Prayers before breakfast!

Prayers before breakfast!

Wednesday 19 October 2011

Remembering the Dead



The Reading of Names
Remembering the Prestwich Asylum Community
St Mary’s Church, Prestwich
13th October 2011

The Greater Manchester County Record Office, an obscure building in Ancoats, holds one of the great historical archives of the nation – the admission books of the Prestwich County Asylum., from 1851 to the 1960s. They tell about the lives of many thousands of people who spent time in the asylum. It was a substantial community which, at its height, had over 3,000 patients and it employed many generations of local people. From these resources, the play, Telling Lives was devised by Cul-de-sac theatre and played as part of Manchester 24:7 theatre festival in 2011.

In researching for that play, I came across the work of the Prestwich Local History society who had compiled the names of the 5,000 pauper lunatics who are buried in St Mary’s churchyard. Their graves were unacknowledged until 2006. The vicar, the Revd. Bryan Hackett, suggested that a ceremony of reading of their names might provide a fitting memorial to those generations who have gone down into history without proper acknowledgement. A community theatre company, like Cul- de-sac, seems an appropriate vehicle for being involved in such a ceremony and we feel privileged to be part of the day’s community activities in the church.

Theatre has much in common with religious practices. It involves ritual, focus, art and a degree of meditative control. These all seem to be appropriate characteristics when remembering the dead. Few of us today, could have known any of the Prestwich patients who are buried here, yet many of us will feel drawn to this act of remembrance. Perhaps it is salving our own fears, that, hopefully, we too will be remembered, at least for a little while, by those who were important to us when we were alive. Rituals help us to focus and to share the ambiguities of being alive, to make them less intimidating. The ritual of the reading the names binds us, the living, together in a sustained public act. We put aside our own concerns to share in the emotions of other people and that gives us insight into the nature of life and increased sympathy for others.

Honouring the dead also extends our communities to the people who have gone before. They would have felt these things just as we do. By implication, it equally extends our communities into the future, to those who will come after us, whom we shall never see. They too, will share some of these emotions, but about us. The reading of the names is also ritualistic, and in that, it is like a form of meditation, a chance to slow down the pace of the world to something that more nearly matches the pace of our ancestors. Those slower brain rhythms are perhaps more ‘natural’ for human beings and this is what gives us a sense of comfort. And it seems right, morally right, to honour the dead. It stresses that all lives are important, regardless of social class or state of health. It asserts publicly and positively that other lives are valuable and that it is human value that is the foundation for all communities.

But it’s still a valid question as to why we want to do this? It’s perfectly natural, indeed essential, for us to remember our close relatives and our dead friends; but to remember those we never knew? What kind of ‘remembering’ is that? If the names were on Babylonian clay tablets, rather than printed paper, would it make a difference? There is something important about proximity and community. The Prestwich names are linked to our present community by a closeness in time. 100 years is a little span. Genes in St Mary’s graveyard are now distributed in us. We will pass them on to the future. Communities are more like long rivers than bounded pools.

And unlike the Babylonians, the Prestwich patients had real images of themselves for us to look at and study. They are not simply the army of faceless victims that social history normally turns up. Through their photographs, we see their humanity in their expressions. They are mirror images of ourselves and reflect back to us our own emotional life. And they had names. As actors today we will ‘remember’, Lily Handley, Willaim McVeaty, Ann Warburton, chiefly as characters in a play, the details of whose lives we have invented and created out of our own imaginings. It is a process that actors have to use in order to embody a character. But they were also real people, two of whom, Lily and Ann, are buried here, in this mass grave. We will read out their names and wonder, rather than remember, who they really were, what they felt, who they loved, what lives they really led. The Prestwich archive offers a strange form of resurrection – because of the haunting power of the photographs in it. We can’t stop ourselves from imagining their lives and sufferings and triumphs. Human beings are narrativisers. The purpose of art and ritual is to give greater intensity to each passing moment of our lives. And many of the Prestwich patients had just such an intensity for an imaginative life, the kind of visions which artists share with the mad. We need stories and ritual tellings, in order to understand how we fit into the flow of time. In recognising these patients from the past, we acknowledge that we too will fade from history – but, we also know, that it is better to have lived intensely. It is a gift we should treasure


But beyond our professional duties, it’s still a valid question as to what we are doing it for, to what purpose? I think an act of deliberate remembering, is a kind of purging of sorrow. We cannot get through life without experiencing sorrow. That is the human condition. It makes us feel helpless, as if we were again like a lonely child. But the Prestwich dead, when they were well, would not wish us to linger in sorrow. They would want us to live life hopefully, as we would wish it for our friends. The Stoics felt that, although sorrow comes to us as like a blow from outside, how we respond to it is under our control. We must first bear sorrow and then master it, and we can do that through courage and resilience. That makes a return to happiness possible. In the Prestwich archives, those two qualities – courage and resilience - can be found in great abundance. Despite the lack of modern drugs and treatments, nearly half of the population actually recovered from their distress, often through simple things like diet and rest, as well as from skilled professionalism and kindness, key qualities which bind communities together. Sorrow is a gift for which we do not ask, but it makes life a richer thing. The Prestwich community teaches us that and we are acknowledging that in reading out their names.

Finally, we can legitimately ask, what good will come of our acknowledging the dead? Under great pressure from the way we live today, is our sense of belonging in a community. The communal spaces where we might once have gathered to meet our neighbours - the church, the pub, the park, the market, - are all finding it harder to survive and play this binding role which enables communities to work well and to nurture their members common interests. An act of remembrance like today’s, reminds us that we need each other, in good times and in bad, as we did in the past, and more importantly, as we will in the future. As the character William Stubbins, (who was a real person in Prestwich), says (fictitiously) in the play, “We are all part of each other’s happiness”. That too, is what we are remembering.


Monday 8 August 2011


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A Brief History of Prestwich Asylum


The Victorians’ had genius for finding large-scale solutions to social problems. In mental
health care, the cruelty of the unregulated private asylums, the pauper lunatics housed in
the workhouses and bridewells, the mentally ill in the prison systems, the haphazard care
that one might find within a family, were meant to be replaced, mid-century, by a
countrywide network of state asylums. These were set in attractive, rural surroundings,
were well provisioned and staffed and built to high specifications. Prestwich County
Asylum was one such. It was built in 1850, costs £87,979. 5s.1d. (There’s Victorian
accounting for you!) There then followed the dedicated profession of psychiatrists –
alienists as they were referred to - to work in these new institutions and a regulatory and
monitoring system, was put in place with 11 Commissioners. It was a system full of hope.
Prestwich was initially scheduled to hold 375 inmates but was quickly enlarged in 1853
to take 500. Originally there were 10 male attendants, 15 female attendants and servants
but these numbers increased greatly over the second half of the century. A brewer was
hired. There were House Stewards, a Chaplain, tailors, shoemakers, bakers, carpenters,
plumbers, painters, engineers and a whole host of domestic staff. A great gang of latrine
emptiers, drawn from the inmates themselves, was formed to keep the sanitary systems
functioning. (They were given extra beer rations). The community made their own
furniture. They worked the farm, forge, kitchen gardens, library, and the extensive
domestic areas and dining halls for 400 patients. Industry was encouraged and much of
the philosophy was based on ‘moral management’, the system pioneered by the Quaker
William Tuke in the York Retreat. By 1875 Prestwich had over 100 acres of parklands
and grounds with a summer house, bowling green, croquet court and extensive walks and
pathways. Any use of mechanical constraints was frowned upon (though there are some
on display in Bury Museum) and people were sacked for rough handling of patients.
But a revolving door system of treatments quickly established itself with epileptic,
syphilitic and demented patients moving back and forth between the asylum, the
workhouses and the community. There was continuous pressure for more admissions, so
an Annexe was built for the chronically ill in 1883 and by 1914, the numbers hovered
around 3,000 patients. Then war broke out. Good doctors and attendants went to the
front. Soldiers with wounds of mind and body returned. The asylum system itself never
recovered.

Thursday 7 July 2011

Docu-drama or Drama-documentary

Telling Lives is a hybrid kind of play, with bits of music and song and poetry, as well as more conventional dialogues and monologues. It's based on historical records, but I've labelled it as a 'Brechitan fiction', so that people are not expecting a historically accurate portrayal of life in Prestwich Asylum at the turn of the last century.

In Telling Lives, I've used a mixture of completely fictional names and real names for my characters. The real names - Dr Perceval, Ann Warburton, Lily Handley etc, were all people I came across in the Prestwich Asylum archives held at the Greater Manchester County Record Office, and I'm very grateful to the archivists for introducing me to these amazing documents. I thought long and hard about using real people's names and about using the blown-up archive photographs of those who had been patients there over a hundred years ago. I felt, on balance, it was worth it.

There is a deep sadness that comes from researching historical archives, like those for Prestwich. You quickly realise that there are thousands and thousands of people, all over Britain, who have just gone down into oblivion, simply because they were mentally ill. There's over 5,000 Asylum patients buried in an anonymous mass grave in St Mary's Church in Prestwich. They lie, ten deep, with just a thin coating of soil and quicklime separating them. Their resting place was unmarked until 2006.

Why does it matter? Is it just class? We remember kings and Prime Ministers with statues, but not the poor. They can go into the dirt or into flames without acknowledgment. Does our very unequal society simply carry on being unequal after death? It can't worry the dead - rich or poor - but it does make some of us, who are still living, feel uncomfortable. Some religious traditions, say the Bhuddists, long for anonymous oblivion and will meditate on corpses just to remind themselves, quite deeply, of where we are all heading. Others, like the Christians, feel a need for a memorial of some kind here on earth, even though they are assured of an after-life elsewhere. Writing a play isn't likely to memorialise anyone for very long, but it felt like something, some honouring, some acknowledgement, of the value of patients, was going on when I was writing Telling Lives.

Cul-de-sac theatre hopes to read out the names of those unacknowledged pauper lunatics on World Mental Health Week, probably October 13th , at St Mary's church in Prestwich. We plan a concert at mid-day with music by composers who suffered from mental health problems; Schumann and Hugo Wolf, Smetana and Donizetti, Berlioz and the sublime English composer and poet Ivor Gurney. Of course they were all successful and, eventually, celebrated composers. But the pauper lunatics from Prestwich? There might have been in Gray's words, some 'mute inglorious Milton' buried there, another John Clare; but probably not. Nevertheless, we intend to acknowledge their lives, then perform a rather longer version of Telling Lives in the evening. When I saw the photographs of many thousands of people, I felt their lives seemed to be worth 'telling' in the narrative sense, and also 'telling' in the sense of important - whatever general, historical and social value was placed on their lives, either then or now.

In film & tv criticism, there used to be a debate about docu-drama vs drama-documentary. It represented two traditons in tv drama, one which came from news room sources and the other from the drama departments. The news room stories implied that journalists couldn't fully report a story because say, it was behind the Iron Curtain. Leslie Woodhead was the master of that tradition and Grigorenko is sadly a now forgotten masterpiece of the genre. It was based on real events, diaries, and individuals caught up in very difficult circumstances. At home, it developed in to wonderful plays on the Miners' Strike or the Hillsborough disaster. With some courage, the broadcasters of the 70s and 80s took on the vested interests of the police and politicians to tell the lives of real people, caught up in those terrible events. The second purely dramatic tradition is more Ken Loach territory, which dramatised issues like homelessness through plays like Cathy Come Home, where all the characters and situations were fictionalised. Alan Bleasdale's The Boys from the Blackstuff was a superb example of that tradition, which brought the nation's attention to the injustices of regional unemployment and its devastating consequences. And of course there's yet another dramatic tradition - like Shakespeare's history plays or Brecht's Galileo,- which tries to put the broad sweep of political and social events into some form of drama, using real named historical people. Macbeth was a real king, but the porter isn't in any sense real - though he's crucial to the play and begins to unwrap its complex meanings.

I think in Telling Lives, I try to combine bits of all three traditions. I want to honour the real dead because all our lives are valuable, whatever our social class. I want to bring attention to some issues in attitudes towards mental health and the policies and practices we use in the care of the mentally ill. And I want to invent totally fictional characters, who we can believe in, and who will vivify and open up debates about the issues we all face, as a society, in looking after members of our communities who are different.


Prestwich, of course, was a real institution and some of the characters were real people of 100 years ago. They were photographed and their lives logged on admission, and then they were sequestered away or released as luck or pharmacology dictated. Some details of their lives, their speech and the comments made about them, are genuinely from the records. Other bits invented purely for dramctic purposes. Some characters are completely fictional - Dr Whewell came off the top of my head - and he is there more to represent an attitude; in this case a humane one. Dr Perceval was a real person, but I don't know how committed he was to measurement, though he was a scientist in an era where measurement seemed to offer such hopes. (Hence the references to Charcot and Bertillon and Maudsley - and others in the longer version of the play.) Sadly, there's some evidential justification for almost every view put forward in the play, - " much gibberish from famous men" it says in my research notes. And the most powerful scene in the play is taken pretty-well word for word, from Krafft-Ebbing's famous book Pyschopathia Sexualis. So, Telling Lives is a hybrid of forms, and I think that's why I've kept the riders - fictional and Brechtian - in describing the play.


And overall I suppose, I want the play to point oliquely to what happens today; women still have their babies taken from them - for the best of reasons; discharged soldiers still come home with terrible wounds of the mind as well as the body; religious fervour still gets people to behave in odd ways, sometimes blowing up themselves and other people; men and women still, occasionally, kill their children when under stress; our prisons are full of the mentally ill; and we still measure madly - and, having just had a brain scan, maybe rightly. There's very little separates us from the late nineteenth century, except for pharmacology. We're very much better at reducing really distressing symptoms by using drugs intelligently. And long may it remain so.

But is that enough? Shouldn't we, through art and culture, be trying to build a more tolerant, calmer, saner society? Wouldn't that, in the long-run, reduce the incidence of mental unhealth? Perhaps that's what we should really be trying to foster in all our social and cultural practices - a less aggressive, more understanding, kind of society. And in the end, maybe the attendant William Stubbins, who was a real person, is right, that we just need to be 'good enough' to produce such a humane community. All our striving seems to produce just more neurosis. I thought I could probably do all this better by looking at real people from 100 years ago, rather than trying to set it in the present day, where it might get interpreted as a critique of the mental health services in the NHS, which would be a distraction.

It is a tricky issue and you hope to tell a larger truth by focussing on fictionalised individual lives. And again, like Brecht, you want people to come out of the theatre thinking and discontented, rather than feeling that they've just had a good night out. The Royal Exchange can do that, and it does it very well. But it's not what community theatre is about. That's about making small changes in oridinary people's lives - and I wish someone had been able to do it for those Prestwich residents of 100 years ago.

Sunday 19 June 2011

Rehearsal photos 18 June










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June 18th's rehearsal






This was good, hard work. Sue started really firmly and worked steadily through the whole play, paying particular attention to the transitions. It was painstaking and difficult grafting, which paid off, as we began to see how the whole thing might flow easily from one scene to the next. Hard day - but essential and very worthwhile.