Forgotten history: A child’s experience of bovine tuberculosis - Helen Parker-Drabble | Author | Speaker | Former counsellor

‘No one believed me. “Children couldn’t have been treated like that.”

But we were.‘ Harry Drabble

In 1937, Harry Drabble, a lively and cherished two-and-a-half-year-old, was torn from his mother’s arms after being diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis (bTB). This traumatic event irrevocably changed the course of Harry’s life. But he was not the only child to be affected. Tens of thousands of children contracted the disease unnecessarily from drinking infected milk, and were taken away from their families for treatment lasting months, but often years.

Harry Drabble, aged 18 months 1936.

Harry was the beloved only child of May, née Turner, and his father, Harry Drabble Senior. They were a happy working-class couple who married in 1933. After overcoming Harry Senior’s initial reluctance to start a family, May gave birth to their blond, blue-eyed son in Sheffield in December 1934.

On Christmas Eve, May and Harry were thrilled to move their three-week-old baby to their new house at 44 Butterthwaite Road on the Shiregreen council estate.

Harry said later:

Shiregreen was a desirable estate. When we moved in, it was a model estate and the people in it had to have a minimum standard of earnings and education to be allowed to live there.

Their home had an upstairs bathroom, a downstairs toilet and a garden to soothe Harry after his gruelling shifts in the steelworks. Their new house was quite a step up. The couple had come from an area that George Orwell described in his book, The Road to Wigan Pier:^[i]

One particular picture of Sheffield stays by me. A frightful piece of waste ground… trampled quite bare of grass and littered with newspaper, old saucepans etc. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four-room houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney behind chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze.

The couple were overjoyed in their new home, and May immersed herself in caring for her infant. She rejected the chaotic parenting of her alcoholic parents, instead finding guidance from her steady and religious grandmother, Eliza Bunting, née Chadwick. May took great pride in Harry, and entered him into a parish baby competition when he was six months old. To her delight, he won first prize.

This happy time was shattered when he started limping at around two years old. After multiple doctors’ visits, Harry was referred to orthopaedic surgeon Dr Creswell Lee Pattison at the Royal Hospital in July 1937. He diagnosed Harry with bovine tuberculosis in his left hip and right elbow, and a nurse wrenched the toddler from May’s protective hold to admit him to the children’s ward. Harry vividly recalled the traumatic memory of being separated from his mother. His frantic screams and cries went unheeded.

The chronic bacterial infection had entered his body through contaminated milk delivered to his home by a local dairy. Bovine tuberculosis was a shame-filled condition where the parents were often blamed for their child becoming ill. The diagnosis meant the child was usually excluded from school, work and often relationships inside and outside the family.

Harry could see a ‘child-friendly’ clock on the children’s ward as he lay in his iron-barred cot. He focused intently on the black metal silhouette of a girl and boy dancing either side of its face ‘because a nurse had pointed at it and said, “When that figure gets round to there your mother will come.” Of course, she never did.’ The betrayal Harry experienced when the hands lined up and his mother did not appear was acute. He said it taught him that people were unreliable, but added ‘everyone has experiences like that’.

He was transferred to the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children, or ‘Rivelin’ as Harry came to call it. He was isolated and silenced, and he experienced sensory deprivation while being immobilised for many months at a time. Harry received no emotional support or physical affection from the staff. Comfort items, toys and books were forbidden, on the grounds they could be an infection risk. As instructed, the nurses did not talk or play with their small charges. They focused on routine bodily tasks like feeding, washing and changing.

To relieve Harry’s pain, maintain joint stability and possibly improve future mobility, his hip joint had to be kept still. He was first strapped to a Jones double hip-abduction frame. This fixed his legs in a triangle position for months.

A child in a Jones double hip-abduction frame. Wellcome Collection reference: 29326i.

When this failed, Dr Pattison ordered Pugh’s method of slinging. This meant Harry’s left thigh was put in traction and fixed to a bar at the foot of a tilted bed.[i] It was imperative he did not try to sit up, so the nurses kept him strapped down. After five months, he was encased in plaster of Paris from under his armpit down the full length of his body with holes to allow him to urinate and defecate. A bar between his legs kept the structure rigid.[ii]^{, [iii]} Early each morning, whatever the weather, a student nurse pushed Harry’s bed on to the purpose-built covered colonnade outside his ward for his fresh air treatment. Each bed was covered with a tarpaulin when it rained or snowed.

A staged photograph of girls taking fresh air treatment at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children, c1920-1939.
Licensed image from Picture Sheffield.

After six weeks’ ‘settling in’, Harry was allowed only one parent, for one hour, once a month, if he was lucky. His parents had no say in his medical care. They couldn’t cuddle him or tell him when he could come home. Staff believed parents made their children unhappy by visiting. In reality, the visits simply revealed the child’s existing distress at their enforced separation.

According to psychiatrist John Bowlby’s emerging research on attachment theory and childhood development, Harry and the children with him were experiencing profound psychological harm. He progressed through predictable stages of separation anxiety: desperate protest through inconsolable crying, despair and emotional withdrawal, and, finally, defensive detachment from his parents and nurses.

Without proper nurturing, Harry was left isolated and emotionally damaged during his critical early years. He also witnessed the raw suffering of children undergoing excruciating lumbar punctures. The combination of emotional neglect and lack of stimulation affected Harry deeply. His innate curiosity and liveliness were replaced by anger, shame and distrust.

The young orthopaedic student nurses who cared for him were not purposefully unkind. However, they operated under strict hierarchies and protocols that did not recognise children’s emotional needs. Rotating wards, overwork and their own immaturity hindered empathy. They became numb to the children’s cries and were conditioned to avoid ‘spoiling’ them with affection.

On the first day of World War II, 1939, the hospital released as many children as possible. Without warning, Harry was discharged for the first time, aged five, after over two years of being immobilised. He emerged a changed child and arrived home to a city readying itself for war. He did not know how to live with his parents, nor they him. The house had been redecorated and his toys were gone. Harry was overwhelmed. He struggled to reconnect with his parents and could not process the trauma of his hospital experience. He also knew he would be sent back to Rivelin, but not when.

Hundreds of thousands of children nationwide suffered similar fates, written off and forgotten by a society which rejected them. Harry’s story sheds light on this dark, forgotten time in British history. It is a testament to generations of children who, like Harry, endured months and years of treatment and emotional and social deprivation.

If this history is one your own family lived through, whether you knew it as a child yourself, watched a parent or grandparent carry it, or have only begun to uncover it in the records, I would be glad to hear from you. Please email me at helen@helenparkerdrabble.com.