Electrical torture, invasive surgical procedures, brain-clamps were props in a grand guignol theatre. Insulin comas, ECT (widely used, in the late Forties, without anaesthesia), modified narcosis (week-long sleep cures), pre-frontal leucotomies: no fantasy was too extreme. The logic for these experiments was itself insane. If epilepsy and schizophrenia were incompatible, then induce epilepsy. Nightmares of the city, of immigration, poverty, families crammed into one room – image and acoustic overload – were treated with fire and blade, earthed in Epsom’s tranquil parkland. David Rodinsky, removed from his books and papers, his solitude, living in a ward of strangers. Ronnie Kray befriending a radiator.
The most Wellsian of all the curious fictions imposed on the kidnapped Londoners was the Mosquito Chamber.
The unsuspecting patient is led into a room with double-doors and sealed windows. The walls are smooth. There is no fissure or crack in which a fly can conceal itself. The patient waits. And waits. The milky window a frozen panel. There is a humming in the ears, imagined tinnitus. The patient scratches at the irritation. But it is not imagined. The clean, featureless room is loud with things that can barely be seen: swamp mosquitoes. They are released, one by one, from a specially constructed box. The patient suffers repeated bites. He remains in the room until the observers are happy his blood has been infected. He is returned to his ward – and, in due course, develops malaria fever: sweats, shivers, high temperature. Parasitic protozoa multiply, destroying his red blood cells.
The researchers are satisfied. The theory has been tested, if not proved: malarial fever, when it has passed, helps sufferers from ‘general paralysis’ to recover their sanity. GPI (General Paralysis of the Insane) is the result of syphilis reaching the brain. Malaria is supposed to kill the spirochaetes: in the way that decapitation could be said to cure the common cold. Malarial therapy was developed in Germany. In England, experiments were conducted at Claybury and at Horton – where the fourteen-bed isolation hospital provided the perfect research facility. The laboratory at Horton became the leading mosquito-breeding centre in the British Isles. Seventy per cent of those treated at Horton survived. Three out of every ten died.
The closure of the hospitals around the motorway fringe, which we witnessed in the course of our walk, and assumed to be a New Labour initiative, was revealed on further investigation to be another borrowed Tory policy. The story went back much further than the Mad Ribbon-cutter of Potters Bar, it reached the fons et origo of Maggietone philosophy: Enoch Powell. Powell, the unbending moralist who would dive into any sewer to keep a handle on power, was the motorway Mekon.
In 1961, the National Association for Mental Health invited the Conservative Minister of Health to address their Annual General Meeting. Enoch Powell, Latinist poet, was always happy to put his trenchant views to a captive audience. He announced: ‘the elimination of by far the greater part of this country’s mental hospitals’. No more money must be wasted on ‘upgrading and reconditioning’. The insane must pull themselves together, get on their bikes or face eugenic engineering; castration or expulsion.
The move towards Barratt estates had been in place for more than forty years. Laingian anti-psychiatry (the heritage of Foucault) had some sympathy for Powell’s policy. Victorian asylums had ceased to be asylums, they were mind-prisons, politically repressive, socially divisive. Smaller units, urban communes, retreats, were more useful than George Hine’s minatory colonies: the architecture of fear and control. Not for the first time, extremes of left and right found common ground.
Tories enact grand gestures that always result in land sales, asset stripping, collapse of public services. New Labour loves phantom government, virtual policies, obfuscation. Talk of ‘care in the community’, as Ruth Valentine recalls, was denounced by the House of Commons Social Services Committee in 1985 as ‘virtually meaningless’. That was the Thatcher method: the shameless lie, endlessly repeated, with furious intensity – as if passion meant truth. Blair lets it float, drift, until it’s all too late; the shrug, the missionary smile, the shafting of another convenient scapegoat. The 310 patients, living in Horton in 1993, were dispersed, struck from the record. Some stayed in the grounds, tolerated in a half-life, while they waited for the developers to finish the job. As ever, the minister responsible would be elsewhere; enjoying a recuperative break in the Maldives or smoothing a crisis in Kashmir.
The hours circling Long Grove and Horton had not been wasted, we could walk away. Back down the green lanes towards the station, in quest of a late breakfast.
We found: a cheapjack clothes store, everything racked, everything one price. I bought a grey polo-shirt for £1 and put it on. Breakfast in the centre of Epsom might require ‘smart casual’ dress. It was that sort of town: clock tower, pubs with history, chainstore catalepsy (Boots, Burtons, Dickins & Jones, Dixons, Dolcis, Dollond & Aitchison, H. Samuel, Laura Ashley, Marks & Spencer, Next, Paperchase, Mothercare, Top Shop, Waitrose, WH Smith, Oddbins, Victoria Wines, Monsoon, Radio Rentals, Thomas Cook, Vision Express). Multi-storey car parks and a ripe undertow of horseshit among the carnations. Serious money has colonised the higher ground, the foothills of Epsom Downs; small dank pubs, near the railway, cater to traditionalists with fond memories of riot, debauched soldiery, racetrack shysters and quick-fisted travellers.
A memory technician, with a window display of cigarette cards (British regiments, cricketers) and collectible issues of Picture Post (Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini), peddles sentiment; the heritage Epsom of sepia postcards, railway histories. We browse. The cluttered shop is like an annex of the asylum colony. Vintage magazines are so crisp they might have been published that morning. Punters discuss the hospital railway as if it were still running. And running over the unwary. Rough sleeper Mary Tobin was killed at the Hook Road level crossing. The Long Grove Light Railway, sections of track still visible in the ground, carried building materials for contractors.
The owner of the ephemera shop recommended a café: ‘Carry on past Sainsbury’s, end of the High Street, Café First.’ We soon faced a choice of more than twenty blends of coffee, every combination of egg and sausage, bacon, tomato; fresh orange juice in an iced glass. I go for the Ethiopian coffee: ‘with cheese undertone and flavour of chocolate’. The long, narrow design of the place, the tight Formica units, gives no hint of the quality of the cuisine, the cheerful service. This has to be the best on the road (as I say every time). West Coast America for European-sized diners: germ-free, bright-coloured, a little too eager to explain itself. There is only so much I want to read about a cup of coffee.
Our tell-tale maps and bulging rucksacks involve us in conversation with a retired local couple who are happy to find fellow hikers taking refreshment. As motorists talk road numbers, convinced pedestrians talk gradients. We face a steep pull up on to the chalk. This pair, stately-round and so well-matched as to be virtually cloned, have wrecked knees and ruined feet (flattered by comfortable trainers); they have caps and tinted spectacles. Debating various routes that would carry us towards Epsom Downs, Walton on the Hill and the M25, they follow us out on to the street. The wife favours a scenic route, while the husband appreciates our whim to check on such matters as the underground tunnels, near Chalk Lane.
They wave us off, watching as we recede. When I’ve finished snapping the Albion, a black and white, Tudorbethan pub, they are still there, alongside the café, philosophising over the advice they’ve handed out. The man, prompted, scuttles after us, with several revisions. The woman, who has taken her cap off, looks very much like a younger Iris Murdoch. Self-barbered fringe. Snub nose, bright eyes. A clever child disguised as an old lady. The man, hair tufting in all directions from beneath a flat cap, might be John Bayley. They aren’t, they couldn’t be; but the generosity of their engagement with two strangers, their mutual affection, makes them paradigms of English eccentricity. Kindly ghosts deputed to hang about cafés, setting travellers on the right road.
2
An excursion
ist mood grips us, time out; after the dark residues of the asylum colony, we turned our faces to the south, to Epsom Downs. The town has become an inconvenient traffic island, a sequence of roundabouts with shopping centre and public toilets attached. It’s not meant to be helpful to walkers – who came from elsewhere with bad news and germs; if you want exercise, the guide book offers the Gym in the Park and the Epsom Polo Club. Car parks (mostly short term) are everywhere. The route for the ‘M25 & Epsom Hospital’ is trumped by a large red and white box: TO THE HAYWAIN TRAVEL INN & CHALK LANE HOTEL.
Advice to motorists wanting the racecourse is: ‘Follow the one-way system.’ Advice to pedestrians: forget it. EPSOM TOWN CENTRE IS MONITORED 24 HOURS BY CCTV.
We hopped metal barriers, dodged traffic. We hit the suburbs of the suburbs. Overemphatic lakes of carnations and pinks – buttonholes for racegoers? – gave way to shady avenues where insurance brokers and IT operatives showed off their good taste in Grade II listed mansions.
‘The Borough Council will seek to conserve and enhance the built heritage of the Borough; the design of new development is to make a positive contribution.’
Chalk Lane, which runs in parallel with the recommended traffic route, Ashley Road, reeks of wealth and privilege. Horse money. Stables. Easy access to the Downs. The Welsh actor/producer Stanley Baker had a house in this area: remember the racetrack heist from the film he made with Joseph Losey, The Criminal? Baker liked to associate with underworld faces; they enjoyed his hospitality, having him in the photographs – Soho Rangers FC (with Eddie Richardson and train-robber Tommy Wisbey), a frost of nightclub tables. It was rumoured for years, on not much evidence (beyond the celebrity snapshots), the film roles he chose to play, that Baker funded the Great Train Robbery. His production, Robbery, directed by Peter Yates in 1967, gave Bruce Reynolds and the team a celebratory send-off (for their twenty-year stretches). Mythologising the headlines of 1963, Baker reinvented historical genre painting; the way Victorians like Benjamin Haydon and W.P. Frith could freeze-frame contemporary dramas and make them epic. (The noise of Frith’s Derby Day was the event horizon for our ascent of the chalk ridge, the pull towards the Downs.)
Suspend disbelief in Stanley’s terrible wig, that squirt of octopus ink, and his physicality as an actor makes him an honorary B-feature Yank. Blacklisted, or happy-to-work-in-Europe, American directors liked Baker: Joseph Losey, Robert Aldrich, Raoul Walsh, Robert Rossen. They exploited his hard stare, his displaced Celtic narcissism and melancholy; muscular baroque.
However he made his fortune, Stanley found the right place to spend it. Much came from South Africa, from the film he made with director Cy Endfield, Zulu. Poet and schoolteacher Peter Carpenter, who grew up in the town, called the Epsom asylums ‘our camps’. He reckoned they were built on the military model (Woolwich Arsenal, Netley). ‘They belong,’ he told me, ‘in the period of the first concentration camps in the Boer War.’ So it’s fitting that Baker’s white château was paid for by restaging the heroic but futile defence of the mission at Rorke’s Drift (from 1879).
South Africa was prime landscape for producing imperialist westerns: Zulu warriors were cheaper to hire than Jews (or tent show extras) who usually played generic redskins. Baker had some interesting Old Kent Road connections in the Land of Apartheid: scrap-metal merchant (and serial company director) Charlie Richardson was trading in dubious mining rights, fraud, and political favours for Broederbonders. His ghosted autobiography, My Manor, has a photograph captioned: ‘Best of Friends. Gordon Winter with General H.J. Van den Bergh, head of the South African Secret Service, at his Pretoria farm in 1979.’ Another remembrance of corporate hospitality captures Major L.H. Nicholson, ‘who helped me set up my South African business’, sharing a glass or two with Harold Macmillan and Lord Soames. This was the period when, as Richardson recalls, ‘My brother Eddie was running around with a friend of his, Stanley Baker, the actor. They were making The Sands of the Kalahari film.’
Naughtiness, gaming, risky ventures in the colonies paid for the copper pagoda roofs, octagonal towers, stables for potential Derby winners. Aristocracies of blood, crime and the City set themselves up on the edge of the racecourse; just as rock dinosaurs, deposed politicians and coke barons bought into bunker-land, the golf course perimeters of Surrey.
We climb through a cool woodland passage at the road’s edge; a soft, pepper-red track overhung with tough bunting, ivy. Dappled sunlight. The noise of traffic labouring up Ashley Road is swallowed. These paths are a teasing reminder of revoked liberties. You can see where kids have burrowed, pulling the skirts of the chainlink fence away from the ground. The copse survives, giving shade to motorists, in order to disguise a network of tunnels. Where nature puts on its Ivon Hitchens (or Samuel Palmer) act, overarching vegetation feinting at the Gothic, you know that something is being hidden. Beneath our feet, running all the way to the racecourse, secret tunnels have been cut into the chalk.
MYSTERY OF TUNNELS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ROYAL REFUGE: London Evening Standard (21 November 1999). A supporting illustration in which George VI, Queen Elizabeth and her daughters have been superimposed on a grim brick passageway, disappearing into darkness. The implication, the subliminal message: Russian Revolution, Ekaterinburg.
Our beechwood copse, according to the Standard, was no more than the verdant roof of a subterranean city: ‘one of Britain’s last forgotten deep air-raid shelters, which is rumoured to have been built as a refuge for the Royal Family and their staff if wartime London had been completely destroyed’. Madmen and gangsters of the inner city to the asylum gulag, royalty to their chalk warrens; the pack was shuffled, and all the cards, joker to king, land on Epsom.
Peter Carpenter, who went to school in the town, and whose parents still live at the bottom of the hill, promised to give us the full tour: ‘St Ebba’s – the paupers’ graveyard, isolation tower… Stanley Baker’s house… Tattenham Corner (the mental patients collected the rubbish after Derby Week)… my old school (Dave Hemmings expelled from it)…’ And, of course, the tunnels. Carpenter reckoned that individual tunnels were ‘given London street names’. So that the buried city became a parallel world London, a memory maze. If the metropolis was destroyed, mole-people could relearn its geography and legends by tracking candlelit brick passages.
The complex, so the Standard revealed, had been sold at auction to ‘a mystery buyer’. Agent Conrad Ritblat facilitated the deal. His representative, Stephen Bellau, claimed that a potential purchaser would have ‘the chance to own somewhere very interesting in a beautiful area of land for not a great deal of money’.
Despite thorough research in the records of a number of government departments, no hard facts have been uncovered. ‘All files on the bunker appear to have been lost.’ A report commissioned by the now defunct Property Services Agency recommends an expenditure of £116,000 on ‘beefing up perimeter security’ – and mentions, in passing, the fact that the land was requisitioned on 8 February 1941. Floor plans show food stores, a marshal’s post, field kitchens, lavatories, dormitories.
It’s tempting to explore this area now, to go over the fence. The new owner will obviously secure the entry to the tunnels and remove all traces of wartime and post-war occupation. We have no torches, no tools – and Peter Carpenter’s local knowledge, when he leads his Epsom expedition, will give us more time to do justice to the mystery.
Crossing Ashley Road, we enter a cemetery; it’s well kept, white stones bright in the morning sun, a view back over the town. Reservations of the dead are often the best parks; avenues of granite, grey-green envelopes addressed with names that have disappeared from the telephone books and trade directories. Cut flowers, little pots of chrysanthemums from garages, signifying remembrance – instead of the pebbles and black stones of a Jewish burial ground.
As we come to the crest of the hill, through paddocks and stables, we turn back to appreciate the huge sky: a dark stand of beechwood, the poplar windbreaks of the cemetery, a cordon sanitaire
protecting Epsom from the white tower blocks of London. Then, soaring above it, fast-moving parachute clouds. We try to recognise familiar landmarks. We imagine groups from the hospitals, bussed up here, working to clear the rubbish after a race meeting: the confusion. Attempts at orientation. After the trip from London, ambulance or train, the years on the wards, the drugs. That is what sane people miss most: knowing where they are. Why doesn’t matter. When is of no account. We have to be able to track the story back: this is where it began, that’s the station, there is the river.
A racehorse, a shivering thoroughbred, is trapped in a cylinder that operates like a set of revolving doors. As we approach, the animal speeds up. It isn’t going anywhere and there is nobody to supervise its drudgery. Observation, by strangers, increases momentum. The method might be economic, but the beast is going to finish up with two legs shorter than the others. If it comes across a clockwise track, it’s finished; it’ll never make it around the first bend. Maybe, this training programme is designed for counterclockwise courses. The horse must feel as if it’s got a termite factory in one ear. The remorselessness of its tight circuits leaves us slightly seasick, hungry for the epic spaces of the Downs.
Massive displacement: crowds that aren’t there. W.P. Frith’s Derby Day painting denuded, stripped to bare canvas. History as a deserted beach. The flags and balconies of the grandstand like a marine hotel. Without prior knowledge, what would you make of this smoothed hilltop? Wide roads, lacking traffic. Combed sand runs (with inward-leaning fences). Hitching rails in the middle of nothing. A battleground? A wounded meadow? When the British regiments were defeated at Box Hill, in George Chesney’s future war fantasy, they fell back on Epsom Downs. The Downs were the final ridge, before the invaders moved on to Kingston and the Thames.
BEWARE. RACEHORSES HAVE PRIORITY DURING TRAINING HOURS. That’s fine with us. The Downs are open to the public. Unlike the defunct and imperialist Wembley Stadium, the racecourse doesn’t make you pay to visit a ruin, to watch videos and marvel at footballers’ shirts in glass cases. Keep your dogs ‘under strict control’ and you’re free to wander. The air is oxygen rich, heady. There’s nothing to bet on, but we feel reckless. It’s easy to understand the delirium of giving it all away, risking your mortgage on a broken-winded nag.
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