Gateway Chronicle 2021

62
Hill End Hospital opened in St Albans (where
Highfield Park stands today) in 1899, as Hertfordshire
County Asylum, taking over from Bedford
Asylum and Three Counties Asylum which had
taken patients from Hertfordshire throughout the
Victorian period. It was a typical hospital of its era,
being mainly self-sufficient before World War Two
with five farms, producing both crops and livestock,
large gardens, a water pumping station and many
services. Patients were largely the workers on these
and a chapel (now Trestle Arts Base) was situated
to the North of the site. Men and women were separated
and their divisions were unequal, with larger
blocks for female accommodation and more female
blocks being added over subsequent years due to the
gender imbalance – this could be put down to several
factors, such as a damning of women as ‘hysterical’
if they objected to the life that was imposed
on them in this time or the admission of women for
short term stays for ‘recovery from domestic lives’.
One headstone that previously lay in the Garden
of Rest at Highfield Park (where patients were
generally buried in mass pauper graves) details
Emily Evans, who died in 1901 (aged 55) and reads
‘released from sorrow, sin and pain’. Her hospital
records are ambiguous and no specific medical notes
exist, with the register simply stating that she was
diagnosed with dementia and the ‘duration of existing
attack’ was ‘birth’ – it is unclear whether this
is her own, or since she gave birth (possibly to an
illegitimate child, given the ‘sin’ on her epitaph and
the nature of her as a single woman with no trade
or occupation). Hill End went through a period of
severe hardship during World War One (common to
most asylums) as extra residents from Norfolk led
to overcrowding and male attendants left to join up.
After this era, Hill End was renamed the Hertfordshire
County Mental Hospital in 1920 to remove
grim and unpleasant associations with the past, and
then to Hill End Hospital for Mental and Nervous
Diseases in 1936.
During the pre- Second World War period, new
‘heroic therapies’ were developed as psychologists
and psychiatrists began to use a more experimental
approach to treatment, with the idea that mental
illness was based on physical issues in the nervous
system or brain. Some of these treatments included
insulin coma therapy, electroconvulsive therapy and
psychosurgery (such as lobotomy). Largely seen
as disturbing today due to their reckless and dangerous
nature, some doctors may have been trying
this to help their patients but many were treating
The Gateway Chronicle
Above: Hill End Hospital
their patients as less than human who could be
forcefully experimented on to ‘empty the asylums’.
This mistreatment continued at Hill End long after
these practices had received public disapproval, and
alleged abuse at Hill End Hospital Adolescent Unit
in the 1970s and 1980s has been reported by over
100 people leading to a three-year police inquiry.
Hertfordshire police reported that ‘in some cases
children were given adult doses’ of sedative medicine.
Statements given included ‘We were beaten,
we were punched, we were put in headlocks, we had
our heads rammed into doors…I was one of the
lucky ones because I wasn’t raped, but I know of
other people who were’, ‘Your knickers were pulled
down and you were jabbed. You just dropped to the
floor immediately. You couldn’t move for two days’
and ‘I’ve never, ever got over it’. Abuse of this scale
was not taken seriously and could happen because
of an apathetic public and an incompetent state who
did not effectively manage patients or support them
for rehabilitation, especially with adolescents who
historically and currently feel a large stigma and
harmful stereotypes attached to struggles with their
mental health, which leads to further feelings of
shame and isolation, preventing people from seeking
out treatment. Another issue at Hill End and
with the entire system was the misuse of it as a care
centre for those who could not be cared for at home,
no doubt exacerbated by Thatcher’s privatisation
of social care. One woman described experiencing
‘cruelty beyond belief ’ after being sent to Hill End
due to being raped at home aged 13 despite her not
having psychiatric problems – it was not known
where to put her due to an ineffective mental health
care system. Another stated ‘It was basically a psychiatric
home being misused as a dumping ground