Catalogue description Wales Court

This record is held by Sheffield City Archives

Details of NHS3/6/5
Reference: NHS3/6/5
Title: Wales Court
Description:

Registers of admissions of 'severely impaired patients': entries include date of admission , general reference number, patient's name, age or date of birth, class or status, whence admitted, and date of death, discharge or transfer with destination.

 

The volumes are unlabelled: by comparing the names of those admitted from this institution to Middlewood Hospital it was deduced that these registers relate to admissions at Wales Court.
Date: [1957] -1990
Held by: Sheffield City Archives, not available at The National Archives
Language: English
Physical description: 2 items
Access conditions:

Under the Data Protection Act patient records are subject to access restrictions. For further information please refer to a member of staff.
Administrative / biographical background:

Wales Court at Kiveton Park was formerly a manor house. It accommodated (what the extant records describe as) around 60 ‘mentally subnormal’ young women over the age of 16. Educational and rehabilitation classes were provided but by the late 1960s adequate facilities were lacking. A number of the girls went out to work daily. It latterly had an occupational therapy unit, for the use of both Wales Court and Aughton Court patients. The only records to survive for this institution are registers of admissions of ‘severely impaired patients’. The classification of impairment was given as: ‘idiot, imbecile, feeble-minded, moral defective’. This altered in 1961 to ‘E.P. [epileptic], severely subnormal, subnormal, psychopath’; in October 1981 these were again altered, to ‘mental impairment’ and ‘severe mental impairment’.

[Another establishment for females over the age of 16, little record of which has survived, was Aughton Court Hospital. Built in c. 1872 as a private residence, it was redesignated in early 1952 from ‘Aston Hall Institution’. Following a short period of management by West Riding of Yorkshire, it was taken over by Sheffield No 2 HMC in 1948. It had accommodation for, what was described as, 62 ‘mentally subnormal’ female patients. Later anecdotal evidence suggests that the institution also took in women without learning disabilities (such as single mums) who ended up ‘institutionalised’. However, there are no extant records to corroborate this.

In 1959 plans were put forward to develop Aughton Court, Grenoside and Thundercliffe Grange Hospitals to permit Hollow Meadows and Middlewood Hospitals to close. Management was transferred from Sheffield to Rotherham Health Authority upon the reorganisation of the NHS in 1982. The unit closed in November 1984 as the premises were deemed unsuitable.]

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