In a chilling echo of Nazi Germany, how the British State rounded up and incarcerated 50,000 vulnerable young 'undesirables' in a drive for the 'perfect race'

David Barron was barely into his teens when he arrived at the Mid-Yorkshire Institution for the Mentally Defective in the late 1930s. He had been taken there by local council officials, having been rescued from a foster home where he was cruelly treated.

'Goodbye, lad. We hope you'll soon settle in,' they said. He was shown into a huge dining room, filled with around 500 people.

It was not the noise that day that would stay in his memory, but the sight of the bars on the windows. The sense that he was in prison, closed in, with the clanging of keys locking and unlocking each room and corridor.

David was an orphan. There was no one outside who was missing him, and no one to check on his welfare. The institution, ten miles west of York – a large, forbidding 'reformatory' building surrounded by strictly segregated dormitory blocks for men and women, later renamed Whixley Colony – was to be his home for many years.

However badly David had been abused by his foster mother, Whixley cannot have been much of an improvement. He was lonely – most of the people there were much older than him, and many had serious intellectual difficulties – and the atmosphere could sometimes be frightening and unpredictable.

Some of the staff were humane and approachable, others brutal. Inmates who were physically capable were expected to work, so he was tasked with scrubbing the corridors and the toilet block. In theory, work at Whixley was paid, but the rate depended entirely on what the superintendent thought you deserved. Inmates assigned to the laundry worked up to six days a week for anything between a halfpenny and fourpence a week. Pay could be stopped for the most trivial reasons – if a worker was caught talking in the queue on payday, for instance, or they held out their left hand to be given their pay packet instead their right. Young as he was, David thought this particularly spiteful, as some did not know their left from right.

A nurse attempts to feed one of her young charges

Once in a while, even he got caught out by the superintendent's arbitrary rules: when an edict went round that socks were not to be worn in bed, his meagre pay from one of Whixley's workshops was docked for a week after he was found wearing them.

But what was an ordinary boy like David doing at Whixley in the first place?

How he came to be categorised as mentally defective – albeit 'high grade' – isn't clear. Perhaps, having suffered the loss of his parents, and being landed with an uncaring foster mother, his education began to suffer. Maybe he became withdrawn, or disobedient. Or perhaps there was nowhere else for him to go.

Whatever the excuse, along with thousands of others, he was swept up in one of the most extraordinary – and sinister – social experiments of the 20th century.

For 45 years, the Mental Deficiency Act – passed on the eve of World War I and not repealed until 1959 – permitted the authorities to round up and detain 'undesirables': young hooligans and petty thieves; girls who had fallen pregnant with an illegitimate child; or anyone who seemed incapable or uninterested in working.

These young people did not have physical disabilities, nor what we would now call learning difficulties. They were ordinary, often spirited teenagers, some of whom probably had conditions we recognise, such as dyslexia or ADHD. Most had committed no crime. They were detained for social or moral reasons under the act's new 'moral imbecile' category, and, once categorised as 'mentally deficient', could be kept under lock and key for life.

Some were given over to the institutions voluntarily, by their families, who thought a spell of discipline might help them calm down, or grow up. They were then horrified to discover they could not get their children back.

By the time the public began to catch on to the scale of what was happening in the late 1940s, some 50,000 young people were being detained indefinitely.

Earlswood in Surrey, where the Queen Mother's cousins were sent

Their story is being told in full for the first time in a new book, The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away A Generation. Its author, Sarah Wise, is a social historian known for uncovering unusual, sometimes unsettling stories about Britain's murky past.

Her first book, The Italian Boy, was a gruesome tale of body-snatching in East London in the early 19th century, where a pair of grave-robbers – who, like Edinburgh's Burke and Hare, were selling bodies to doctors for dissection – began to find the business of hanging around cemeteries too bothersome and took to murder instead.

The story she has uncovered about the 'undesirables' is no less shocking. Indeed, it is a cause for national shame. For the 'moral imbecile' and 'feeble-minded' categories of the Mental Deficiency Act arose as a result of an academic enthusiasm for eugenics.

Inspired by Charles Darwin's writings on evolution theory, a belief began to grow during the early years of the 20th century that it was possible – laudable, even – to try to eliminate the weaker strands of society.

So the young people caught up by the act were held in single-sex colonies, specifically to prevent them from breeding a new generation of undeserving Britons.

Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, introduced the concept of eugenics in 1883, leading an army of influential commentators to believe that anti-social behaviour and criminality were transmitted down the generations (rather than being the product of a poverty-stricken environment).

The rhetoric of these 'social Darwinists', who included the science-fiction writer H.G. Wells, was powerful: there was no point in trying to improve the lives of the poor and feckless, they believed, because the 'feeble-minded' would carry on drinking and pumping out illegitimate babies, regardless.

Incidentally, these educated, middle-class culture warriors held a similar disdain for the aristocracy, in whom generations of cousin marriage had produced a number of offspring deemed 'imbecilic' or 'insane'.

The rich, however, were always able to hide their less able children. Most notably, the late Queen Elizabeth II's first cousins, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, were placed in Earlswood hospital for the mentally disabled in 1941, when they were in their early 20s. They were listed in Burke's Peerage, incorrectly, as dead.

Others were kept at home, but out of sight, shielded by tutors, governesses, companions and other domestic staff. So, detention for the 'feeble-minded' was principally aimed at the poor. And when it was first raised in Parliament in 1910, the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, was on board (though he felt sterilisation might be a humane alternative): 'If, by any arrangement… we are able to segregate these people under proper conditions, that their curse dies with them and is not transmitted to future generations… we shall have taken it on our shoulders in our own lifetime a work for which those who come after us owe a debt of gratitude,' he said.

The Mental Deficiency Act came into force – appropriately perhaps – on April Fool's Day, 1914. It was largely concerned with the care of people with serious learning difficulties, but the final two, catch-all clauses, concerning the 'feeble-minded' and the 'moral imbeciles', allowed local authority officers to start rounding up youngsters who did not match up to society's expectations.

Any female 'in receipt of poor relief at the time of giving birth to an illegitimate child or when pregnant of such child' was to be ascertained for mental deficiency. That made poor women and girls particularly vulnerable to being branded mentally defective. Pregnancy was thought proof that they could not protect themselves, either through weak-mindedness or their own 'erotic tendencies'.

Their babies were taken away and they were sent to colonies, or put under guardianship, with different levels of care and control – but always with the stipulation that they should have no kind of sexual encounter.

Records show that children assessed in school who refused to answer questions because they were withdrawn – or defiant – were detained. Backchat, Wise notes, could be fatal: take 16-year-old Noele Arden, who came before a mental deficiency panel in the late 1940s. To test her intelligence, she was asked to explain the difference between an orange and a lemon. 'Suck it and see,' she replied (correctly). She was sent to Rampton, the hospital for the criminally insane, and stayed nine years.

The single-sex colonies were supposed to be pleasant places, set in the countryside, where inmates could benefit from the fresh air and undertake useful work, but their isolation – and lack of money to fund them due to the outbreak of war – led to secrecy and cruelty.

David Barron's memoir, A Price To Be Born, co-written with Edwin Banks and published in 1981, is the most detailed record of day-to-day life in the colonies.

As a 'high-grade' defective, he could be given hard, physical work. Before long he was promoted to the 'sewing room' where he spent all day mending Whixley inmates' clothing and linen.

Later, he would run the shoe-mending workshop and undertake occupational therapy, including mat-making, basket-weaving, pottery and crochet.

He says the biggest fear for inmates at Whixley was to be sent to Rampton as punishment if they stepped out of line. He said of the patients sent there that 'if they went out like lions, those who did come back were like lambs on their return, and no wonder, the sort of treatment they dished out there'.

Other snippets can be found in oral histories. In interviews with researchers Maggie Potts and Rebecca Fido in the early 1990s, a number of elderly men and women spoke of their time at Meanwood Park Colony near Leeds. One interviewee was detained for 63 years. The shortest stay was 25 years.

The sexes were segregated and inmates were under constant surveillance. No privacy was allowed and there were no locks on toilet cubicles. Items including towels, combs and sometimes underwear were communal.

No hot food was served in the evening – even in winter – and baths were weekly.

'Joe' recalled colony staff knocking children about. Sally spoke of being straitjacketed, and on another occasion being placed in 'the dark room'. Frank said he had been punished with an injection but did not identify the substance. Bromide (a sedative famed for its fabled use on soldiers to calm their libido) was used, as was croton oil – a laxative that caused powerful stomach cramps and was given as a punishment, quite legally.

Peggy Richards recalled the violence of staff at the Royal Western Counties Institution at Starcross, Devon, in the mid-1940s: 'The nurses beat me and hurt me for nothing. They used to punish us by putting a wet towel around our necks and twisting it until we fainted… I often ran away.'

Peter Whitehead was at Besford Court Catholic Mental Welfare Hospital in Worcestershire. A leather strap was frequently used for punishment, as was having to stand still on a low wall for up to three hours, or having to kneel on a pile of marbles with bare knees.

In 2004, three men who had also been held there spoke to a newspaper. The boys at Besford had no idea they had been classified as mental defectives. Most were from terribly impoverished homes, some had committed petty crimes, some were truants. One said: 'I went to the grave of a teacher who'd made me kneel all night. I looked at it and spat at it. I felt extreme hatred for him.'

Occasionally, voices were raised in protest. In the mid-1920s, a newspaper latched on to the story of Dora Thorpe, a persistent truant who had called a School Board inspector a liar. She was sent, aged 12, to a residential school. Aged 16 – without her parents' consent – she was transferred to the Stoke Park Mental Deficiency Colony, near Bristol, having been declared 'feeble-minded'.

At Stoke Park, she worked as a weaver at a hand-loom from 8.30am to 4.30pm. 'Tragedy of Tortured Girl: State Slaves Six Shillings a Year' ran the headline, prompting questions in Parliament. Dora, by then 26, was found to be of ordinary aptitude and released to her mother.

The beginning of the end of the colonies came in 1947, when a retired accountant in Devon began to suspect the local hospital board, a nearby colony and local magistrates were corruptly certifying youngsters to get funds from Government.

The newly founded National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) became involved, and received more than 200 letters from parents and relatives of detainees seeking help.

The craze for eugenics faded with the demise of the Third Reich, but the urge to incarcerate 'wild' girls remained strong.

A London ledger from the early years of the Mental Deficiency Act shows detainees to be mostly female, at a ratio of 8:1.

The London records contain many examples of girls who fell pregnant while unmarried, such as Mary R, 19, who was in domestic service in North London and gave birth at the Marylebone workhouse. Eliza H was referred to the mental deficiency committee by the Paddington workhouse. She had three illegitimate children, was cheerful and clean but 'cannot be trusted in sexual matters'. Conclusion: 'This is a case for institutional care.'

A really heartbreaking insight into the number of girls who were locked up for getting pregnant came in 2022, long after the institutions had closed, when photographer Ian Beesley posted a photo on Twitter, part of a series he had taken chronicling the closure of Moor Psychiatric hospital in Lancaster in 1996.

The photo featured 'Dolly', an elderly lady who had spent her life in the institution, having been detained under the 1913 Act because she had a baby aged 14.

In 1953, Winston Churchill surprised the House of Commons by setting up a Royal Commission to investigate how the laws on both mental illness and mental deficiency were working. Churchill, by then Prime Minister, had moderated his views over the years, and must have been alarmed by the injustices the NCCL had begun to uncover.

In 1959 the Mental Deficiency Act was repealed and, overnight, thousands of people – some of whom had been institutionalised for decades – were released.

David Barron was then 30 and had been at Whixley for 16 years. He was shocked by the suddenness of it all: suitcases were delivered and a tailor measured the boys and men for new suits.

The co-author of his memoir wrote that though David found many jobs, including cinema ushering, 'time after time, malicious rumour that he had been 'in a mental institution' caught up with him and he moved on'.

In the following years, David tried to commit suicide three times. He eventually found peace in sheltered housing in Manchester in the mid-1970s, but a few years later he wrote: 'I've got to watch I don't slip back into institutional ways.'

He was far from the only one. A released woman who had spent decades at Rampton, having been detained aged 11, was described by a nurse as having 'had her life absolutely ruined… she couldn't understand that cutlery wasn't counted and that she didn't have to have a locked bedroom'.

In the 45 years the act was in operation, many thousands of lives were similarly ruined but there has been no apology, no public inquiry and no acknowledgment that an untested hypothesis – that criminal and anti-social behaviours were hereditary – was used to drive through such draconian legislation.

Many detainees went to their graves with no recognition of their suffering. Now, at last, their voices are being heard.

© Sarah Wise, 2024

The Undesirables by Sarah Wise is published by Oneworld on April 4, at £20. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to 07/04/24; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.