12 April 2022 marks the centenary of a dramatic strike led by Nottinghamshire female nurses at Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital, Saxondale. They were protesting against wage cuts and increased hours which were being forced on them by their employer, Nottinghamshire County Council. The strike is remarkable for the women’s determination to stand up for their rights, the support they received from the National Asylum Workers Union, and the violent tactics used to evict them from the hospital.
Rosemary Collins, from the Nottinghamshire Nursing History Group, has researched the strike in-depth and describes below what happened on that fateful day a hundred years ago. Her article was first published in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Labour History Society Newsletter (April 2022) and it is reproduced here with their kind permission. To find out more about the Society, you can visit the NDLHS Facebook home page.
12 April 2022 marks the centenary of ‘perhaps the most sensational strike of modern times’ which took place at Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital.[i] The strike, led by female nurses, was a protest against proposals by Nottinghamshire County Council to increase hours and decrease wages. After a four-hour battle the nurses were evicted. Sixty-six staff were sacked that day; the authorities described their actions as ‘insubordination’ and ‘misconduct’.[ii]
Proposals for a longer working week and wage cuts were put forward by the hospital’s Committee of Visitors, a subgroup of Nottinghamshire county councillors with responsibility for managing the institution. Their duties stemmed from the Lunacy and County Asylums Acts of 1845 which compelled local authorities to make institutional provision for ‘paupers’ suffering from mental illnesses. Visiting Committees oversaw the work of those running institutions, notably the Medical Superintendent, Clerk and Steward, Matron, and Head Male Attendant, and sent reports to their county councils on matters concerning patient admissions and discharges, staff changes, finances, and maintenance. The 1845 Acts also created a national Commission in Lunacy under the remit of the Home Office, to conduct regular asylum inspections. The Commissioners’ reports highlighted issues that needed addressing; its duties were transferred to a Board of Control in 1913. This system of governance, common to all public asylums, remained in place until the National Health Service brought in much needed reforms after its introduction in 1948.
Nottinghamshire County Asylum’s Committee of Visitors, none of whom were medically qualified, included wealthy landowners, old Etonians and farmers; they were predominantly Conservatives. Viscount Galway, for instance, a Nottinghamshire Committee of Visitors member for many years, had been an aide de camp to Queen Victoria and a Conservative MP.
The asylum they governed was located at Saxondale, near Radcliffe on Trent; it opened in 1902 with beds for 450 patients. It was renamed Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital in 1919 when responsibilities for mental health care were transferred from the Home Office to the Ministry of Health. From the outset the institution aimed to practice an enlightened approach to its patients by supporting their leisure activities, encouraging contact with the local community and granting home visits where appropriate. Overcrowding, infectious diseases and staff shortages, which were common problems in asylums during the early-twentieth century, hindered the development of this approach.
Nottinghamshire County Asylum’s nurses, like their counterparts in asylums and mental hospitals across Britain, worked long hours for poor pay in difficult and frequently challenging situations. They had a poor public image and were considered inferior to nurses in general hospitals; they were excluded from the General Nursing Registers when the Registers became official in 1919.[iii] Female nurses in mental hospitals were especially oppressed. They were expected to set a moral example to their patients, restricted indoors in wards, laundries, and kitchens, and were paid less than men for doing equivalent work. They were not entitled to staff cottages and had to leave if they wanted to marry. Female nurses at Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital generally came from similar working-class backgrounds to their patients. They were often employed far from their homes coming from places such as Ireland, Wales and Tyneside. Male nurses, known at this time as attendants, were more likely to come from Nottinghamshire; several were ex-servicemen. Nurses and attendants had little in common with the Committee of Visitors and none of their class advantages; the two groups were socially, politically and culturally distinct.
Cover of the National Asylum Workers Union Magazine (1912).
The National Asylum Workers Union (NAWU), established in 1910, protected workers’ rights and advocated reforms. In the 1920s, for instance, it campaigned for the state registration of mental hospitals and the abolition of visiting committees.[iv] The Union became heavily involved from 1918 onwards with its members in several hospitals who were engaging in strike action over pay and hours. For a short time it appeared that strike action led to improvements. A Joint Conciliation Committee, set up in 1920 with a newly formed Mental Hospitals Association, representing employers, and the National Asylum Workers Union, representing workers, introduced increased pay and a reduction in hours to sixty per week. The Nottinghamshire Committee of Visitors became members of the Mental Hospitals Association and upheld the Joint Conciliation Committee’s agreements over pay and hours until 1922.
The state of the national economy in the early 1920s resulted in the government putting pressure on local authorities to reduce their spending. Wage cuts were soon being planned for employees in the public sector. In February 1922 the Committee of Visitors, having insisted they were only subscribing members of the Joint Conciliation Committee and did not have to abide by its decisions, announced pay reductions and increased hours on notices posted around Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital. After weeks of staff agitation, which included a peaceful strike for four days at the beginning of March and several meetings with the NAWU, the Committee sacked its male and female nurses on 27 March. They were given new contracts to sign if they wished to continue their employment, to be returned within eight days. The new contracts reduced wages by ten per cent, increased hours from sixty to sixty-six and cut leave from four to three days a fortnight. The nurses had already agreed to accept a reduction in wages but rejected the proposal to increase their hours. Only four of the forty-two female nurses signed the new contracts but around half of the thirty-four male nurses did sign; several were married, lived in staff cottages and would have been fearful of losing their homes as well as their jobs. Threats by hospital officials accompanied demands to sign.
On 11 April the female nurses, supported by the NAWU, went on strike. Thirty-eight nurses barricaded themselves in wards with their patients and nine kitchen staff. The patients were well cared for and the day passed peacefully. A meeting took place that evening attended by male nurses and union officials; some of the men decided to join the strike the following morning. 12 April began with female nurses and patients still locked in their wards with tables and chairs piled up against the doors. Fourteen male nurses barricaded themselves in three of the men’s wards. The men resisted eviction but were soon overpowered by a large evicting force. The Committee of Visitors met during the morning and sacked all the strikers, together with five union members whom they had previously suspended. Female blacklegs hired by the Committee of Visitors were bussed in and waited in the recreation hall, ready to take over once the authorities gained control. The strike breaking force then prepared to deal with the women; it included around sixty-three policemen, twenty-five bailiffs and twenty-two hospital ground staff. The attacking force went into action at one o’clock when the bailiffs began breaking into the wards. This physical attack by a large group of men armed with hammers and crowbars was a blatant exercise of male power, authorised and encouraged by the Committee of Visitors. Seven female patients were ill with typhoid and an eighth patient was dying in one of the barricaded wards. The attackers carried on regardless. The nurses and house staff fought back and turned water hoses on their attackers before the supply was turned off. A male striker, interviewed many years later by researchers at the University of Warwick, said:
‘The patients were all sympathetic to us and on the female side they fought the police. One policeman had his hand bit. When a policeman put his hand on the nurse, the patient went for him. Louie Burley, the charge nurse, she weighed about fourteen stone and gave a policeman an uppercut, and by remarkable timing knocked him out. There were various incidents like this. They smashed windows; the patients tore legs off chairs … In some of the wards there was no glass at all left in the windows.’[v]
After four hours the strikers were forced out and held in the nurses’ sitting room, where they sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and other songs while waiting for the Union to escort them from the hospital. Their patients were left to be looked after by blacklegs. Although the patients may not have known the intricacies of the dispute, their loyalty and fierce determination to protect the nurses indicates that there was a strong bond between them.
The strike received extensive press coverage locally, nationally and internationally. Reports described it as ‘sensational’ because the governing body had ordered an attack on its staff, patients had rushed to protect their nurses, and hospital property was destroyed in the process. The National Asylum Workers Union regarded the incident as being in the vanguard of a general attack on workers’ rights in mental hospitals, which would be followed by a return to pre-war conditions. They were right: the Joint Conciliation Committee failed to maintain its agreement and the sixty-six-hour week was re-introduced in all mental hospitals run by local authorities in June 1922.[vi] The Committee of Visitors completed their authoritarian actions on 13 April by sacking a further six nurses and a housemaid. None participated in the strike but were probably union members. From the Committee’s point of view, the outcome of the strike was a ‘triumph’: they remained in charge and had, in their opinion, ‘crushed the union’.[vii]
The seventy-three sacked workers were given financial support from the NAWU: a lump sum grant of £100 for the seven married men involved and a maintenance grant of £1.50 a week, plus £5 when they obtained employment, for the remaining ex-employees. In May 1922 the NAWU magazine reported that the Committee of Visitors had circulated a blacklist of strikers’ names to other asylums, urging superintendents not to employ them. However, the July 1922 issue told readers ‘We are glad to state that the Radcliffe committee’s attempt to institute a boycott of the strikers has been a failure, as the majority of our Radcliffe evicted members have now been placed in employment most of them in institutional service’. It also noted that several hospitals had contacted the union to say they would ignore the blacklist.[viii] In the September 1922 issue, the NAWU announced that only twelve members were still receiving strike pay; the remainder had secured jobs.[ix]
The strike at Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital was a fundamental challenge to an institution characterised by an authoritarian system of governance. In protesting against proposals that were deleterious to their working conditions, the female nurses demonstrated women’s commitment to achieving change through radical actions as well as giving ‘a lesson in militancy and collective determination to the men’.[x] The centenary of the strike is a time to remember and commend their actions.
Rosemary Collins
Nottinghamshire Nursing History Group
Featured image: Interpretation of the strike by Italian illustrator Achille Beltrame, published in La Domenica del Corriere, 30 April 1922.
[i] ‘Amazing and sensational scenes at Radcliffe asylum’, Nottingham Journal, 15 April 1922.
[ii] ‘Notts Asylum Dispute’. “Insubordination by female staff”, Nottingham Guardian, 12April 1922.
[iii] Nolan, Peter (1993), pp 69–70, A History of Mental Health Nursing, London: Chapman & Hall.
[iv] NAWU Magazine, Vol.13, No.8. (August 1924), p.14.
[v] See ‘Herbert Hough, mental nurse interviewed in 1979’, http://www.warwick.ac.uk, MSS.229/6/C/CO/7/12.
[vi] NAWU Magazine, Vol.11, No.7, (July 1922).
[vii]‘From Our Correspondent, Nottingham 31’, The Times, 16 April 1922.
[viii] NAWU Magazine, Vol.11, No.7, (July 1922), p.12.
[ix] NAWU Magazine, Vol.11, No.9, (September 1922), p.12.
[x] M. Carpenter, Working for Health: A History of the Confederation of Health Service Employees (London, 1988), p.84.
Nottinghamshire Nursing History Group 
Hello, I have read the article with interest and would like to know if it would be possible to add it to the below named website under the Places/ ‘Hospitals’/ mental hospitals section. If i could ask that the author contacts me at the email address below I would be very grateful.
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