Description:Other children with health and learning problems were less well served. In the middle of the 19th century Birmingham opened a Lunatic Asylum for Paupers in Winson Green. Extensive records were kept about the patients. In these records we can find case notes which enable us to identify individual children. However, none of the statistical reports produced by the Medical Superintendents of the Asylum indicate the presence of children. Children who had severe learning difficulties and epilepsy were confined for the purpose of protecting society at large. These children are hidden within the records and their lives have been generally forgotten. Most of them died inside the asylum in their teens. It was not until the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act that the practice of placing children in asylums ceased.
Ellen Allport entered All Saints Asylum for Pauper Lunatics when she was 7 years old. She is described as insane from birth and epileptic. However, a later case note describes her as having been ‘much neglected in education’ but having ‘exhibited no good reason for being here’. Ellen told a nurse that she had been sent to All Saints for being naughty. She died following a series of fits in 1880 aged 15.