Western Mail Cardiff Directory for 1911

Lodge – David E Turner

Steward’s House T. Morgan (Head Steward)

Houses on Park road

Gordon Holmes (Chief Engineer)

George Davies (Head Gardener)

S C Humber (Inspector)

Charles Hayman (Attendant)

William Wright (Attendant)

Charles Peters (Attendant)

William Woodland (Attendant)

J Flock (Attendant)

George Woolford (Night Inspector)

Thanks to Ian Beech for this post.

THE provincial meeting of the Association was held on Thursday, February 23rd, at the Cardiff City Mental Hospital, by the courtesy of Dr. Edwin Goodall and the Committee of Visitors, under the presidency of Dr. JOHN MACPEERSON. There was a good attendance of members and visitors.

The PRESIDENT, replying on behalf of the association, expressed gratitude for tle city’s kind hospitality, and remarked that the function of the members being the care and treatment of the insane, it was necessary continually to educate themselves, and it was in pursuance of that aim that the opportunity of the, visit to the Cardiff Mental Hospital was welcomed.
The PRESIDENT proposed the toast of ” The Lord Mayor and the Corporation,” and expressed a high opinion of the new mental hospital, which was well worthy of emulation. In replying, the LORD MAYOR said that in constructing the hospital the aim had been to have an institution which should be worthy of the city and of the cause, one in which patients could be properly housed and cared for, and yield a fair proportion of cures. That fair degree of success he could claim had been achieved. A further aim had been to make the hospital, by means of an efficient staff and adequate laboratory accommodation, a centre of investigation, and already distinct scientific advances had been made. He hoped one result of the visit of the association would be to encourage the workers at the hospital, and to show the ratepayers of Cardiff the wisdom of the course which had been pursued.

Full text can be found at:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2333525/pdf/brmedj07821-0035.pdf

Thanks to Tim Goosey for finding this information.

Land within the City of Cardiff was at a premium. The majority of the land was owned by three estates: Bute, Tredegar and Windsor and much of this had been used for housing stock. When it came to building an asylum the Visiting Committee tried to find land outside of the city boundary. Land from the Velindre Estate was offered by Mrs Caroline Booker and 120 acres were purchased by the Corporation at two hundred pounds per acre. Thus Cardiff had a site for its asylum outside of the city at a not inconsiderable cost yet cheaper than land within the city boundary would have allowed.  The land was originally farm land and some of the farm buildings were incorporated into the hospital grounds and became the hospital farm. county boroughs of Wales were slowest of all to respond to the need of asylum provision. Newport (1906), Cardiff (1908) and Swansea (1932) were the last places in Wales to build asylums: each preferring to save on capital expenditure and board lunatics in the local county asylum. Cardiff, in particular, had experienced massive urban growth in the nineteenth century. In spite of the city having entered into an arrangement with Glamorgan County Lunatic Asylum in Bridgend to house the city’s pauper lunatics in return for a certain level of payment per head, by the end of the nineteenth century the situation was becoming untenable. Cardiff was pushed into opening its own asylum by concerted pressure from the Lunacy Commission who expressed great dissatisfaction at the overcrowding in Bridgend. Indeed, by the time Cardiff opened, the arrangement with Bridgend had become so stretched that other supplementary arrangements had been brokered and patients returned to the city from Brighton, Chichester, Bridgend, Plymouth, Carmarthen and Talgarth.

Thanks to Ian Beech for this post

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/columnists/2010/05/27/it-s-tme-to-take-another-stroll-through-history-of-our-suburbs-91466-26525745/

It’s time to take another stroll through history of our suburbs

May 27 2010 Brian Lee, South Wales Echo

Steve Nicholas is a lifetime resident of the area and his website, which is well worth looking up, is www.whitchurchandllandaff.co.uk

Still in Whitchurch, and back in 1986, Mr P. I. Edwards, manager of the Industrial Unit at Whitchurch Hospital, wrote an interesting little booklet called Industrial Therapy at Whitchurch Hospital, and his widow Mrs Violet M. Edwards has kindly sent me a copy.

The following information is an extract from it:

“On Wednesday the 15th of April 1908, Whitchurch Hospital was formally opened. At that time it was intended to provide accommodation for 750 in-patients, 414 women and 336 men. It had been built on the assumption that the wards would be locked as up until then the function of mental hospitals had been chiefly of a custodial nature.

“The patients at Whitchurch however were allowed to go more or less where they wanted to and the hospital was one of the first to recognise that mental illness in a lot of cases was a curable disorder rather than a permanent one.

“The weekly cost for an in-patient at that time was 13s 5d (67p). The nursing staff in 1908 consisted of a head male attendant, matron, their two deputies, a night inspector (male) and a night sister. There were 48 male attendants and 38 nurses on the day shift and four male attendants and five nurses at night.

“Between 1914-1919 the hospital dealt with casualties and the hospital benefited by the general hospital equipment which was installed by the War Office and which was later used in peace time.

“It was in 1930 that occupational therapy started at Whitchurch with the appointment of the first occupational therapist and the hospital became a more open institution.

“During the Second World War, the hospital was again taken over as a general hospital and it wasn’t until the end of the war that the hospital continued the work which had been interrupted by the hostilities.”