This multimedia display allows visitors to hear the voices of current and former staff and volunteers of groundbreaking feminist mental health service, the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. Now known as Self Injury Support, this pioneering group was started in the back of a charity shop in Easton as a feminist collective in 1986. Its goals were to listen to, support, and amplify the voices of women using self injury to cope with their experience of trauma. In 2022, as part of an oral history […]
The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act aimed to prevent the mentally afflicted from being incarcerated in workhouses for long periods. However, studies across the country have demonstrated that large numbers of people with mental health issues were being held in these institutions, sometimes in appalling conditions, throughout the Victorian period and even into the twentieth century. Data for Eastville workhouse (constructed in 1847) in east Bristol supports this trend, despite the fact that after 1845 […]
In 1855 rumours of murder and a cover up were circulating in the small north Somerset village of Walton-in-Gordano. An epileptic destitute country girl, Hannah Wiltshire, had died in the Bedminster Union Workhouse at Flax Bourton. The Board of Guardians were suspected of concealing the true magnitude of neglect at the workhouse, leading to accusations of medical negligence. Wiltshire’s death caused public outrage after letters were written to the local newspapers, sparking a campaign for […]
In 1861, Bristol’s Lunatic Asylum opened its doors and 164 pauper patients transferred from the workhouse. What treatment did this new state-of-the-art hospital provide, and how did it evolve over the next 130 years until closing in 1994? Stella Mann of the Glenside Hospital Museum, housed in the old asylum chapel, will talk about the evolution of Bristol’s mental health provision from the Victorian age to the present day. History can be discovered through many different routes. Every […]
Journalist, Fishponds Voice History columnist and Bristol Radical History Group author Mike Jempson will reveal some of the fascinating facts his research uncovered about the private madhouse which dominated Fishponds in the eighteenth century. His talk includes some of the institution’s more startling treatments, the sensational public inquiry and the shameful end of the Mason dynasty - the family firm that ran this biggest private asylum outside of London for 120 years. Drawing on museum […]
In April 1986, a group of women drawn together by their experiences of trauma, self injury and punitive psychiatric treatment started the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. An explicitly feminist user-led and volunteer-run listening service for women suffering mental health crises, it offered callers space to talk about their pain and how they endured it. Through listening without judgment, BCSW showed women a solidarity they had rarely experienced. Amplifying their voices, it began to forcefully […]
We are thrilled to be collaborating with the Bristol Reference Library for an opening the archives event on Saturday 13th April. There will be a choice selection of books and documents on display to view and peruse, complementing the themes of the forthcoming Bristol Radical History Festival. As the public library service built up its international affairs collection during the mid-1930s, interest in the Spanish Civil War was foremost. Historic items reflecting perspectives from both […]
Not A BRHG Event
People's University of Fishponds - Sun 28 Jan 2024 - 7:00om - The Nissen Hut, Eastville Park, Bristol. Journalist, Fishponds Voice History columnist and Bristol Radical History Group author Mike Jempson will reveal some of the fascinating facts his research dug up about the old private madhouse which dominated Fishponds in its day. His talk includes some of the institution’s more startling treatments, the sensational public inquiry and the shameful end of the Mason dynasty - the family firm that […]
In April 1986 a group of women in Bristol who considered themselves both feminists and survivors of psychiatric treatment came together to found the Bristol Crisis Service for Women (BCSW). Organised as a collective and with scant funding, the group drew on the feminist practice of consciousness raising to develop its work. It also took inspiration from the contemporaneous Survivor Movement, that rejected the medical model of mental illness, condemned the barbarity of much psychiatric […]
