There are nearly a thousand names on the list compiled at Netherne, each patient listed by surname, forename, date of birth and sex. The list is organised by ward rather than alphabetically, so it took some time to check through. Beegan was probably someone else entirely — someone who knew Ballinasloe and knew the Beegans, because he knew where they lived.
Perhaps a labourer who worked for them for a while, cutting stone, or a neighbour. This was a disappointing discovery, mainly because it meant there is very little chance of ever working out who the artist known as J.
Beegan really was. But as I looked at the long, carefully inscribed list of names I was bothered by something else. The handwriting was extremely familiar. The list appeared to have been written by my father. When I was small I was always in trouble for my blotchy attempts at cursive script.
I could never get the nib at the right angle and I dripped ink from the inkwell all over the place: hands, face, clothes and the bits of the paper that were supposed to remain ink-free. Each evening, when I was five or six, I had to draw a picture representing the story we had heard that day at school and fit it inside a quarter page of my homework book. The twelve labours of Hercules; the loaves and the fishes; the three wise men; Jason and the Argonauts. I was utterly perplexed by the repeated requests to turn a story, with all its twists and turns of events and feelings, into something you could see in a square marked out in pencil on a page.
My father took pity and often did the drawing for me, and wrote the caption underneath. This was a fantasy, certainly. My father was ten years old in And I learned that the incidence of inherited handwriting characteristics is or was in these experiments highest between father and son. It is as high as The register must have been produced by my grandfather. This was eminently possible. My paternal grandparents lived and worked at Netherne from the mid s, and my father was born there.
It is likely that at some point during J. And maybe he did other things too. It was hard to see past the people carriers and the four-wheel-drives squeezed onto the newly paved forecourts, or past all the architectural improvements the porches, the decking, the picture windows, the roof extensions , to the narrow country lane of nearly a hundred years ago. But in the gaps between the houses you could see through to the Farthing Downs below.
Boys together in Coulsdon woodlands, Bramble-berried and steep, He and his pals would look for spadgers Hidden deep. We learned that poem at primary school and my own childhood was overlaid with its landscape, since I too lived in Coulsdon, and went blackberrying in the woods with my sisters.
My mother had come to Croydon from the west of Ireland in the late s, and it was there she met my father. They had travelled in the early years of their marriage, and lived in some exotic places, but now they were back and we were all living in Coulsdon.
Netherne Hospital was one of a string of large psychiatric institutions that hung like beads around the neck of Outer London. Standing on the rise at Netherne with nearly one thousand patients in , you could see the Victorian water tower of Cane Hill Hospital to the north with approximately two thousand patients , and to the east the towers of what was known locally as Caterham Subnormality, full to bursting with more than two thousand mentally disabled inpatients when my teenage grandmother arrived from her South Wales village to work there as a nursing attendant.
Further east was the Croydon Borough Mental Hospital later known as Warlingham Park , a much smaller outfit with just over six hundred beds and, perhaps not unrelatedly, in the mid s the highest ratio of recovery to admissions in England and Wales. There were barely five miles between them all. My grandparents met at an air force dance. In they married and lived for a time in rooms in the grounds of Netherne, while they waited for the new cottages to be finished. They moved to their new home in , or early , shortly before my father, their second child, was born.
Before the Second World War, the social world of the hospitals must have felt similar to the early 19th-century villages that grew up around large landed estates. The hospital was a self-sufficient community. Netherne had its own vegetable and dairy farm with labour provided by the patients , a bakery, kitchens, laundry, carpentry and light engineering workshops, a printing press, chapel, library, cinema, dance hall, orchestra, choir, sports facilities and amateur dramatic society.
No wonder staff married staff, patients married patients, and sometimes staff and patients married each other. Nearby Cane Hill, which also had a private fire station, got its own railway station in , with a covered walkway leading directly to the hospital. With their locked wards and their armies of demobbed soldiers employed as attendants to keep the more unruly patients in check, these hospitals in the s and s were something between state villages and prisons.
In , when my mother arrived at Netherne to be trained in mental nursing, she was taking a similar route to the one Beegan had taken. It is possible he was still alive when she started working there. It is possible that my mother was one of the nurses who brought him from the locked ward to the studio and back again, along those unpleasant corridors.
She remembers delivering patients to Adamson in the studio, and the way he would ask what sort of mood they were in. It is highly unlikely, though, that she would have noticed him. He was simply one of hundreds of bruised and bandaged patients living on the back wards, who had to be managed as best they could. Murphy wangles himself a job as an attendant in the asylum, which Beckett renames the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. He would be expected to make beds, carry trays, clean up regular messes, clean up casual messes, read thermometers, write charts, wash the bedridden, give medicine, hound down its effects, warm bedpans, cool fevers, boil gags, sterilise when in doubt, honour and obey the male sister, wait hand, foot and mouth on the doctor when he came, look pleasant.
He would never lose sight of the fact that he was dealing with patients not responsible for what they did or said. He would never on any account allow himself to be affected by the abuse, no matter how foul and unmerited, that would be poured out upon him. The patients seeing so much of the nurses and so little of the doctor, it was natural that they should regard the former as their persecutors and the latter as their saviour.
He would never on any account be rough with a patient. Restraint and coercion were sometimes unavoidable, but must always be exerted with the utmost tenderness.
After all it was a mercyseat. If singlehanded he could not handle a patient without hurting him, let him call the other nurses to his assistance ….
He would never on any account neglect to keep his mouth shut. The mercies of the Mercyseat were private and confidential. But for Beckett, moving backwards and forwards between Britain and Ireland in the s, like half the characters in his novel, the idea that these were two different worlds was clearly nonsense. They were the same world, arbitrarily divided across two jurisdictions. Murphy seeks a job in the hospital because he wants to test his hypothesis that a life cut off from other people is a truly free life.
He turns out to be wrong about that. But in only seeing what he wants to see he behaves just like everybody else, including whole communities adept at turning a blind eye to their own operations, or disavowing the meaning of what they have seen.
How did the ward orderlies and the nurses understand the afterlives that their patients were living in? How did my grandparents, my parents and my aunt, understand their work in the hospital?
What were the stories — about the kind of suffering they witnessed, the necessity for control, the value of surgery, and also perhaps the nature of humanity — in which they had to believe to make their work bearable?
My childhood was steeped in images and stories of the hospital. But they were two sides of the same coin. My family was formed in the shadow of these British and Irish institutions. While some people including some members of my family were sacrificed to the system of institutional care and banishment, others my grandparents, my aunt, my parents and, in the end, me became beneficiaries of the system.
We were both the victims and the perpetrators. It mostly just felt like life. She was eighteen. I have a pretty clear visual image of what she was like at that time because just over a year later she appeared in a film set in the hospital.
She recalled this little adventure only recently, and found herself unable to remember anything about the film except that the lead actress was blonde. I spent weeks googling actresses born in the s and s and checking the colour of their hair. I typed all sorts of combinations of terms into the search engine: psychiatric hospital, film, s, Sheila Hancock, Netherne, asylum, depression, Sylvia Syms, and on and on until one day I was searching through the BFI catalogue and found the film free to watch online.
I was so damned pleased with myself when I saw the hospital entrance appear on my laptop screen. Released in , Out of True was funded by the Crown Film Unit as a public information film designed to demystify mental hospitals and get people onside with new developments in mental health care under the NHS. The blonde actress turned out to be Jane Hylton, and one of the dark-haired extras was my mother. Much of the film focuses on the series of punishing treatments Virginia suffers uncomprehendingly, including scalding baths and electric shock, and the barbaric treatment of patients considered troublesome or beyond help.
A group of British psychiatric nurses, concerned that the hospitals in which they worked would be tainted with the gruesome picture of state asylums in America, tried to have the film banned in the UK. They failed, and Out of True was one consequence of their failure — an official attempt to provide an alternative and positive picture of institutional psychiatric care in Britain.
The Crown Film Unit had a store of radical talent to draw on. The screenplay for the film was written by the poet and communist Montagu Slater, who wrote the libretto for Peter Grimes and worked with Auden on John Grierson documentaries such as Coal Face.
Elisabeth Lutyens composed the music. She supplemented her income from writing orchestral and chamber music by creating scores for horror films and her skills in melodrama came in handy, especially in the gothic opening scenes.
There are sensational aspects to Out of True but they are all associated with life outside rather than inside the hospital. Jane Hylton stars as a depressed housewife, driven to the edge by — what exactly?
She lives in a small flat with her husband and two children. Her mother-in-law has come to stay and the place is overcrowded; she has no time alone with her husband; she feels judged by her mother-in-law Mary Merrall and her nosy neighbour Beatrice Varley ; one morning she runs out of tea, and leaves the gas on by mistake.
None of these is sufficient reason on its own, perhaps, to throw yourself into the Thames, and that is why she is admitted to Netherne.
She passes through the hands of various kindly and avuncular experts. She is injected with a truth drug and undergoes narco-analysis in an attempt to get to the root of the trouble.
She experiences a benign and highly streamlined version of electro-convulsive therapy, administered by ultra-calm nurses in starched uniforms the film cuts just before the current is turned on. She does art therapy and physical exercise; she befriends another patient, played by Muriel Pavlow, whose problem seems to be neurotic jealousy of her sister; and finally she has some sessions of Freudian psychotherapy with the wise Dr Bell played by Jean Anderson.
There was a real female Freudian analyst working at Netherne at the time, whose name was Dr Yates. Her film alter ego helps Jane diagnose the cause of her breakdown as an inadequate childhood relationship with her mother, which she now projects onto her mother-in-law. The course of her treatment does not run entirely smoothly.
One stormy night she gets out through the French windows of her open ward, and races through the Coulsdon woodlands to get back to her flat and her children.
She is convinced that she does not need to stay in the hospital. But her reaction to the sound of a distant alarm proves that her nerves are still broken and her husband returns her to the safety of the institution on his motorbike. This escapade teaches her to trust the experts. The film has many lessons for its viewers. It is misguided to be fearful of the mentally ill. They are just like you and me, and this is especially true of neurotic women patients, and especially if you and I are women.
The film also teaches that if you are one of those neurotic women it is misguided to be fearful of mental hospitals. No one gets locked up in the film, no one is a danger to anyone except themselves, and the food and accommodation are excellent. Netherne did have a reputation for the civilised and humane treatment of its patients.
It was probably not chance that the hospital was chosen as the setting for the film. In the medical superintendent at the hospital, Eric Cunningham Dax, published Modern Mental Treatment , a handbook for nurses detailing the latest therapies. The diagrams showing, for example, how to lay out instruments for administering insulin, resemble a storyboard for the shots of treatment in Out of True. The whole thing exudes clinical authority and the promise of hygienic control over mental illness.
I picture my teenage mother, in a starched uniform, learning the drill. It is, in fact, very easy to picture her because I can find online a photograph of someone very like her logging insulin coma patients at Netherne in a Picture Post archive from the early s.
Netherne was proud of its reputation for cultivating a benign and enlightened environment in which to be ill. In the hospital became an international showcase when Eleanor Roosevelt visited and extolled the benefits of its progressive regime, compared to the grim conditions inside state asylums in the US. About 24 minutes into the film my mother appears.
She is lying on the grass outside one of the wards reading a book. She wears a flowery dress, and behind her the Surrey hills roll out to the horizon.
She is, it seems, a resident of Netherne; next to her sits another patient, flicking through a magazine. It is a scene of tranquillity, and, apparently, some affluence.
The point appears to be that people of all backgrounds get sick, and that mental illness is no respecter of brains or bank balances. A couple of years later, as though to prove the point, Vivien Leigh was admitted to Netherne, following a breakdown while filming Elephant Walk.
Her treatment included being placed for some weeks in an insulin-induced coma, through which she was nursed by two sisters — actual sisters, Maureen and Kathleen Barrett from Galway, one of whom took the day shift, the other the night — as she lay on a mattress on the floor.
At the end of the scene Jane and Muriel are called in to tea. As they walk back through the French windows, my mother raises her head from her book to look at them. It lasts a second, this movement of her head. I watch it again, and again, and again. I put the film on half-speed. I try to slow her movement by watching slowly, holding my breath. I am looking at my mother before I knew her, at around the age my daughter is now, moving on my laptop screen. My mother as voluntary patient at leisure: what intrigues me about this hilltop scene is the way it points so directly to the faultline running through the new look psychiatric institutions of the s.
The day-to-day functioning of the hospitals, like prisons, depended on a clear differentiation between staff and inmates — those who had authority and those who were subject to it.
Yet as the purpose of the hospitals shifted after the war, from being primarily custodial towards the goals of treatment and cure, they became increasingly invested in the idea that roles could change.
Unlocking the wards made no sense unless you accepted that the difference between the people inside and those outside was marginal. Inmates could, and ideally should, progress sufficiently to return to civilian life as Hylton does in the film. But by the same token the staff could regress to become inmates. The woman in the flowery dress in the background and her magazine-reading companion were not patients, they were nurses.
My mother remembers the day she was filmed as a patient. She had spent the morning as a very junior assistant in the operating theatre passing instruments? By the early s theories regarding the biological cause of mental illness had shifted attention from the organs to the brain, and the operating theatre was given over to neurosurgical interventions, leucotomies or lobotomies in particular.
The charismatic neurosurgeon Wylie McKissock, who was based at Queen Square in London and the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, would turn up every six months or so and perform leucotomies on patients who had been selected by the psychiatrists. The series ran for five episodes in the spring of In the mid s almost half of all hospital beds in the UK were occupied by patients with mental health disorders, but mental illness was hardly talked about.
If you were going to persuade people that psychiatry was a respectable field of medicine then something would have to be done about this stigma. To allay fear.
To encourage the sick to take advantage of available treatment in the early stages of disease. Watching the programmes now it seems extraordinary that anyone could have taken these doctors and their pet treatments seriously. It teeters on the edge of parody, Monty Python without the laughs. And the cracks must have been visible back then too.
The point of showing the prisons and the cages was to make sense of the need for new treatments. Until then the major treatments for psychoses in Britain were insulin coma, ECT and leucotomy. If you wanted to get away from a purely custodial regime straitjackets, padded cells, doses of paraldehyde to get people off to sleep , you had to try to prove that the new therapies worked.
I can study his account of choosing fifty patients for a leucotomy trial in , based pretty much on how much of a nuisance they were. Beegan spent those years. Two of the patients in the trial died, but apparently the others became more docile.
I can discover that insulin therapy was the speciality of R. Freudenberg in Berlin until he fled in and then in Vienna until he fled in , and that he eventually brought his expertise to Netherne. And I can watch this treatment being carried out by nurses at Netherne in the third episode of The Hurt Mind.
No one mentions the mortality rate, and the fact that there was no proof at all that it worked. And he brought some of that excitement back to the hospital with him. By the mid s there was a resident sociologist at Netherne, producing studies of social behaviour inside the hospital.
There are whole books in which Netherne features as a central character. I read all of this in the hope of better understanding the way people thought about hospitals and treatment fifty or sixty years ago.
But all I really got from it was a sense of the speed at which they changed their minds. I searched the anonymised case histories for a detail that would tell me what it felt like to be a subject of these studies and experiments. Gerard was just a girl of 2 or 3 when her nights became a terrifying world of serpents.
Giant boa constrictors, huge pythons, anacondas. Each one would disappear under my bed, and I would start shrieking loud enough to startle Mrs.
Burdick next door. This went on for a couple of years. The memory of it is as vivid as when it happened so many years ago. I had not yet been to a movie. We had no books about snakes or the Amazon. How on Earth did I know about snakes?
Explain that one. Scott-Stevens found nothing but the creeps in a popular cultural figure. His costume stayed in a pile on the floor with his dang hat placed neatly on top. Scarred me for life! When we asked readers for their childhood fears, the response was fast and varied, with only a few common themes coming into view. And that was just a month ago.
I was also more than a little rattled by a Dr. In the sane light of day, the story thrilled me. What would I do, I wondered, if my own pants go up and started meandering on their own? Timeless classic? Try dream warping horror show. Sarah Lapierre, of Mechanic Falls, says she was traumatized by a number of movies that were made specifically for kids. Lori A. Hallett, of Auburn, was afraid of spiders and thunderstorms as a child. Guess what? I used to run back up the hill as fast as I could.
Never told anyone about this. One woman says she was afraid of ketchup when she was a little girl. Another was afraid of windshield wipers, and still is, kind of. Jim Shine, of Oxford, is rather leery of loud noises, especially at night. You can hardly blame him. After that, I was always scared of loud noises at night. The explosion was in Oakville, Connecticut. He moved away, to Indianapolis, and gradually began to forget about the horrors of that night. A house in a nearby neighborhood exploded.
It wiped out an entire subdivision. Killed a few people in the process, and damaged the hearing of dozens. So I am sorta on edge with booms at night again. Like so many of us, Mary Wallace had an older sibling to help her fears along. Older brothers and Stephen King. With those kinds of influences, what child is going to get through his or her youth without fear?
Seems silly now, but back then. Little Ann, 5 or 6 years old, would go hide in her room, which spared her older brothers the chore of babysitting her. Clowns were also noted as sources of dread in childhood. To be frank, there are absolutely no positive role models in this movie. All of the characters are being blackmailed for various crimes: war profiteering, corruption, sleeping with a mental health patient, mariticide, and homosexuality not a crime but this was the '80s.
All of the characters, including those who are not being blackmailed, have motives of self-preservation at any cost. There are six deaths in Clue, every single one of them a murder committed by a character that viewers may have grown to like, so be careful with younger viewers getting attached to any characters in this movie because there is no question that these characters are objectively bad people.
This being said, all of the violence is very cartoonish. Of seven and a half deaths, three are blunt force trauma to the head, a gunshot wound, a stabbing, and asphyxiation. The half is a little more complicated because the audience and most characters think that the person is dead, first from a gunshot which is shown not to have hit him , then it's presumed they died of a poisoning, then they are shown to have died of blunt force trauma to the head at a later time.
Two gunshots happen in the dark, shown only by flashes of light, blows to the head cut to black before the blow lands, the stabbing is shown after the fact, and the asphyxiation is bloodless and not at all realistic.
There is quite a bit of other slapstick type shenanigans that kids may find amusing, and plenty of witty banter to occupy more mature viewers. What makes this film so great, though, is that there are a few scenes of actual tension and mild fear between characters searching a large, old house for what they think is an unknown assailant. The one thing that I really don't like about this movie is that the guard dogs german shepherds are shown to be scary and violent, which I think is sad and damaging to larger "bully breeds" of dog.
Make sure your kids know before watching this that the pooches are acting, too. A bit more innuendo than I'm sure most parents would like, but other than that not much to complain about. Slapstick comedy for kids, quippy dialogue for parents. What's not to love? Characters are prostitutes and adulterers, others show disgust towards that. Had useful details. Confusing- but very good My first reaction to the movie was "How did you get all of this from a boardgame?
You probably would think 'nahh, its to weird' but I can think of weird movies that have no meaning Blades of Glory. It was confusing but you didn't need to stop and ask questions. Every little action was a clue. The last three endings didn't make much sense, but I honestly liked going with 1 or 2, because I didn't like the original ending. It does have many sexual references and of course violence, but it makes me play the board game again.
And makes me want to go to one of the mystery murder dinner parties! Kid, 10 years old April 5, My favorite movie! I love clue! I think the biggest issue is the suggestive themes. Early in the film a man squeezes a woman's buttocks and some moments that most kids wouldn't understand, but will make adults laugh.
I mean, seriously, I saw this movie first when I was eight and all of the inappropriate stuff went over my head. Other than that, it's really funny. But I'm upset with common sense media's review. What happened to Madeline Kahn's famous improvised "Flames"? Teen, 14 years old Written by Thalia Grace October 9, Kid, 10 years old September 9, I hate this movie, it is so much worst than the game!
Hilarious Mystery Movie Okay, so there is some sexual references that are displeasing, and it is a show about murder, but it is all balanced out by the comedy. It's hilarious! I also like the multiple alternate endings. Yes, this movie isn't for anyone younger than twelve because of the sexual content, but that's my only concern. All in all, great movie. Teen, 14 years old Written by Sun Always Shin May 28, The Common Sense Media review has decent points, I mean it is mostly juvenile humor and you'll either laugh or cringe.
For humor, it's mostly a mixture of sexual jokes some work, some don't and the physical comedy which landed pretty well for me. It's not at all a bad movie and humor is subjective. You may laugh, you may not. One thing I was excited for was when I heard about the alternate endings. I had never heard of another movie to do that, and while it was a cool idea it felt more like they were trying to stretch the movie out to that 90 minutes. Especially because some of the specific details just feel But whatever.
This movie isn't meant to be about logic, it's much more just supposed to be fun. One of my biggest complaints was about a scene involving Curry running around and recapping the entire movie we just saw.
While it was quite funny to begin with, it just seemed to drag on and was to the point of getting me annoyed. Overall, a pretty good movie. Certainly not bad. I said once that "Tim Curry can do no wrong and can make any bad movie sparkle", I still stand by that. It does have great performances from big names, but Curry's the one you're going to remember when the night is done. If the humor is not your taste and you'd prefer a grittier more cohesive murder mystery, I'd suggest 's "Knives Out".
Teen, 14 years old Written by crazymonkey12 March 31, Now, anyway Teen, 17 years old Written by A-non-y-mous March 25, One of the best 80s movies!!! I watched this movie when I was 6 or 7 years old. When kids are little they do not get suggestive comments or inappropriate comments like when Ms. There is no true age limit to of watched this. There is also a gay guy.
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