Royal Albert Asylum for the care, education, and training of idiotic, imbecile, and weak-minded children and young persons, belonging to Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Westmorland, Cumberland, Durham and Northumberland : twenty-eighth annual report.

  • Royal Albert Asylum (Lancaster, England)
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Royal Albert Asylum for the care, education, and training of idiotic, imbecile, and weak-minded children and young persons, belonging to Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Westmorland, Cumberland, Durham and Northumberland : twenty-eighth annual report. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    70/86 (page 68)
    Speech of the Right Hon. J. T. Hibbert, M.P. ;63,ooo a year. It was not to be thought of that they should keep empty and unused the space occupied by those hundred children, because there were so many children, as they knew, waiting to enter the Institution.— Therefore it would be for the philanthropic people of the seven northern counties to provide 'the money to enable the management to receive a hundred more election cases. They would want, some of these days, an additional income of more than ^ year for that purpose. He laid this before them in order that they might think over the matter, and he did hope that in the future a little more earnestness would be developed and a little better organisation established, and that from Yorkshire as from other counties they would increase their annual income. He had been connected with this noble Institution from its inception, because he was one of the four who formed the very first meeting at the suggestion of the late Mr. Brunton to consider the matter, a meeting which was held in a very small room, so small a room that they could hardly “ whip a cat ” in it, and therefore, as they might easily imagine, he had watched this Institution with very great care and observed its success with ever-increasing admiration— it had been, indeed, a thing which he had felt most grateful for that he had been permitted to do what little he was able to do in connection with the Royal Albert Asylum. They might take it from him that the members of the Central Committee and those who had the arrangement of the details were most earnest and most careful in the adminstration of the funds which the people of the various northern counties committed to their charge. (Hear, hear.) He thought, therefore, that their friends might, with the greatest feeling of assurance, place in the Committee’s hands what would suffice to keep this noble Institution at work. THE RIGHT HOM. JOHN T. HIBBERT, M.P., President at the Election Meetings held at Bradford, June 2nd, 1892, THE OBJECT OF THE ROYAL ALBERT ASYLUM. “ It might be well to say something with respect to the objects of the Institution. The Royal Albert existed for the training of the poor idiot and imbecile children of the seven Northern counties. In those counties there was a large population, and he regretted also to say there was a very large number of idiots and imbeciles. According to the census returns in i88i there were something like 8,700 persons of the class in the counties referred to, and the Commissioners added that in consequence of the unwillingness of parents to enter their children as idiots, this number was much less than the truth, and ought probably to be doubled. Under twenty years of age, that was, under the age in which the children could be trained and educated and improved, there were, according to the census, 2,500, or, taking the more probable figure, 5,000 persons in the district in question. Yet the whole provision for the proper education of idiots in the seven counties was the six hundred beds in the Royal Albert Institution. This was a very sad state of things, and one which he hoped before many years would be remedied. He hoped the County Councils all over the country would take up the matter, and would try to make provision to meet the wants of the pauper class of imbeciles, so as to reniove them from the workhouses and the lunatic asylums, places which were quite unfit for persons in the condition of imbeciles. For the information of those who