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‘His experience in the Royal Albert would be of great value’:
The Influence of the Royal Albert on an Australian Institution for People with
Learning Disability
A note on language:
Readers should be aware that the language used in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to describe people with learning disability is now highly offensive.
While acknowledging that this is so, this article retains the use of contemporary terms
because they are revealing of past attitudes to, and understandings of, learning
disability. Use of such terms has, however, been minimized where possible. The
author would also like to stress that she does not share the assumptions the
contemporary language expresses.
In 1892, Dr James McCreery described the establishment of Kew Cottages,
Australia’s ‘first specialist institution’ for people with learning disability,1 to a
meeting of the Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia. McCreery, the
Superintendent at Kew, explained to his audience that while the institution had
experienced some initial problems in recruiting suitable staff, it was fortunate to
secure ‘a head-teacher who had been employed for eight years at the Royal Albert
Institution in the north of England…and so we were able to start in the right
direction’.2 The man he referred to was Theophilus J. Eastham and he was to have a
significant influence on the early history of Kew Cottages.
Theophilus Eastham was born on 21 June 1850 in Preston, Lancashire, the son
of Daniel and Alice Eastham (nee Howarth).3 He began working at the Royal Albert
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sometime in 1873, when he was in his early twenties. Although he was initially
engaged as an ‘Ordinary Attendant’, he spent most of his more than six years at the
Albert employed as a ‘School-Attendant’ and was, by his own account, ‘second in
charge of the School’ when he left.4 Eastham apparently felt a vocation to teach ‘idiot’
children, as he called them, because he concluded his application for the position of
Head Teacher at Kew by expressing his ‘great desire to be amongst them again’.5
Certainly, the references he carried from the Royal Albert’s Superintendent, G. E.
Shuttleworth, and its School-master, Edward Woods, attested to his ability as a
teacher of children with learning disability.6
Eastham left the Royal Albert toward the end of 1879, apparently intent on
emigrating to the antipodean colonies.7 By early April 1880, he was working as an
attendant at the Sunnyside Hospital for the Insane in Christchurch, New Zealand. He
remained there almost two and a half years, his aptitude for the job reflected in a
promotion to Charge Attendant during that time.8 By October 1885, he was in
Victoria and employed at the Sunbury Lunatic Asylum as a temporary warder. His
engagement there was, however, limited to three months, because he was older than
the maximum age permissible for permanent appointment to government service.9
Early the following year, he took a job as a House Porter at the Royal Women’s
Hospital in Melbourne (the capital city of Victoria). It seems that he preferred asylum
work, however, because he resigned from the Hospital in early August to take up
another position as a temporary warder, this time at Melbourne’s Yarra Bend
Asylum.10 It was from there that he applied to be Head Teacher at Kew Cottages.11
Both the Superintendent and Inspector of Asylums considered Eastham
eminently qualified to take charge of the new institution. His age, however, posed an
obstacle to his permanent appointment. While the government seemed content to
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appoint someone from the ‘existing staff’ of Victoria’s asylums, despite there being
no one with equivalent qualifications available, the Inspector was not. He urged the
government to exempt Eastham from the age requirement, declaring that ‘[h]is
experience in the Royal Albert would be of great value and an opportunity like the
present is not likely soon again to arise’.12 Finally, officials found the means to
circumvent the regulations and Eastham became Kew Cottages’ first Head Teacher.13
This struggle to ensure Eastham was appointed Head Teacher reflected a
longstanding ambition in Victoria to establish an institution for children with learning
disability ‘on the same lines as those in England’.14 Dr Edward Paley, the colony’s
Inspector of Asylums, first proposed the creation of a separate institution for children
with learning disability some twelve years before Kew opened. He made his
suggestion only a few years after the establishment of several English ‘asylums’ for
children with learning disability, including the Royal Albert, and he hoped any new
Victorian institution might be modelled on them.15 In the years between this proposal
and his retirement in 1883, Paley attempted more than once to establish an institution
in which the children might undergo ‘a system of industrial training and
occupation…similar to what is at present carried on in some of the English
asylums’.16 However, it took until May 1887 and the opening of Kew Cottages (which
took its name from the Melbourne suburb of Kew in which it was located), before
such an institution was successfully established in Victoria.
That Theophilus Eastham had considerable influence on the organization of
Kew Cottages is reflected in McCreery’s remark that the institution was able ‘to start
in the right direction’ because it had secured his services as Head Teacher.17 Eastham
also acted as Head Warder and his responsibilities were apparently considerable. In an
1898 application for an increase in salary, he described himself as ‘the responsible
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Officer’ at the Cottages ‘under Dr McCreery’s observation and Instruction both in
regard to the working of the place, the patients and buildings.’18 The same application
suggests that he consciously used his experience at the Royal Albert as a model for
the new institution. Having referred to the ‘special knowledge in the training of
Feeble-minded Children’ he had acquired while in Lancaster, he explained that ‘the
work’ of teaching children with learning disability at Kew ‘had to be formed on the
lines of the English Institution as far as practicable’; such lines, he added, had ‘been
followed out in a great measure’.19
This was certainly true of the ‘school arrangements’, for which Eastham was
entirely responsible.20 In addition to instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic, the
children at Kew received colour, clock and object lessons, as well as singing and
drawing classes, all subjects taught at the Royal Albert.21 The ‘shop lesson’ that
occupied one afternoon each week – Tuesday for girls and Wednesday for boys –
Eastham certainly introduced from there. His 1887 description of the shop at
Lancaster - ‘A complete grocery store, with coins and weights…set up as an object
and Shop lesson’ - is consistent with those of visitors to the Albert.22 While probably
not so elaborate at Kew, the intent was no doubt the same: in Eastham’s words, to
develop the senses ‘by the practical demonstration of comparison. In taste, touch and
the relative value of coins and weights’.23 Lessons at Kew were short, as they were in
the English institution,24 and the Kew timetable suggests an attempt to emulate the
Albert’s organisation of classes according to the differing abilities of pupils. Kew’s
small size may have hampered these attempts at ‘classification’ and the physical
separation of the girl and boy’s schools, however.25
For the boys at Kew, each school day began with ‘drill’ and it punctuated
classes for both sexes, as it did at the Royal Albert.26 Again, it seems Eastham
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introduced some methods directly from the English to the Victorian institution. In
February 1880, not long after Eastham had left the Albert, a visitor recounted some of
the teaching methods used there. ‘The use of the feet’, the visitor explained, was
‘taught by encouraging the patient to step from one flat rung of a stepladder to
another’.27 A photograph, taken at Kew sometime near the turn of the century, shows
Eastham and another teacher encouraging a group of boys to walk across a ladder in
just this way.
Work comprised perhaps the most important part of the training at both
institutions. In 1898, a visitor declared the ‘industrial training shops’ at Lancaster ‘the
triumph of the Institution. Here boys are employed, training for their after-life in the
world’. In the same year, Eastham wrote of Kew that it was ‘in the Industrial branch
(work of the gardens, the kitchens, the general work about the premises, and
especially in the Workshops) where the effect of the whole round of training is
shown’.28 Patients in both institutions found themselves employed in many of the
same occupations - tailoring, mat making, basketwork and boot repair, as well as
house, garden and farm work for the male residents; sewing, laundry and house work
for the female patients - though, again, the scale of endeavour was smaller at Kew.29
Theophilus Eastham was Head Teacher at Kew for twenty years. During that
time, it grew from an institution of fifty-four patients to one of almost three hundred
and suffered through a severe economic depression.30 By the early twentieth century,
McCreery, now Inspector of Asylums, counted it one of the successes in Victoria’s
treatment of mental disorder. Victoria, he declared in his report for 1900, was unique
in offering ‘accommodation and training’ for all resident children with learning
disability ‘and in this respect at least is in advance of other places. The system of
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training the children is based on that of the best English institutions, and the results
may, I think, be looked upon as satisfactory’.31
McCreery retired in 1905, the Annual Report for that year praising his
superintendence at the Cottages as ‘work of the highest humanity and utility’.32 Two
years later, Theophilus Eastham took leave from work due to ill health. Shortly
afterwards, the new Inspector-General of the Insane recommended that the position of
Head Teacher be abolished, with the intention of appointing ‘Teacher Attendants at a
much lower rate of pay’. The following year the government granted Eastham’s
request to retire early from public service, financially compensating him for the loss
of his remaining years of service.33 He moved with his wife and family to the country
town of Toora, 112 miles south-east of Melbourne, where they ran a news agency for
some years.34
Thirteen years after leaving the Cottages, on 5 April 1920, Theophilus
Eastham died, having suffered heart trouble for several years.35 Thus, he lived long
enough to see the optimism about the developmental potential of people with learning
disability that underpinned Kew’s establishment replaced by the belief that they were
a ‘menace to the future of the Australian people’. Kew Cottages, founded as a training
school on that earlier optimistic model, would become instead ‘the means by which
the new doctrine of eugenics could segregate people with intellectual disabilities’.36
These changes do not erase Eastham’s considerable contribution to the early
development of Kew Cottages. That Victoria was able to establish an institution for
children with learning disability ‘on the same lines as those in England’ was very
much due to him and, in turn, to the training he received at the Royal Albert.
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I owe Norma Sutherland, Theophilus Eastham’s great, great granddaughter, many
thanks for sharing her family research and photographs with me. They provided much
assistance in writing this article. We would both be interested in any information
people may have on Theophilus Eastham or his family.
Dr Lee-Ann Monk
Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry)
History Program
School of Historical and European Studies
La Trobe University
Victoria, 3086, Australia
Tel: + 61 3 9479 2366
Fax: +61 3 9479 1942
Email: l.monk@latrobe.edu.au
For information on the Kew Cottages History Project, visit
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/history/kew_project.html
1
Charles Fox, ‘“Forehead Low, Aspect Idiotic”: Intellectual Disability in Victorian Asylums, 1870-1887’, in
Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (eds), ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum, St
Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2003, 145, 155.
2
James V. McCreery, ‘Idiocy and Juvenile Insanity in Victoria’, in Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia:
Transactions of the Third Session, held in Sydney, New South Wales, September, 1892, edited under the Direction
of the Literary Committee by L. Ralston Huxtable, Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1893, 665.
3
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, Certificate National Mutual Life Association of
Australasia; personal communication with Norma Sutherland.
4
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, Eastham to Inspector, 28 August 1886 and Shuttleworth
testimonial, 18 October 1879.
5
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, Eastham to Inspector Dick, 28 August 1886.
6
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, Shuttleworth, 18 October 1879 and Edward Woods, 13
October 1879.
7
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, testimonial, 14 October 1879.
8
8
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, testimonial, 12 January 1883.
9
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, Eastham to Alfred Deakin, 30 October 1886 and
testimonial, 2 January 1886.
10
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, testimonials, 30 July and 3 August 1886.
11
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, application, 26 August 1886.
12
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, note to Chief Secretary, 26 October 1886.
13
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408 and PROV, VA 2863, VPRS 1519, Staff Registers, Vol. 2,
1.
14
McCreery, 665.
15
Report of Inspector of Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year 1875, Victoria: Papers Presented to
Parliament, 1876, vol. II, 12; David Gladstone, ‘The Changing Dynamic of Institutional Care: The Western
Counties Idiot Asylum, 1864-1914’, in David Wright & Anne Digby (eds), From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency:
Historical Perspectives on People With Learning Disabilities, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 137-8.
1616
Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year ended 31st December
1875, Victoria: Papers Presented to Parliament, 1876, vol. II, 12; Report of Inspector of Lunatic Asylums on the
Hospitals for the Insane for the Year ended 31st December 1879, Victoria: Papers Presented to Parliament, 1880,
vol. I, 11.
17
McCreery, 665.
18
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 341, File 90/P3520, McCreery to Inspector Dick, 9 July 1888 and Box 705,
File 98/H2443, Eastham to Reclassification Board, 9 March 1898.
19
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 705, File 98/H2443, Eastham to Reclassification Board, 9 March 1898.
20
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 200, File 87/J8666, Inspector Dick to Under Secretary, 13 June 1887.
21
Report of Inspector of Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year 1887, Victoria. Papers Presented to
Parliament, 1888, vol. III, 15 and 47 and McCreery, 667; Joe Alston, The Royal Albert: Chronicles of An Era,
Lancaster: Centre for North-West Regional Studies, University of Lancaster, 1992, 15-27, passim; C. Miller,
Broken Gleams, Lancaster: Published for the benefit of the Royal Albert Idiot Asylum, Lancaster, 1873, 15-22,
passim.
22
Report of Inspector of Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year 1887, Victoria. Papers Presented to
Parliament, 1888, vol. III, timetable, 47; PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, Eastham to
Inspector Dick, 26 August 1886; Alston, 24; Miller, 19.
23
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 194, File 87/J7408, Eastham to Inspector Dick, 26 August 1886.
24
Report of Inspector of Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year 1887, Victoria. Papers Presented to
Parliament, 1888, vol. III, timetable, 47; Miller, 16.
25
Report of Inspector of Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year ended 1887, Victoria. Papers
Presented to Parliament, 1888, vol. III, 15, 47; Alston, 15-30, passim; Miller, 13.
26
Report of Inspector of Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year 1887, Victoria. Papers Presented to
Parliament, 1888, vol. III, timetable, 47 and McCreery, 667; Alston, 22, 27; Miller, 19.
27
Alston, 22.
28
Alston, 18; PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 705, File 98/H2443, Eastham to Reclassification Board, 9 March
1898.
29
Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year ended 31 st December
1888, Papers Presented to Parliament, 1889, vol. IV, 49; Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums on the
Hospitals for the Insane for the Year ended 31st December 1891, Papers Presented to Parliament, 1892-3, vol. V,
15; Hospitals for the Insane. Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums for the Year 1892, Victoria. Papers
9
Presented to Parliament, 1893, vol. II, 14; McCreery, 667; PROV, VA 2852, VPRS 7420, Case Books of Male
Patients, vols 1-3; Alston, 13-41, passim; Miller, 24-6.
30
Report of Inspector of Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year ended 1887, Victoria. Papers
Presented to Parliament, 1888, vol. III, Table 1, 44; Hospitals for the Insane Report of the Inspector-General of the
Insane for the Year ended 1907, Parliamentary Papers, 1908, vol. 1, Table 1, 10.
31
Hospitals for the Insane. Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums for the Year ended 31 st December 1900,
Papers Presented to Parliament, 1901, vol. 11, 14; also Hospitals for the Insane. Report of the Inspector of
Lunatic Asylums for the Year ended 31st December 1902, Papers Presented to Parliament, 1903, vol. II, 15.
32
Hospitals for the Insane. Report of the Inspector-General of the Insane for the Year ended 31st December 1905,
Papers Presented to Parliament, 1906, vol. 11, 34.
33
PROV, VA 475, VPRS 3992, Box 1136, File 1909/F7415.
34
Personal communication from Norma Sutherland.
35
Personal communication from Norma Sutherland.
36
Gladstone, 137-9; Fox, 155-6.