When two-and-a-half-year-old Harry Drabble was admitted to a Sheffield hospital in 1937, his mother was allowed to see him for one hour, once a month. That was not the rule of one harsh institution. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, British hospitals kept sick children and their parents apart by design, believing they were being kind. This is how the rule worked, why it lasted so long, and what it took to undo it.
On the children’s ward at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children, in Sheffield’s Rivelin Valley, there was a clock with the black metal silhouette of a boy and a girl dancing on either side of its face. A nurse pointed to it and told Harry Drabble that when the figure came round to a certain point, his mother would come. He fixed on it with the whole of his attention. She did not come. Harry was freshly separated from his parents, and still in pain from a tuberculous hip. He remembered the betrayal for the rest of his life. It taught him, he said, that people are unreliable.1
There is no reason to think the nurse was unkind. She was working inside a system that had a rule, and the rule was not hers to change.
The rule at Rivelin
The rule was exact, and the single monthly hour was hemmed about with conditions. Only one close adult relative could come, never two together, and only on a Sunday. A postcard might cancel even that at short notice, and without a word of explanation. It was about six weeks after Harry was admitted before he was allowed any visitor at all. When his parents came, they could not lift or hold him because he was strapped to a tilted frame or encased from chest to ankle in plaster.2 His mother, May, told her family long afterwards that for months she would wake in the night believing she could hear him crying.3
To a small child, none of this was a rule at all. A two-year-old does not grasp visiting hours, or infection control, or a postcard that cancelled a visit. Harry knew only that his mother had been there, and then was not. The rules belonged to the adults. The absence belonged to him.
This was not cruelty peculiar to Sheffield, nor to this one hospital. It was the ordinary practice of the age.
How common were these visiting rules?
At Great Ormond Street, the most celebrated children’s hospital in the country, mothers were received on Thursday afternoons and fathers on Sundays, and from 1939 the hospital suspended visiting altogether from the beginning of January to the end of March.4 The Westminster Infants’ Hospital did not allow parents to visit at all.5 Against that, Rivelin’s monthly hour could almost look generous, and Harry’s parents, who never missed a permitted visit, were among the fortunate; some children, kept far from home by poverty, work, or the sheer difficulty of the journey, went years without seeing their families.6
How little a parent could expect is plain from a 1949 survey of London’s teaching hospitals. At Guy’s, visiting was allowed once a week, on Sunday afternoons. At St Thomas’s, a newly admitted child was allowed no visit at all for the first month. Restricted visiting was not a quirk of the poorer or the provincial hospital; it was the settled policy of the institutions at the very centre of British medicine.7 Figures cited in the House of Commons in 1955 suggested that, even then, several hundred of the roughly 1,362 hospitals admitting children still did not permit a daily visit.8
The reason given was almost always infection. A crowded children’s ward was a reservoir of cross-infection, and a visiting parent was thought to carry contagion in with them. Yet by the time these rules were at their most rigid, the argument was already faltering: a British Paediatric Association investigation in 1945 had found no demonstrable link between parental visiting and cross-infection.9 The barrier stayed up long after the evidence for it had come down.
‘A quiet child was a happy one’
Infection was the stated reason. Beneath it lay a belief about children themselves. Most doctors and nurses held that a quiet child was a contented one, and that visits from parents only stirred children up and made them harder to manage. Children were therefore left to ‘settle’, and a child who had stopped crying was counted as settled.10
We can hear that conviction, undiluted, in the voice of the medical superintendent. Dr E. G. Herzog, who became superintendent at the King Edward VII in 1952 and was remembered fondly by Harry, was still defending the old regime decades later. Writing in 1986, he maintained that daily visiting was ‘quite unnecessary’ for children like these, that they soon adjusted, made friends with particular nurses, and formed little groups among themselves, and that those old enough to understand showed no sign of feeling abandoned by their parents.11 His confidence is on record. Whether it was warranted is exactly the question the children could not be asked, and it is hard to believe he had spent many of his evenings watching how the wards felt after the visitors, such as they were, had gone home.
One further possibility is worth raising, and it can be no more than that. Some doctors who defended these rules had been trained within a professional culture shaped by public-school assumptions: discipline, emotional restraint, and the belief that separation from home could be formative rather than harmful. For those who had themselves been sent away as boys, such assumptions may have made it easier to believe that children adjusted and that separation did no lasting damage. This is not a fact to be asserted of any particular doctor, but it is a thought worth holding.
Robertson, Bowlby, and the evidence of harm
The children’s quiet was not peace. By the early 1950s, a few people had begun to say so and to prove it. In 1952, James Robertson, a social worker on John Bowlby’s team at the Tavistock Clinic, filmed a little girl he called Laura, two years and five months old, through an eight-day stay at the Central Middlesex Hospital in London. A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital is hard to watch precisely because so little appears to happen: a composed child, visited only briefly, withdraws by degrees into a frozen, over-controlled calm that an untrained eye could mistake for having settled in.12 Robertson and Bowlby named the sequence beneath it, the movement from loud protest, through despair, to a detachment that looked like recovery and was in fact its opposite.13
One detail from the film throws Harry’s case into relief. Laura was allowed to keep a scrap of her old blanket, which she called her ‘baby’, and her teddy, and clung to them throughout as a thread back to home.14 Harry, admitted fifteen years earlier to a tuberculosis quarantine ward, was allowed no such comfort: a familiar toy or blanket was ruled an infection risk.15 The very things that soothe a frightened child had been judged a hazard.
Others had seen the damage without naming it. When children’s visiting was debated in the Commons in 1952, members described children who came home from hospital changed: clinging, waking in terror, wetting the bed. The architecture of separation could be brutally literal. A 1941 photograph from the King Edward VII Memorial Children’s Hospital in Ladywood, Birmingham, a different institution that shared the royal name, shows a mother permitted only to look at her own baby through a glass screen, ‘to prevent infection’.16 She could see her child. She could not reach him.
What the Platt Report changed, and how slowly
The tide turned, at least on paper. In 1956, the Ministry of Health appointed a committee under Sir Harry Platt to study the welfare of children in hospital, as distinct from their medical treatment. Its report, The Welfare of Children in Hospital, appeared in 1959 and made fifty-five recommendations. The one that mattered most here was also the simplest: ‘Parents should be allowed to visit whenever they can’, and to share in the care of their child.17
Platt reframed the hospitalised child as a person with feelings, and not merely a body with a diseased joint. But the report could only advise; it could not compel. Hospital authorities kept their discretion, and many kept their habits. A decade later, a 1969 survey by the National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital found that a large share of hospitals still did not truly allow open visiting, and that ‘unrestricted’ could still mean half an hour a day, no mornings, or, on isolation wards, a child seen only through glass.18 As late as 1976 the Court Report found that, among hospitals caring for children for longer than four months, fewer than half allowed unrestricted visiting or offered a parent a bed for the night.19 Even after Platt, as one history of the period puts it, ‘institutional resistance and inertia meant that the pace of change was glacial’.20
What hospital records show, and what they leave out
This is why visiting rules matter to anyone tracing a relative who spent part of childhood in hospital. The institutional record will tell you a great deal: when a child was admitted, what was wrong, how long they stayed, sometimes the ward and the surgeon. It will rarely tell you they were allowed a visitor once a month, and never that a nurse pointed to a clock and made a promise the rules would break. For that, you need the other sources, and above all the testimony: what a relative remembered, and how it shaped the years that followed.
Harry remembered the clock. He remembered the figure that danced towards the hour his mother was meant to appear, and the moment the hands lined up and she did not. The admission register has no column for that. It is what does not survive in the record at all. That part of a life was never the hospital’s to keep. It is ours to recover.
If you, or someone in your family, remember these visiting rules, I would like to hear from you, at helen@helenparkerdrabble.com.
Harry Drabble’s childhood is recovered in ‘Yet’: A Story of Triumph Over Childhood Separation, Trauma, and Disability, by Helen Parker-Drabble.
Notes
1. ‘Yet’, p. 29 (the ward clock; that it taught him people are unreliable).
2. ‘Yet’, pp. 40–41 (one relative, never two together, only on a Sunday; cancellation by postcard; about six weeks before the first visitor; unable to be lifted or held because of the frame or plaster).
3. ‘Yet’, p. 26 (May waking in the night believing she heard him crying).
5. The Westminster Infants’ Hospital’s exclusion of parental visiting is recorded in its House and Finance Committee minutes, entry for 16 February 1932, cited in Arton, M. E. (1992), Development of Sick Children’s Nursing 1919–1939, unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Bath. The example also appears in ‘Yet’, pp. 40–41.
6. ‘Yet’, p. 40 (cheap bus tickets for parents; some children unseen for years; Harry’s family never missing a permitted visit).
7. The 1949 survey of London hospitals is reported in Van der Horst, F. C. P. and van der Veer, R. (2009), ‘Changing attitudes towards the care of children in hospital: a new assessment of the influence of the work of Bowlby and Robertson in the UK, 1940–1970’, Attachment & Human Development, 11(2), pp. 119–142.
8. The House of Commons debate of 31 October 1955 (Hansard).
10. ‘Yet’, p. 40 (the belief that a quiet child was a happy one; children left to ‘settle’).
11. A history of King Edward VII Orthopaedic Hospital Sheffield by Dr E. G. Herzog, 1986, quoted in ‘Yet’, pp. 46–47.
12. Robertson, J. (1952), A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital (film), Tavistock Child Development Research Unit, made at the Central Middlesex Hospital, London. Laura’s age and the eight-day stay: Bowlby, J. and Robertson, J. (1953), ‘A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 46, p. 425.
13. James Robertson and John Bowlby on protest, despair and detachment; see Robertson, ‘Some Responses of Young Children to Loss of Maternal Care’, Nursing Times, 49, April 1953, pp. 382–386; and Robertson papers, Wellcome Library, PP/ROB. The protest, despair, and detachment sequence is discussed in ‘Yet’, chapter 3.
15. ‘Yet’, p. 28 (a familiar toy or blanket forbidden as an infection risk).
16. Post-discharge distress: House of Commons debate, 26 March 1952 (Hansard). The photograph: Historic England Archive, MED01/01/2177, King Edward VII Memorial Children’s Hospital, Ladywood, Birmingham, 1941 (Topical Press Agency Medical Collection). This is the Birmingham hospital, not Harry’s King Edward VII in Sheffield.
17. Ministry of Health, The Welfare of Children in Hospital (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1959), p. 38. The committee was appointed in 1956 under Sir Harry Platt and made fifty-five recommendations: Davies, R. (2010), ‘Marking the 50th anniversary of the Platt Report’, Journal of Child Health Care, 14(1).
19. Committee on Child Health Services (Court Report), Fit for the Future (1976).
20. Quoted in ‘Yet’, p. 46.
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 experiences, 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.