Middle-class Fathers,Sons,and Mental Illness in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

Many middle-class fathers and sons in late Victorian and Edwardian England became closer as the latter reached adulthood. Unsurprisingly, there continued to be plenty of flashpoints, especially while sons remained financially dependent on their parents, but there were also increasing opportunities for mutual support and understanding, based on newly shared adult identities associated with masculine autonomy and rational maturity. Howard Coote was the fifteenth and last child of a successful Cambridgeshire corn dealer and landowner, a stern and forbidding man. Writing his autobiography decades later, Howard admitted that up to the age of seventeen “there was no one I disliked so thoroughly as I did my father.” This started to change once all his siblings had left home, giving father and son the opportunity to hold “many conversations … in his billiard-room after dinner.” As a result of this new way of communicating, which involved more than rebukes or orders on the one side and resentful, silent obedience on the other, Howard developed a better understanding of his father's character, and came to love and admire him. ¹

There were, of course, plenty of factors that could disrupt this new accord. Mental illness, either a father's or a son's, was one such factor. At its most extreme, it could lead to confinement in a mental institution and a break-down in relations. In November 1916, thirty-one-year-old lab assistant Alfred Westrop explained to the Willesden conscription tribunal that his father had been in and out of asylums three times, “and is away from home now, and has been away for the last four and half years.” The following month he added that “he has been discharged but I do not know where he is.” ² That said, only a minority of mentally ill middle-class men experienced institutional care, despite the growth in size and number of mental asylums in this period. ³ Those who were admitted into an asylum, furthermore, did not always lose touch with their families or remain confined for the rest of their lives: most middle-class men (and women) who suffered from a mental illness or disability lived and were cared for at home. ⁴

Focusing on such domestic care, and on interactions in adulthood, the aim of this article is to explore the impact of mental illness on the relationship between middle-class fathers and sons in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England. The timeframe covered by this article includes the First World War, and the impact of shell shock on family relationships undoubtedly calls for further investigation, but the focus here is on mental illness in civilian life. Guided by the sources themselves, the article adopts a broad definition of mental illness. It follows individuals who felt themselves, or considered others, to be unwell, affected by a more or less serious disruption to their “normal” mental well-being. The focus thus is on illness, rather than life-long disabilities (although these are not entirely excluded from the discussion below), and on conditions that affected individuals at some point in their lives, whether temporarily, recurrently, or even permanently, with varying degrees of severity.

In the ideal late Victorian and Edwardian middle-class family, fathers were expected help sons to achieve full adult masculine autonomy, while sons’ support would ensure that fathers were protected from the erosion of masculine status that could result from ageing. Focusing first on families where the son became unwell, and then turning to fathers, this article explores the impact of mental illness on these “normal” life-course events, questioning the extent to which it disrupted the new closeness experienced by many fathers and grown-up sons. Historians have emphasized the fear and shame felt by middle- (and upper-) class families in this period when confronted with madness among its members, particularly in view of the widespread belief in the hereditary nature of mental illness: this article assesses whether shame was indeed the dominant response when fathers or sons became unwell. ⁵ It investigates the strategies deployed firstly by fathers and then by adult sons to deal with and care for the mentally ill, assessing whether the priority was indeed to hide evidence of mental illness for the sake of the family as a whole, irrespective or even to the detriment of the sufferer's well-being.

As several historians have noted, finding out about the day-to-day experiences of mentally ill or disabled individuals within the domestic arena is a tricky task: the records of mental asylums, for example, have provided historians researching the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with much better insights into institutional and medical than family care. That said, important recent studies have made use of sources such as commissions of lunacy records and press reports, ⁶ as well as hospital case notes, admission records and correspondence, in order to examine the family relationships that—they have shown—had a profound impact on the lives of the mentally ill. ⁷ This article aims to contribute to this growing understanding of family care by examining a range of sources that include autobiographies and oral history interviews, most notably the interviews carried out in the late 1970s, exploring “Family Life and Work Experience before 1918” among middle- and upper-class families. ⁸ Newspaper reports of patricide, filicide and other incidents of serious violence between fathers and sons, where the guilty party was found to be of “unsound mind,” allow further insights into the strategies adopted by families to deal with a member's challenging behavior: the violence depicted in these reports was very unusual, but the strained relationships and the practices adopted and decisions made by families as a result of mental illness, were not.

While newspaper reports of serious violence show us families whose strategies ultimately failed, a further set of sources provide information about families that (more or less) coped: records of appeals against military conscription during the First World War. The introduction of conscription in Britain in 1916 led to the setting up of local tribunals to assess applications for exemption from military service. If rejected, appeals could be lodged with the relevant county (and in some cases, national) tribunal. Appeals could be made on a range of grounds (seven in total), including health, domestic, financial and business hardship or conscientious objection. Individuals and/or their representatives thus had an opportunity to justify why they should remain on the home front and mental health—both the appellant's and his relatives’—was one of the arguments put forward by a substantial number of appellants to justify why an individual was not fit for military duties or was needed at home. Of course, it was not in appellants’ interest to down-play their own or their relatives’ mental health problems, but claims were scrutinized and regularly checked (for example, through home visits by tribunal representatives): they could not stray too far from reality. A sample of appeals submitted to the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal have thus been examined for the insights they provide—almost accidentally—into the impact of mental illness on the relationship between fathers and sons. To try and capture as wide a range of middle-class backgrounds as possible, the sample has been selected based on three occupations that span a broad spectrum of income and status: “manager,” “clerk” and “assistant.” ⁹

None of the sources used in this article were created for the purpose of discussing mental illness, the ways in which families coped with it (or not), or how it affected family relationships. However, as individuals recalled their earlier lives as part of an oral history project, tried to explain why serious violence had erupted within a seemingly peaceful family, or why a physically fit man of military age should not be forced to leave his home to enlist, a complex web of relationships emerge as the background to individual lives affected by mental illness: these include relationships between fathers and sons, which are the focus of this article.

Mentally ill sons

One of late Victorian and Edwardian middle-class fathers’ main responsibilities was to ensure that sons received an education and career openings that would allow them to earn their own living—and, ideally, prosper—ready to marry and set up a new, financially stable household. ¹⁰ Mental illness or disability, however, were among the factors that could lead to an extension of the time during which a son remained financially dependent, sometimes with little prospect of ever becoming self-supporting. In February 1916 W. A. Baker, a printer, appealed against conscription on behalf of his twenty-year-old son William, whom he described, adopting the language of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, as “mentally deficient.” William, who did not have an occupation, seems to have been unable to contribute to the family finances. His sister accompanied him to the Appeal Tribunal hearing, where she explained “that he had been in this condition from birth, and had only done three weeks’ work in his life, as an errand boy.” ¹¹ In many cases, far from being able to provide financial help to their parents as they grew older, sons who were mentally unwell proved an additional burden to sometimes hard-pressed households. In early 1916, Alfred Bradshaw, a London draper who was already finding it difficult to keep the business afloat in challenging wartime circumstances, explained to a conscription tribunal that his son Stanley had become “mentally affected through overwork in amunition [sic] factory,” and was now at Napsbury Asylum, “at my expense.” ¹²

That said, plenty of young men continued to contribute to the family finances, despite suffering from some form of—sometimes quite serious— “mental weakness,” either an illness or a disability. ¹³ In some cases, for example when fathers were themselves in poor health or suffering from the frailties of old age, and struggled to run a family business, the contribution of sons remained key, however poor their mental health. ¹⁴ In September 1916, nineteen-year-old Albert Fergusson was acknowledged “as being physically, and mentally, unfit for the army.” Nevertheless, he played an important role as a shop assistant in his father's boot and shoe business. According to Thomas Fergusson, his son's contribution had by the autumn of 1916 become even more significant, as the only other male shop assistant had left for military service. ¹⁵ In July 1917 Ernest Jesshope, a grocer and provision dealer, pointed out that his son Hubert was his “weakest son intellectually” and “mentally unsound.” Notably, however, he was also “my sole help now and very useful to me in my business … My age is 56 and I'm not so able as I was … when younger.” ¹⁶ Mathew Thomson notes that during the First World War, “under conditions of wartime manpower demand, mental deficiency was hardly recognized as a problem”: it is arguable that in peacetime too the contribution made by the labour of young men who suffered from some form of mental illness or disability, particularly to family businesses, was far from negligible. ¹⁷

Many young men like Ernest Jesshope found a place in their father's business, presumably with the aim—when this seemed a realistic goal—of ensuring their eventual financial independence. Thus, Albert Fergusson, mentioned above, worked in his father's boot and shoe business. ¹⁸ Similarly, Stanley Matthews worked as a tailor's assistant in what presumably was the family business, Matthews Bros, located on Staines’ High Street, although by March 1918 it had been seventeen months since he had last been able to work, following an attack of “neurasthenia” characterized, according to his medical certificate, by “shakiness of the body,” insomnia, loss of power in his arms and legs and “attacks of crying.” ¹⁹

Far from seeking to hide them away, it seems that family businesses were often willing to make adjustments (or keep a job open) for young—and not so young—family members who, like Matthews, suffered from recurring bouts of “nervous strain” or other mental problems. ²⁰ Indeed, family businesses were not unique in this. In January 1917, the managing director of Carltona Limited, “manufacturers and packers of food products,” wrote to the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal to explain that for the past three years they had been employing Oscar Riches as correspondence and ledger clerk. He pointed to Riches’ usefulness to the business, as well as to the fact that the young man was unlikely to cope elsewhere, “if placed to work among a body of strangers.” Carltona had “only been able to keep him going for the three years by the extension to him of very considerable leniency … his health conditions being curious and very indifferent.” Behind the scenes, paternal influence seems to have been at play here too: it was because “his Father also has been in our employ for many years,” and was clearly a valued employee, that they had made such allowances. Indeed, it is reasonable to suppose that when the younger Riches’ “neurasthenia” had forced him to leave a better paid job in a larger business, it was his father who helped him to find work with his own employer, presumably keeping an eye on him thereafter. ²¹

Such strategies were clearly intended to benefit a son who was unwell, by enabling him to achieve at least a degree of economic independence. At the same time, it was also in the family's interest not to have one of its members, at least not one of its male members, entirely unable to contribute to its finances; as Akihito Suzuki points out, “families were both an emotional and a financial unit, and both aspects were important in the domestic management of lunatics.” ²² After conducting a Binet test in June 1918, for example, Reginald Langdon-Down, the director of Normansfield “Training Institution for Imbeciles,” concluded that twenty-nine-year-old Michael Pamphlett was “feeble minded.” ²³ He reported that “in general intelligence he is only equal to an ordinary boy of nine years old.” According to his mother, Pamphlett was “very wanting in self-control” and “has always been different from other children.” He only received “13/- a week as pocket money or wages which he puts to no useful purpose.” Nevertheless, he was still expected to contribute his labor to the family laundry business, as his parents were “advanced in years and unable physically to carry on the business without the son's assistance.” It was he who, among his duties, wheeled a handcart to collect and deliver clothes. Between March and December 1917, furthermore, he was employed by an engineering company, McEwen, Denby & Hart-Briggs Ltd. It is not clear in what capacity, but no doubt his pay made a welcome contribution to the family's finances. ²⁴

The balance between benefit to the family and to the unwell son varied between families, but however this was struck, it seems that young men like Albert Fergusson, Hubert Jesshope or Michael Pamphlett were left with limited agency. There is certainly plenty of evidence of middle-class fathers who spoke for or acted on behalf of mentally ill sons. Being able to make decisions over issues that affected their lives, for example in connection with education, employment, or consumption, was a key marker of adult masculine status, and mental illness could mean the loss of this, sometimes hard-fought, autonomy. ²⁵ Paralleling the ways in which shell-shocked First World War servicemen were frequently infantilized, mentally ill men's loss of decision-making powers can at least to some extent be understood as a lack of progress from, or a reversion to, the powerlessness and lack of autonomy of childhood. ²⁶ Other family members, including mothers and siblings, could (and did) also intervene in sons’ or brothers’ lives, but fathers seem to have had a particular responsibility to act as vulnerable sons’ advocates, just as they often made key decisions about their sons, for example in connection with education or careers, during childhood. ²⁷ It was Albert Fergusson's and Hubert Jesshope's fathers, for example, who appealed on their sons’ behalf for exemption from military service. Similarly, Herbert Matthews appealed for his son Stanley. ²⁸

Albert Fergusson, Hubert Jesshope, and Stanley Matthews's own voices do not appear anywhere in their case files. Nevertheless, they were clearly not entirely passive. Despite his “unfitness,” Fergusson had at some point before September 1916 presented himself to the military authorities and attested his willingness to join up under the Derby scheme, as had Matthews and Jesshope, the latter also having tried to enlist back in 1914. ²⁹ It was certainly not unheard of for mentally ill men to speak for themselves, including in such formal, and presumably intimidating, settings as conscription tribunals. Although he had a father still living, in January 1918 Thomas Strange, an assistant manager at a silk warehouse, appealed on his own behalf for a medical re-examination and arranged a visit to a Harley Street doctor. In addition to suffering from psoriasis, his application explained, he was also “neurasthenic.” He had suffered a nervous breakdown twelve years previously, followed by a partial relapse three years earlier and had since then remained under medical supervision. ³⁰ Strange, it should be noted, was a forty-year-old married man: it generally seems to have been the fathers of younger men, or of sons with learning disabilities, who took on the role of spokesperson, in what can perhaps be best understood as an extension of, or perhaps a reversion to, sons’ childlike status. When sons were older, financially independent or themselves husbands and fathers, this reversion may not have been considered possible or appropriate.

Although seemingly with the best of intentions, some of these fathers described their sons’ mental condition in terms that few of the latter can have welcomed. Furthermore, just as legal procedures such as commissions of lunacy involved a “public investigation into … the extent of masculine inadequacy in the private and public sphere,” so when appealing against sons’ military conscription, fathers made their points very publicly: with a few exceptions, appeals were discussed in open court, and were often reported in the local press. ³¹ Thus, in a contemporary context where full adult masculinity and good health, both physical and mental, were seen as intertwined, fathers’ stress on their sons’ frailties can hardly have enhanced their claims to manliness. ³² In July 1918, Frederick Kingsnorth felt it his “duty as a parent” to warn the conscription tribunals that his eighteen-year-old son Ralph was “not strong enough for military service.” In addition to a range of physical problems that included rheumatism and defective eyesight, “his nerves are very weak and is still very subject to fainting especially during air raids, also has fainted at the V.T.C. [Volunteer Training Corps] on several occasions … Three months ago he had a nervous breakdown.” Kingsnorth Senior was undoubtedly motivated by a desire to spare his son—who for his part had attested under the Derby scheme, was in employment and had joined the Volunteer Training Corps—from military duties that he considered too heavy for him, but the stress on Ralph's delicate physique and “weak nerves” relegated him to a form of masculinity that was at best viewed with pity, and at worst with contempt. ³³

Some fathers were even blunter in their assessment of sons’ limited capabilities. According to George Smith's father, writing in 1917, his nineteen-year-old son's heart disease and “neurasthenia” meant that he was excluded from forms of masculinity based on physical strength and vigour: “He is quite unable to take part in outdoor sports and pastimes and becomes exhausted after quite a moderate walk.” His doctor had advised him “to take things very quietly and on no account to ride a bicycle or hurry to the railway station.” ³⁴

In November 1916, in a letter to the Hendon tribunal, J. S. Stevens went even further. He explained that his twenty-one-year-old son Jack's

mental capacity … is far behind his years so that he has never shown any manly instincts … This and his physical weakness has necessitated very close and careful guardianship at home from which he has never been away. From my own personal experience of military training, I do not believe that my son could possible [sic] stand it or be of any use in such capacity.

Even when not broadcast so publicly, many middle-class fathers’ response to sons’ mental illness seems to have been based on the belief that the latter could not be left to their own devices, and that it was they who had a particular responsibility to look after them. There were, unsurprisingly, plenty of exceptions, with many fathers adopting very different strategies to deal with sons’ mental illness and sometimes disruptive behavior. Denial was one option. Charlie Drage's brother Ismay, born around 1900, suffered from severe psychotic episodes throughout his life, eventually dying “raving mad” in his early forties. Charlie recalled that their father, the barrister and Conservative MP Geoffrey Drage, never accepted that there was anything wrong with Ismay, which made him “rather trying in some ways.” ³⁶ Alternatively, as Suzuki points out, “keeping an insane family member away from one's own home turf was not uncommon.” ³⁷ In the late 1880s and early 1890s, James Greatrex, a Walsall businessman, responded to his son's erratic and frightening behavior by setting him up in business abroad, funding a series of unsuccessful ventures in New Zealand, America and finally Switzerland, eventually stipulating that the allowance of £350 per year was conditional on his son residing abroad and not trying to make contact with anyone at home. ³⁸

Such a stratagem was arguably motivated by fear, rather than shame: secrecy, segregation, and confinement seem to have been twentieth-, rather than nineteenth-century responses to mental illness or impairment. ³⁹ Indeed, Greatrex's strategy of keeping a mentally ill son away from his family was by no means the norm. Plenty of middle-class fathers sought to secure sons’ place within the family and personally devoted time and attention to their well-being. In March 1883, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregationalist minister from London, took his son William, a twenty-eight-year-old clerk, to Matlock Bridge for a holiday. It was later reported that William had only lately been released from a mental asylum. Father and son thus “visited Matlock to benefit the son's health, as he had been in a low state for some time.” William had siblings, a mother and a wife, with all of whom he enjoyed a close and affectionate relationship, but it was his father who organized the holiday and travelled with him to Matlock, to complete the recovery his son seemed to have started while confined. ⁴⁰

Significantly, far from being ruthlessly willing to sacrifice a son's well-being for the sake of the family as a whole, the former's mental illness or break-down could bring to the fore the more tender, caring sides of fatherhood, which recent historians have emphasized. Middle-class fathers, it has been observed, were as likely to be playful and affectionate as stern and authoritarian ⁴¹ and a child's illness often provided a key opportunity for “more emotional moments” with his or her father. ⁴² This seems to have been the case in adulthood too, and plenty of fathers’ responses to an older son's mental distress was understanding and gentle. John Gowland enlisted while underage and was only twenty when he was demobilized at the end of the First World War, with “four years of death, misery, and stark horror” behind him. He explained: “I am dazed, and have no trade or profession. My body is whole but I have lost … my youth.” It was his father who tried to comfort him, by reassuring him that “my depression will pass.” ⁴³ For his part, as he grew older William Kent gradually lost his faith, which led to a troubled relationship with his father, a successful printer who embraced a strongly evangelical, “corybantic Christianity.” ⁴⁴ Such difference of opinion eventually led to a breakdown in relations between them, no doubt made worse by his mother's suicide in 1910 and his father's remarriage a year later, and there seems to have been a period of eighteen months when they were estranged. Things changed in the summer of 1913: while he was on holiday in Scotland William had his first “attack of neurasthenia.” His father “heard of it and enquired after my health. This led to a meeting, and terms of reconciliation.” ⁴⁵

Some historians have been quite severe on middle-class “fathers of the old school who were most resolute in checking their sympathies for their distraught sons,” ⁴⁶ but far from simply being ashamed or embarrassed by it, plenty of fathers were distressed by their sons’ unhappiness, and sought to alleviate it. J. S. Stevens, mentioned above, may have described his son Jack's character and capabilities in less than flattering terms, but this does not mean that he was indifferent to his feelings. In February 1917, he wrote to the appeal tribunal, explaining that Jack had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and had been told that he needed to go to a sanatorium. Stevens asked whether Jack really needed to attend the next tribunal hearing, during which it would simply be confirmed that he was exempted due to ill-health. He explained that “my son seemed very depressed” at hearing his diagnosis, and he hoped “to avoid, if possible, distressing him by reiteration of these facts.” ⁴⁷

However well-intentioned, such desire to assist sons when they were poorly could nevertheless easily slip into attempts to control their behavior, removing much or all their agency. It was the reverend Julius Benn, for example, who decided that his son William should enter an asylum. It was again he who, a few months later, decided that William would benefit from a holiday in Matlock; William's own wishes seem to have been a secondary consideration at best. ⁴⁸ Just over twenty years later, in around 1905, nineteen-year-old James Hamilton Nicholas left England for New Zealand, where he found work on a farm. In April 1909 he suffered from sunstroke, which his family believed led him to develop “religious melancholia and fever,” as a result of which he was confined in an Auckland mental asylum. In 1910 his father, a retired Royal Army Medical Corps surgeon, travelled to New Zealand and brought him back to the family home in Croydon, where he took charge of his care. His supervision, to which other family members were expected to contribute too, meant that the younger James's freedom was severely curtailed. For example, “he was always locked in at night, and had wooden shutters to the windows.” Control extended also to the kind of leisure and consumer activities that adult men would normally have been able to choose for themselves, irrespective of whether these were good or bad for them. While on holiday in Kingsand, for instance, the younger James, now in his twenties, was not allowed to bathe or to eat between meals and was only allowed to smoke at set times. ⁴⁹

Other family members were also expected to participate in the varying mixture of care, containment and surveillance that were thought appropriate for a mentally ill son. James Hamilton Nicholas, for example, was only allowed to leave the house if two other family members went with him. ⁵⁰ Relatives did not always approve of the strategies adopted to care for young men who suffered from some form of mental illness or distress. During an interview carried out in the 1970s, Archie Yuillie, a prosperous London tea merchant, recalled that while in his teens his younger brother, born in around 1906, had “sort of had a bit of a nervous breakdown.” According to Yuillie, he had:

suffered a good deal – through my having been in the – at the war. I think he got a little bit too much – molly coddling because I wasn’t expected to come back alive, and so I think he got a little bit too much – care and attention which didn’t do him any good. ⁵¹

Similarly, James Hamilton Nicholas's mother had “begged” her husband “to get a keeper” for their son, particularly once he started to show signs of “turning against his father,” but James senior “thought he was able to control his own son” and “would not have it.” Partly because of his status as the young man's father and partly because of his experience “of mental cases” while in the army, he thought he could “manage” the younger man. ⁵⁴ Both Benn's and Nicholas's confidence proved misplaced: in March 1883, during their stay at Matlock Bridge, William Benn killed his father by battering him over the head with “the chamber utensil”; almost thirty years later, James Hamilton Nicholas stabbed his father to death during a holiday in Cornwall. ⁵⁵ Of course, such an outcome was neither inevitable nor common: shocking incidents of patricide were a good deal more likely to be reported than the routine, day-to-day, uneventful care of mentally ill or disabled sons that no doubt represented the majority of families’—and fathers’—experiences.

Mentally ill fathers

Plenty of middle-class men achieved economic independence, getting married and setting up their own household, in many cases supporting not only wife and children, but also other family members, despite suffering from some form of—sometimes serious and periodically debilitating—mental illness, not infrequently accompanied by painful and distressing physical symptoms. Indeed, many individuals thought that their mental maladies had their origin in a physical illness. In July 1916, thirty-four-year-old Harold Clark was suffering from ongoing health problems. He explained that he had “contracted enteric fever and brain fever very badly indeed some years” previously and had “never been right since, never feeling strong and suffering from nervous debility, etc.” In particular, “a great trouble ever since the fever” had been severe agoraphobia. Despite these problems, his work as a quantity surveyor's assistant enabled him to discharge his duties as paterfamilias and not only support a wife, but also “help … support widowed mother living with her only daughter [and] my two other brothers serving in the forces.” ⁵⁶ Mental illness thus did not always stop middle-class men from taking on the masculine role of family breadwinner. In 1916 William Holland, a man in his thirties who worked as the head clerk for a firm of London tailors, was described by his employers as “subject to nervous breakdowns,” while his doctor wrote that he suffered “from neurasthenia in a very pronounced form.” Despite this mental frailty, he was married and supported his family, which included four children, with his earnings. ⁵⁷

That said, mental illness undoubtedly made it more difficult for middle-class men to fully discharge their duties as paterfamilias, particularly when the malady proved severe or lengthy. They could thus fall short of middle-class notions of manliness, unable to provide a model of adult masculinity that their sons could aspire to, or to protect and support their families. ⁵⁸ Harold Dearden's father, a wealthy Lancashire mill-owner, was a successful industrialist and a domineering, self-assertive man. He suffered from his first stroke in around 1900 and lived on for another three or four years, but was “little more than a shadow of his former dominant self … All his faculties were profoundly affected. He was confused and disoriented; he failed as a rule to recognise anyone. He was gentler, too, to an uncomfortable extent.” Despite some moments of clarity, he was unable to run the family business and mostly sat quietly by the fire, no longer economically or socially active. ⁵⁹

Particularly in childhood, sons were often helpless when faced with a father's mental illness, and vulnerable to unpredictable or violent behavior. Some fathers proved an actual danger to young sons’ (and other family members’) lives. ⁶⁰ Far more often, however, the latter simply had to put up with a father's mercurial and difficult behavior. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, for example, a young Horace Horsnell had “to accommodate” himself to his father's “swiftly alternating moods of elation and depression which were to dominate his prime and render home life emotionally precarious.” ⁶¹ While still children or in their early teens, sons had few opportunities to intervene or help fathers who suffered a mental breakdown. In 1912, when Ronald Adam was about sixteen, his father, a famous comedian, “decided he had failed, that he was ill and that his powers had failed him.” His health quickly deteriorated: “He could not sleep, and he walked about all day, staring at the floor.” Neither his doctors nor his family, Ronald included, were able to help “and so he took to his bed. He refused to eat and after some months of this he died of heart failure.” ⁶²

Older sons, on the other hand, were expected to, and often did, intervene. In particular, they frequently shouldered at least some of a father's responsibilities when the latter became ill. In many ways, this differed little from the additional responsibilities adult sons were expected to take on when a father was forced to become economically inactive for other reasons, for example through physical illness or old age. ⁶³ Indeed, plenty of middle-class fathers suffered from physical as well as mental poor health, which together with the effects of old age, made it difficult for them to discharge their key masculine responsibility of supporting their family. In January 1917, for example, twenty-seven-year-old Stanley Coles was still living with his “aged parents,” whom he supported through his work as an assistant at a London warehouse, his father no longer able to earn more than a pittance. In an unsigned letter, an official of the church Coles attended stressed his parents’ poor health (something “which blights the family”), including “heart troubles, nerve troubles and diabetes.” ⁶⁴

In some cases, fathers’ mental health deteriorated to the point that they were considered to need asylum care. There continues to be a good deal of uncertainty about the reasons that led middle-class families to confine one of their members in an asylum, either a private or a county institution, although as historians such as Akihito Suzuki and James Moran have amply demonstrated, the suggestion that the primary motive was a desire to hide away embarrassing inconveniences is clearly an over-simplification. ⁶⁵ Whatever the trigger for confinement, in fathers’ absence, adult sons were expected to step in. In July 1916 thirty-six-year-old publishers’ assistant George Trice explained to the Harrow-on-the-Hill conscription tribunal that illness had affected his father's “head” and he had spent the past four months in the County Asylum in Maidstone. According to the doctors “he must not have any more worry if he is to get better.” As a result, it had been left to George—not, for example, to his mother or other family members—to “arrange his affairs.” ⁶⁶ Some families seem to have had little hope of the paterfamilias's recovery, requiring sons to step in on a more permanent basis. In November 1916 thirty-one-year-old lab assistant Alfred Westrop explained that his father had been in and out of asylums three times, “and is away from home now, and has been away for the last four and half years.” His mother had died three years earlier and, in addition to his own wife and child, Alfred was “the main support of the home,” which included four sisters and one “badly deformed” brother, all of whom lived with him. There seemed little prospect of their father ever resuming his responsibilities as breadwinner and head of the family. ⁶⁷

A son's involvement was particularly important when there was a family business to which a mentally ill father could not, or could no longer, contribute. Female family members might play a role too, but it was seemingly considered essential for sons to step up. According to James Plumpton, writing in February 1916, he was “absolutely indispensable to the business [a dress agency and outfitters] of which I am manager for my mother,” adding that “owing to the condition of my father's brain he is unable to earn a penny and is entirely dependent on mother and self.” ⁶⁸ Limiting unwell fathers’ dangerous behavior and protecting the rest of the family often seems to have been adult sons’ particular responsibility too. ⁶⁹ According to James Plumpton, there were times when his father was “unmanageable and a positive danger to mother and sisters for whose safety it is essential there should be a man to protect them.” ⁷⁰

In a way this role mirrored fathers’ own responsibilities when sons’ behavior was erratic or violent, but the emphasis seems to have been more on negotiation and “management” than outright control of fathers, in what seems to have been a nod to their—at least nominal—status as the paterfamilias. In July 1916 thirty-five-year-old bank clerk Benjamin Pope told the Chiswick conscription tribunal that following a stroke, his father's mind had become “a blank, and at times gives vent to very great rage.” These episodes mostly occurred in the evening, “and so far I have been the only person able to” pacify him. His sisters were unable to cope by themselves and “are afraid for me to be out any evening.” ⁷¹ It was frequently sons’ particular masculine responsibility to negotiate with and “pacify” a troubled father. In some cases, one of the male siblings was singled out for this role. Thus, in the mid-1880s, the Young family left it to John, the favorite son, to try and calm his father, a successful butcher based in Etherley Dene, County Durham, when he became agitated, especially following violent quarrels with his other sons. ⁷²

Management, however, was not sons’ only responsibility vis-à-vis mentally ill fathers: many also fulfilled a caring role, ensuring that helpless, distressed, or unwell fathers received appropriate help. The Reece family, for example, was not close. Following his return to England in 1860, having retired from the Indian Army, Major-General William Reece rarely saw his two sons, although “he kept up a correspondence” with them. Despite this limited contact, when in 1875 they found him living in squalor and neglect, his mental and physical health having taken a turn for the worse, they swung into action: they “engaged nurses to attend upon him, and also consulted physicians, as to his mental as well as physical condition.” ⁷³ Not all sons, including well-to-do ones, delegated care to others, and often seem to have been willing to accommodate, rather than restrict a father's behavior, even when this proved challenging. Thus, Harold Dearden's father would occasionally wake up at night and not recognizing where he was, try to return to his childhood home, and “there was nothing to be done but accompany him … I have walked by his side at dead of night for hours on end, until sheer exhaustion compelled him to give in.” Harold was then “faced with the appalling task of getting him home again,” but there does not seem to have been any question of stopping him from leaving the house in the first place. ⁷⁴

It was not unheard of, furthermore, for sons to give fathers the day-to-day routine and intimate care that middle-class fathers were rarely required to provide their infant sons. ⁷⁵ Benjamin Pope had “to do many things” for his father which, the siblings thought, were physically impossible or not appropriate for his sisters, such as taking him out in a bath-chair, dressing him, “bathing and sundry other things,” which likely meant helping him to use the toilet. ⁷⁶ In addition to shouldering the family responsibilities of incapacitated middle-class fathers, then, and despite the well-established association of caregiving with femininity, many adult sons took on not only the management, but also the care of fathers, playing a mixture of roles that, it seems, were thought to be the province of adult male family members.

Conclusion

Mental illness rarely left the relationship between fathers and sons unchanged. The better off sections of the middle class may have been able to soften the blow, while still ensuring that the afflicted person could remain within the family home, by paying for medical support, including nurses or other carers. In most cases, however, mental illness brought significant pressures, further amplified if the sufferer also happened to be the main family breadwinner. Families, then, developed strategies to cope, generally within the confines of the home, with adult men playing a central role. Neglect and mistreatment were of course not unknown, ⁷⁷ but shame and attempts to segregate and hide away mentally ill family members were not the norm. On the contrary, attempts to ensure “normal” progression through the male middle-class life-course, including the achievement of financial autonomy, seem to have been key responses. This could prove difficult to achieve. A recurring objective for fathers seems to have been to ensure that sons could still achieve full masculine economic independence. However, they also sought to protect and advocate for their sons, often exerting a good deal of control over their lives, thus undermining the very autonomy they sought for them. Adult sons, on the other hand, were expected to take on many, if not all, mentally ill fathers’ responsibilities, particularly as family breadwinners, ultimately underlining the latter's unfitness for the role of paterfamilias.

Becoming mentally ill thus generally involved a loss of autonomy, a key attribute of middle-class manliness: sons, particularly those in early adulthood, could find themselves reverting to the powerlessness of childhood, while fathers’ position within the family could become a marginalized and dependent one. ⁷⁸ The impact, however, should not be understood simply as a shifting of power relations between male family members. Mentally ill men did not give up all agency and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they remained objects of love and concern, not simply a burden to be “managed” and controlled, but also to be pacified, negotiated with, indulged and cared for. The relationship between fathers and sons could thus become troubled and even violent, but in plenty of cases remained a caring and tender one: far from precluding it, mental illness could actually foster loving intimacy between middle-class fathers and grown-up sons.