In 1935, a modest directory of some 165 pages set out, county by county, where children in Britain with disabilities were to be sent and to whom their families should apply. Two years later, a Sheffield toddler named Harry Drabble became one of the children it describes.
The Directory of Orthopaedic Institutions, Voluntary Organizations and Official Schemes for the Welfare of Cripples was published in 1935 by the Central Council for the Care of Cripples, from an office at Carnegie House, 117 Piccadilly, London. Its purpose is stated plainly on the first page: ‘to show what provision for the treatment, vocational training and other needs of the crippled is made in any particular town or district in the United Kingdom, and to whom application should be made in order to obtain the benefit of the facilities provided’. It tells an official, a doctor, or a health visitor where a disabled child might be sent, and whom to ask. It does not tell us anything about the child.
The directory works by county. Under each heading comes a general statement of how far orthopaedic work has been organised in that area, and then the details: the hospitals, the clinics, the convalescent homes, the training centres, and the voluntary associations. At the front is a list of orthopaedic hospitals arranged by date of foundation, beginning with the Royal Cripples’ Hospital in Birmingham in 1817 and continuing down to hospitals founded as recently as 1933.
This is the first thing the directory quietly proves. The provision for children like Harry was not a local arrangement or a Sheffield peculiarity. It was a national system, more than a century in the building, with its own institutions in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man. The King Edward VII Hospital, Sheffield, appears on that list, founded in 1916.
The Sheffield entry
Turn to the Sheffield entry, and the system comes into focus. The city’s population is given as 511,820, on the Registrar-General’s estimate of 1933. The City Council, the directory records, ‘arranges for an orthopaedic surgeon to make periodical visits to the school clinics and special schools to examine crippled children’. Those needing admission ‘are sent to King Edward VII Hospital, Sheffield, or to other orthopaedic hospital schools’. The Council maintained three special day schools for children with disabilities, at Firth Park, Highfield, and Nether Green. And the general welfare of the city’s disabled children fell to the Sheffield Cripples’ Aid Association of 33 Union Street, which visited them in their own homes, ran classes in boot-repairing and needlework, supplied appliances, carriages, extra nourishment, boots, and clothes, and looked after those leaving the schools for the ‘physically defective’.
Read on its own, the entry is a model of orderly provision. A surgeon visits, a child is examined, a child is sent, a charity calls at the house. Everything has been arranged. What the directory cannot show, because it was never built to, is what any of this felt like from the inside.
The child the record could not hold
Harry Drabble was sent to King Edward VII in July 1937, two years after this directory was published, when he was two and a half. He travelled the seven miles from home by ambulance, the first time he had been in a motor vehicle and the first time he had travelled without a parent; his mother was not allowed to follow. On the babies’ quarantine ward, he was strapped into a steel cot, without a soft toy or a familiar blanket, both forbidden as an infection risk. He was still in pain, and there was no one to soothe him. None of this is in the directory. The directory records only that Sheffield’s in-patients ‘are sent to King Edward VII Hospital’. Harry was one of the children that sentence is about.
The same gap opens over the Cripples’ Aid Association. The directory lists what it provided. Harry remembered what it was like to be on the receiving end. The Association, which he knew as the ‘Sunbeam Club’, sent a volunteer to the house every month he was home. He found the visits ‘excruciating’. He recalled being ‘inspected regularly: hair, teeth, eyes and fingernails’, and called it ‘insulting’. The visitors were well-meaning middle-class women who, he thought, did not understand that they were insulting his family, his home, and his community. Harry’s verdict was blunt: ‘I didn’t need Cripple’s Aid. In my head, I wasn’t a cripple’. The directory’s tidy line about home visiting and the supply of boots and clothes is true. It is simply not the whole truth, and the part it leaves out is the part that lasted.
The directory is honest about its silences, if you read the right page. Under ‘Omissions’ it explains that it makes no mention of the ordinary methods of finding children in need of treatment, since it is presumed that medical officers and health visitors are already on the look-out, and that at every clinic ‘it is assumed that massage is given, remedial exercises taught, and plaster-work undertaken’. Only the exceptional is recorded; the ordinary is taken as read.
This is exactly how institutional records behave. They note the unusual and pass over the routine, where most of a child’s life is actually lived. A hospital admission register records a name, an address, and the part of the body under treatment. It has no line for the steel cot, or for the mother who was not allowed to follow. The directory is built the same way. It records what a city provided. What that provision did to a child was never its subject.
Reading a directory in your own research
This is the value of such a source to anyone tracing a disabled ancestor, and the trap in it. A county directory of institutions is a genuine finding aid. If you know roughly when and where a relative was treated, it will tell you which hospitals, homes, and schools existed in that district, who ran them, and to whom application would have been made, which in turn points to where surviving records might now be held. But it will only ever give you the official shape of a life. To recover the life itself, you need the other sources: the school admission book, the doctor’s notes, a photograph, and above all the testimony: the things a relative said about what was done to them and how it felt. Read together, the directory and the testimony do what neither can do alone. The directory shows the system that received Harry. Harry shows us what the system could not see.
It is worth holding both in mind at once. The 1935 directory could have predicted, more or less, where a Sheffield boy with tubercular disease of the hip would be sent in 1937, and what welfare would call at his door once he was home. It could not predict, and did not follow, what he made of it: the self-taught reading, the violin, the struggle to be seen and to find work as a man with a physical disability, and the long, ordinary triumph of a life. That was never the records’ to give. It is ours to recover.
Harry Drabble’s childhood is recovered in ‘Yet’: A Story of Triumph Over Childhood Separation, Trauma, and Disability, by Helen Parker-Drabble.
Where can I find the 1935 Directory of Orthopaedic Institutions?
Original copies are rare. Library Hub Discover lists holdings at the British Library, the National Library of Wales, and the Wellcome Collection in London, where the directory can be consulted. in person. No copy has yet been digitised, so I am preparing a complete, searchable scan and will make it freely available here.
Would it help if I digitised a copy? Email me if you want this resource helen@helenparkerdrabble.com.
Download the free guide: How to access British medical records
Read more about Harry’s story here
About Helen
Helen Parker-Drabble is a Bristol-based author, speaker, and former counsellor whose work sits at the intersection of family history, local history, and psychology. Her series Who Do I Think You Were?® brings ordinary lives into focus through a psychological lens, exploring how childhood experience, trauma, and social circumstances shape individuals across generations. Her second book, ‘Yet’: A Story of Triumph Over Childhood Separation, Trauma, and Disability (2025), on which this article draws, chronicles the life of her father Harry Drabble, from his diagnosis with bovine tuberculosis in 1937 to his remarkable refusal to accept the limits a discriminatory society placed upon him. ‘Yet’ won a Silver Award, Nonfiction Authors Association Book Awards 2026, and was named Runner-up, Best Hardcopy Publication, Alan Ball Local History Awards 2025.