Autumn at The Crichton

Thought I'd better do an autumn colour post.























I had the great good fortune to have a work meeting up at The Crichton last week. Although it went on longer than I anticipated, I still had the chance for a wander before the boys needed picked up from school. And even though it was a dreich day, the grounds were beautiful.

The Crichton is an enormous site in Dumfries that began its formal life as a lunatic asylum.

In the early nineteenth century Dr James Crichton, a trader and physician who made his fortune in India and China, retired to the Dumfries area. He died in 1823, leaving a sizeable fortune to be used for "charitable purposes". His particular wish was that the bulk of the money be used to found a college of university status in Dumfries. Despite the best efforts of his widow, Mrs Elizabeth Crichton, the plans to found a university were refused.

From his legacy, about £85,000 was used to found the Crichton Royal Hospital. A fortune, then.

No expense was spared as Elizabeth was determined to build the best asylum in Europe. Of grandiose design, it included a cathedral-like church, a farm of over 900 acres, and an artesian well.

A rock garden was built, and plant specimens were obtained from as far away as Darjeeling.

A number of patients were admitted free of charge.

For 15 shillings a year, a private "sleeping room," iron bed, and "animal" soup were provided.

Those who paid £17.50 a year were given a parlour, bathroom, meals with wine and dessert every day, and grouse in season. Each patient had one "keeper" and the use of a carriage or horse every day.

The Crichton was at the forefront of psychiatric care, both nationally and internationally.

A detailed history-taking schedule was adopted, and a wide range of social and educational activities provided the initial focus for treatment.

The Department of Clinical Research was first active under Professor Mayer-Gross. He had come from the University of Heidelberg and was a follower of Kraepelin but also acquainted with Freud and Jung. His department in Heidelberg had been greatly influenced by the work of Jaspers, creating the science of psychopathology, and he brought this with him to Dumfries.

Professor Mayer-Gross, together with Drs. Roth and Slater, wrote the leading British psychiatric text of its time whilst at the Crichton.

An EEG department opened in 1948, Scotland’s first residential children’s unit opened in 1951, and an old-age unit opened in 1958. A social therapist was appointed, and specific learning disability units opened in the 1980s. However, with improvements at other British psychiatric hospitals, referral of adults from outside the region, previously common, diminished.

Tom Pow's book, Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness which won the poetry category in this year's Scottish Book Awards, is based on his sifting through detailed case histories still retained by the Crichton Archives.

From The Times review by Hugh Lupton:

" ... tensions between asylum containment and open fields, between delusion and reason, run through Tom Pow's extraordinary new book of poems, Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness. The collection circles around the Crichton Asylum in Dumfries - now part of Glasgow University. Founded in the 1830s, the asylum was initially part of the same humane impulse as Samuel Tuke's “Moral Treatment”. Its 150-year existence charted a shifting and evolving understanding of mental illness and the permeability of identity. This social history is at the root of the book. "

Tom Pow taught until very recently at the University of Glasgow, Crichton Campus.

New health policies in the 1980s meant that large psychiatric institutions were no longer required. This heralded a very major change in the way the site was used.

Since 1995 the Crichton Development Company has been working to turn what was, effectively. a redundant and deteriorating former psychiatric hospital into one of the most significant regeneration projects in Scotland. The project has been progressed (they say) applying the very highest conservation and economic regeneration principles.

Basically, on what really does feel like a unified site, where old hospital buildings have been converted to new uses and new buildings seem to have been kept to a minimum, you have:

The Crichton University Campus, which houses the University of Glasgow (off-shoot), the University of the West of Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway College and the Scottish Agricultural College (offshoot, I think).

The Crichton Business Park, which describes itself as "quality office accommodation with high speed fibre optic communications." Coo!

The Easterbrook Hall and the Aston Hotel. The first is a very large conference and events centre with exceptionally nice toilet facilities and fierce air hand-dryers. The Aston is its accompanying luxury hotel (the new section of which is a bit of a bastard blue, which is one of the very few wrong steps taken, in my opinion).

100 acres of "Public Realm" plus a 9-hole golf-course.

And these grounds are beautiful. All the photographs in this post are of one teeny-tiny section by the Crichton Memorial Church.

There are still two wards (possibly three, can't remember) left of the Psychiatric Hospital, and the Health Board seems to occupy some of the top end of the site (it is right next door to the Dumfries and Galloway Infirmary).

Dumfries, which seems determined to get so little of its heritage right, has actually made a fair go of The Crichton. If you are ever in the area, it's worth a walkabout - and both the coffee and the deluxe bacon rolls at The Aston Hotel are rather good.

Happy Autumn.