If you were to see the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore from the main road, you would likely not give it a second thought, let alone realise that it is a rare early example of fully accessible architecture for disabled people.
Very few people know that these buildings had been built and designed in 1936 as ‘The Crippled Boys Training College’. They were officially opened on 20 July 1937, hailed as innovative and exemplary architecture enabling the education and training of disabled young people.
In the past, terminology differed significantly from today. The word ‘cripple’ is now considered offensive by many people. But the terms ‘cripple’ and ‘crippled’ were once regarded as factual and neutral, describing those whose physical impairments affected their ability to walk. Though stigma existed, many disabled people used these terms themselves.
From the late 18th century, charitable initiatives began to fund some basic education and job training for disabled children becoming independent adults. While some non-disabled founders and supporters may have aimed to lower long-term taxpayer costs, integrating disabled people into the community still had many positive effects.
In 1865, the ‘National Industrial Home for Crippled Boys’ opened in Kensington. The boys required sponsorship and contributed something to their own support by making goods for sale.
By 1869, when the Home moved to premises in Wright’s Lane, workshops included teaching carpentry, tailoring, and colour/relief stamping. In 1907, the home added boot-making, enabling boys to contribute to the war effort by mending army boots.
From the start, the Home had experienced financial challenges. It was hoped that the number of veterans with affected mobility would start to challenge attitudes to “the cripple, whether child, soldier, industrial, transport or road casualty”. Unfortunately, the First World War seems to have had an impact on the home’s affordability.
The census shows there were around a third fewer boys in the Kensington Home in 1921 than in 1911, with only 2 of the trades still being taught. A proposal to merge with the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital’s (RNOH) ‘Country Branch’ in Stanmore was made so that the boys could benefit from cleaner air and potentially better facilities for mobility issues.
For example, the RNOH Country Branch provided ‘crippled children’ with ‘open air treatment’ and the healing effects of ‘Dr Sun’, which at the time was deemed as important to orthopaedic patient health as “the skills of surgeons and nurses”. As much of the day as possible would be spent outside. Patients confined to their beds would be rolled out.
The 1918 Education Act made schooling compulsory for all disabled children, and in 1923, the RNOH ‘Country Branch’ opened the very first Hospital School, certified as a ‘Residential School for Physically Handicapped Children’.
After a decade of delays, the merger took place. The Board of Education gave approval for the building of a ‘Cripples Training College’ with accommodation and workshops on land to the west of the Brockley Hill hospital estate.
This layout is in clearly deliberate contrast to the multi-storey Wrights Lane premises. Built many years before Selwyn Goldsmith’s ‘Designing for the Disabled’, and decades before the Disability Discrimination Act, this is a surviving early example of accessible architecture.
From the boys’ point of view, this was a step-free complex: accommodation and recreation areas, classrooms, and workshops were all on the ground floor. Corridors were wide and included handrails. External paths on the sloping ground were ramped rather than stepped.
Designed in a wide arc aimed at securing “the maximum sunshine and air”, natural daylight and ventilation are to be understood as an intrinsic element of the inclusive principle, allowing disabled people to be well enough to learn and thrive.
In terms of catering to a variety of needs, the facilities also included a concert hall.
There was also “…a quiet room where even the wireless is prohibited…”. This retreat offered a safe space where the trainees (perhaps those with sensory sensitivities) could find calm and get away from noise.
It was a significant investment (equivalent to £3.5 million today) and it is clear that the architect did not deem the buildings merely practical. They have the same build quality and design elements as private apartment blocks from the same firm.
Before its completion, the site’s international importance was highlighted by disabled Canadian activist William Ritchie Watson’s interest. He took blueprints back home to help shape services in a region where there was only 1 such school, lacking accessibility features. Following his advocacy, a new school offering vocational training to “crippled adolescents” had opened near Toronto in 1949.
Industrial schools have a problematic history as sites of abuse, and it would be naïve to assume all the boys had as positive a view of their home and education.
But in the absence of most of the institutional records, we have a 1937 British Medical Journal article providing a remarkable account of the Training College, titled ”New Training College for Cripples – The Stanmore Enterprise”.
It describes “one of the pleasantest places of the kind we have ever visited”, noting that “nowhere is there any institutional atmosphere.”
100 trainees over the age of 15½ could, over at least 3 years, learn a trade that would enable them to live independent lives. The choice of trades was at least partially shaped by what would be beneficial to the hospital: surgical and bespoke boot-making and repair, mattress-making and upholstery, painting and signwriting, woodwork and cabinet-making, tailoring, watch and clock-making, and the making of surgical instruments.
The workshops were deemed “model establishments” from the point of view of “light and hygiene and convenience”. There was even a fear that the trainees would notice how different their lodgings and workshops would be when they left – “an unpleasant change in their circumstances…”.
In June 1939, during preparations for potential casualties from the looming Second World War, the RNOH Great Portland Street workshops transferred to the Training College at Stanmore.
In August 1939, the Home closed, just before Hitler invaded Poland.
Staff were still resident during the 1939 Register, and in 1940 there were still sales. Among the College staff was the surgical bootmaker William Henry Tuck, who joined the hospital in 1931. In the 1939 Register, he is listed as ‘Works Manager, surgical boots’.
Mr Tuck exemplifies the legacy of post-First World War rehabilitation and training for wounded soldiers. In an interview conducted for a 1970s promotional magazine for Shell Oil, we discover that Mr Tuck had learnt his skills from “the tragedies of the 1914-18 War”.
As a child, Mr Tuck was treated for a ‘foot deformity’ at the RNOH Great Portland Street. For many years, he wore surgical boots and a leg support. The Great Portland Street workshops employed several ‘fitters’ who themselves wore prostheses and were likely to be ex-servicemen wounded in the First World War.
The College remained closed throughout the war, and struggled to restart after it due to a large building debt that the fees being charged for the boys could not cover. The Ministry of Education was not prepared to make up the shortfall.
In 1948, 4 months after the institution of the NHS, the Committee of Management decided to close the College.
After the closure, Mr Tuck continued in its workshops and developed plastics for orthotic appliances.
In the aforementioned interview for Shell Oil’s promotional magazine, he describes making a plastic foot for a goose:
… ‘he’s over there somewhere’ he added, pointing across the frozen field to where a gaggle of geese was scurrying noisily away. The animal keeper greeted us. ‘Ah yes,’ smiled the keeper. ‘You can’t see him – I ate him!’
William Henry Tuck, an extract from an interview for Shell Oil’s magazine, 1970s
The workshops were leased to the Institute of Orthopaedics, and Mr Tuck become a senior lecturer in orthopaedic appliances. Even after his retirement in 1975, he remained involved in training the next generation of orthotists, as the fabrication of orthotic appliances continued in the workshops, together with Biomedical Engineering and Stanmore Implants, pioneering developers of orthopaedic implants.
Nicola Lane, 2019.
Large sections of both buildings are now empty, with evidence of ‘managed decline’.
In 2019, Pegleg Productions’ Heritage Lottery project began documenting the Orthotics Department. Much had been cleared in preparation for a proposed demolition, but 2 boxes were discovered in a cupboard in the Orthotics workshops. These are the toolboxes allocated to each trainee – relics of a forgotten history of disabled people.
The Crippled Boys Training College had aimed to offer the boys a trade from which they could earn their livelihood, with the intention that the students would go “out into the world as self-supporting individuals” to enable them to “meet life on more or less equal terms”. The survival of its premises poignantly reminds us of the intentions that drove its establishment and accessible architecture.
Written by Nicola Lane and Philip Milnes-Smith
About the authors
Nicola Lane is an artist filmmaker whose creative practice includes using a variety of media to explore themes informed by her experience of disability. In 2011, she founded Pegleg Productions. In 2019, she became Project Lead for Pegleg Productions’ Heritage Lottery funded ‘Searching for the Grey Lady: A Ghost from WW1’, working with archivist Philip Milnes-Smith and participants to discover and recover artefacts and archives relating to the founding and evolution of the RNOH Stanmore.
Nicola attends the RNOH Prosthetic Rehabilitation Unit and the project proposed to explore legacies of rehabilitation from the perspective of people whose lives continue to be shaped by that heritage, which includes the almost forgotten story of the Crippled Boys Training College, Stanmore.
Philip Milnes-Smith is the Digital Archivist at Shakespeare’s Globe. A former teacher of children and young people with ‘Special Educational Needs’, he is particularly interested in the history of education and vocational training for disabled people. One of the Archives and Records Association’s Diversity and Inclusion Allies (where he leads the Accessibility working group), he co-runs training in Disability and Accessibility for Record-Keepers and has set up a blog series sharing stories of disability history and inclusive practice. He set up the Disability Collections Forum for colleagues across libraries, archives and museums to aid networking and develop good practice.
Further reading
Interesting. Thank you. The architect was ahead of his time, and from the photos, he appears to have considered aesthetics as well as practicalities. The idea of training young men in a trade was such a forward thinking idea. In some ways I expect the boys experienced better outcomes than many of those subjected to today’s ‘care’ in the community. Some may criticise the focus on only boys, but those were different times, with different social norms.
Happy to give credit to Richard Mountford Piggott – a longstanding architect for the hospital: https://www.mountfordpigott.com/about/history/
This is the architect – Richard Mountford Piggott – and the firm is still very much in business: https://www.mountfordpigott.com/about/history/
Amazing! Looks very beautiful and as you say a serious investment in the boy’s future.
Really fascinating article!
What a very interesting, well researched article. The creation of the Training College for Crippled Boys was so enlightened and the design of the buildings seems to have been of the highest quality that “managed decline” doesn’t seem to be a suitable fate.
I made many visits to the ‘Appliances Workshop’ as a child in the early 1950’s, and had callipers made by Mr Tuck and his team. I was also one of the first to try out Mr Tuck’s plastic orthosis. Mr Tuck and Mr Hall, his replacement after retiring, are still referred to with awe by many of Orthotists today. His workshops, in which callipers and shoes were measured and made on the one premises, were incredibly efficient and effective. Today’s Orthotists look on the arrangement with envy.
Thank you for this article which brought back many memories for me.
Fascinating. Nicola Lane is an artist with a very tenacious way of weaving her stories. These hidden or forgotten histories are so vitally important.