From asylum to action in Scotland: the emergence of the Scottish Union of Mental Patients,1971–2

Introduction

Detailed empirical studies investigating the history of how patients have experienced madness, psychiatry and asylum or ‘post-asylum’ spaces (Philo, 2000) have drawn upon a range of primary sources, including asylum admission records, case notes, patients’ letters, published first-person accounts written by patients following their release, asylum magazines, protest pamphlets and oral history interviews (Andrews, 1993, 1998; Beveridge, 1995a, 1995b, 1998; Crossley, 1999, 2006; Davies, 2001; Peterson, 1982; Porter, 1996; Roberts, 2009). Scholarship has often dealt with particular geographical areas, institutions or patients, providing rich details of the lives of patients at specific times and places. This article will focus on the discourse and action of the Scottish Union of Mental Patients (SUMP), a group formed in 1971 at Hartwood Hospital, North Lanarkshire, to protest against indefinite detention and conditions at the hospital.

Condrau (2007: 534) remarks that a ‘political background for patients is not easy to unearth’, but it is still possible on occasion to disclose something of the ‘political background’ behind collective agitation by patients. Hervey (1986) provides a detailed description and analysis of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society (ALFS), which campaigned in England between 1845 and 1863. Crossley (1999, 2006) and Spandler (2006, 2009) examine the Mental Patients’ Union (MPU) formed in London in 1973. According to Crossley’s account of collective action by psychiatric patients in the twentieth century, ‘strictly speaking the earliest … organisation … was the Scottish Union of Mental Patients, … formed in 1971’ (Crossley, 1999: 652). ‘There is’, he claims, ‘no direct line of influence from SUMP to the MPU, as there is from the MPU to many of the groups still active today’ (Crossley, 2006: 144). Survivors History Group (SHG) have disputed this claim, arguing that ‘continuity between SUMP and MPU was strong [and] the Scottish experience fed directly into MPU practice’ (SHG, 2011: 12). Two SUMP members, Thomas Ritchie and Robin Farquharson, were among the founding members of MPU at Paddington Day Hospital in London. Farquharson was instrumental in finding premises for MPU and a union residence was named after him following his tragic death in the early months of the organization’s existence. SHG is a community history project led by mental health activists, many who identify as ‘survivors’ of psychiatry.

SHG has collected and archived a wide range of documentary materials relating to patient-led collective action, challenging academic researchers to provide richer empirical investigations into the histories of collective action by psychiatric ‘survivors’. Included within a collection held by Andrew Roberts of SHG is the remarkable set of SUMP documents authored by Thomas Ritchie. By preserving and collecting these documents, SHG have opened up an entire new domain for research on the history of psychiatry in twentieth-century Scotland. SUMP arose when a petition was signed by 27 patients demanding ‘redress of grievances and better conditions’ at Hartwood Hospital (originally Lanark District Asylum) and presented to Mental Welfare Commissioners who visited the hospital on 26 July 1971 (Ritchie, 1971a: 3). The grievances which motivated Hartwood patients to form a ‘union’ are revealed in documents penned by Ritchie between 1966 and 1972. He deposited the SUMP papers with MPU London, and they have been preserved by Andrew Roberts, a former MPU member. Ritchie began to write the document of grievances before he left Hartwood and kept a Journal of SUMP’s Days after his release. In the Journal Ritchie refers to a ‘Manifesto’ which is ‘not finished’. It is not clear if he was referring to all of the other surviving documents, but for the purposes of this paper I refer to all documents not part of the Journal as part of the ‘Manifesto’.

Within the Manifesto’s ‘Introduction’ is a short autobiographical account which Ritchie describes as his ‘case history’ (9 pages). A large section of the document details his personal grievances (1971d, 18 pages), the personal grievances of other patient members and ‘general’ grievances of all patient members (1971c, 1971e, 1971f, 21 pages in total). Most of the documents appear to have been written sometime between the summer of 1971 and Ritchie’s discharge from hospital in October 1971. The ‘Manifesto’ was part handwritten, part typed. The Journal (Ritchie, 1972) was entirely handwritten and all dated entries were recorded as 1972. The Journal contains a membership list (with 100 names) and a record of Ritchie’s activities after he was discharged from Hartwood. The majority of the ‘Manifesto’ document was initially created for presentation to the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland (MWCS), but it was also circulated more widely via the press.

This paper presents a preliminary description and analysis of these documents, providing a snapshot of the moment of arising of this ‘union of mental patients.’ The SUMP documents reveal much about their author, the context of their production and intended audiences, how Ritchie represented Hartwood and SUMP, the collective grievances which motivated patients, and also how they agitated. The asylum is a social and material order. By situating the discourse and action of SUMP in the social and material contexts of the asylum space and beyond, by cultivating some details and accidents that accompany its beginning, this study explores how contingent conditions, both proximate and remote, shaped the emergence of SUMP. It will be shown that, by engaging in transgressive acts of civil disobedience and provocative free speech, Ritchie tested the social and material boundaries of the asylum space, appropriating discourses and tactics of collective bargaining, mutual aid, and civil rights, in the hope of moving beyond it.

SUMP at Hartwood

The ‘Foundation Members’ of SUMP were the petitioners in locked ward 7 who had ‘the courage to make their complaints and sign the petition’, along with three patients from the locked wards 8 and 10 to whom the petition was ‘smuggled out’ (Ritchie, 1972). The idea for a union was first mooted by an elderly patient on the geriatric ward, Archie Meek, aged 91 at the time. He suggested the idea when Ritchie was shaving him as part of duties he had undertaken at Hartwood: ‘Christ, Tam,’ exclaimed Archie, ‘Whit are us auld men tae dae if ye ever leave us? We’re a’ dividid frae yin anither. Kin ye no start up a union afore ye go? Fur divided we fa!’ (Ritchie, 1971a: 2). According to Ritchie, the old man ‘was probably one of the original pre-Great War trade unionists’ (p. 2). Ritchie himself was a state patient at Hartwood, having been sent there after he was arrested and charged with breach of the peace in 1963, ‘with a restriction on my discharge whereby only Secretary of State for Scotland had the power to discharge me’ (Ritchie, 1971d: 1). He claimed that he was only meant to be detained for 15 months but remained a patient of Hartwood until October 1971, by which time he was 43 years old. Prior to this eight-year spell at Hartwood, he had experienced a previous short stint there as a voluntary patient, as well as short stays at Leigh House in Coventry (voluntarily) and at Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries (involuntarily) (Ritchie, 1966–71: 2–4). He had not anticipated such a long stay this time.

I certainly didn’t know what I was in for that morning in the Sheriff Court at Lanark eight years ago. I could never have imagined in those days exactly what would be entailed in being a ward of the Secretary of State, for the effective reality of the matter is that State patients simply do not have any rights. (Ritchie, 1971d: 1)

Ritchie had drifted around the UK and Ireland as a young man, spending time in Glasgow, London, Belfast, Dublin, Brighton, Coventry and Lanark (Ritchie, 1966–71: ii–iv). The autobiographical ‘case history’ section of the ‘Manifesto’ recounts aspects of his upbringing, employment, travels, drug habits and his experience of psychiatric hospitals (pp. ii–iv). In the 1950s he had ‘drifted into photography’ and experienced ‘brush[es] with the law’ on a handful of occasions, mainly for driving under the influence of alcohol, but also for forging prescriptions to obtain drugs, landing him in Brixton and Barlinnie prisons for short periods (pp. ii–vi). He received drug treatment, including anti-depressants and chlorpromazine, and was given ECT during his spells in hospital (pp. iv–vii). He did not have any links with trade unions prior to the formation of SUMP and in fact had worked casually for the Conservative and Unionist Party as ‘a kind of pollster’ before being detained at Hartwood. His ‘case history’ (dated 1966) leads up to a list of personal ‘grievances for redress’ (dated 1967). He expressed his grievances to the hospital authorities throughout his time at Hartwood, but had found that ‘the solitary plaintiff gets nowhere’ (Ritchie, 1971a: 3).

Through my first seven years I tried all the constitutional means available in vain effort to have my grievances redressed. The ‘normal channels’ they talk about look good on paper. In effect they are functionless in the service of an aggrieved State patient. The latter very soon finds that it is useless complaining about anything. (Ritchie, 1971d: 1)

Ritchie’s individual predicament stands out because a disproportionate amount of ink was spilt on his own grievances relative to those of other SUMP members, and inevitably his own perspective colours the account presented in the SUMP documents.

Grievances of seven other patients were listed, and short contributions by a few other patients were included. Some of the original SUMP petitioners were state patients, some being involuntarily detained while others were voluntary patients. One patient apparently demanded ‘immediate access to his own cash’, ‘full parole immediately’ and wanted ‘to be released as soon as possible’ to the care of his niece (Ritchie, 1971c: 1). The same patient wrote on 3 July 1971 that ‘ever since being admitted … I have been acting as Secretary of Hartwood Patients’ Social Club committee – a group of patients of both sexes’ (Ritchie, 1971e: 21). He listed the duties undertaken in this role, concluding that ‘the foregoing to my mind completely disposes of any suggestion that my mental faculties are in the least sub-normal’ (Ritchie, 1971e: 20). Another patient wanted ‘an immediate stop to the brutality, and better, more positive medical treatment’ (1971c: 1), and one wanted ‘his release at once, having entered Hartwood voluntarily’ (Ritchie, 1971g). An avowed reason for Ritchie joining with others to take collective action was that his own individual complaints were rejected or ignored. The formation of SUMP was thus a pragmatic response to the failure of his individual complaints, and he wrote that:

[T]he conviction grows in many that they will die in hospital (this one), their ability to rehabilitate themselves on the outside diminishing with the passing years. I myself have the feeling that I must make a now-or-never effort to get out this year, for with every passing day my prospects are marginally less. (Ritchie, 1971d: 2)

One patient who signed the petition had been at Hartwood for over 11 years, having originally been sent there ‘for his own safety’ (Ritchie, 1971e: 21). According to Ritchie, this was supposed to be a short-term measure until such time as there was a vacancy in an epileptic home for him. Another had been detained at Hartwood for 14 years for breach of probation, and was also an epileptic and a victim of polio (p. 21). From a letter written by a patient who was ‘on the run’ from the hospital, Ritchie extracted a passage for inclusion in the documents of grievance. The extract refers to ward 7 where most of the petitioners were detained, and the patient, not part of the original group of ‘foundation member’ petitioners, wrote:

There is a ward 7. It is actually a punishment ward … I tell you they run the hospital to please themselves. As for the nurses they are in it for just one purpose and that is money, and money alone … As I write this letter I am on the run. I have spent my time hiding in a lodging house. At least you can communicate with people, whereas in the hospital you can’t. I firmly believe the medication the patients receive there just can’t help them. I know it is entirely up to oneself … When one becomes a patient one loses all self-respect. At the moment I am sleeping in terrible conditions. But I am free? (Ritchie, 1971e: 21)

Ritchie (1971f: 25) added a rejoinder, remarking that this patient ‘puts it rather mildly when he says that you cannot communicate in Hartwood’, and he underlined the frustration felt by patients:

Nobody (I refer to staff) seems to listen to what anyone else says … The communication breakdown in Hartwood is permanent. It exists at all levels and along all lines: between doctors and nurses, doctors and doctors, nurses and nurses, doctors and patients, nurses and patients. One shudders to think what tangle the external lines linking Hartwood with the world outside have wound themselves into! If a patient complains about anything, the subject matter of the complaint gets scrambled in the passing so that nothing is ever done about it. (p. 25)

The MWCS was SUMP’s first intended audience beyond the walls of the asylum, but Ritchie was also addressing a wider constituency:

[T]his public sector sickness in regard to Mental Health Services is more than a local phenomenon. There seems to be a chronic malaise eating at the NHS mental hospitals on a national scale – and I do not allude to that No-account Species, the British Mental Patient. (Ritchie, 1971g)

The grievances which motivated SUMP members to agitate were place-specific, but Ritchie addressed the situation of mental patients in British asylums more broadly. Indeed, such grievances were by no means uncommon among asylum patients and were long-established. In his studies of patient letters from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, Beveridge (1998: 435) finds that patients wrote ‘to complain, to get out, to communicate with the outside world, to plead their sanity, to condemn the Asylum, to criticize other inmates or to express affection for them’. Likewise Andrews (1993: 111–12) discovers that patients’ letters and case notes from Gartnavel Royal Asylum were ‘full of sardonic commentary on the tortures of their “home” at Gartnavel … and the majority of patients whose opinion is accessible from case notes and correspondence … appealed repeatedly for their discharge’. Continuities abound in the records of patients’ grievances at Scottish asylums from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. The studies of Beveridge and Andrews ‘reflect the daily concerns and frustrations of institutional life – the irritation of living with fellow patients, the poor food, the noise, the skirmishes with attendants’ (Beveridge, 1998: 461) and the ‘regimental monotony and conformity of asylum life’ (Andrews, 1993: 115). Andrews (1993: 113) argues that overcrowding at Gartnavel Royal ‘during the second third of the twentieth century created just as many, if not more, tensions between dehumanized patients and over-worked nurses, than had pervaded the nineteenth-century asylum’. The SUMP documents reveal just such tensions between patients and staff at Hartwood in the 1960s and 1970s, but – unlike the messages from the individual patient letters examined by Beveridge – the collectivist message articulated by Ritchie in the ‘Manifesto’ reached an audience beyond the walls of the asylum.

Reaching beyond the walls of the asylum

The MWCS was the most obvious official channel through which SUMP members could voice their grievances, being sanctioned ‘to make inquiry into any case where it appears to them that there may be ill-treatment, deficiency in care or treatment, or improper detention of any person who may be suffering from mental disorder’ (MWCS, 1972: 20). According to the MWCS, there was ‘no question of complaints being submitted through recognized channels, or being sifted before reaching the commission’ (p. 5). When commissioners visited Hartwood in 1971, patients made their complaints known verbally. Following the MWCS visit, a ‘formal document of grievance in writing’ was promised and Ritchie undertook the task of composing it. The grievances detailed in the SUMP papers included allegations of deficiency of treatment, improper detention and the use of unreasonable force to restrain patients. Ritchie remarked that ‘staff-to-patient violence and brutality [in] 1967 … was an everyday occurrence not to be remarked upon’, and added that, ‘although I maintain that brutality is on the way out, [another patient] holds the view that things are pretty much as they always were’ (Ritchie, 1971f: 24). According to Ritchie (1971c: 20a): ‘there is rather more rough-handling and scruff-of-the-necking than one would expect to see in a hospital, even be it a NHS mental hospital, if indeed one would expect to find any such treatment dispensed at all in a hospital’. Apart from an incident in which a nurse – ‘no lightweight, being dense of body as well as of mind’ (p. 20a) – sat on top of a patient for nearly an hour, most of the grievances did not refer to specific allegations of brutality, but rather to general conditions at the hospital. Indeed, the 1972 MWCS report claimed that ‘it is rare, but not unknown to find instances of deliberate ill-treatment or wilful neglect. More commonly it has been found that restrictive practices, once accepted as the norm, have been continued into an age when they are no longer acceptable’ (MWCS, 1972: 5). The general grievances of patients listed reflected this admission to some extent.

In a ‘Question & Answer’ section of the ‘Manifesto’, the question was posed, ‘Why ‘Scottish’ rather than ‘National’ [Union of Mental Patients]?’ Ritchie (1971a: 1) answered:

Certainly not for reasons of rabid porridge-and-bagpipes patriotism! Rather the opposite, in fact, with regard to the secondary reason – which is to draw attention to the fact that there are variations between Scotland and England & Wales in respect of the mental health service. We have a different Act of Parliament to start with. We are run by a different government department … The main reason for ‘Scottish’, however, is to contrive the abbreviation SUMP – a level below which you cannot sink.

The implication was that Scotland did not compare favourably with the rest of the UK in regard to mental health services. He drew attention to the separate legislation and administration of mental health for Scotland, but he also alluded to official enquiries into abuse at hospitals in England and Wales in order to decry the plight of mental patients in Scotland and the UK more broadly. While SUMP was formed for the purpose of taking action against the specific conditions at Hartwood, Ritchie expressed an ambition to form an organization for all mental patients in Scotland while also speaking more broadly to the situation of the ‘British mental patient’.

After he was discharged from Hartwood in October 1971, he sought to develop the union by recruiting more members, including women, to which end he made visits to Gartnavel Royal and Gartloch hospitals (Ritchie, 1972). The membership list recorded in the Journal included many patients outwith Hartwood, but there is no evidence of any significant coordinated activity following the petition by the original group of ‘foundation members’ at Hartwood, despite attempts by Ritchie, after his release, to gain the support of local organizations such as charities, voluntary groups and churches (Ritchie, 1972). The membership list included patients and ex-patients from Gartnavel, Gartloch, Lennox Castle and Leverndale, all mental institutions surrounding Glasgow. Before he was discharged from Hartwood, Ritchie had enlisted the support and advice of the information service Glasgow Advisory People (GAP), and it was the founder of GAP who had taken seriously Ritchie’s suggestion to start a union. GAP was a short-lived alternative information service founded by a young Glasgow graduate, Felicity Harris, which provided a ‘child-minding service’ and an ‘information and legal advice service’ (Anon., 1971a). GAP helped Ritchie when he absconded from Hartwood in May 1971 by advocating his return to an industrial rehabilitation course: ‘had it not been for GAP I should still have been wallowing helplessly in the bureaucratic quagmire but luckily I took the chance and went AWOL to visit that Organisation in Glasgow’ (Ritchie, 1971d: 8–9). Another patient had written to Ritchie informing him of the ‘invaluable assistance’ offered by GAP ‘in his fight against Hartwood’ (p. 8). No doubt Ritchie was encouraged by this outside support. After he was discharged, he sought further support from the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties (SCCL), homeless charities the Simon Community and Shelter, trade union officials, local clergymen, journalists and his local MP. These organizations were listed as ‘active sympathisers’ in the SUMP Journal. By associating with established social and civic institutions and emerging charities and voluntary action groups, Ritchie hoped that they would provide assistance and lend credibility to the idea of mental patients forming a union. He also aimed to reach an anti-establishment ‘counter-culture’ or ‘alternative society’ beyond the walls of the asylum and, indeed, beyond Scotland. GAP was part of an emerging movement of ‘alternative information services’ in the UK which included a burgeoning ‘underground press’.

In October 1971 Ritchie sent a copy of the SUMP ‘Manifesto’ to the editor of Ink magazine. Ink was part of the London underground press which offered space for visions of an alternative society to be articulated. The colourful pages of these newspapers gave various counter-cultural groups the opportunity to express themselves on issues ranging from art, music, sex, drugs, alternative lifestyles and philosophies, to mainstream and marginal political issues (Nelson, 1989; Reid, 2011). The underground press was an expression of the emerging counter-cultures of the 1960s and 1970s and a means by which social boundaries were challenged and tested. The offices of underground press newspapers were regularly raided and two underground newspapers, Oz and IT (International Times), were prosecuted on charges of obscenity and conspiracy to corrupt public morals. Ink was launched in May 1971 and had grown out of Oz. Ink described itself as ‘The Other Newspaper’ and took a more overtly political approach to Oz. John Lloyd, later editor of the New Statesman, was Ink editor when Ritchie sent the SUMP manuscript in October 1971. According to Lloyd, speaking in 2008, ‘you had issues taken up, often quite intemperately, which have passed now into normal, liberal practice’ (Campbell, 2008). In a weekly column for the Spectator entitled ‘Notes from the Underground,’ Tony Palmer (1971) remarked that Ink’s ‘sole concern was information denied the possibility of broadcast elsewhere’ and that ‘it spoke for a minority, ill-defined and incoherent though the minority might have been’. He claimed that ‘without a public voice, they might well turn to more silent protest. Ink was their opportunity to use the democratic process of debate’. Ink (Anon., 1971b) published an extract of the SUMP ‘Manifesto’, claiming that there was ‘accumulating evidence that mental institutions in this country and elsewhere are being run as an extension of the prison system – i.e., remove the problems by making the constituents of it invisible and depriving them of their basic rights’. The newspaper told its readers that ‘anyone wishing to read this extraordinary [SUMP] document should send to Ink for a copy’.

SUMP member Robin Farquharson was unmistakably part of emerging counter-culture scenes in London at this time and his was the first name on the list of SUMP members who was not a Hartwood patient. It seems he had a short-stay at Gartloch Hospital before being transferred to Epsom. A South African, ex-Cambridge don and prize-winning researcher on voting theory (see Farquharson, 1969), he was in and out of mental hospitals during the 1960s and had been excluded from the Kingsley Hall therapeutic community by the so-called ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R.D. Laing (Mullan, 1995: 181, 189). Laing said of Farquharson that ‘he was a very strange guy … very intelligent and totally out of his fucking mind’ (Mullan, 1995: 189). Farquharson’s involvement with SUMP was most likely tangential, perhaps signing up as a member when Ritchie visited Gartloch. Farquharson’s (1968) account of temporary homelessness in London, Drop Out!, inspired by LSD guru Timothy Leary, reads in places like a whistle-stop psychogeographical tour of the streets, interspersed with encounters with hippie London, in which he extols the virtues of LSD. He helped to find premises in London for a group called People Not Psychiatry. He was involved in anti-apartheid campaigning and numerous ‘alternative society’ projects, including the White Panther movement, squat communities, free festivals, the Anti-University, the information service BIT, its newspaper Bitman, and other underground press publications Freek Press and Friends. Ritchie was far removed from these activist and counter-cultural scenes while at Hartwood, but, when he also found himself in London, he too gave expression to fashionable tastes for sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and the sexual revolution. Having already acknowledged his long-term drug addiction problems in the SUMP ‘Manifesto’, at the founding meeting of MPU Ritchie signed himself ‘RITCHIE – LONDON – SEX – SUPERSTAR’ (SHG, 2011: 12). While SUMP was formed in resistance to the regime at Hartwood, it was also an expression of wider anti-institutional sentiment, of emerging attitudes of social liberalism and counter-cultural forces beyond the asylum and, indeed, beyond Scotland. Yet, when Ritchie was writing the ‘Manifesto’ in Scotland in 1971, it was the more sober tradition of trade unionism to which he appealed when making his case.

The discourse of SUMP

The discourse of trade unionism and guiding principles of industrial relations were central to the case outlined by Ritchie (1971b) for ‘patients in mental hospitals having their own fully democratic and autonomous national association or union’. He claimed that:

The same advantage, more or less, would accrue to such a body in the field of collective bargaining as those enjoyed by trades unions proper. As combinations of workers formed for the purpose of taking united action against employers for the improvement of wages and other working conditions find that success is overwhelmingly more probable, so too would combinations of patients find that a united front against the Hospital Authority would be much more rewarding than the frustrating neglect they meet with should they act individually. (Ritchie, 1971b)

For the same reasons as other bodies or groups of people with something in common, [mental patients] need a Union or association to protect their special interests – only more so. Nurses and ancillaries have two Unions. Doctors have their professional body to guard their interest and preserve the esoteric mistiness of their calling. And with what rare diligence does that August Body we all know protect its own! Watch the ranks close when lesser creatures presume to question …

Self-governing associations, guilds or Unions protect all those whose livelihood depends on the Mental Health Services. Indeed the only section which does not speak with a united voice is the one comprising the nuts themselves! – the poor creatures for whom the mental hospitals were built, and for whom, presumably, they are intended to function. (Ritchie, 1971a: 2)

Despite the flippant comment by Ritchie about contriving the acronym SUMP to create the slogan, ‘SUMP – a level below which you cannot sink’, the historical and geographical significance of the ‘union’ discourse must not be discounted. As Ritchie suggested, it is likely that Archie Meek, who suggested starting a union in the first place, had been an active trade unionist in his working days. Not far from Hartwood, the coal industry of Lanarkshire had been in decline since the end of World War I and, while old industries may have been contracting in that region, traditions of trade unionism lived on. Workers continued to organize collectively to advance their own interests, to improve wages and conditions, as well as to halt the decline of their industries and the jobs provided.

Most notably, one charismatic and eloquent trade union shop steward and Communist of the Upper-Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), Jimmy Reid, came to prominence in the summer of 1971, leading a high-profile campaign to keep the shipyards open (Foster and Woolfson, 1999). Instead of striking, UCS workers staged a ‘work-in’ after the Conservative government decided to remove the state subsidy upon which the UCS yards were dependent. The ‘work-in’ led by Reid lasted 15 months and received widespread recognition and support, ultimately forcing the government to back down. Samuel (2006: 210–11) remarked that trade unionism was ‘not only a cause’, it was ‘something approaching a workers faith’ in which there was ‘a quasi-religious impulse at work [,] … a search for self-transcendence; the claim to collective dignity by reference to the past; the joy of wider belonging’. SUMP laid claim to the collective dignity of mental patients by referencing and associating with traditions of trade unionism from the industrial heartlands of the Central Belt of Scotland. Indeed in the Journal (Ritchie, 1972) ‘Clydebank Div. Shipyard Shop Stewards’ were listed as ‘sympathisers who had given SUMP active support’. The explicit association made with the shipyards and the appeal to ‘collective bargaining’ and ‘friendly society activities’ demonstrated how industrial strife and trade union solidarity beyond the walls of the asylum impinged on the discourse deployed by Ritchie and the action taken by the SUMP petitioners in the summer of 1971.

The references to ‘collective bargaining’, ‘combinations’, ‘united action’, ‘democratic and autonomous national association’, ‘united front’, ‘communal help’ and ‘the need of a brotherhood’ (Ritchie, 1971b) all underline how the principles, rhetoric and tactics of the trade union movement were appropriated by Ritchie in his call for collective action by mental patients. The Herald (Anon., 1972) reported on SUMP after Ritchie and the vice-chairman of SCCL, Edgar Prais, were interviewed in March 1972. Glasgow-based lawyer Prais told the newspaper: ‘We have a large dossier from this man on his own case … A union to look after patients’ rights seems to be an entirely suitable and desirable thing to have.’ The article described how ‘during his final year Mr Ritchie absconded from the hospital three times to draw attention to his case, returning when he ran out of money’. Ritchie told The Herald, ‘I don’t think this harmed my chances of release. They were getting a bit fed up with me. I had already gone through every appeal procedure open to me without success. I even wrote to the Prime Minister.’ Interestingly, The Herald noted that Ritchie ‘hopes his organisation will get support from trade unions’, but the SUMP Journal (Ritchie, 1972) records that only a few months later Ritchie had left Scotland and SUMP behind to travel to London.

It is not clear whether Ritchie returned to Scotland after this particular trip to London, but what is certain is that he was present at the founding meetings of the Mental Patients’ Union (MPU) at Paddington Day Hospital in March 1973, by which time SUMP had dissolved. He remained involved with MPU for at least two years and was resident at an MPU house. The discourse of unionism deployed by Ritchie and the call for collective action was taken up by individuals and groups of mental patients dispersed across the country during the 1970s, as MPUs were formed in Portsmouth, Manchester, Dundee, and at Roundway Hospital, Horton Hospital, Hackney Hospital and Shenley Hospital (SHG, 2015). Despite the continuity between SUMP and MPU, Ritchie joined a larger, more effectively networked group of people, operating in more conducive settings at Paddington in 1973. MPU was also shaped by local concerns and did not depend on the example of SUMP for its raison d’être. Whether or not Ritchie was given ‘active support’ by trade union officials before he finally abandoned the SUMP project, the proximity to industrial heartlands of Scotland where traditions of trade unionism flourished, particularly to the high-profile UCS action, was evidently formative of the discourse employed by Ritchie.

These place-specific concerns constituted local peculiarities of time and place, contingent social and material conditions, which shaped Ritchie’s rhetorical strategy. One commentator remarks that the UCS work-in ‘proved to be a one-off event, more effective as an exercise in propaganda than as a success for workers’ control’ (Gallagher, 1991: 105). The same can be said, with more justification, of many short-lived radical experiments emanating from emerging counter-cultures, including SUMP, GAP and Ink. All folded within a year of being established, underlining their improvised ad hoc nature and, some would argue, demonstrating the lack of seriousness and short-term self-indulgence of the ‘underground’ (Jones, 1998). While SUMP proved to be an effective vehicle for expressing collective grievances to MWCS and a broader public audience, it was a far cry from establishing a ‘fully democratic and autonomous national association or union’ (Ritchie, 1971b).

A revolt against psychiatric power and the asylum space

Ritchie emphasized the loss of liberty, the boundaries of the asylum space and the constraints on communication and movement imposed at Hartwood. SUMP members, some of whom were state patients, were not only resisting the power of the state to detain patients indefinitely, but were also revolting against the specific social and material order of Hartwood. Ritchie’s critique was directed at the regimental regulation and power relations between staff and patients, but he also questioned the therapeutic value of the regime of confinement.

Can you doctors not perceive the grinding monotony of pacing up and down the corridors of locked wards; cannot the doctors themselves have the humanity to stop the practice? It is they who impose these periods of incarceration presumably for curative purposes. But is it curative? How many people hold the belief that getting locked up has some therapeutic value? How would doctors like it? Can’t they imagine themselves in the same circumstances as their patients? Have they no empathy at all? (Ritchie, 1971f: 27)

Ritchie (1971b: 20b) proclaimed, ‘To the Psychiatrists of that hellish place I say: “You cruel bastards!” And, Christ, how I mean it!’ He lambasted the timetables, the spatial segregation, the strict rules insisting on minimal contact between the sexes, and what he saw as the hierarchical system of ‘segregation’ and ‘stratification’ at work in the hospital (Ritchie, 1971f: 28).

You are effectively classified and graded according to the ward you are in. This applies both to the living-conditions and to the treatment you receive … Preference is given according to ward in the hospital issue of clothing. Very few of the new articles of clothing, for instance percolate down to Ward 7. The issue of fine socks is restricted to the Hill Wards … Even what you eat depends on what ward you are in … ‘Battery feeding’ is the order of the day in the main dining hall, or more accurately, ‘feeding place’. There is always an unholy rush to get the patients’ meals over and done with; bells ringing to summon you for food, bells ring between courses, bells let you know when to go. (Ritchie, 1971f: 27–9)

SUMP members were frustrated that doctors seemed to share patients’ concerns about overcrowding, but did not seem to be in a position to address the issue:

Yes, [Ward] Seven is overcrowded, the doctors and other Hartwood dignitaries will resignedly agree, shrugging a despairing shoulder. But what can they do about it? The fault, they say, lies with the woolly-headed amateurs who planned the framework of the NHS. ‘We professionals don’t have much say’, they maintain. (p. 33)

When patients in ward 7 realized that work was commencing to rebuild on an airing court at the hospital, ‘they thought that they were going to get a new dayroom or recreation-hall or something’. ‘Not on their collective nellies!’ Ritchie blasted, ‘the new building is to be Hartwood’s Dispensary for the 1970s’ (p. 33). According to Ritchie, the space for the new dispensary was ‘until recently an enclosed yard; this resembled what you’d imagine an abandoned playground in Ghost Town Elementary to be like – weeds up through the macadam, dust of all ages in every corner, litter, seagull droppings’ (pp. 32–3). He asked:

Is a new dispensary more pressingly needed than additional living and sleeping space for Ward 7 patients? – And all the other basic requirements that Seven lacks, like: a visitor’s room; recreation room; separate TV room; decent, more secure and ample locker-space for patients; comfortable chairs and a couch or two for patients to stretch out in, instead of on the floor as at present; some board games like Monopoly, Scrabble, etc.; better and larger toilets and WCs; better and more hygienic shaving arrangements and facilities than at present (so few sinks, so many patients). Those are only some of the needs of this damnable ward. (p. 33)

The discourse here was shaped by the constraints at Hartwood, as well as by openings created by the increasing permeability of the asylum space. Ritchie benefited from the encouragement and support of an occupational therapist at Hartwood to study and complete A-levels through a correspondence course (Ritchie, 1966–71: 8–10). This, along with the support he received from GAP when he absconded in June 1971 and the inspiration of the radical action of the UCS workers, demonstrated how the enclosed and enclosing environment of Hartwood was increasingly susceptible to challenges from both inside and outside the hospital. Ritchie was aware of wider challenges to the asylum regime and official enquiries into mental institutions in England and Wales, and was keen the exploit the interstices being created. By conducting a dialogue with the contingencies that shaped the social and material conditions of existence for patients at Hartwood in 1971, Ritchie forged a rhetorical strategy, appropriating and improvising the means of persuasion available to him in the broader culture of the time.

The SUMP discourse entailed a strategic mobility and polyphony, involving tactical interactions and communications across the boundaries of the asylum space. The discourse was shaped by social and material circumstances, but was also employed to produce effects in specific contexts and audiences. The rhetorical strategy that Ritchie deployed was serio-comic: sometimes refined and earnestly reasoned, at other times ironic and derisive, coarse and impetuous. His writing displayed considerable sensitivity, ingenuity and wit, as well as intemperance and frivolity. He articulated a demand for specific changes at Hartwood and expressed solidarity with fellow mental patients. SUMP enacted an innovative form of collective bargaining through its petitioning of the MWCS and invented novel rhetoric and tactics with which to engage and to provoke wider audiences. Transgressive acts of civil disobedience and free speech made it possible to resist the regime of confinement at Hartwood, spreading the message of solidarity and subversion beyond the asylum walls. The more formalized aspect of his rhetorical strategy, which drew on practices of collective bargaining, mutual aid and civil rights, spoke to proximate official audiences, established civic and social institutions, such as MWCS, SCCL, trade unions, charities and churches, as well as to a broader constituency of concerned citizens. The cynical and comical aspect of the strategy was no less concerned with persuading, but performed its ‘carnivalesque symbolic inversion’ of psychiatric and asylum authority by means of provocative acts of free speech, mockery and satiric scorn, no doubt finding audiences more receptive to such rhetoric via the underground press (Jones, 1998: 285, 292).

Conclusion

SUMP initiated a ‘counter-conduct’ at Hartwood, a form of ‘struggle against the procedures implemented for conducting others’ in which there was a ‘counter-society aspect, a carnival aspect, overturning social relations and hierarchy’ (Foucault, 2007: 201, 211–12). SUMP’s struggle was motivated by the perceived breakdown in communication at Hartwood, the interplay of relations of power, the social and material order of the asylum space, and contingent external events permeating the asylum space from within and without. By seizing on these contingencies, Ritchie improvised tactics to destabilize relations of power at Hartwood. The exercise of power and spatial organization at Hartwood structured the field of possible actions of patients; and, through reflection on the social and material boundaries of Hartwood and via provocative acts of free speech, Ritchie transgressed the asylum order. He used his local knowledge of Hartwood to mount a critique of the asylum system in the UK, sounding a clarion call for mental patients to engage in collective action. Although few heeded his call, in the summer of 1971 SUMP demonstrated a capacity for resistance and practical self-organization not previously seen among asylum patients in Scotland or elsewhere (at least in Britain). Informed by the campaigning and propaganda activities of GAP, UCS and SCCL, SUMP employed practices of free speech, collective bargaining and mutual aid to initiate a novel counter-conduct.

Case-studies of groups such as SUMP and MPU can be compared, not only for what they reveal about the local circumstances which shaped their emergence, but also for what they reveal about broader differences defined by geographical regions and chronological boundaries. The biographies of pivotal figures in mental patient unionism, like Ritchie and Farquharson, reveal much about broader cultural phenomena, those discursive, institutional and social practices and processes, which intersected and shaped collective action by psychiatric patients. That said, there is no indication in the SUMP documents that Ritchie was aware of professional-led ‘anti-psychiatry’ before founding SUMP, although Farquharson had been a resident of Kingsley Hall, the cockpit of British ‘anti-psychiatry’ piloted by R.D. Laing and David Cooper.

The cases of SUMP and MPU manifest in microcosm a significant difference in deinstitutionalization between Scotland and the rest of the UK. When the MPU emerged at Paddington in 1973, the resident population of mental hospitals in Scotland was 370 per 100,000, compared with an English occupancy rate of 190 (Martin, 1984: 68). SUMP emerged from an old asylum, whereas MPU was formed at a day hospital. As Martin (1984: 70) observed, ‘day hospital facilities were unknown in Scotland before the mid-seventies’. Despite having played a pioneering role over the previous century, with the introduction of boarding-out and open-door policies, Scottish mental hospitals in the 1970s were overcrowded and retained large numbers of long-term residents. A decade after the UK Health Minister Enoch Powell announced in 1961 that ‘for the great majority of these establishments there is no future appropriate use’, Scotland remained stubbornly yoked to traditional forms of institutional provision (see Long, this issue). It is perhaps not surprising that the first mental patients’ union in the UK emerged from an old asylum in Scotland, at a time when a diminished role was envisaged for such institutions in the UK and throughout the West.