While researching Watnall Hall's Rolleston family graveyard, I discovered a mysterious third brother called Henry who was conspicuously absent from the graves. He is mentioned in early census records as a child but then disappears from the family records for over 60 years until his death in 1924.
So what happened to him and why the mystery?
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| The Rolleston graveyard in 2022 for Sir Lancelot's 175th anniversary. Henry is the only sibling absent from the graveyard. |
Henry Edward Rolleston was born in 1851, the youngest brother to Sir Lancelot Rolleston, Vice-Admiral Sidney Rolleston and sister Eleanor. He is the only one of the four siblings not buried at the family plot in Watnall. I could find no trace of him except his birth, the census in 1861 aged 10 when the family were living in Brighton and his burial aged 73 in Surrey. His life remained a complete mystery until now. There were no military records or newspaper announcements about his marriage or anything else. Now, thanks to an Ancestry.com subscription, the missing pieces of the jigsaw have started to appear.
Lunatic Asylum
It seems poor Henry was consigned to a mental hospital in 1875 aged 24 and remained institutionalised until his death in 1924 aged 73. His "Previous Place of Abode" was listed as Wynburg, Cape of Good Hope, today a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa but there is no trace of him there.
Today he would be described as "mentally subnormal" or with "learning disabilities" but in his day "weak-minded", "defective" or "idiot" were still used. He'd apparently had this condition since childhood.
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| Henry Rolleston pictured in June 1903 aged 52 on his Holloway patient record |
For reasons currently unknown, he returned from South Africa and was admitted to a private hospital in London called Northumberland House on 12th Jan 1875. He is listed as a "private" patient rather than a "pauper". It seems that the fee-paying private patients helped to subsidise the pauper patients.
Northumberland House was built as a private mental hospital in 1822 on the south bank of the New River on Green Lanes, opposite Finsbury Park. It was licensed as a lunatic asylum by 1829 and there are records of visits by officials from the "Metropolitan Commission in Lunacy" from that date.
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| c.1900 - Northumberland House private mental hospital |
Victorian Asylums
Perhaps surprisingly, from our 21st century perspective, Victorian attitudes to treating the mentally ill were quite progressive. There was a large programme of developing public lunatic asylums from 1808 onwards and Northumberland House seems to fit the style in which they were constructed in the early nineteenth century. It was purposely set in lovely gardens with a very grand country house style interior...
"The majority of asylums were purpose-built because of the belief that the insane were best treated away from their own homes in an environment which was specifically designed to meet their treatment requirements. Lunacy reformers and medical practitioners of the nineteenth century were largely concerned with therapeutic and humanitarian means of treating patients rather than promoting custodial regimes. This was manifested in a prominently held conviction that the asylum institution possessed inherently redemptive powers, drawn in large part from the ornamental landscape laid out for therapeutic uses, in which the building was firmly rooted. Superficially the purpose-built asylum estate appeared to be based on the model of the country house estate, which was still a popular and developing model of domestic residence for the wealthy classes."
"The Landscapes Of Public Lunatic Asylums, In England, 1808-1914", Sarah Rutherford, PhD Thesis, De Montfort University 2003
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| The spacious gardens at Northumberland House |
Many of the hospitals were built on spacious grounds in urban as well as rural locations, not only because more land was available, but also because space had therapeutic and practical value. One of the design principles laid out by the Victorian "Commissioners in Lunacy" stated that...
"An asylum should be placed on elevated ground and should command cheerful prospects, should be surrounded with land sufficient to afford outdoor employment for males, and exercise for all patients, and to protect them from being overlooked or disturbed by strangers."
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| 2010 - Holloway Sanatorium, Virgina Water, Surrey now a gated housing complex |
Transferred to the Holloway Sanatorium
Henry stayed at Northumberland House for over 20 years until 1st Dec 1897 when, aged 46, he was transferred to the even more grand Holloway Sanatorium in Virgina Water, Surrey. He was admitted by his brother Sidney.The sanatorium's meticulous case books are available online and list all the people admitted, including Henry as we'll see below. They often have pictures of the patients and give a full history of their symptoms and treatment. Some patient's issues would today be viewed much more sympathetically and include alcoholism, insomnia, homosexuality and "persistent masturbation". Many also had relatively short stays, akin to a short period of respite care, before being discharged.
The Holloway Sanatorium, set in 24 acres of private walled parkland, was built in 1885 by the pharmaceutical businessman and philanthropist Thomas Holloway.
Holloway is remembered for the two large institutions which he built in England, the Holloway Sanatorium and the Royal Holloway College, a college of the University of London in Englefield Green, Surrey. Both were designed by the architect William Henry Crossland, and were inspired by the Cloth Hall in Ypres, Belgium, and the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, France. They were founded by Holloway as "Gifts to the nation".
A French idea that plain walls were obnoxious to the mad caught Holloway's imagination and so every inch of wall is richly decorated including portrayals of small devils amidst the florid design. The initials of Holloway and his wife Jane figure in the ceiling designs of the entrance hall and his own especially designed coat of arms is celebrated in stained glass on the great stairway.
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| 1885 - Holloway Sanatorium opens |
Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner regarded the two buildings as the "summit of High Victorian design" with their elaborate Franco-Gothic style and imposing and highly decorated exteriors and interiors. Like Northumberland House, Holloway was set in very grand ornamental gardens. It closed in 1980 and still stands today converted into luxury housing but unfortunately with new housing built in the grounds.
In Popular Culture
Before the 1994 housing conversion it lay semi-derelict and uncared for but found its niche as a gothic pop video location. The Cure shot the video for "Charlotte Sometimes" here and Bonnie Tyler did the surreal and dramatically backlit video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart". The travel writer Bill Bryson recorded that the sanatorium had a charm about it because "it was full of wandering lunatics". Bryson worked at the sanatorium in 1973 as a nurse. Many patients were allowed to wander freely down to the shops and back, mingling on equal terms with the locals, who affectionately referred to the institution as "the sanny."
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| The Holloway Sanatorium as shown on the inside front cover of Holloway's Almanac and Family Friend (1892). |
Daily Life for Henry
It was considered very important that the patients should occupy themselves to take their mind off their problems. There were leisure activities such as tennis, croquet and billiards and a recreation hall for concerts and parties. There were trips to Ascot and Henley and cricket matches. There was a seaside branch where patients went for short stays. The men lived in one part of the building and the women in another, but they came together for entertainments and outings.
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| 2006 - The Holloway Sanatorium converted into a gated residential community with luxury housing. It is grade 1 listed. |
Henry Rolleston's Patient Record
It is in the handwritten pages of the Holloway's 1897 case book that we finally meet Henry face-to-face and learn why he was admitted. On the date of his admission he is described as "weak-minded and child-like" and has been so since childhood. It adds... "He is quite contented to be under control and restraint, is childishly happy and thinks this is a most lovely place to live in. His memory is very defective, does not remember how long he was at Northumberland House or how old he is. Is quiet and well-behaved. He eats and sleeps well."
In the subsequent months and years, Henry's condition does not alter very much.
His character and thoughts start to emerge from the notes though and there are occasional flashes of something deeper perhaps too easily dismissed by the staff. One doctor notes...
"Talks nonsense about a "pneumatic sole" for his boot, he has an unpleasant habit of buttonholing you and boring you with silly, rambling conversation." Was Henry on to a prototype Doc Marten boot?! They weren't invented until 1945.
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| Doc Martens? - "Pneumatic sole" for his boots |
His conversation though is generally described as "harmless chattering", "silly and purposeless" or "long-drawn out, rambling and incoherent" but when a new doctor's handwriting appears in 1907 he comments "will talk quite rationally on some subjects but is deluded on others."
Seaside visits
His records show him leaving Holloway for regular visits to "Hove Villa" near Brighton lasting several weeks. His first visit was in Sept 1898. This was a summer seaside convalescent home bought by the sanatorium in June 1891.
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| St. Ann's convalescent home with Poole harbour in the distance |
In 1912 Hove Villa was replaced by a new, £46,500 purpose-built seaside convalescent home at Canford Cliffs near Bournemouth in Dorset. It was like a grand hotel overlooking the sea and had 14 acres of grounds. It was was named St Ann's Hospital (after St Ann's Heath, the location of Holloway Sanatorium). In his later years Henry goes on extended stays to this new seaside branch of the sanatorium.
Health and treatments
A common theme is his "enormous appetite for food". His notes also say.. "...has to be watched at mealtimes as is in the habit of bolting his food. In good health.". Unfortunately though this makes him... "grossly fat and flabby". He develops diabetes and a suffers with a large and troublesome hernia. In later years he developed a fear of some impending catastrophe or of being burned alive during the night. There is no treatment mentioned for his mental condition, only his general health ailments are treated.
Henry's Death and Burial Place
Henry remained a patient at Holloway for 26 years until his death aged 73 in 1924 on 15th June. He is buried nearby at Christ Church Churchyard, Virginia Water. He outlived his sister Eleanor and her husband Robert Tennant. Like Henry, they too lived in the London area and were both buried in the family graveyard at Watnall. It is a shame Henry was not given the same final honour.
Despite his lifelong care in specialist, state of the art facilities, which was no doubt a large expense for the Rolleston family to bear, his burial place perhaps indicates a lingering element of shame that shadowed poor Henry Rolleston even after his death.
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| Henry Rolleston perhaps c.1918 from his Holloway patient case notes |
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Notes and Sources
Ancestry.com - various documents to do with Henry Edward Rolleston (subscription required)
The plushest lunatic asylum? Perhaps not. One of Henry's local contemporaries from Bestwood Lodge in Nottingham, the Duke of St Alban's son Lord Burford was admitted to a private asylum of his own. After increasingly erratic behaviour, he spent the last 36 years of his life, from the age of 28, as a ‘Chancery lunatic’ at Ticehurst House private asylum in East Sussex See the story here, note number 2 at the end of the article. https://watnallhall.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-watnall-troop-cricket-match-and.html
Northumberland House
Northumberland House
By Stevie Smith
I was always a thoughtful youngster,
Said the lady on the omnibus,
I remember Father used to say,
You are more thoughtful than us.
I was sensitive too, the least thing
Upset me so much,
I used to cry if a fly
Stuck in the hatch.
Mother always said,
Elsie is too good,
There’ll never be another like Elsie,
Touch wood.
I liked to be alone,
Sitting on the garden path,
My brother said he’d never seen a
Picture more like Faith in the Arena.
They were kindly people, my people,
I could not help being different,
And I think it was good for me
Mixing in a different element.
The poor lady now burst out crying
And I saw her friend was not a friend but a nurse
For she said, Cheer up duckie the next stop is ours,
They got off at Northumberland House.
This great House of the Percies
Is now a lunatic asylum,
But over the gate there still stands
The great Northumberland Lion.
This family animal’s tail
Is peculiar in that it is absolutely straight,
And straight as a bar it stood out to drop after them
As they went through the gate.
November 1964
Holloway Sanatorium
https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/subjects/living/1-2/
Patients Case Books https://wellcomecollection.org/works/sbssedcn/items?canvas=190
Henry Rolleston's patient record https://wellcomecollection.org/works/zjqxubuy/items?canvas=547
Henry Rolleston's case notes continue from Sept 1907 in "Case book A, p.275" which cannot (yet) be found.
Henry Rolleston's additional case notes, "Supplementary volume of case notes on various patients. Gives cross-references to original case note volume. The notes cover the period Jan 1911 - Oct 1926" pages 45, 50, 53 and 169: They continue until his death in 1924.
Lost hospitals - https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/holloway.html
The conversion of Holloway Sanatorium - Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , April 1997, pp. 232
St Anns, Bournemouth https://pooleshealthrecord.wordpress.com/2023/03/01/the-origins-of-st-anns-hospital-poole/
Mental Illness
Those They Called Idiots: The Idea of the Disabled Mind from 1700 to the Present Day Hardcover by Simon Jarrett (Author)
BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed - Learning Disabilities
Henry Rolleston's documents trail
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| 1851 - Henry's baptism by his uncle Rev John Rolleston of Burton Joyce at Greasley St. Mary's |
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| 1875 - Henry's admission to Northumberland House private mental hospital, London |
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| 1897 - Henry's transfer to Holloway (actually aged 46) |
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| 1924 - Henry's burial record at Virginia Water, Surrey |
Bill Bryson connection - In his book Notes From a Small Island, the British-American humourist Bill Bryson briefly mentions the period in 1973 when he worked as a janitor at the asylum, a job he obtained through knowing some of the student nurses (and where he eventually met his future wife).
He describes the institution as such: The hospital, I came to discover, was its own little universe, virtually complete unto itself. It had its own joinery shop and electricians, plumbers and painters, its own coach and coach driver. It had a snooker room, a badminton court and swimming-pool, a tuck shop and a chapel, a cricket pitch and social club, a podiatrist and hairdresser, kitchens, sewing room and laundry. Once a week they showed movies in a kind of ballroom. It even had its own mortuary. The patients did all the gardening that didn’t involve sharp tools and kept the grounds immaculate. It was a bit like a country club for crazy people. I liked it very much.
Over the years, Bryson, whose parents-in-law lived in the area, sadly watched the decline of the old sanatorium after it closed its doors in 1981. From being initially used as a set to film crime drama or rock videos (including the spooky Charlotte Sometimes, by The Cure), the buildings eventually fell into total disrepair and were repeatedly vandalised, as well as being looted for remaining ‘artefacts’, including some of the old casebooks.
In the late 1990s when Bryson returned to Virginia Water from America, fully expecting to see the old sanatorium further degraded, he was unprepared for the scene which awaited him and described it thus: So imagine my surprise when I crested a gentle slope and found a spanking new entrance knocked into the perimeter wall, a big sign welcoming me to Virginia Park and, flanking a previously unknown vista of the sanatorium building, a generous clutch of smart new executive homes behind. With mouth agape, I stumbled up a freshly asphalted road lined with houses so new that there were still stickers on the windows and the yards were seas of mud. One of the houses had been done up as a show home and, as it was a Sunday, it was busy with people having a look. Inside, I found a glossy brochure full of architects’ drawings of happy, slender people strolling around among handsome houses, listening to a chamber orchestra in the room where I formerly watched movies in the company of twitching lunatics, or swimming in an indoor pool sunk into the floor of the great Gothic hall (this was originally the dining hall, similar to the Great Hall, upstairs) where I had once played badminton and falteringly asked the young nurse from Florence Nightingale (a ward name) for a date, with a distant view, if she could possibly spare the time, of marrying me.
According to the rather sumptuous accompanying prose, residents of Virginia Park could choose between several dozen detached executive homes, a scattering of townhouses and flats, or one of twenty-three grand apartments carved out of the restored san, now mysteriously renamed Crossland House (this was after Thomas Crossland, the architect). The map of the site was dotted with strange names – Connolly Mews, Chapel Square, The Piazza – that owed little to its previous existence. How much more appropriate, I thought, if they had given them names like Lobotomy Square and Electroconvulsive Court. Prices started at £350,000
Afterwards, when I re-read Bill Bryson’s account of the months he spent at Holloway San, it tallied with the stories the nurses had told me of upper-crust patients (there was still a proportion of fee-paying patients up until 1974 to offset costs, some even from the pre-NHS days) wandering the estate and neighbouring town of Virginia Water in plus fours and dinner jackets, their cut glass accents allowing them to get away with a certain amount of mischief both in and out of the asylum. Bryson describes this scenario more generally in his book as follows:
Virginia Water is an interesting place. It was built mostly in the twenties and thirties, with two small parades of shops and, surrounding them, a dense network of private roads winding through and around the famous Wentworth Golf Course. Scattered among the trees are rambling houses, often occupied by celebrities and built in a style that might be called Ostentatious English Vernacular or perhaps Game Stab at Lutyens, with busy rooflines crowded with gables and fussy chimneypots, spacious and multiple verandas, odd-sized windows, at least one emphatic chimney breast and acres of trailing roses over a trim little porch. It felt, when I first saw it, rather like walking into the pages of a 1937 House and Garden. But what lent Virginia Water a particular charm back then, and I mean this quite seriously, was that it was full of wandering lunatics. Because most of the patients had been resident at the sanatorium for years, and often decades, no matter how addled their thoughts or hesitant their gait, no matter how much they mumbled and muttered, adopted sudden postures of submission or demonstrated any of a hundred other indications of someone comfortably out to lunch, most of them could be trusted to wander down to the village and find their way back again.
Each day you could count on finding a refreshing sprinkling of lunatics buying fags or sweets, having a cup of tea or just quietly remonstrating with thin air. The result was one of the most extraordinary communities in England, one in which wealthy people and lunatics mingled on equal terms. The shopkeepers and locals were quite wonderful about it, and didn’t act as if anything was odd because a man with wild hair wearing a pyjama jacket was standing in a corner of the baker’s declaiming to a spot on the wall or sitting at a corner table of the Tudor Rose with swivelling eyes and the makings of a smile, dropping sugar cubes into his minestrone. It was, and I’m still serious, a thoroughly heartwarming sight.
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