Asylum

Stanley Royd – Former, Pauper Lunatic Asylum – Wakefield

Archive footage from the sixties and nineties.

The building was necessary to care for the treatment and care of the insane poor, and work began on it in 1816. The main builders were John Robson, John Billinton and William Pockrin – all from Wakefield. Work was completed and the hospital occupied by the 23rd of November 1818. The eventual cost of the building work was £23,000 being £7,000 more than the contracted price. The total cost was shown in the records as £36,448. 4s. 9¼d.
The building stood in an area of 25 acres. For privacy the grounds were surrounded by plantation in either Wakefield or Stanley to be quiet, peaceful and secluded. It was a much needed hospital for in the early part of the 19th century very little was available by way of treatment for mental illness.

Before the opening of this asylum, sufferers were incarcerated in prisons, workhouses or in their own homes at none of which treatment was available except for purging, bleeding or mechanical restraint. Some of records of mechanical restraint make horrific reading. There was a case of a James Norris who, at Bethlem Hospital, London, was chained for several years to a vertical bar fixed to a wall, able only to slide in his chains from a sitting to a standing position. Records tell at Wakefield of a woman patient admitted from Barnsley Workhouse where she had been chained in a cell for no less than 36 years.

www.highroydshospital.co.uk – www.meanwoodpark.co.uk and now www.stanleyroydhospital.co.uk

Duration : 0:8:8

[youtube voqwlVKNreg]