RESIDENTS of one of Oxfordshire’s newest housing estates might be slightly surprised to learn what used to go on there.

A new book reveals how the neat rows of new houses at Cholsey’s Fair Mile estate belie its dark history as a Victorian mental hospital.

From 1870 until 1948, Moulsford Asylum was the county mental hospital for Berkshire.

Mark Stevens’s Life in the Victorian Asylum reveals the often disturbing stories of thousands of patients and staff who lived and worked there.

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They include Ellen Brookes, a young Hagbourne widow who tried to commit suicide by banging her head against a wall in the Wallingford Workhouse, and the asylum’s youngest patient – five-year-old Frederick Freeman, the son of a Wantage plumber who suffered from severe learning disabilities.

But Mr Stevens – author of 2013’s Broadmoor Revealed – wants to “celebrate” the Victorians’ approach to health care.

The professional archivist for Berkshire county archives said: “The public asylums get a bad press today, but their original aim is still worthy – to provide a safe haven for those with mental illness, as is their encouragement of occupation and interaction for good mental health.”

The hospital’s first head doctor, Robert Gilland, became obsessed with the detail of his work and suffered a nervous breakdown.

One of his chaplains, Frederick Agassiz, had an affair with the village schoolmistress, ran up massive gambling debts, then left his wife and children and fled to South America.

In 1845, all English counties were obliged to provide a lunatic asylum.

The site at Moulsford was chosen only when Oxford’s Littlemore Asylum became full. It opened in 1870, joined the NHS in 1948 as Fair Mile Hospital, and closed in 2003.

The book also tells the tale of Hannah Mulcay, a 26 year-old laundry maid. She gave birth to an illegitimate child. The body was later discovered behind pipework in the laundry drying room and she was charged with murder, convicted of concealing a birth and ended up in Reading Gaol.

Mr Stevens, 45, said he wanted to create a guidebook to the Victorian asylum, detailing routines, treatments and the sense of ward life.

He said: “These people were real, they played games in the Moulsford dayrooms, sat on the benches in the airing courts and slept in the dormitories. They struggled with illnesses similar to those experienced today.”

Life in the Victorian Asylum is published in hardback and ebook by Pen and Sword Books, £19.99 RRP.

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