frominstitutiontocommunity

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

A version of our film From Institution to Community with subtitles, telling the story of the people who lived and worked at Monyhull Hospital, as well as looking at how their lives have changed with care in the community.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

How St Francis Church became Monyhull Church

The Revd Siôr Coleman first took his role as a Free Church Chaplain at St Francis Church in Monyhull Hospital in 1986. He worked alongside a Roman Catholic Chaplain and the full time Chaplain, the Revd Dr Brian Easter, who’d been there for 25 years and had been a very influential part of the staff team.

There were 400 people still resident in the hospital when Siôr first went there, but just 12 years later, the hospital was closed and the residents resettled into homes in the community. All the buildings were demolished, apart from the church and the grade 2 listed Monyhull Hall, which was used as an admin building and staff accommodation when part of the hospital.

Siôr still leads services for the Learning Disability community at what is now Monyhull Church on Sunday mornings and when asked about the changes said: “In some ways my role hasn’t changed because of the pioneering work that Brian Easter did. He saw that his role was to offer friendship. One of the challenges that he encountered was that people who lived at Monyhull had perhaps become numbers rather than names and as a result of that he felt it was really important to be known to everyone on first name terms; he was Brian to everybody.”

One of the main problems identified with institutional care was that with people living in such numbers and with such low staff to patient ratios, it was almost impossible to provide a service that catered to all the individuals’ needs. This contravened their human rights to be treated in accordance with their wishes. However, what Siôr learned from Brian Easter was: “... that the people with whom we worked at Monyhull were people whose humanity was incredibly important. It was not that it should be protected, but we should so respect it that we could learn from them.”

This was a message that he has promoted through his own writing, saying “I have recently written a piece called ‘Givers or Receivers’. I thought I was a giver, but in the thirty or so years that I have been working at Monyhull, I have become a receiver.”

Many of the people living there were quite able and talented in many fields, so should never have been in an institution, but, regardless of this, all had lived through some trying times: “There were some extraordinary people who had lived all their lives there and for whom it had been challenging. In the old days, you’d have a ward with upwards of fifty people there and the only privacy was afforded by the curtain that was suspended between each bed.”

The idea of transformation (that people could change dramatically under certain circumstances) became evident to Siôr when he took his newly born daughter to Monyhull. One woman who normally “swore like a trooper” suddenly showed a completely different side to her, challenging the prejudices that he’d had previously.

The way that his friends at the church reacted to each others’ actions also challenged Siôr’s thinking on how well other people in society treated each other. After one incident in which a resident arrived at church very angry and threw a cup at him whilst at the altar, extinguishing a candle, but not harming anybody, Siôr and Brian noted two things. He burst into tears, so Siôr hugged him until he calmed down and then he just took his usual seat between his friends, who moved up for him. They didn’t judge him and he left his anger behind, leaving church in a much happier frame of mind, rather than carrying it with him.

He concludes: “I suspect in more ‘normal’ churches people would come to church angry and they’d pray about it but not leave it there. After church they’d go back and pick it up again and take that anger and resentment home, without having dealt with it.” This feeling about what can be learnt from his friends at Monyhull has been a very powerful one ever since.

As well as Brian Easter, Siôr, who is somewhat of a railway enthusiast, is very proud of the fact that he was also preceded by a more famous clergyman, Revd W Awdry, author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books. In those days (1940-1946), rather than the 400 residents of the 1980s, there would have been more like 1,400 and the church would have been packed. Men and women were very strictly segregated then, so church would have been one of the few places they were allowed to sit together in the same building, albeit on opposite sides. The Reverend’s sermons would also probably have been rather less accessible to the residents than some of his books may have been, because in those days they did not use images or signing to help relay the messages as they do today. Over time, in order to treat everybody the same way and “acknowledge we’re all equal before God” services have changed quite a lot. Siôr will ask members of the congregation to help him lead the signing for songs, bread and wine is given in a way that everyone can receive it, prayer books have colour pictures. In an action which Siôr believes makes a subtle but profound statement, at funerals the head of the coffin is put nearest the altar (a position normally only used for priests) to demonstrate his conviction that his congregation is a “priesthood of all believers”.  Services are often attended not only by former residents of Monyhull, but former members of staff, too.

Pastor Colin Tamplin was the minister of a congregation that was then called the South Birmingham Evangelical Church, which was looking for a new venue to meet on Sunday evenings in 1995. Brian Easter offered them the evening use of the chapel and they started coming there while the hospital was still open. 

Colin had grown up locally and was aware of the myths about the place, as well as the fact that children used to call each other ‘Monnies’ at school as a term of abuse, but honestly reflected that he had no idea what it would be like in practice to worship on the site. 

He remembers that there were several residents who would come in while they were having their services, especially Fred, who everyone at the hospital remembers because of his talent for playing the organ. “They were different characters, who behaved in different ways, often very quiet, although sometimes would make comments during the services, but we accepted that was our neighbourhood and they were to be welcomed.” 

A couple of times, the heating had broken down in the chapel, so they moved the services over to the hospital social club, where, much to Colin’s amusement, hung pictures of John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe; faces that he certainly hadn’t preached in front of before! In 1998, the hospital closed down and demolition of all the buildings around the church began. Colin came to an agreement with the NHS Trust and planning authorities about taking over the church building, with the proviso that there would be community provision for the new estate, and also that those who remained from the hospital in the newly built bungalows would have a chaplaincy building nearby where they could still go to worship.  Nowadays, there has been a fair amount of landscaping done, but in the time of the hospital, Colin remembers that everything was on the same level, with buildings all around them, including administrative, social and residential facilities. The density of development increased dramatically when the housing estate was built, but quite a large amount of green space remains, as that was one of the most prominent features of the hospital.

Sadly, Colin remembers: “We began to find after the buildings had been demolished and we were here full time from 2000 former residents would come back onto the estate, walking around and looking quite disorientated. It seemed that they were missing what they had had here.”

The church at the time of the closure of Monyhull was also very different to how it looks today. There is a new community hall and associated rooms, which were completed in 2014, providing some great spaces for community events, including the celebration event for our project on the history of Monyhull. The main chapel itself is also very different: the organ has been removed as has the divider up the middle which provided a room at the back that could be hired out. The divider included a large graphic of old testament scenes including an “anatomically correct” Adam facing the congregation, as well as scenes depicting the life of Christ and St Francis after whom the church was named. For practical reasons the divider was removed - providing a much-needed doubling of the capacity of the chapel for the new Monyhull Church.  Although Monyhull Church owns the chapel, it is still used by the chaplaincy of the South Birmingham Learning Disabilities team. Volunteers from the new church help out at the residents’ services and Colin says: “We’ve always felt an affinity with people with Learning Disabilities. There’s been a warmth and a welcome to people like that in the congregation and partly that’s because of the heritage we feel we have. The fact that we have links both with the new community and the existing community has been very much part of our identity.” Colin retired in 2017, but the church continues to have strong links between the new team and the Sunday morning services led by Revd Sior Coleman. 

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Iris had a dream of being self-sufficient, but the system beat us both

Jackie Edmunds volunteered as an Advocate in the 1990s. She was a qualified doctor, who had some personal experience of Learning Disabilities through a family member and had always felt that she wanted to do more to support people in negotiating the difficulties of life in the community.

She was friends with Jerry Chance, the first manager of newly formed advocacy charity CASBA, so found out from him about opportunities to get involved in helping people moving out of Monyhull Hospital with the transition. It was a befriending role and she was aware that there was a group home in the next road to her, so was introduced to Iris, who lived there, and became her advocate.

She had a little training on what the role of an advocate was and how to deal with certain circumstances, then went to meet Iris and told her that she would like to be her friend and come to visit her. She found out a bit about her backstory: “Iris told me that she had been in Monyhull from the age of 12. She came from quite a large family and, when it was obvious that she had Learning Disabilities, her mother just couldn’t cope, so she decided that Iris must go somewhere she could be looked after.”

Now in her fifties, Iris had spent over 40 years in institutional care. Jackie said that she had been reasonably happy because she never really known anything else, but, having been in a place where everything was decided for her, she found it very hard to make decisions for herself or relate to people. “She was used to being told what to do, so all these areas of her life were quite problematic for her”, Jackie remembers.

Iris didn’t really talk about her time in Monyhull Hospital, Jackie said that she had put it behind her and wanted to look to the future: “The thing that she talked about most was that she wanted to have a place of her own. She’d got this dream of being self-sufficient. I think it’s something that she’d never been able to do in the past and I was hoping that was something I could enable her to achieve.”

Unfortunately, there were a series of problems with the places where she was living. When she was not getting on with somebody, she could become aggressive, so got moved on several times because of that. For Jackie, that presented a problem because she kept moving further away from her and it became increasingly difficult to visit Iris regularly.

Then, a serious incident happened in the kitchen: “One of the things she loved to do was make a bread and butter pudding”, Jackie recalls. “It was her piece de resistance, but there been some kind of issue when she was making one.” Apparently, a care worker had said something that had riled Iris and this caused her to pick up a knife. The incident was reported, and she was sent to see a consultant psychiatrist, who diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia.

Jackie was not happy with how it was handled: “This happened really quickly. I wasn’t involved or even told this was happening and the consultant immediately put her on really strong anti-psychotic drugs. From the jolly, outgoing person I knew, she became very sedated and withdrawn. Although we were working towards getting her a place of her own and had actually identified somewhere, this sedation made that out of the question.”

She made a formal complaint and was told she would get an appointment with the consultant, but this never happened. She pushed for a new protocol to be written, so that someone independent of the care home and medical profession would always be involved at such times, although it was too late for Iris: “I was very upset at this happening. There was very little I could do about it because once this diagnosis was written on her notes it got transferred from one doctor to another, so she never actually got a place of her own.”

In fact, much to Jackie’s dismay, when Iris reached 60, she was transferred to an old people’s home rather than a group home for people with Learning Disabilities. Despite the issues she’d had, staff in group homes were actually trained to help people with Learning Disabilities and some even remembered her from Monyhull. Iris became unhappier and then her health deteriorated.

Jackie did try to get her to a doctor, but says: “She was refusing all treatment and I think she realised she had something serious and didn’t want to go on.” She died of cancer of the bowel quite quickly and Jackie says: “Despite our best attempts and our love and care, I never felt that she had a totally fulfilled life. The system was difficult for me to work. Even with my training, I found it hard to try and put her needs forward to people and get them to react.”

Her funeral was held at Monyhull Church with five or six people present who all spoke of how they remembered Iris and the things they’d done together. Amazingly, some flowers arrived from her family, even though they had never been to visit her and had rejected Jackie’s attempts to meet. Iris had asked that her ashes were scattered on her mother’s grave at Witton Cemetery and Jackie tried to arrange this, but was told she couldn’t do it unless she had the owner’s permission. Instead, she arranged to scatter the ashes in amongst the snowdrops at the graveyard where Jackie’s mother is buried in rural Worcestershire – a place where she had taken Iris a few times and visits regularly now to remember both women.

“I’m very grateful to CASBA for setting up the principle of Advocates and having someone to look out for people like Iris, who’d otherwise have had no one. It enabled us to be more tolerant and more loving to each other.”

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

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.”

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Debbie worked as an advocate for CASBA, speaking up for residents when they were resettled from Monyhull Hospital.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Viv has been running a care home and working with former residents of Monyhulll Hospital since it closed. She remembers how they first settled them.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Two members of the resettlement team remember how little the residents had when they left Monyhull and that there was resistance from inside and outside the hospital.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Two members of the resettlement team remember being shocked at the language in residents' notes.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Sarah was a nurse at Monyhull and remembers some successful trips, but also that some places were not good for people with disabilities.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Sior remembers those who did not want to leave Monyhull Hospital and were spared having to do so, as they died before it was time to move out.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Sarah worked as a nurse at Monyhull and remembers a patient who used to keep wild pigeons at the back of the ward.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Eileen was working at Monyhull  Hospital when they organised their first holiday for the residents.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Dot remembers how good some of the residents at Monyhull Hospital were at making money 

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

As well as being a long-stay hospital, Monyhull had facilities where residents could socialise and also animal projects.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

A local man remembers playing near Monyhull Hospital as a child.

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Rev Sior Coleman knew Monyhull Hospital from the inside and outside, as he both worked as Chaplain there and as an RE Teacher in a local school, hearing children speak of their fears about the place. 

[frominstitutiontocommunity]

Lyn Lawson talks about her memories of Monyhull Hospital from being a child and then working there.