Inside the Institution – a Nurse’s View
Sarah Barnes was just seventeen years old when she was thinking about what career to pursue. She knew that she wanted to do nursing, but not in mainstream hospitals, so she applied for the in-house training scheme at Monyhull, a long stay hospital in Kings Norton, and started just a year later.
She says that she was so young and naïve that when asked in her interview about incontinence she thought it was something about going to Europe, yet she was still given a place. Looking back, she says that in the twelve-week placements, trainees were basically used as a spare pair of hands in short-staffed wards. The hours were very long (12-hour shifts), and they were “thrown in at the deep end to either sink or swim”, but she says it was great fun.
There was a sense of camaraderie, as Sarah remembers; “We used to pool our lunchbreaks together sometimes – maybe once or twice a month. We’d sit down, especially if it was someone’s birthday, and have a curry. There were quite a few Mauritians working there, some of whom were great chefs and they’d be cooking a curry all day, saying ‘don’t worry, we’ve made it really mild for you’, but at that age I’d never had spicy food before and it would blow my mouth off! They thought it was very funny.” Staff would also go to a social club on the site after their long shifts and drink together to unwind, so you get the impression that Monyhull had quite a family feel to it from what many people say.
Although there were all sorts of residents at the hospital, Sarah initially worked with elderly, frail people with serious health problems who needed end-of-life care. She was incredibly enthusiastic, even to the extent where she would talk about some of the gory details of what she did at parties with her mates, much to their disgust. “I didn’t realise it was really inappropriate, because I was just so fascinated by the whole experience and my new career as a nurse”, she admits.
The senior staff who she worked under were real sticklers for discipline and seemed to rule by fear in a way that would not be accepted nowadays. Sister Brown retired in the early eighties, but Sarah trained under her and remembers: “you jumped when she said jump”. Whether it was nurses’ uniforms, beds being made to military precision, or timekeeping under the most trying circumstances, Sister Brown always expected perfection. Despite her fearsome reputation, Sarah had enormous respect for her and says that there were more people at her retirement party than anyone else’s. At the party, she singled Sarah out and told her “I did it for your own good, you know” and gave her a hug.
As well as around seven hundred residents living on site in the seventies, there was also accommodation for the nurses and other staff. Only two buildings from the time of the hospital still remain on site now and one of these is Monyhull Hall, which was always called ‘The White House’ by staff and locals. It has now been converted into private flats, but used to function both as the administration block and also two floors of nurses’ accommodation. Sarah only lived there for six months and recalls being quite lonely there: “If you were ill, they didn’t expect to see you, but what could you do? You had a little shoebox of a room and had to go and eat in the canteen, but you felt scared that they wouldn’t believe you were really ill if you were up.”
From an outsider’s point of view, it would be easy to think that, as life in the institution was all so regimented and routine, there was little room for individuality, but that’s certainly not the case when you listen to Sarah’s stories. Sometimes, it sounds a bit like a prison, as there was a definite pecking order and the stronger, more dominant patients would bully the weaker ones. She particularly remembers a man called Dick, who had cerebral palsy, but would hit the other residents with his walking stick and make sure everything in the ward was exactly as he wanted it. She said that he softened as he got older, but such behaviour could have been a survival strategy developed in harsher times at the colony, as it used to be called in pre-war days.
Another patient called Archie, who had been there his whole adult life, would try to hoard food, presumably as there had been shortages when he was younger. They got wise to it and stopped him doing it once they kept discovering mouldy remains in the dormitory. Then, one day a man who turned out to be his brother turned up. Despite being almost totally blind and having spent his entire life in Monyhull, Archie somehow recognised him. The man promised to return, but never did.
Monyhull Hospital was a long-stay institution for people with Learning Disabilities, but many people talk of those who should never have been put in there and Sarah is no different. She spoke about a man who had TB when younger, who then spent his whole life there. Another woman was rumoured to have been put in there for being a floozie by her father, who was Lord Mayor of Birmingham at the time and couldn’t stand the shame. With others it was neglect; she remembers another woman who had been found living in the coal bunker at her house and then brought to Monyhull.
One of the saddest cases she remembers is a woman called Janet, who was young and had mental health issues rather than a Learning Disability. Sarah developed quite a bond with her despite the fact that she used to threaten everyone, scaring staff and residents alike: “She’d give you the evil eye and say: ‘I’ll have you’ before leaping at you like a panther”. She was a similar age to Janet and one day agreed to go shopping and buy her some jeans. After that, she never had any trouble from her. “She was just a young girl in the wrong place” she muses before revealing a very sad back story; Janet had a twin, yet she was the one rejected by her mother, who had mental health problems and could only handle one child, while the other one carried on living at home. With the pain of such an experience and then being locked up in an institution, it seems entirely understandable that she would have been angry.
One of the hardest things to deal with for the nursing staff could be residents’ families. Sundays was visiting day and it seems that all the staff felt a sense of dread before they arrived. “Some of them were lovely, but there was this one woman who was just an awful mother, very controlling. Her daughter was young, a very bad epileptic with Learning Disabilities. The poor girl used to have the most terrible seizures by the end of the day because her mum had wound her up so much.”
Her work didn’t just revolve around the wards in the institution; by the 1980s, there were regular holidays that staff would take the residents on. One of the places she speaks most fondly about going to is The Calvert Trust (an organisation providing activities for people with Learning Disabilities). There they could do horse-riding, canoeing, rock climbing and all kinds of exciting activities away from the normal expectations and over-protective parents.
In society, people often talk about challenging behaviour (a term which is now thankfully being challenged), but Sarah saw things differently. She seemed to have an amazing aptitude for getting on with all the residents at Monyhull: “They were lovely. There’s not one person that I’ve said; ‘I don’t ever want to come across them ever again.’ They were wonderful.”
A number of the older residents didn’t do well after leaving and died quickly, but one of the most painful things for Sarah about when the hospital was closed down was losing touch with all of the residents: “We weren’t encouraged to keep in touch. I thought that was sad because they’d been there all their lives and the staff were like family to them. Institutional care isn’t brilliant, but it was the only thing they’d ever known and it was hard in that respect, because we were so attached to them, as they were to us.”