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| My Favourite Pic of Plympton House - Found using Google Images Search by the Houses and Heritage facebook page. (however, sadly, the article which goes alongside this pic is largely factually incorrect when it comes to the house's years as an asylum). |
And yonder mansion old and strong, is now by some ill luck, (Oh! shame of story, and of song), The madhouse of Doctor Duck![1]
The house referred to in the anonymous verse above, is the private asylum known as Plympton House Asylum, which was opened in 1836 by Dr James Duck.
NOTE: Plympton House asylum was the focus of my Masters Degree and is one of the establishments which I am covering as part of my PhD :) The content of this blog post is made up of excerpts from my Masters thesis, and so it is copyright, however, citations might be made to said thesis using this reference: [Barrett, Emma., “The Madhouse of Doctor Duck: Plympton House Asylum 1835 – 1860” (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Plymouth, 2018)] The Thesis itself is accessible on request to Emma.Barrett@students.plymouth.ac.uk until it is formally published.
Bang in the middle of Plympton, is a walled in estate which is currently a scene of demolition and re-purposing as an old manor house and its outbuildings are being converted into an exclusive new gated housing estate. Previously a nunnery and a care home, Plympton House also has a much darker side to its history.
In 1835, at the height of reform in mental health care, a Quaker doctor named James Duck from Bristol purchased a lease on Plympton House to turn it into an insane asylum. Dr Duck was a seasoned asylum owner as, along with his brother Nehemiah, he had been running asylums for over ten years in Somerset. This is important as Quaker doctors were amongst some of the forerunners in mental health care at the time. Nehemiah and James split with James’s move from Somerset, as well as a change in religion brought about by his marriage to a non-Quaker lady. Initially, the men who inspected the asylums for the crown in Devon seemed to be pleased with the conditions there, and initially Plympton House Asylum was intended for private patrons only. Later, however, Plympton House was styled as a “House and Outbuildings” private asylum.[2] This style of asylum was one which was rising in popularity during the early nineteenth century amongst private asylum owners who took on pauper patients who could not afford to pay for care (This being before there was any state or government-run asylums at all in Devon). The concept of a “house and outbuildings” asylum being that the well-to-do private patients were housed in the house with the family, whilst the paupers kept separately in the outbuildings.[3]
During the 1840s, the governing bodies which inspected asylums were to change drastically, and with these changes a group of men known as the “commissioners in lunacy” were sent to inspect every single asylum in England. In their reports, Plympton House was found to be in a very poor way, especially for the pauper patients. The commissioners described the House as “Disgusting and offensive” and unfit for purpose.[4] They stated that Plympton House Asylum was visited three times, October 1842, July 1843 and October 1843.[5] They open by discussing how previous visiting justices had lodged a number of complaints already, about the objectionable condition of the premises, and add that there seemed to have been no observable response to these complaints. On their first visit, the commissioners describe cramped quarters, with a room of 16 by 12 foot holding seventeen patients. The bedrooms were “Cheerless and wet, from damp or rain”. Chief in their objections too was that a room inhabited by girls, which was accessible by a male patient.Later, things had worsened even more, with patients tied to beds, restrained, dirty and confined to small dark rooms which had not been cleaned.
So what had caused Plympton House to fall into such a state? The answer is possibly down to the fact that Dr Duck began to take on pauper patients. Dr Duck doesn’t seem to have been able to fill his asylum with enough of the well-to-do patients, or perhaps the local governing bodies of Devon were desperate for somewhere to send the mentally unwell of the county. Whichever is the case, it would seem that the conditions declined when pauper patients were admitted.In 1843, Dr Duck left for America, leaving his family member by marriage, a Dr Richard Langworthy in charge of the asylum. The Langworthy family were another seasoned family of asylum owners, also from Devon, Somerset and Bath. Shortly after, the Devon County Asylum opened its doors and all of the pauper patients in Plympton House were transferred back in to government care. After this, for a time, the inspectors found Plympton house to be much improved, however in the 1850s the house was once again falling into disrepair and the conditions worsened. It can be no coincidence that it was during this time that the Devon County Asylum had become full, and pauper patients were being sent once more back to Plympton House. Thus the pattern began again.
Plympton House remained an asylum for many years after this, and then eventually was taken over by a group of nuns who turned it into a care home.
Further Reading:
Primary: “Plympton House Asylum” Exeter and Plymouth Gazette 3rd June 1843 p.3“Fullands House Lunatic Asylum” Western Times, 5th September 1828, p.3“Lunatic Asylum, Ridgeway House” Bristol Mercury 14th February 1820, p.2“Taunton – Lunatic Asylum” Exeter Flying Post, 25th January 1821, p4“Dr James Duck”, Taunton courier , 18th May 1829, p4“Lunatic Asylum – Plympton House” North Devon Journal , 23 July 1835, p.3“Plympton House Lunatic Asylum Near Plymouth”, Sherborne mercury, 3rd August 1836, p.1“Preservation of a Testimonial to Dr Cookworthy” Western Daily Mercury, 27th July 1869 p.3Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor, Parliamentary Papers [henceforth “PP”], 1844, No. 1, Vol. 26, XXVI.
Books.There are no books specifically on Plympton House (until mine comes out!), but these might be of interest:
Johnathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Customers and patrons of the mad-trade : the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London ; with the complete text of John Monro's 1766 case book (London : University of California Press, 2003)Charlotte Mackenzie, Psychiatry for The Rich (London: Routledge, 2005)Peter Nolan, A History Of Mental Health Nursing, 2nd edn (London: Stanley Thornes, 1993)William L Parry Jones, The Trade in Lunacy (Originally printed 1972, Reprinted London: Routledge, 2006)
There are also a wealth of academic journals and articles on the subject of insane asylums – go to Google Scholar and search terms such as “lunatic asylum”
Picture Courtesy of Plymouth Herald: https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/behind-walls-secret-plymouth-mansion-700979
[1] An anonymous rhyme dated at approx. 1840, collected and cited by J.G. Commin, Devon Notes and Queries , 30, 1967 p. 20[2] Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor, Parliamentary Papers, 1844, No. 1, Vol. XXVI, pp. 60[3] . J.K. Walton, Casting out and Bringing Back in Victorian England: pauper lunatics, 1840-70, in W.F. Bynum, R. Porter and M. Shepherd (eds), The anatomy of madness, vol. II, London, Tavistock Publications, 1985, pp. 132[4] Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy 1844, pp. 62[5] Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy 1844, pp.60-65