychiatric or otherwise!
    In reference to the treatment of psychiatric (mental) patients, have a look at a book Encyclopedia of Asylum Therapeutics by Mary De Young to see the attitude of psychiatrists (?) over the years toward mental patients – Severalls was only one of the hospitals highlighted as ill-treating patients but such treatment was not only widespread – it was almost total until the 1950’s when chemical treatments became available.
    Now, unfortunately, chemical treatment has become the main focus even when the drugs employed may in many cases cause more harm than help! Too many drug companies make ready money from continuous prescribing to have any real interest in the outcome for the patient!
    So – abuse of patients continues – and the production of new patients by using questionable drugs at questionable doses and in questionable diagnoses continues – except now it is kept below the horizon!
    The King is dead – long live the King!!
    Take care,
    Hugh

  4. I don’t know if you still monitor this site but I have just been sent a returned copy of Madness in its time which I bought for a friend but he returned as his opinion was that it was a rubbish history – his opinion, not mine! But I agree so if you want a reference copy I have a spare, just pay the postage!
    See a website called Severalls Memories which seems to be the most active for staff memories.
    Happy memories,
    Hugh

  5. I was a patient at severalls in 1968 during Russell Bartons time . I had a lot of ECT every other day for weeks on end but I must say I was always treated with care and kindness. I never witnessed any bad treatment even though many patients were extremely ill and often violent. I can honestly say I look back on my time there with fondness. The worst time was that I was there during the ‘Irma Kurtz’ incident if you have read the book madness in its Place you will know of it. It caused a lot of upset when the article came out and we patients and staff were very distressed at being fooled-we lost our trust in the staff who didn’t know she was a journalist,we didn’t believe them. It still causes me distress to think about the things Kurtz wrote ,things about me and my friends that had befriended her because we thought she was a patient.

  6. Thank you for this interesting article. I found it incredibly hard to read as my grandmother died there in 1940 aged only 29. She was admitted with mental health issues after the birth of my father…in hindsight the poor girl was probably only suffering from post natal depression. Sadly we will never know. Her death certificate says cause of death was typhoid fever, but to this day I am haunted by the feeling she may have been abused or mistreated. I wish you all the best with your research and would like to be kept updated.

  7. hey I am a student and was wondering if you have any information on how they treted there patintes in this hospital

      1. ‘Madness in its place’ is rubbish regarding treatment of mental illness! Have a look at ‘Lunatics, Imbeciles and Idiots – A History of Insanity in Nineteenth Century and Ireland’ – not specifically Severalls but some doctors then predicted the way mental patients SHOULD be treated. Then in the late 20th century, we had the ‘therapeutic community’ – only it was about 100 years late! Now we still use ECT – because the treatment of psychiatric patients hasn’t really moved forward – except to give drugs – which benefit the drug companies and hide the size of the mental health problem. ‘Care in the community’ might work but it needs financial and community support – much more than vocal support!

  8. We’re just finding out that my nan Mrs rosina Lillian gooding was at severalls died in 1962??but we don’t no if she died hear, and wat of. Can u help she live in dagenham 520 valence av, Dagenham Essex married to percey, born 1901

    1. Lily Rosina May Bavin your Nan was born 28th July 1901, husband Walter Percy Gooding born 5th December 1902. Lily married Walter Percy on July 2nd 1932. In 1939 they are living at 520 Valence Avenue Barking Dagenham as you have mentioned.

      You will have to send off for Lily’s death certificate to get the cause of death. The document registration you will need is 4a page 537 september quarter, Colchester. Lily was buried 31st August 1932 at Newham.

  9. I don’t think your comment “(the hospital didn’t have central heating until 1973)” is quite correct. My father was the engineer at Severalls during the 50/60s and we lived in a house called Sunnyside along the back lane of the hospital grounds. We had heating via radiators in our house. My grandmother spent her last few years in Severalls, first in a villa opposite our house and then later in Chestnut Villa, a little further along. Whenever I went to see her, it was always warm and comfortable. There was always plenty of hot water for a bath if she wanted one and she was very well looked after. Heat and electricity for the hospital came from the enormous coal fired boilers and huge steam powered generators and the pipes and cables ran mostly through the network of corridors between the buildings.

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