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MENTAL HEALTH IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Music and Moral

Management in the
Nineteenth-Century
English Lunatic Asylum
Rosemary Golding
 Mental Health in Historical Perspective

Series Editors
Catharine Coleborne, School of Humanities and Social Science,
University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia
Matthew Smith, Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare,
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Covering all historical periods and geographical contexts, the series
explores how mental illness has been understood, experienced, diagnosed,
treated and contested. It will publish works that engage actively with
contemporary debates related to mental health and, as such, will be
of interest not only to historians, but also mental health professionals,
patients and policy makers. With its focus on mental health, rather than
just psychiatry, the series will endeavour to provide more patient-centred
histories. Although this has long been an aim of health historians, it has
not been realised, and this series aims to change that.
The scope of the series is kept as broad as possible to attract good
quality proposals about all aspects of the history of mental health from
all periods. The series emphasises interdisciplinary approaches to the field
of study, and encourages short titles, longer works, collections, and titles
which stretch the boundaries of academic publishing in new ways.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14806
 Rosemary Golding

Music and Moral

Management
in the Nineteenth-
Century English
Lunatic Asylum
Rosemary Golding
Music Department
The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

ISSN 2634-6036 ISSN 2634-6044 (electronic)

Mental Health in Historical Perspective
ISBN 978-3-030-78524-6 ISBN 978-3-030-78525-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78525-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
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and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Colney Hatch, lunatic asylum. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Stephen
 Preface

Music, all pow‘rful o‘er the human mind!

Can still each mental storm, each tumult calm;
Soothe anxious care on sleepless couch reclin‘d,
And e‘en fierce anger‘s furious rage disarm.

At her command, the various passions lie,

She stirs to battle, or she lulls to peace,
Melts the charm‘d soul to thrilling ecstasy,
And bids the jarring world‘s harsh clangour cease.

Soft thro‘ the dell the dying strains retire,

Then burst majestic, in the varied swell,
Now, breathe melodious as the Grecian lyre,
Or on the ear, in sinking cadence dwell.

Oh! surely Harmony from Heav‘n was sent,

To cheer the soul when tir‘d with human strife;
To soothe the wayward heart by sorrow rent,
And soften down the rugged road of life.1

I have long had an interest in the relationship between music, health

and wellbeing, particularly in historical contexts. The current project,
however, came about unexpectedly: when searching through advertise-
ments for organists during the 1860s I came across a couple of notices
seeking an organist for a pauper lunatic asylum. At the time I knew
next to nothing about mental health provision during the nineteenth

vii
viii PREFACE

century, nothing about the large, state-run institutions that took care of
the majority of poor patients during this period, and certainly nothing
about any music that may or may not have taken place within their walls. It
has been a voyage of discovery exploring the institutions, ideas and people
that made up such an enormous network, through the immense volume of
archival documents and other resources left behind. From visiting many of
the extant buildings to tracing individuals through census records, exam-
ining photos of now-anonymous attendants in the band to deciphering
the riddles of a concert programme, the project has presented surprises,
joys and challenges.
The asylums of the nineteenth century were enormous institutions,
often beautiful buildings, with a small army of staff required to service the
community based there. Yet the legacy and reputation of the nineteenth-
century asylums is often contradictory and difficult to resolve. Osten-
sibly part of the Victorians’ great philanthropic project, asylums were—on
paper—intended to protect (both those inside and those outside), offering
safe haven and the possibility of care and cure. Yet popular imagery more
often reflects the horrors of overcrowded institutions, in an age where
advances in both public sanitation and the understanding of mental illness
were still woefully primitive. Many of the original asylums were in use as
National Health Service hospitals and private institutions until the late
twentieth century. While a few remain in active medical use, the majority
have been repurposed as accommodation, or are in a state of disrepair.
It has been a pleasure to visit many of the institutions I have studied;
the engineering and design behind the original buildings are just small
remaining testimonies to the enormity of the asylum project as it devel-
oped through the nineteenth century. Yet to confront the buildings is
also, in some small way, to confront the reality of life for the individuals
who lived and worked in asylums, and whose everyday experiences I have
been investigating.
The same dichotomy is to be found in archive holdings: the sanitised
accounts of medical officers in annual reports and formal documents tell
of patient numbers, management strategies, expenses and problems, but it
is in the patient case books and collections of patient letters and writings
that the pain, anguish and despair of individuals is stark. It is not surprising
that some of the archival research I have undertaken has been discom-
forting. Archive documents from this context use words and concepts that
make us ill at ease. The ready discussion of ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’, the
regular admission of women suffering from mental illness associated with
 PREFACE ix

childbirth or menstruation, the inclusion of young children as patients,

the reduction of human beings to numbers and tables: all of these chal-
lenge the historian to balance the claims of Victorian progressives with
the realities of poverty and incarceration. My focus on music and moral
management has often meant skimming the surface of asylum life, setting
aside the personal, lived experiences of individual patients as too often
absent from accounts of everyday existence. Throughout this project I
have attempted to balance my absorption into the worlds of my protago-
nists—chiefly the medical officers and other management associated with
the asylums—with a reflective sense that I am largely missing the voices
of patients, their friends and families, attendants, nurses and other junior
staff.
The power of music, particularly in relation to mental health medicine,
is a slippery topic. Delving into both the history and current practice
of music therapy has been a fascinating introduction to the close links
between music, the mind and the body. I have only been able to touch
upon the immense skill and knowledge of music therapists, and remain
in awe of their increasingly important work in a complex world. As
Henry White (1785–1806) suggests in his poem ‘On Music’, repro-
duced at the head of this preface, music really does touch the ear, the
soul and the passions. The varied forces at work under Music’s power,
as described in White’s rather archaic and romanticised verse, still chal-
lenge those working to harness music within medical contexts. Since the
earliest records of antiquity music’s particular abilities to move the human
soul, to communicate, unite communities and to heal have been studied
and exploited. The efforts of nineteenth-century English mad doctors to
achieve the same represent but a minor part of this ongoing exploration,
but I hope go some way to enlightening this small corner of the history
of music, medicine, culture, and society.
The two parts of this volume are complementary. Both offer new mate-
rial. In the first, the broader picture and historical context of the English
asylum, as well as the idea of moral management, are addressed, together
with an examination of the ways in which music was used in the asylum
system, and more broadly with medical and moral associations. The three
chapters in this part draw on published theoretical texts as well as reports
and examples from specific asylums. I also consider the methodological
and terminological challenges of my subject matter. In the second part,
a series of case studies allow for individual institutional narratives, prob-
lems and sources to be considered in detail. Balancing public and private
x PREFACE

asylums, larger and smaller, and those founded towards the start of the
nineteenth century (or earlier) with later foundations, I build up a dense
web of material addressing both the forms of music found within the
English nineteenth-century asylum, and the ways in which music was
considered part of the therapeutic regime.
I completed this book during the year of the most seismic event to
affect my own life, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21. Never has the
healing power of music and the arts been so apparent. As musicians—
professional and amateur—took to the Internet with ever-more inventive
ways to share their art, others offered outdoor performances for neigh-
bours across balconies and back gardens, and community projects in song
and dance brought people together where physical meeting was outlawed.
Music provided the ultimate panacea. The uses of music as a community
facilitator, an accompaniment to dance and exercise, a link to ‘normal-
ity’ and as a means to connect, came closer to the spirit of music in the
nineteenth-century asylums than any form of modern music therapy. We
can only hope that music continues to be recognised and valued, in many
varied and wonderful ways, for its immense contribution to our lives and
wellbeing.
I am indebted to the array of archivists, cataloguers and conservators
who work to make material relating to the lunatic asylums available to
researchers and the general public. In particular, I am grateful to Frank
Meeres and staff at the Norfolk Record Office, Colin Gale at Bethlem
Museum of the Mind, Alexandra Medcalf and colleagues at the Borth-
wick Institute for Archives at the University of York, archivists and staff
at the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield, staff at the Worces-
tershire Archive and Archaeology Service, Helen Timlin and colleagues
at the Gloucestershire Archives and Julian Pooley and colleagues at the
Surrey History Centre. I gained important insights from the displays at
the George Marshall Medical Museum and Infirmary Museum at the
University of Worcester and am grateful to staff at both museums for
their help. I am also indebted to David Juritz, who welcomed me into his
home for a day to sift through some of the vast collection of band music
from the Norfolk Asylum.
I am fortunate to have the benefit of rich and supportive academic
communities. Colleagues at The Open University have encouraged my
research interests, and I have had many useful conversations with the
network based around the Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain confer-
ence. Material from this volume was first presented as conference papers
 PREFACE xi

at the Royal Musical Association annual conference (2016), the Society

for the Social History of Medicine conference (2016), The Open Univer-
sity’s conference ‘The Hidden Musicians’ (2016), Anglia Ruskin Univer-
sity seminar series (2017), the Listening Experience Database study day
(2017), the Biannual Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(2017), the Bethlem Museum of the Mind (2017), The Open Universi-
ty’s Health and Wellbeing Research Spotlight (2021) and the conference
‘Between Centres and Peripheries’ hosted by the Centro Studi Opera
Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Lucca (2021). I am grateful for the feedback
and questions I received on these occasions. I am also indebted to my
anonymous readers, who have offered careful and detailed comments on
this and other publications, as well as to the editorial staff at Palgrave
Macmillan. Among the individuals who have inspired, encouraged and
deepened my research are Helen Barlow, Martin V. Clarke, Helen Coffey,
Byron Dueck, Trevor Herbert, Helen Odell Miller, David Rowland, Dave
Russell and Leonard Smith. Thank you.
The research presented here was supported by a Wellcome Trust
Research Expenses grant (2015–2016) [108497/Z/15/Z] which
allowed for vital time spent in archives during the early period of my study.
I am also grateful to The Open University for the provision of research
time and conference funding allowing me to complete my project and
share my early findings. Thank you also to Elaine Walker who assisted
with the Cheshire Asylum archives.
I am privileged indeed to have the support of many from my commu-
nity of friends and family, from the singers of the CSCC, the ‘Morden
Mummies’ and the online #WIASN. You have all sustained me in many
different ways. But it is to my family that the most fundamental apprecia-
tion must go. When I started this project in early 2014 I was engaged to
be married; as it nears completion I am blessed with a wonderful husband
and two beautiful daughters. I am enormously thankful to them all for
their forbearance as I travelled to archives and conferences, enthused
about former asylum buildings from the motorway (and dragged them
around several sites) and disappeared into my study for days on end.

Steeple Morden, UK Rosemary Golding

November 2020
xii PREFACE

Note
1. Verses selected from Henry Kirke White’s ‘On Music’, written in around
1800, as set to music by Thomas Attwood Walmisley (1814-1856) in about
1830.
 Contents

Part I Music, Health and Asylum Practice

1 Introduction 3
Music, Medicine and Morality 13
Researching and Writing the History of Music, Madness
and Medicine 26
2 Asylums, Moral Management and Music 41
The Nineteenth-Century Asylum 41
Moral Management 45
The Asylum in the Late-Nineteenth Century 52
Music and Moral Management 56
3 Music in the Asylum: An Overview 69
The Asylum Band and Dance 70
Concerts and Musical Performances 74
Music in Religious Practice 76
Music in the Patient Quarters 79
Music and Gender 81
Music and Class 82
Music, Noise and the Soundscape of the Asylum 83
Therapy, Moral Management and the Purposes of Music 86
Case Studies 92

xiii
xiv CONTENTS

Part II Case Studies: Pauper Asylums

4 Norfolk County Asylum: Moral Management
and the Asylum Band 105
5 West Riding Asylum: Music and Theatre
in the Large-Scale Pauper Asylum 129
6 Gloucester Asylum: Private, Charitable and Pauper
Patients 157
7 Worcestershire County Asylum: Patients, Staff,
and Professional Musicians 177
8 Brookwood Asylum: Music at the Centre of Moral
Therapy 199

Part III Case Studies: Private and Charitable Asylums

9 Bethlem Hospital: Talented Staff in an Urban Setting 237
10 The York Retreat: Moral Management and Music
in a Quaker Context 273
11 Barnwood House: Music in the Small Asylum 289
12 Holloway Sanatorium: The Middle-Class Experience 299

Part IV Conclusion
13 Conclusion 319

Bibliography 339
Index 359
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 West Riding ‘Mental Hospital Band, 1899’ C85/1401

(Reproduced by permission of West Yorkshire Archive
Service, Wakefield) 149
Fig. 5.2 West Riding Asylum Band [c. 1900] C85/1400
(Reproduced by permission of West Yorkshire Archive
Service, Wakefield) 150
Fig. 5.3 West Riding Asylum Band [c. 1900] C85/1402
(Reproduced by permission of West Yorkshire Archive
Service, Wakefield) 151
Fig. 8.1 Brookwood Asylum Band [1873–1883] in Photograph
Album 3043/1/20/7, 38 (Reproduced by permission
of Surrey History Centre) 213
Fig. 8.2 Brookwood Minstrels in Photograph Album c. 1896
3043/1/20/7, 37 (Reproduced by permission of Surrey
History Centre) 217
Fig. 8.3 Brookwood Asylum Band [1889–1896] in Photograph
Album 3043/1/20/7, 37 (Reproduced by permission
of Surrey History Centre) 218
Fig. 8.4 Brookwood Asylum Band c. 1890 [1885–1889] in folder
3043/10/2/7 (Reproduced by permission of Surrey
History Centre) 219
Fig. 8.5 Brookwood Asylum Band [1895–1896] in folder
3043/10/2/7 (Reproduced by permission of Surrey
History Centre) 220

xv
xvi LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.1 The Hospital of Bethlem [Bedlam], St. George’s Fields,

Lambeth: the female workroom. Wood engraving probably
by F. Vizetelly after F. Palmer, 1860 (Wellcome Collection.
Attribution 4.0 International [CC BY 4.0]) 245
Fig. 9.2 Bethlehem Royal Hospital Glee and Madrigal Society
Concert Programme 17 March 1879 in BEN-01 volume
of programmes and ephemera (Reproduced by permission
of Bethlem Museum of the Mind) 249
Fig. 9.3 Bethlem Nubian Minstrels Programme 15 January
1889 in BEN-01 volume of programmes and ephemera.
Reproduced by permission of Bethlem Museum
of the Mind 253
 List of Tables

Table 8.1 Bandmasters at Brookwood 1889–1907 216

Table 8.2 Organists at Brookwood 1867–1905 227

xvii
 PART I

Music, Health and Asylum Practice

 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The band again struck up, and this time it was for a mazurka, which was
as well danced as the quadrille. I was considerably puzzled at the whole
scene, and I inquired of one of the assistants, what class of patients they
were who conducted themselves in so orderly a manner?
“They are of all classes, sir,” he replied; “the majority are prisoners for
various offences—burglars, thieves, and murderers.”
“Murderers! Are there any murderers here?”
“About thirty,” he answered, quietly, and without anything like aversion
in his tone or manner.
… “But are you not afraid of a disturbance?”
“Not the least, sir. The band are all trained warders, and there are
several in the room as well. Among the women also there are several female
warders.”
I waited some time longer, and heard two or three songs, and saw as
many dances, all conducted with the greatest propriety, and then proposed
leaving – finding myself more shocked than amused at the scene.1

So the writer and reformer William Gilbert (1804–1890) described a visit

to the Fisherton House asylum near Salisbury, a private lunatic asylum
established in 1813 which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, also
accepted pauper and criminal lunatics. Gilbert’s 1864 article draws on his
interests in social responsibility and the dangers of alcohol, but also gives
insights into the practices of moral management and their perception by

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

Switzerland AG 2021
R. Golding, Music and Moral Management in the Nineteenth-Century
English Lunatic Asylum, Mental Health in Historical Perspective,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78525-3_1
4 R. GOLDING

the public. Like many authors of the mid- to late-nineteenth century,

he is astonished at the apparent power of music and dance to calm the
patients, to regulate behaviour and to create order. Yet the asylum ball
was only a part of a broader scheme of moral management developed at
English asylums during the nineteenth century, the attendants’ band part
of a wider musical experience, and the connection between music and
patient behaviour just one aspect of the complex relationship between
music, medicine, wellbeing and morality that formed an important—and
changing—part of music’s identity and status throughout the century.
Music history has long since moved beyond an exclusive focus on great
composers and music within concert halls. This is particularly true of
studies of music in nineteenth-century Britain, where the roles of music in
the private sphere, popular venues, music education and the street have all
been the subject of recent research.2 Studying the musical performances
and repertoires within lunatic asylums offers an opportunity to investi-
gate a new type of context for music, and the semi-isolated musical life
that developed within these closed communities. The numbers involved
in asylum music—performers in their hundreds, and tens of thousands
of patients and staff—mean that it deserves consideration as a significant
aspect of the musical life of nineteenth-century England. Medicine, and
Medical History, have similarly eschewed a closed, teleological, approach
to consider more broadly the social and cultural contexts of health and
wellbeing, and the effect of the arts, emotions and the individual. Both
Psychiatric Medicine and Music Therapy fall outside core medical prac-
tice, as do their histories. The history of music in asylums, however,
represents an important turning point: the first example in the UK of
music as therapy used widely and systematically, despite its lack of empir-
ical basis. This remained the case until the more widespread adoption of
similar practices among hospitals and recuperation clinics during World
War I. The role of music in asylums forms an important background to
the formal development of music as therapy from the 1890s, and as Music
Therapy from the mid-twentieth century.
The question of what music was played and heard within lunatic
asylums during the nineteenth century has been largely outside the
purview of musical, medical and cultural historians.3 This study draws on
a range of historical sources to examine the uses and meanings of music in
the English asylum during the nineteenth century. Looking outwards, it is
intended to prompt further consideration of music’s place in nineteenth-
century society more broadly: its meanings and functions, the ways it
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

related to class and status, and the styles and genres to be found in the
everyday lives of people across England. In this way it contributes to
an understanding of the philosophy and value of music in nineteenth-
century England. It is also directed towards interest in the potential value
of the history of music and medicine, particularly practice in institutional
contexts, for modern-day scholars and practitioners of Music Therapy and
Music Medicine.
Recent histories of mental illness and madness have (rightly) empha-
sised the importance of the experience of the ‘service user’ or patient,
exploring the multiplicity of narratives, authors and storytellers available
to the historian.4 The present volume adds yet another story, investi-
gating the roles in which formal and informal music making was used
and experienced within the asylums of nineteenth-century England. This
book offers a new perspective, cutting between the top-down focus on
institutions and regulations, and the more recent drive to represent the
voices of the patients or inmates. Following the trail of the music used
and experienced within the asylum gives a glimpse of the everyday sights
and sounds which accompanied patients and staff throughout their lives
within the institutions. At the same time, it offers new opportunities to
evaluate the therapeutic regimes and management structures at play. I
contend thatmusic was used both as a means of softening the experience
of incarceration in an asylum, and a contribution towards the control
and socialisation often associated with the nineteenth-century institu-
tions. Music helped to delineate structural spaces, asserting expectations
of behaviour as well as giving further weight to the patterns and bound-
aries which defined so much of patient life. Finally, it forms a central part
of the idealised world created for asylum patients by their middle- and
upper-class benefactors.
There is little here which addresses fully the ‘silencing’ of those
who experienced mental illness identified by Diana Gittens.5 Many of
the voices of nineteenth-century patients will remain silent, particularly
those from pauper backgrounds in the large, state-funded institutions,
for whom we have scant records. Indeed, the present volume draws less
on patient case notes than many studies of asylums, relying more heavily
on official documentation and ephemera. Yet in many ways I address the
literal silence of the institutions, to add a dimension to our impression
of its existence (and that of its residents) through the medium of sound
and music. In the case studies which comprise the second part of this
volume, the impact of the individual lives of asylum staff is given greater
6 R. GOLDING

prominence, while institutional narratives are examined through the lens

of attitudes towards, and provision of, musical entertainment. The minor
issues of finance, the fire which destroys a recreation hall, or the diffi-
culty in recruiting (and retaining) sufficiently skilled nursing staff, are
rarely given more than a passing mention in institutional histories. Yet in
these cases, their impact on the day-to-day lives of patients and the ability
of an institution to implement successful programmes of entertainment,
engagement and proto-therapy, was often important.
The institutional context of this study is the world of the nineteenth-
century English asylum, one which has received recent and thorough
interest from scholars examining social questions such as gender and class,
aspects of architecture and interior design, landscaping, drama and the
arts, and the medical body.6 Perspectives include those of the patients,
management and attendants; the political and social meanings of the
asylum; and the interactions and boundaries between asylums and the rest
of society. The predominant organising philosophy within asylums during
this period was the idea of ‘Moral Management’: an attempt to care
for, and cure, patients by controlling all aspects of their day-to-day life
and environment.7 Medical Superintendents, the senior officers in each
asylum, directed each element of the institution’s administration, from
diet, daily schedule, work and exercise to architectural layout and interior
decoration. Moral management embodied the two frames of ‘cure’ and
‘control’ that I will identify as central also to music’s role in the asylum.8
Asylums were not places of punishment, so there was a drive to embody
an ideal society within them, to create the kind of order and control
that was central to moral management, to influence via idealised middle
class values, and to smooth the path for rehabilitation by mimicking the
structures of everyday life in the external world.
Investigating the role of music within a broader structure of physical
activity, employment, and entertainment offers an insight into the ways
in which mental illness was approached long before the development of
psychological medicine. In the absence of personalised treatment, it was
general wellbeing, behaviour and order that received attention. Although
patients were categorised by their symptoms and general presentation,
treatments were administered on a catch-all level to all whose behaviour
and physical ability allowed them to participate. With self-control a central
component in patient rehabilitation, music as a means or an incentive
became an important part of the therapeutic and moral management land-
scape. Music’s role helps illuminate the ways in which early mental health
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

therapies were conceived and considered. The case of music illustrates

that ‘cure’ and ‘control’ were two sides of the same coin. As we will
see, through music patients often gained levels of self-control or social
acceptance which were considered essential for their rehabilitation and
eventual release. Musical experiences offered the re-creation of external
social contexts, such as the dance or religious observance, which made this
control possible. Curing patients was inextricably related to controlling
them, whether through self-control or control via conforming to social
norms. In the absence of a medical understanding of mental health, it was
uncontrolled behaviour that led to a diagnosis, and controlled behaviour
that would denote a patient cured.
This study also casts new light on other aspects of asylum manage-
ment, particularly the relationships between asylums and their immediate
rural and urban contexts, patterns of employment and training of musi-
cians (and other staff), and the ways in which ideas and practices were
shared through the travels and communications of medical officers as well
as the Commissioners in Lunacy. Music was an important link between
the asylum and its wider context, whether in the form of events which
brought together patients, staff and external visitors, or the employment
and visits of professional musicians, on a regular or ad hoc basis. Local
patronage was essential to the running of each County Asylum: Manage-
ment Committees and Visitors were drawn from the region’s aristocracy,
while financial and personal patronage were often key to providing fixtures
and fittings, decorations, books and magazines, or even new buildings.
Bequests were sometimes made for the entertainment of the patients, or
to provide for newly-discharged patients needing funds for tools, clothing
or lodgings. Moreover, the attitudes of the upper classes towards the
asylum’s patients were important for securing their protection via legal
and legislative processes. Events were carefully managed to ensure only
the best-behaved and most-predictable patients were present. Musical
ability became a feature in the employment of staff, from attendants and
nurses, to the talented medical officers at the Bethlem Hospital, whose
amateur orchestra helped form a bond between many of the London
medical institutions. Music was used, therefore, to structure both the
internal life of the asylum (through the regular pattern of dances, enter-
tainments and religious observance), and its externally-facing work (in the
form of fetes, performances and religious festivals).
Music and musical events also came to signify asylum life: theasylum
ball featured in contemporary accounts, both literary and non-fiction,
8 R. GOLDING

as well as imagery such as Katharine Drake’s painting of the Somerset

Lunatics Ball dating from 1847, or the image of the Entertainment at
Colney Hatch in 1853 which is used on the front cover of this volume.9
The account of the Colney Hatch event illustrates many key features
of the use of music within asylums: its association with wellbeing or a
form of treatment; its use at events where external visitors were present;
participation by officers, staff and patients:

One of the most interesting features of the non-restraint system of treating

lunatics is the celebration of periodical festivals, in which the patients are
allowed to participate; and such rational recreation, doubtless, in many
instances, induces habitual cheerfulness, and thus proves one of the many
aids by which the moody sufferer is often restored to reason. An enter-
tainment of this description was given to the patients in the Middlesex
County Lunatic Asylum, Colney Hatch, on Tuesday evening, the 4th inst.
The numbers of the patients present were—males, 200; females, 327.

Several of the committee of visiting justices and other magistrates of the

county, with their friends, and many of the neighbouring gentry with
their families, to the number of upwards of 100, were present. The enter-
tainment consisted of a few tableaux, performed by the officers of the
establishment, accompanied by music; also, solo singing by several patients;
dancing in character, Ethiopian serenading, by attendants and servants, &c.
The patients partook of tea, cakes, fruit, and spiced beer; and afterwards
danced together. The festival was given in the exercising-hall of the insti-
tution; the room was gaily decorated with flags, and a temporary theatre
was built for the occasion, these preparations being entirely the work of
the officers and patients. The cost of the whole, including refreshments,
did not exceed £30.10

Descriptions of visits to asylums during the 1840s and 1850s almost

always included an account of a dance, the author expressing astonish-
ment at the good conduct of the patients and reflecting on the benefits
of music. Among the male patients at an 1841 Lincoln Asylum dance,
for example, the author recorded ‘all were in a moment subdued…
the most turbulent were soothed into quiet’, while at the Morningside
Asylum near Edinburgh in 1845 dancing ‘proves not only harmless, but,
by diverting their thoughts and senses from the exciting cause of their
malady, is a relief and a benefit… the same patients who are often noisy
and obstreperous in their ordinary abodes in the asylum, behave with the
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

utmost decorum at the soirées’.11 Sander Gilman suggests that Charles

Dickens, in his 1851 account of a visit to the Boxing Day Ball at St Luke’s
Hospital for the Insane, ‘consciously chooses the image of music and the
dance as his metaphor for the new asylum’.12 Dickens emphasised the
homely and family atmosphere of the asylum as played out in the dance.
He contrasted previous impressions of the asylum, based on the noto-
rious practices at institutions such as Bethlem, with the newly-reformed
and state-funded asylums such as St Luke’s or Hanwell, where Dickens’
friend John Conolly promoted the practice of ‘non-restraint’. Thus music
and its associated activities acted as metaphors for the public: important
representations of ‘normal life’ being recreated within institutional walls.
This study also offers an opportunity to investigate musical participa-
tion—both active and passive—within population groups which might
have had very different musical experiences, were it not for their asso-
ciation with the asylums. While the asylums did not achieve an extensive
impact on their surrounding communities, in the ways that brass bands
connected with mining communities or military winds bands often did,
their reach is not to be underestimated. With about 100,000 patients
at the turn of the twentieth century, and thousands of staff drawn from
a wide range of social levels, a large portion of the population—from a
variety of ages, backgrounds and occupations—was exposed to organised
music making within both secular and sacred contexts. Behind the walls
of the asylums and within a closed community, there was often a rich
offering of music and other arts in the form of dances and bands, concerts,
theatricals and religious observances. Aspects of the musical world of
the asylum are documented in a detail usually lacking for other sectors
of society. Studying music in the asylum therefore provides a unique
opportunity to trace the day-to-day musical experiences of patients in
an extended manner. If we take the idea of the asylum as a controlled,
idealised, community, it also gives us a sense of music’s broader role
and meaning for society: as a means of structuring social encounters,
as a moral and intellectual pastime, and to provide a balance between
individual creativity and prescribed norms.
Comments on the role of music in aiding patient recovery go some way
towards identifying the ways in which music’s power as health-giver was
discussed during the period. There was little scientific evidence to inform
a medical view on music’s role in medicine. Yet music was increasingly
linked with important aspects such as morality and wellbeing, whether
10 R. GOLDING

through the efforts of Victorian philanthropists to secure ‘rational’ oppor-

tunities for the new leisure time enjoyed by the working classes, or via
the legal fights of those opposed to the noise and disorder of street musi-
cians.13 The beneficial effect of music was a common trope; writers such
as the anonymous ‘Vernon’, published in The Musical Times and Singing
Class Circular in 1852, promoted the view that ‘Music has no expression
for vice; it has no relation to bad passions, but to the finest affections of
our nature’.14 The author continued,

It can incite no man to the commission of an evil action, but rather

prepares the mind for the exercise of virtue, and soothes the troubled
spirit. It may therefore be termed a popular science—the influence it has
upon the mind of a people being that of unmitigated good.15

A few years later Florence Nightingale remarked:

The effect of music upon the sick has been scarcely at all noticed. In fact, its
expensiveness, as it is now, makes any general application of it quite out of
the question. I will only remark here, that wind instruments, including the
human voice, and stringed instruments, capable of continuous sound, have
generally a beneficent effect—while the piano-forte, with such instruments
as have no continuity of sound, has just the reverse. The finest piano-forte
playing will damage the sick, while an air, like “Home, sweet home,” or
“Assisa a piè d’un salice,” on the most ordinary grinding organ will sensibly
soothe them—and this quite independent of association.16

In this sense the present study also contributes towards an incipient

philosophy of music for nineteenth-century England, exploring some of
the ways in which music’s power was used to address medical and social
needs.
Music’s important place in institutions for mental health during the
nineteenth century is in sharp contrast to its absence from other forms of
medical care and theory. While general medicine was subject to regulation
and professionalisation from the first quarter of the century, the new state-
sponsored lunatic asylums (set up following the County Asylums Act of
1808) and private madhouses only began to come under firm state control
from the 1840s.17 This relatively unregulated and un-theorised branch of
medical science allowed for the flourishing of music in a quasi-therapeutic
manner. Training for specialists in psychiatric care was largely through a
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

loose apprenticeship system, with young medical doctors finding oppor-

tunities to shadow a medical superintendent before taking on a junior
role.18 Training and examinations for nurses and attendants in asylums
only developed in the last few decades of the nineteenth century.19 The
foundation of the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospi-
tals for the Insane, the centralising influence of the Commissioners in
Lunacy from the 1850s and frequent contact between Medical Super-
intendents helped to develop a fledgling discipline around the medical
treatment of mental illness, but scientific understanding of the brain and
mental health lagged well behind that of physical illness.20 Thus the field
was open to experimentation and conjecture, with music among the many
therapeutic techniques used across the country. Without the grounding
of psychiatric theory, music and other aspects of moral management were
more closely aligned to influence on patient behaviour, the use of regular
routine and the importance of social structures as methods of treatment
and rehabilitation. Thus elements of ‘cure’ and ‘control’ were strongly
related as doctors sought to draw patients towards acceptable forms of
expression and behaviour.
It was not until the 1890s that music began to receive special, scien-
tific attention in relation to medicine, and particularly mental illness. An
editorial from The Lancet in 1891 gives a useful summary of the complex
position of music, which had long been connected with care and cure,
but viewed with suspicion due to its concurrent connection with magic
and mystery. The very opening of the piece encapsulates the practice of
moral treatment:

Among the accessories of directly medicinal treatment, and side by side

with such health-promoting agencies as rest, exercise, and change of
surroundings, a definite place is due by right of its character and history
to music. It is true that in later, as well as in early times, the sister art has
been associated rather more with what is mythic and visionary in medicine
than with its accredited or scientific practice. Miracle workers, mystics, and
charlatans have in all ages made much of its influence on the minds of the
impressible, whether truly suffering or not. There can be no doubt also that
they have, as a class, been indebted in no small degree to their appreciation
of this and the like natural aids for an apparent mastery of physical affects
too commonly imputed to other personal and mysterious gifts of healing.
In this respect they may teach us a lesson. The possession of a refined
musical taste or a so-called “ear” may be denied to many persons. Some
conception of harmony is probably almost universal. This understanding
12 R. GOLDING

differs, as it must, with different minds and moods, but it exists in some
degree and form, we should say, in every human being. Each tempera-
ment knows and could show, if intelligence and language were adequate,
the terms of its own simplest musical coefficient, and perhaps even some of
its remembered variations. The cheerful rhythm that lightened for him an
hour of gloom, the flowing cadence that absorbed his petulant irritation,
are as the kindred spirits of a man’s family. What wonder, then, if music
be found equal to the treatment of some of his diseases—those, namely,
which concern his mental and nervous condition.21

The 1890s did, indeed, see some of the first concerted efforts to examine
the relationship between music and health from a scientific perspective.
But at the author notes, music had long been associated with forms of
healing, and particularly in relation to mental health and ‘nervous condi-
tions’. In most cases it was this generic ‘healing’ that remained associated
with music, rather than a more medicalised approach, until the advent of
theorised Music Therapy in the twentieth century.22
This study poses two key questions: what forms of music were to be
found in English lunatic asylums during the nineteenth century, and in
what ways was music considered part of the therapeutic regime? Both
questions are addressed by sustained engagement with archive mate-
rial, from formal reports to books of concert programmes, photos and
ephemera. The second question also lends itself to a more detailed study
of the surrounding literature, including books, pamphlets and journal
articles, as well as parliamentary papers and records. In this volume
an extended consideration of the history of asylums, their cultural and
medical world and the place of music within them is followed by a series
of case studies which demonstrate the particular contexts and meanings
of music in each institution. Public and private establishments, large and
small, older and newer, are examined with the intention both of identi-
fying both common themes and the particular elements that depend on
individual institutional circumstances: personnel, geographical location,
local connections, philanthropic support and so on. Each case study builds
on the general patterns while showing how music was managed, what its
role was and how the individual attitudes of staff, particularly Medical
Superintendents, contributed to its use. Together they form a powerful
picture of the meaning and place of music within the context of psycho-
logical institutions. This in turn tells us much about the place of music
in everyday life, in forming social encounters, in moulding emotional
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

responses, in signalling gender or class, and as an accompaniment to

religion and morality, work and play.
The remainder of this introductory chapter addresses two elements:
firstly, the context of the relationships between music, medicine and
morality, particularly during the later part of the nineteenth century; and
secondly, the issues surrounding the writing of a history of music in
asylums, questions of archive and methodology, as well as narrative and
terminology. In the subsequent chapters, the history of asylums, moral
management and the place of music is given more detailed consideration.
The case studies which form the final part of the volume both illustrate
the broad picture painted in the first two chapters, and give further grist
for the evaluation of music’s role and meaning within varied institutional
landscapes.

Music, Medicine and Morality

The association between music and medicine can be traced back to the
earliest writings of the Greek philosophers, who used an embodied idea
of music to explain its influence. Pythagoras and Plato both employed the
concept of cosmic harmony, arguing that music had the power to align
the music of the body with the music of the spheres, bringing the body
into synchronisation with the universal order. Plato argued that music
should be focussed on the soul, not the body: musical sensuality and phys-
icality was dangerous; simplicity in music was ‘the parent to temperance
in the soul’.23 The sixth-century intellectual Anicius Manlius Severinus
Boethius (c. 480–c. 526) identified three forms of music underpinning its
influence and power: musica mundana (music of the spheres or celestial
harmony), musica humana (the relationship between body and soul) and
musica instrumentalis (the music produced by voices and instruments,
which followed the same principles as celestial and bodily harmony).24
The use of music as a metaphor for bodily health and wellbeing persisted,
particularly with regard to mental illness. In 1632, for example, Donald
Lupton likened the mad inmates of Bedlam to ‘faire Instruments of
Musicke, but either they want strings, or else though being strung are
out of tune, or otherwise want an expert Artist to order them’.25 The
seventeenth-century physicist Robert Hooke similarly likened the regular
and geometric patterns of nature and the human body to the harmonious
construction of music.26
14 R. GOLDING

Within medical treatises, music was often included among the various
forms of physical and social treatments. Robert Burton’s seventeenth-
century Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, recommended music along
with drugs, bloodletting, prayer, exercise, diet, friendships and occupa-
tion.27 Music was also frequently associated with causes and symptoms
of illness; Burton, for example, identified melancholy caused by excess
blood as often leading to over-enjoyment of music, dancing and women,
while musical hallucinations were another symptom of imbalance.28
Burton concluded, ‘that diseases were either procured by music, or miti-
gated’.29 While these views persisted well into Enlightenment Europe,
early modern thought also defended musical sensuality. Music in its
bodily nature began to be considered as ‘a form of nervous stimula-
tion’.30 Where musical aesthetics were concerned, nineteenth-century
developments once again rejected the role of nerves, using metaphysical
models to connect music to the transcendental subject. Music’s abstract,
autonomous form was prioritised, most notable with the rise of absolute
music. However, nervous stimulation continued as an idea in medicine
within psychiatry and physiology as well as acoustics.31
While the idea of music as a beneficial element in health has a long
and complex history, a significant change around 1800 set the path for
its characterisation throughout the nineteenth century as both a positive
and negative influence. A new model of disease posited stimulation of
the nerves as the principle cause of illness and a rise in mental illness,
particularly among the rich, was blamed on over-stimulation due to exces-
sive lifestyles.32 The Scottish medic David Uwins, for example, suggested
that ‘Pianos, parasols, Edinburgh Reviews, and Paris-going desires, are
now found among a class of persons who formerly thought these things
belonged to a different race; these are the true sources of nervousness and
medical ailments’.33
Music was incorporated into this model by a new theory which linked
it to ‘quasi-electrical stimulation’: over-stimulation via unsuitable music
would cause ill health.34 Where previously music had been considered as
a source of (sometimes excessive) passion, this shift to seeing music as a
direct stimulant of the nerves meant it was seen as particularly dangerous.
James Kennaway notes that, until the late eighteenth century, music was
connected with the nerves in a positive sense: music was regarded ‘as
a model of order, morality, and health as much as any neo-Platonist,
seeing it as a means of refining the nerves and of calming unhealthy
passions, including sexual ones’.35 New musical aesthetics meant music
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

lost its connection with order, becoming instead more entangled with
social issues (including sexuality and illness) and Romantic sensibilities.
This music was particularly dangerous to women, threatening miscarriages
and infertility as well as other effects.36
During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries the links
between music and medicine were theorised more explicitly among conti-
nental practitioners. The influential physicians of the Paris asylums (an
important model for asylums in England) would have been familiar
with contemporary theories concerning music and health developed by
their own countrymen. The Montpellier doctor Etienne Sainte-Marie,
for example, drew on eighteenth-century medical publications when he
argued for the importance of the connection between listening to music,
and the general health of the body and nervous system.37 Writing in
1803, Sainte-Marie argued that the auditory nerves spread through the
body, exciting feelings such as courage, love, pity and joy. Illnesses of a
nervous nature, or those with an emotional or nervous element, might
be treated or even cured by rebalancing the energy in these nerves.38
Music ensured activity in the nervous system, and music was therefore an
embodied, physical act, rather than a passive experience.
The ‘power of music’ was a regular trope in both prose and poetry
during this period, as part of a growing interest in music’s fundamental
origins, its relation to nature and its potential meaning. The idea of
music’s capacity to influence mind and both in man and beast was popu-
larised through quasi-sensationalist anecdotes to be found in both medical
and lay publications. A number of these were collected by Joseph Taylor
in his 1814 volume The Power of Music.39 The tales included the young
lady suffering from convulsions, for whom ‘the soft melody of the violin
or the piano forte, skilfully adapted to the taste and state of the patient,
and often repeated, frequently prevents the convulsive fits, or abates their
violence’, and the depressive actress Zamperini, who was restored in
‘health and rationality’ after repeatedly listening to harpsichord music.40
Taylor draws his stories from sources such as Charles Burney’s History
of Music (1776–1789) and the Encyclopedia Brittanica (first published
1768–1771) and, while we can be sure that at least some of them were
apocryphal, the regular repetition of music’s miraculous powers no doubt
played into its status as a form of medical aid.41 The army surgeon
John Gideon Millingen drew on many of the same anecdotes in his
1837 compilation of medical notes and tales.42 Millingen notes ‘We…
frequently meet with lunatics who, although they have no remembrance
16 R. GOLDING

of the past circumstances of their life, recollect and perform airs which
they had formerly played’.43 The anonymous ‘J.C.’, writing in 1846, also
referred to Saul in his argument for the practical use of music in lunatic
asylums and hospitals, as well as more widely among the poor in prisons
and workhouses.44 Responding to the 1844 ‘Report of the Metropolitan
Commissioners in Lunacy’, the author suggests.

that of all the amusements which might be introduced, none would be

so efficacious as music; in some few cases, it is true, it might produce
excitement, but in the generality it would have a soothing influence. The
soft pealing of the organ must often produce a calm over the feelings that
would, in itself, render the patient more susceptible of other impressions.45

Later nineteenth-century writers also continued to draw on their clas-

sical forebears: in 1873 Henry Maudsley, for example, recounted that the
Ancient Greek ‘Asclepiades, who seems to have been the real founder of
a psychical mode of cure, made use of love, wine, music, employment,
and special means to attract the attention and exercise the memory’,46
while Lyttleton S. Winslow, writing in 1874, mentioned the biblical
madness of Saul as the earliest record of mental disease; in this case ‘David
was supposed to have subdued by music his attacks of maniacal fury’.47
The Reverend Thomas Firminger Thiselton-Dyer (1848–1923) produced
another set of anecdotes in 1886, which included examples of the effect
of music on persons with mental illnesses, stating ‘idiots appear to most
advantage when under the influence of music’.48
Within the emerging medical study of alienism, or modern-day psychi-
atry, music was identified as both a cause and a cure for mental illness.
Over-emotional states were dangerous, particularly in patients prone to
manic episodes. But for depressive patients, music could stimulate posi-
tive emotions. As with longstanding medical theories based around four
‘humours’ corresponding to temperaments, early therapeutic treatments
for mental illness were centred around emotional balance.49
Music also played an important part in the development of brain
sciences such as psychiatry and neurology during the second half of the
nineteenth century. Physicians investigating the language disorder aphasia
were particularly interested in patients who retained musical abilities,
such as singing, despite the loss of speech. Carl Stumpf (1848–1936)
and Theodore Lipps (1851–1910), for example, carried out experiments
using music to attempt to understand the relative functions of music
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

and language in patients of different abilities.50 Other related investi-

gations concerned the science of brain localisation, which built on the
eighteenth-century interest in phrenology developed by Franz Joseph
Gall (1758–1828). The localisation of language was further probed by
the French surgeon Paul Broca (1824–1880), whose identification of the
frontal lobe rejuvenated experimental interest in the problem.
British authors also pursued the question of the relationship between
music and language, more notably from the perspective of evolu-
tionary science and the hierarchies of intellect and emotion. Debates
between Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
and Edmund Gurney (1847–1888) focussed on the origins of music
and language. While Spencer argued that music evolved from language,
Darwin contested that music was the origin of language, placing music
low down on the evolutionary scale.51 The neurologist John Hugh-
lings Jackson (1835–1911) considered similar issues from an experimental
perspective, also building on the work on continental physicians to
suggest a distinction between emotional and intellectual or ‘proposi-
tional’ language. Singing was included among the ‘emotional’ forms of
language, and the separation of the two helped Jackson formulate theories
explaining his observations of aphasia.52
These interests fed into the work of several physicians in the 1890s,
including two examples directly connected with lunatic asylums. Richard
Legge (?–1926), Assistant Medical Officer at the Derbyshire County
Asylum, observed both musical listening and participation among patients
with various diagnoses of mental illness.53 Legge suggested most patients
with mania, melancholia, dementia or general paralysis displayed a reduc-
tion in musical appreciation or ‘musical ear’.54 Among ‘idiotic’ patients,
however, musical enjoyment remained despite the loss or absence of
other faculties.55 Herbert Hayes Newington (1847–1917), physician and
manager of the exclusive private Ticehurst House Hospital, also consid-
ered musical abilities among his patients.56 Contrary to contemporary
interest in brain localisation, however, Hayes Newington concludes that
no specific part of the brain is set aside for musical perception and
processing: music ‘in one form or another calls into play at various times
nearly every attribute of the brain’.57
Music also gained a formal place in the work of many Continental
European asylums. The Aversa asylum in Italy was well-known for its long
tradition of rich musical entertainments as well as a generous attitude to
entertainments and amusements for its patients.58 Numerous accounts
18 R. GOLDING

point to its efficacy as a form of therapy at the institution, with concerts

held several times a week at which patients were among the performers.59
The anatomistJohn Bell, writing in 1835, regarded the Italian institution
favourably, suggesting its liberal approach to treatment led to happier,
more contented and more ‘harmless’ patients than their English counter-
parts.60 Likewise in the early nineteenth century the private sanatorium
at Ober-Döbling near Vienna, run by Bruno Goergen, included music,
literature, walking and conversation among its activities, while the Parisian
physicians Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) and Jean-Étienne Esquirol (1772–
1840), pursued the systematic use of music for the treatment of nervous
disease and emotional distress.61
Later in the century the asylum at Illenau is recorded as proffering a
busy schedule of music concerts as part of its therapy; here, again, the
approach was more deliberately medical than at the English asylums, with
the repertoire receiving careful consideration.62 Throughout the century,
the use of music as therapy at Continental European asylums received
more medical attention than parallel practices in England and the Anglo-
phone world, with psychiatrists making use of patients’ preferences and
educational backgrounds as well as gender and nationality to achieve a
personalised treatment.63 Although English alienists were widely familiar
with the work of Pinel and Esquirol, with institutions such as Aversa
receiving attention in English publications, there does not seem to have
been any attempt to emulate such a formal approach to music as therapy.
Rather, continental writings were used to bolster the general sense of
music’s efficacy, in defence of its inclusion in moral management.
Music’s dual effect for good and ill was at work on many levels. Socially
and culturally, Romanticism’s ‘exaltation of feeling over reason’ was at
odds with the drive to use music as a tool for instilling sobriety and ratio-
nality in a changing world.64 Medically, music’s potential for ill effects
came to the fore although its general powers for restoring and maintaining
health were acknowledged. Within the asylum, music worked to provide
entertainment and emotional engagement for many patients, while also
acting as an agent for control and order. Michael Clark points out that
the creativity of the arts often sat at odds with the attributes valued within
moral management: ‘there remained a fundamental antithesis or at least
a tension between the unmodified character of imagination, and those
intellectual and moral qualities of right reason [and] sound judgement’.65
Thus the identity of music itself—as a rational, intellectual endeavour, or
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

as a creative, artistic pursuit—was also important for its relationship with

medicine and society, as well as its place in Victorian values.66
The nature and substance of music, as well as its effect on the body
and the emotions, were important topics to philosophers and scientists
throughout the middle of the nineteenth century, also reflecting the dual-
ities of music’s place in society and medicine. The nature of sound and
singing, in particular, came under the interests of writers on evolution
including Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin.67 Music was identified as
belonging to the realms of both the emotions and the intellect. Edmund
Gurney, for example, described this duality as the ‘impressive’ and the
‘expressive’: music speaking directly to the soul or the emotions, and
music reflecting or describing external objects and ideas.68 John Stainer,
likewise, argued that both emotional and intellectual responses to music
would contribute to full appreciation, leading discussion at the Musical
Association during the 1890s on the nature of musical listening.69 Those
employing music as a medical therapy harnessed both aspects in different
ways and in different circumstances. Within the asylums, the two aspects
of ‘emotions’ and ‘intellect’ correspond closely to the two main aims of
‘entertainment’ and ‘(self-)control’.
While the era of Romanticism brought new recognition of the place
of emotions and intuition besides reason and scientific thought, such
ideals were both liberating and dangerous. Nineteenth-century opera
was a particular example.70 The Chambers Edinburgh Journal recounted
the story of a man who had been ‘confined, literally music mad’ after
attempting to compose an opera in which ‘the labour of the composer
was greater than the excellence of his music’. The cure was to be found
in the performance of a Haydn melody by the famous Italian singer
Mme Camporese.71 It is not accidental that the excesses of opera were
‘cured’ by the simplicity of Haydn. Throughout the nineteenth century,
the new genres of the Romantic era, particularly those involving virtuosity
and high levels of emotion, were viewed with distinct suspicion by the
British musical establishment. Such ‘virtuosophobia’ is discussed by Gillen
D’Arcy Wood, who notes ‘With the advent of bravura Italian singing in
Britain and its adaptation to the violin and piano, however, public music
culture and the wonders of virtuosic musicianship gained greater visibility,
while raising, for its critics, the spectre of a mechanised humanity driven
by (merely) technical accomplishment’.72 Often it was the excesses of
French and Italian music that were set against the calm nature of the
German Haydn, or adopted Englishmen Handel and Mendelssohn.
20 R. GOLDING

The perceived close relationship between music and health, and partic-
ularly mental health or madness, was complicated by the image of the
Romantic artist. Madness, as a deviation from the cultural norm, was
almost synonymous with the individualism and genius demanded of the
Romantic creator—whether artist, poet or composer. Free from sustained
scientific and medical examination until later in the nineteenth century,
the realm of the insane offered new scope for creative exploration. Artists
were quick to pursue the image of the mad, tortured creator. In the
absence of scientific theory, artistic fascination with insanity and, later,
psychoanalysis fed into themes of the self, the unconscious, dreams and
symbolism.73 Romanticism was also linked with decadence and degen-
eracy, sitting uneasily within the Victorian preference for order and
discipline. While Romanticism offered new avenues for the connections
between music and the mind, therefore, it gave music and the other arts
an ambivalent status in terms of moral and social good.
Music’s link with madness was cemented by the well-publicised fates of
several high-profile musicians, most notably the composer Robert Schu-
mann, who died in 1856 while incarcerated at the asylum in Endenich,
near Bonn. Joseph N. Straus notes that, during Schumann’s life time and
later, madness in a composer was thought to be reflected in the quali-
ties of the music: ‘also mad and therefore bad—sick, diseased, deformed,
and defective’.74 The notice of his funeral from the Niederrheinische
Musikzeitung, translated and published in The Musical Times and Singing
Class Circular, reflected that.

Although the mournful news naturally shocked us, a mild dissolution of

the bonds which still enchained his body to the earth was the sole hope of
all those who loved and honoured him, since, unfortunately, there could
no longer be any doubt as to the incurable nature of his malady. The flame
which burned in his heart for music had consumed his restlessly creative
mind. His works are his monument.75

While music’s standing as a social good developed in England through

the work of philanthropists and reformers, it remained connected with
the potential for over-stimulation and madness, both in medical work
and via the cases of some high-profile musicians. While there was little
direct debate about the roles of music with respect to its dual status, the
concern about potential association with over-emotional states and less-
salubrious social contexts for music may well have fed into the careful
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

control of music’s use in asylums. Asylum managers were obliged to find

a place for music was allowed its entertainment properties to be used
for the benefit of patients, while retaining the characteristics of ratio-
nality and improvement that aligned to values of self-control, intellect
and respectability.
Moral management and asylum development largely took place outside
standard medical structures. Widespread interest in music’s medical and
biological effects among the scientific community came towards the very
end of the nineteenth century, which saw the first examples of organised,
empirical research into music’s role in medicine, psychiatry and wellbeing.
Technological invention, medical developments and theoretical discus-
sion of musical aesthetics combined to encourage serious consideration of
the effects of musical listening. Several of these projects involved the ill,
including patients in an asylum. Scientific discussion regarding the uses of
music was prompted in particular by three short pieces which appeared in
The Lancet during the spring of 1891, responding to the innovative work
of Canon Rev. Frederick Kill Harford.76 The anonymous author argued
that music was helpful in reducing anxiety and pain, which could be used
to treat both mental and physical illnesses. The ‘anaesthesia of hypnotism
and the soothing effects of harmony in sound’ acted on the mental state,
which in turn would affect the perception of pain and grief.77 The author
was clear that music was not acting directly on the cause of the illness:
‘The reference, of course, is to the pain endured rather than the malady
that occasioned it’. Yet, as they noted, the reasons for music’s efficacy
were unknown.
All three editorial pieces (the second is quoted at length towards
the opening of this Introduction) relate music especially to the treat-
ment of nervous disorders, and therefore to the realm of mental illness.
Yet music is also linked to both body and mind, and to the balance
between the two. The author suggests the effect of music both in arousing
emotions in the brain, and in stimulating the nervous system, the circula-
tion, the heart and the organs.78 Music acted upon both directly, and by
providing ‘a diversion to the fretting mind’. In particular, though, music
was recommended for the insane: ‘Definite statistics on the subject are
not forthcoming, but all that we have said goes to show that states of
insanity, which are largely influenced by the condition of the sympathetic
system, should find some part of their treatment in the hands of the musi-
cian’.79 During the 1890s, music and medicine continued to generate
lively discussion in a variety of publications.80
22 R. GOLDING

Frederick Kill Harford’s experiments with the Guild of St Cecilia repre-

sent the most concerted effort to test theories regarding the effect of
music on patients during the nineteenth century, and their reception
demonstrates the split among medical professionals concerning the poten-
tial use of music as therapy. Harford, an ordained priest, was a gifted
musician, composer, writer and collector. He responded to the sugges-
tions made in The Lancet by offering to provide musicians to London
hospitals in order to demonstrate the influence of music.81 Among the
experiments detailed by Harford are playing ‘soft music’ and lullabies to
patients at the Temperance Hospital and St Pancras Hospital, and the use
of gramophones.82 Patients treated with music included those suffering
from nervous depression, delirium and melancholia, but Harford does
not appear to have taken his musicians into any dedicated asylums.
Commenting on the Guild’s work, however, the physician Edwin Goodall
recommended asylums as a next step, suggesting ‘the average lunatic, with
senses of taste and smell unimpaired, would cheerfully discard paralde-
hyde in favour of a lullaby; and asylum physicians… would doubtless
be interested in an attempt to influence the mind through the sense of
hearing’.83
Despite some initial indications of success, the scheme attracted fierce
criticism from much of the scientific community. When the conclusion
of the Guild was announced in The British Medical Journal in March
1896, the editor reflected that music had been shown to be effective in
calming delirium and serving as a sedative in some cases. However, he
remained unconvinced that it would ever ‘take a place among recognised
antipyretics’.84 Although Harford’s experiments had been conducted
with quasi-scientific methods, the lack of a theoretical or rigorous basis
for music’s medical use prevented its widespread adoption as a core treat-
ment. During the early part of the twentieth century, however, many of
the approaches seen in asylums and elsewhere became part of a recognised
‘therapy’ which eventually took on its own theoretical and professional
status.85
If asylum managers drew heavily on a traditional association between
music and wellbeing, they also sat firmly within a context in which music
occupied important social and cultural roles. There is no doubt that music
was used as a powerful tool for promoting moral and social good within
Victorian society, and this often drew on notions of health and wellbeing.
Music’s role as a social force is perhaps best known due to its role in
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

industrial communities, where brass bands were set up in order to facili-

tate ‘rational recreation’ among the men and women at work in mills and
factories, chiefly in the north of England and across Wales.86 Brass bands
were part and parcel of new social structures, living habits and commercial
pressures. As Stephen Etheridge notes, they were seen as ‘an investment’:
industrialists ‘gave the bands rehearsal space, music, uniforms, instru-
ments and tuition, paid time off work, finance for travel, board and
lodgings when the band was away. In return, business owners received
advertising for their company and its products’.87 Although in many cases
the foundation and financial support of bands was broadly philanthropic,
the benefits for the business, both in terms of employee behaviour and
advertising, were clear. Writing in 1895, Algernon S. Rose suggested ‘We
have to thank music, no less than the Board School influence, for the
suppression, in many labouring centers, of many objectionable pastimes.
The successful cultivation of art, in any form, by the masses, impercep-
tibly educates the general taste and makes politeness of manners keep pace
with refinement of mind’.88
The success of bands within the move to a new, urban environment was
transferred to municipal authorities, again with the argument that rational
recreation would improve the quality of life for the growing populations
in large towns and cities. Supporting the public financing of such bands,
Rose argued that a local band would ‘be invaluable by affording help at
charitable and local entertainments’, that ‘the blowing of [brass] instru-
ments is in itself a healthy recreation’ and that public funds would ‘[put]
the performers continually on their mettle, making them feel they are
under a constant moral obligation to show their friends they are worthy
of such assistance’.89 Although the original purposes of control and disci-
pline were eventually diluted as the band movement grew, with its own
events, customs and identities, their function as an important part of
recreational activities—both for performers and listeners—remained.90
One avid supporter of music’s role as rational recreation was the
Reverend Hugh Reginald Haweis, who campaigned for the Sunday
opening of public spaces such as galleries and museums. Haweis argued
that, as well as intensifying the specific emotions engendered by a text
or ideas, music could be responsible for creating abstract emotions for
both good and evil.91 Indeed, Haweis used the example of George III to
reflect on the ‘power of music to create atmospheres of peace, and restore
something like harmony to the “sweet bells” of the spirit “jangled out of
tune”’. Used carefully, he suggests, the ‘acknowledged influence of music
24 R. GOLDING

over the insane’ might find wider application, becoming ‘as powerful an
agent as galvanism in restoring healthy and pleasurable activity to the
emotional regions’.92
Music was to be found in many other areas of Victorian society in
its guise as a rational recreation and philanthropic endeavour. Charles
Edward McGuire’s study of the Tonic Sol-Fa movement places it in close
relation to dissenting Christian organisations, groups promoting temper-
ance and even the political suffrage campaign.93 Like the brass bands,
tonic sol-fa classes and massed choirs provided an accepted way for the
working classes to spend their leisure time and were often offered under
the auspices of Mechanics Institutes and other civic associations. Vocal
music, such as the published tonic sol-fa primers, could also promote
social and political messages more directly.94 Wiebke Thormählen traces
the idea that singing is good for the body and the mind through the
eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, concluding that ‘Examining
the rise of choral singing suggests that the socio-political circumstances
as well as popular belief systems suffused with contemporary theories of
body and mind instigated its huge popular success’.95 Music also found
a place at many of the new Victorian institutions, such as workhouses,
young offenders’ institutions, prisons and systems of State education.96
There is no doubt that many philanthropic schemes were deliber-
ately designed to produce a sense of morality and discipline among the
working classes, for whom the changes in industrialisation and urbani-
sation had created enormous upheaval. Yet the imposition and control
engendered by such schemes were not necessarily unwelcome or to
be frowned upon. Writing on the late nineteenth century, Geoffrey
Ginn contends that many endeavours were seen as genuine attempts
to improve living standards among the lower classes—‘not necessarily
regarded as an alien culture of the governing elite imposed for largely self-
interested reasons’.97 As with the asylums themselves, therefore, studying
the broader context of Victorian philanthropic institutions requires a
careful balance between the extant records, the underlying philosophies
and the historical distance of modern values and assumptions.
The use of music to influence the behaviour of the lower classes
suggests a two-tier approach to music’s power as part of therapeutic prac-
tice. Promoting music among the lower classes not only encouraged them
to emulate the social and moral framework of the middle class, but specif-
ically introduced a level of morality and discipline considered appropriate
to the lower orders. Within the private asylum, therefore, patients might
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

be exposed to music chiefly as part of a medical regime; within the pauper

asylum, music had added meanings associated with its moral and social
role. Within the private asylum, patients’ surroundings and lives were
constructed in order to imitate closely the kinds of interiors and activities
they might be used to from their experience outside the institution. In
the pauper asylum, in contrast, arrangements were for an idealised form
of living, mimicking the middle-class day-to-day lifestyle in its physical
sphere, its music, its sports and other activities. Within this latter envi-
ronment music had a particular role to play in imparting a middle-class
set of morals and sensibilities, as well as its broadly medical purpose in
restoring the unbalanced mental faculties.
The general experience of music also helps to put the use of music
in asylums into perspective. Although access to formal musical experi-
ence—both in terms of concerts, the opera or chamber music, and the
study of musical instruments or theory—was limited among the lower
classes, musical life was often rich. Throughout England, music was a
regular part of religious worship, which often extended throughout the
day on a Sunday, with hymns and psalms sometimes continued in the
home. In industrial areas or towns with military settlements, brass and
wind bands were to be heard with bands travelling to performances and
competitions from the 1850s. At around the same time the music hall
developed, again within new urban areas of expansion. The music hall
genres of parlour songs, character pieces and minstrelsy joined the older
repertoire of broadside ballads to be found in pubs and meeting places,
later moving into private houses as mass-produced pianos found popu-
larity in better-off households.98 From the 1870s, music was regularly
taught in elementary schools, children learning songs by rote as well
as simple music literacy; the tonic sol-fa revolution in the mid-century
ensured thousands of working-class adults were also exposed to singing
as a means of recreation.
The status of music changed as popular music began to gain a pres-
ence in day-to-day life, both in formal contexts such as music halls,
and in the domestic sphere. A division of musical genres likewise arose
within medical considerations of music’s influence: while serious music
was directed at the mind, trivial or sensuous music acted on the nerves.99
Although music was often encouraged as a beneficial pastime, therefore,
some genres also came to be associated with less-salubrious contexts and
effects. Within the pauper asylums it was largely popular genres that
26 R. GOLDING

dominated musical provision, whether at dances or fetes, or at the enter-

tainments given by visiting performers. Yet these were experienced within
controlled environments. Discussion of the impact of music covered both
mind and nerves. Patients were expected to develop self-control as a
result of their musical experience (particularly in large gatherings, such as
the dance or chapel), but for melancholic or depressed patients, it was
the direct influence of music on their emotions that could be a form
of therapy. Thus the relationship of music to healing, therapy or well-
being was complex, and could depend on the musical genres, contexts and
forms of engagement as well as the practical considerations of providing
for music and musicians within a large institution.
It is clear from this discussion that the medical staff and management
of English asylums drew on both medical traditions dating back to ancient
practice, and the social and cultural context of bourgeois values and
nineteenth-century philanthropy. At the same time they worked largely in
a vacuum, creating miniature societies within institutional walls that made
use of music in ways not replicated elsewhere. The microcosmic society of
each asylum was as much about creating an idealised space for the prac-
tice of approved employment, day-to-day life and recreational activities
as about medical treatment or therapy. Persuading patients to adhere to
these practices was part of both cure and control—indeed,self-control, via
appropriate social behaviour, was central to the perceived cure. Music’s
place in asylums was both moral and medical, steeped in the context of
changing values and practices, and influenced by both ancient medical
beliefs and modern social contexts.

Researching and Writing the History

of Music, Madness and Medicine
Recent scholarly work has included numerous fascinating studies
exploring the intersections of music and medicine in different countries
and time periods. These are of interest to many different audiences: musi-
cologists, historians, music therapists, medics, scientists and many others
with personal or professional interests. While some aspects of music’s
role in medicine seem to transcend the differences of time and place,
others are historically and culturally contingent. Penelope Gouk notes the
deep cultural siting of musical healing.100 Not only does cultural context
inform how different types of music might be used therapeutically, but
also the ways in which medicine, the body, the soul and the mind are
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

conceptualised. Music Therapy as a distinct and formalised discipline or

practice in the United Kingdom came into being in the mid-twentieth
century, after the Second World War. As such, the therapeutic uses of
music examined in this volume are a form of general music therapy, a non-
specialised activity that results from participation in music as performer
or listener, rather than a practice carried out by a trained specialist in
conjunction with one or more patients. Furthermore, the roles and places
in which music was to be found in the asylum went beyond consciously-
therapeutic aims, and included religious, social and cultural structures.
While this volume contributes to the pre-history of Music Therapy, there-
fore, I also examine the wider role of music in the particular social and
cultural context of the asylum, and the implications of this for our under-
standing of music, madness, society, mental health care, and a lot more
besides, in the nineteenth century.
Some of the concepts and terms used in this volume have retained their
currency in modern times, but many are distinctly outdated, and some
have acquired pejorative connotations. Terms such as ‘lunatic’, ‘pauper’,
‘idiot’ and ‘imbecile’ will be found throughout this book attached to the
contexts and meanings they were given in the nineteenth century. These
terms have been retained when using direct quotations. When using my
own words, however, I have largely used ‘patient’ and ‘mental illness’ in
an attempt to avoid those terms now most closely associated with stigma
and offense.
The term ‘lunatic’ is used throughout. Of course, large numbers of
the patients resident in asylums were not suffering from what we would
recognise now as mental illness, but had transgressed norms of behaviour
expected of their class or gender. Some descriptions of patients in asylums,
the ways in which they were discussed or treated, and the philosophy
behind the treatment of the mentally ill, make for uncomfortable reading.
On the whole, those responsible for patients and institutions during this
period acted according to what was believed to be their best interests
within practical and financial constraint, but it is important to recall that
medical understandings of the brain and mental states were at a very
early stage. Furthermore, pauper asylums, which form an important part
of this study, took care of the very poorest members of society, at a
time when modern structures of national insurance and a universal health
service were absent. On the one hand we might praise the foresight and
generosity of those who committed funds and legislation to improve and
protect the lives of those facing mental illness; on the other hand we
28 R. GOLDING

can lament the awful conditions in which many were kept as institutions
struggled to keep up with demand, and the slow progress in scientific
or medical understanding which left many without hope of appropriate
treatment or cure.
The key sources utilised in this study are drawn from the formal record
of asylums: annual reports, minutes, correspondence and accounts chart
the management of the asylum, its expenses, its patient body and its
connections. They also chart the way in which each asylum presented its
activities to its overseers. Formal reports include the records of medical
officers, management (in some institutions the most senior manager was
not a medic; elsewhere, especially in the second half of the century, the
roles were combined) and the asylum chaplain. Alongside data detailing
patient numbers and financial records, prose reports cover the activities of
each institution, most notably its approach to employment and recreation,
religious observance, building works and staffing.
Formal records rarely give a sense of the day-to-day state of patients’
health, or of the tensions and challenges involved in patient management.
Patient case books, available in most asylum archives, give a much greater
and more detailed insight into the individuals resident in each institu-
tion, their mental states and physical conditions. Although also written
by medical staff, the individual patient records add to the medicalised
diagnoses and anonymous data of the formal reports, describing the
detailed symptoms and behaviours of each patient. Many archives contain
a small amount of patient-produced material: letters, poems or drawings
give yet further insight and new perspectives into patients’ mental states.
Finally, ephemera more directly connected with entertainments include
photos, handbills, posters and programmes, patient magazines, newspaper
reports, and ad hoc records of attendance at dances or concerts, as well
as participation in a band or choir. Although patient records and material
occasionally offer snatches of evidence relevant to my topic, it is from the
formal records and ephemera that most information is drawn.
The picture that emerges from reports, particularly when read with a
focus on the use of music, is often unexpectedly positive. The present
volume is replete with stories of entertainments, dances, fairs, choirs
and bands being trained, patients enjoying themselves, and the lighter
side of asylum life. Asylum Superintendents were willing to spend time,
energy and money investing in music as an effective form of entertain-
ment as well as a potential therapeutic agent, and the picture given to the
Asylum’s management, external Visitors and the powerful Commissioners
 1 INTRODUCTION 29

in Lunacy, was necessarily a positive one. The beneficial effect of music

may well have been exaggerated in order to secure approval and funding
from the Visitors, local authorities and Commissioners.
Such a top-down (and potentially inaccurate) view from the asylum
management can only provide a very idealised version of affairs at each
institution, and perhaps an unrealistic impression of the ways in which
music was used, as well as its impact on patients. From the perspective of
medical history, the narratives discussed here largely fail to address Roy
Porter’s exhortations to move from a ‘physician-centred account’ to an
‘alternative history of medicine, largely written from the patient’s point
of view’.101 Throughout this volume, however, there are glimpses of alter-
native perspectives important for a more rounded view: extracts from
patient case books at Holloway Sanatorium give unusually individual and
detailed examples of music at work; the tale of dismissed band members
at the Norfolk County asylum reveals tensions between providing music
and maintaining discipline; data of patient admissions, discharges and
deaths, and numerous accounts of fire, disease and overcrowding which
are alluded to within the heavily-sanitised formal reports demonstrate the
often-dangerous and insanitary reality of asylum life. Despite the paucity
of evidence directly from the patients, the aim is to reconstruct the day-
to-day experiences of music within the asylum from a wide perspective
that includes patients, as well as all levels of staff and external visitors.
Charles Caesar Corsellis, Medical Director at the West Riding Lunatic
Asylum between 1831 and 1853, captured the problem of perspective in
one of his early reports. Corsellis noted

To paint the upper current of a Lunatic Asylum alone, and to give it all
the glowing colours of some delightful scene; to speak of the walks and
gardens, the music and dancing, the mirth of some, the contentedness of
others, and the universal cleanliness, would be an easy and delightful task.
But besides all these, there is, as a modern author has justly said, “a deep
undercurrent of unhappiness, constantly in agitation, which seeks vent in
habitual moroseness or spleen, or in occasional bursts of violence, or in
that capricious waywardness and irritability which can neither be subdued
nor soothed. There is a display of all the follies and vices of human nature,
deprived of the veil which the suggestions of prudence or reason, or the
usages of society supply, and urged to assume their most aggravated forms,
by imaginary misfortunes and delusions;” and perhaps at the very moment
the benevolent spectator contemplates the scene around him with feelings
of pleasure, he passes the door of some wretched sufferer, enduring in
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during our stay amongst the ice. When I say “in a rush” it is only
relatively speaking. For a rush was impossible in our circumstances.
The pilot’s room offered good sleeping accommodation for two people
if they went to bed quietly and carefully. There were so many uprights,
struts, and pipes that our bedroom had the appearance of a birdcage.
The making of a miscalculated movement landed one against a pipe or
a strut, sometimes both. In addition to this one could not stand at full
height. To speak of a rush under such conditions is therefore stupid.
The sight which met us when we put our heads through the trap-door
was interesting, but not altogether inviting. It was interesting to note
how much four desperate men can straighten out. The pool we had
made was now covered with ice in the center of which N 25 was stuck.
The pressure was tremendous and a catastrophe seemed
unavoidable. Gathering all his strength, Riiser-Larsen sprang like a
tiger. He jumped high in the air in order to land anywhere on the ice
which jammed the seaplane. The result was always the same. The ice
broke under him without resistance. Omdal had got hold of a tool (I
don’t know which one) and helped his comrade splendidly with its aid.
Larsen pushed for all he was worth against the seaplane’s nose and
tried to free it from the ice pressure. By this united work they managed
to loosen the machine about 45° and thereby lighten the pressure
against the sides. In the meantime Ellsworth and I were occupied in
putting the provisions and equipment on the old ice. We were masters
of the situation at last, but it was a near thing that time.
To return to our old quarters was unthinkable, so we looked round
for a safe place somewhere else. We lay in a favorable position for
crossing to N 24 and decided it might be wise to pursue this course.
There was a possibility that we might reach it by way of the new ice,
but this seemed unlikely after our last experience. However we would
try our best to get over because it would be an advantage to be able to
use N 24’s petrol without transporting it. Moreover it appeared that
conditions across there were calmer and offered a safer resting place.
That this was not the case we shall see later.
Thus we began again to hack and to level and by breakfast time
the track was finished. Exactly as though we ourselves had dispersed
it the fog lifted, and we could soon start. This reminds me of an
amusing occurrence, amusing for others, but not exactly for me. On
account of the small accommodation in the machines it was necessary
for us always to move about in tabloid form, bent, drawn together and
compact. The result of this was cramp, sometimes in the legs, in the
thighs, in the stomach, in the back. These attacks came on at the most
inopportune moments and the martyr was a never-failing object of
general amusement. Everything was ready that morning for departure
and I suddenly remembered my glasses which I had forgotten in the
mess and which I now rushed to fetch. But it was a mistaken move on
my part. My first hasty jerk gave me cramp in both thighs with the
result that I could not move from the spot. I heard titters and giggles
and notwithstanding the infernal pain I could not do otherwise than join
in the general amusement.
The second start was not more fortunate than the first. The ice
broke all the way and N 25 became famous as an icebreaker. One
good result came from it, however, namely, that we got near to the
other machine. That presented a sad appearance as it lay there lonely
and forlorn with one wing high in the air, and the other down on the ice.
They had been lucky enough to get its nose up on to a grade of the old
ice floe, but the tail lay right out in the ice.
The conditions here seemed quite promising. We had an open
waterway about 400 meters long with fine new ice quite near. The third
attempt to start was undertaken the same afternoon but without result.
We decided to join up the waterway and the new ice. It was possible
that the great speed one could attain on the waterway would carry one
up onto the ice and if that happened there was a big chance of rising in
the air as the track would then have become about 700 meters long. At
2 a.m. on the 4th June we started the work, continuing all day. As by
eventide we had got the track finished, down came the fog and
prevented us from starting. A little later the ice got rather lively,
beginning to screw during the night. Fortunately it was only the new-
frozen ice, but even it was eight inches thick. There were pipings and
singings all round us as the ice jammed against the machine. The
methods and tools we now used were most original. Dietrichson armed
himself with a four-yard-long aluminium pole with which he did
wonderful work. Omdal used the film camera tripod, which was very
heavy, ending in three iron-bound points. Every blow therefore was
trebled and was most effective. Riiser-Larsen was the only one who
had brought rubber boots with him; these reached to his waist. As the
ice encroached it was met by ringing blows. The battle against it
continued the whole night and by morning we could once again look
back upon a conquest. Meantime the old ice had crept up nearer to us.
It now appeared as though the “Sphinx” was taking aim at us; this was
an ugly forbidding iceberg, formed in the shape of the Sphinx. The
movements of the ice had caused the sides of the waterway to set
together and our starting place was ruined again. The fog lay thick on
the 5th of June while fine rain was falling. The ice cracked and piped
as though it would draw our attention to the fact that it still existed.
Now what should one do?
With his usual energy Riiser-Larsen had gone for a walk that
afternoon amongst the icebergs accompanied by Omdal; they wished
to see if they could find another place which could be converted into a
starting place. They had already turned round to return home, as the
fog was preventing them from seeing anything, when suddenly it lifted
and there they stood in the center of the only plain which could be
used. This was 500 meters square and not too uneven to be made
level by a little work and patience. They came back happy and full of
hope and shouted to the “Sphinx”: “You may be amused and smile
even when others despair—even when the position is hopeless we still
sing with pleasure aha! aha! aha! Things are improving day by day.”
The “Sphinx” frowned! It did not like this!
 COLLECTING SNOW BLOCKS FOR A RUN-WAY
The way to the plain which the two men had found was both long
and difficult, but we lived under conditions where difficulties frightened
us no more. First of all the machine must be driven there—about 300
meters through new ice to a high old plain. Here we would have to
hack out a slide to drive the machine up. From here the road crossed
over to the Thermopylæ Pass, which was formed by two moderately
sized icebergs, and ended in a three-yards-wide ditch over which the
machine must be negotiated on to the next plain. On the other side
one could see the last obstacle which must be overcome in the form of
an old crack about five yards wide with sides formed of high icebergs
and loose snow—rotten conditions to work in. Early on the morning of
the 6th the work was started. After breakfast we took all our tools and
attacked the old ice where the grade should be built. In order to get to
this spot we had to pass round a corner which took us out of sight of
N 25. Under general circumstances one would not have left the
machine unattended, but conditions were otherwise than general and
we had no man we could spare. Singing “In Swinemunde träumt man
im Sand,” the popular melody associated with our comfortable days in
Spitzbergen, we used our knives, axes, and ice-anchor to the best
advantage, and fragments of ice flew in all directions. It is with pride
and joy that I look back on these days, joy because I worked in
company with such men, proud because our task was accomplished.
Let me say quite frankly and honestly that I often regarded the
situation as hopeless and impossible. Ice-walls upon ice-walls raised
themselves up and had to be removed from our course; an
unfathomable gulf seemed to yawn before us threatening to stop our
progress. It had to be bridged by cheeky heroes who, never grumbling,
tackled the most hopeless tasks with laughter and with song.

TRYING OUT OUR BULB SEXTANTS

 FAST IN THE ICE
At 1 p.m. we went on board for soup. The ice was then calm. The
“Sphinx” lay in the same position. Oh! how good the thick pemmican
soup tasted! Five hours’ hard work on a cup of chocolate and three
small oatcakes gives one a good appetite. At 4 p.m. Dietrichson went
on board to fetch something, and on his return remarked that it
seemed to him that the old ice was approaching the seaplane. Now,
he, during the last days, had suffered a little from snow blindness and
we thought accordingly he had made a mistake. It was indeed a
mistake. We should have gone at once and looked into the matter.
One must however remember that every second is precious and that
we grudged stopping work. At 7 p.m. we went on board to eat our three
biscuits. The sight which then met us would have filled the bravest
heart with despair. The great pack had approached the seaplane to
within some meters. The “Sphinx” seemed to bow and chuckle with
amusement. Now it would have us! But it had laughed too soon. The
six men that it now looked upon were not the same six who some days
ago had arrived through the air from a place full of life’s comforts; the
six now were hardened by obstacles, weariness and hunger, and they
feared nothing on earth, not even the “Sphinx.” “Hurrah! heroes.
Hurrah for home and all we hold dear. The devil take the ‘Sphinx.’” And
so the work began and in its performance we got more self-confident
than ever before, as we managed to turn the heavy machine round in
the course of a few minutes. What task each person specially
performed it is difficult to say, but it was a Herculean task. We lay
down, we pulled, we toiled, we scratched. “You shall go round!” Before
we realized it there it was, turned 180° and the course set for the new
slide. The “Sphinx” hung its head and looked sad; but the next day it
lay exactly on the spot where N 25 had lain. During this performance
N 24 was pushed on to the plain beside which it had lain. Still a little
more leveling and the slide was ready. To shouts of joy the machine, in
the evening at eleven o’clock, was driven over the track and stopped
exactly beside the Thermopylæ Pass. To-morrow there would not be
much to be done.
The 7th of June. Norway’s Day! At home they would be wearing
light summer clothes and enjoying life, while flags flew over the whole
land from the North Cape to Neset. But don’t think that we forgot this
day. No! From the N 25’s highest point our silk flag flew and our
thoughts—oh! don’t let us think at all of them!
The side of the pass was formed by two gigantic icebergs which
would have to be more than half cut down before the wings could pass
over and the great ditch had to be filled up with ton after ton of snow.
But the 7th of June is a good day to work for homesick folk. The knives
are driven with greater certainty, the axes swung with greater power,
and in a remarkably short time the ice giants dwindled to dwarfs. We
experienced a very exciting episode on this occasion. While Riiser-
Larsen drove the machine over the snow glacier Dietrichson went past
and did not get out of the way. At the last moment he threw himself
down flat on the ground and the tail-skid passed so near to him that I
could not see daylight between. It was in the words’ fullest meaning a
narrow escape. “I saw you all right,” remarked the pilot later. “But I
could not stop in the middle of the bridge.” That his words were true
was proved by looking back and noting that the bridge was no longer
there. It was a delightful feeling to sit on a “flynder” and rush across the
snow plains. It was not often we got the satisfaction, as we usually had
to stand by ready to push or haul the machine over the snow. But this
intermediate plain was hard and the pilot could manage to steer with
the wheel. And thus we stood before the last ditch which had to be
filled and leveled. It took us six hours before it was finished and the
machine landed in safety on the big plain. It had been thawing the
whole day and was uncomfortably warm for working, but one could
always throw some clothes off. We were not so particular about our
appearance.
The 8th of June brought us fog and half a degree of heat. It
drizzled the whole time and we were exceptionally uncomfortable. We
were now faced by another hard task, namely, turning the machine
round in the deep wet snow. We were unused to this work and
consequently were fairly clumsy. In addition to this we had to decrease
our daily rations from 300 to 250 grammes, insufficient to keep up our
strength. Our work in the deep wet snow of this plain was wearying.
More wearying than ever before. Do you remember, comrades, how
we made the turning platform? You will scarcely have forgotten that?
The machine had to be driven up to the starting place and then swung
round 180° to face the right direction. The snow as already said was
deep and wet, and any turning of the machine under these conditions
was hardly possible. What should we do now? There was only one
thing to be done, namely, to dig down to the ice and turn the machine
on that. The snow here was from two to three feet deep and every
spadeful was a heavy weight to lift, particularly as we used the big
shovels. We cleared a circular place with a diameter of fifteen meters.
That got the name “turning-table.” Had we solved our problem by this
you might have forgotten the turning-table by now, but when we tried to
turn the machine, we found that the skids caught in the ice and
stopped the whole progress. Again we were faced with the question
—“What shall we do?” And some one was struck by a bright idea—to
lay a snow-skate underneath. We all agreed the idea was good, but to
accomplish it was not easy. We must lift the machine and it weighed
four and one-half tons. But even that did not frighten us. It was not to a
great height that we had to lift it—just about two centimeters, but only
five men were available while the sixth must place the snow-skate
underneath. Never mind, come on, my heroes. Lay your shoulders to
the wheel and lift. And then five backs are bent in unison, and one!
two! three!—we had got it up on the snow-skate at last. We continued
working steadily, regardless of time’s flight, from 4 a.m. on the 8th of
June to 4 a.m. the next day. During that time starting place No. 5 was
worked on, tried, and approved. The fog lay thick and heavy while the
drizzle continued all day on the 9th, but Riiser-Larsen insisted that the
track should be completed. Think now what a problem we had before
us when we started to work that morning. A track—500 meters long—
twelve meters broad—should be made in wet snow three feet in depth.
The snow cleared away from the track must be thrown at least six
yards away from each side so that it should not get in the way of the
machine. We had lived on 250 grammes daily for several days so you
will not be astonished when I say that by evening we were absolutely
worn out. I watched, with wonder, the two giants who wielded the
shovels all day. We others did what we could, but our work was trifling
compared to theirs. On the 11th we set to again after breakfast, but we
could not keep up this strenuous work; an observer would have
noticed at once that he had a number of worn-out people before him.
The clang of the spades got slower, the rest-intervals longer and
longer till in the end we stood quite still and stared at each other. It
seemed an impossibility to get the snow shoveled aside in a
reasonable time. Whilst we stood discussing it, Omdal walked up and
down in the snow. It was only a chance that he did so, but a chance
which brought about important results. “See,” he shouted suddenly,
“this is what we can do instead of shoveling.” The place where he had
trekked was quite hard and with a little frost would give a splendid
surface. In the afternoon we started our great trek. Foot by foot of the
track of soft wet snow was trodden into a solid road. It was still
thawing, but we knew that if it turned frosty it would become a perfect
track—and it was only natural to expect that frost would come. To
make the surface even we had to remove long and high stretches of
ice-formation containing tons upon tons of ice. On the 14th of June as
we laid down our tools I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that all in
all we had removed 500 tons of ice and snow. That day we made two
starts, 6 and 7, but the foundation was still too soft as we had had no
constant frost. Certainly the temperature that day had been as low as
-12° c., but then it rose immediately after to 0° again. It was impossible
to get up sufficient speed to rise, the machine sank down into the
snow, and in a number of places dragged the whole of the underlying
snow with it. Now will it freeze or not?
The 15th of June was fixed as the latest day for our next attempt to
start. If that was not successful we must collaborate and decide what
could be done. There were not many courses to choose. Either we
must desert the machine and attempt to reach the nearest land, or we
must stay where we were and hope for an opportunity to rise in the air.
We had performed the miracle of leaving Spitzbergen with one month’s
provisions, and yet after four weeks had passed we found we had
provisions for six weeks. We could thus hold out until the 1st of
August. In my lifetime I have often been faced by situations where I
found it difficult to decide on the right course of action, but to choose in
this case with any degree of certainty was more difficult than the
making of any previous decision. The first alternative—to set off in
search of land—appeared to me to be the most sensible as, should our
provisions run out, it was possible further south that we might find
edible animal life. In addition this plan had the great advantage that it
would occupy our thoughts with the work we had ahead. Against this
plan the fact of our modest equipment and our probably weakened
condition must be weighed. When I privately considered these two
alternatives I always came to the conclusion that to look for land was
the most sensible, but as soon as I decided on this course a voice
whispered in my ear: “Are you mad, Boy? Will you leave a complete
and good machine, filled with petrol, and go down into the high broken
ice where you know you may perish miserably? A waterway may open
up before you to-morrow and then you will be home in eight hours’
time.” Will any one blame me for my indecision when I found it so
difficult to choose.
On the evening of the 14th we unloaded everything on the ice
except the most necessary, and that we placed in a canvas boat. We
kept sufficient petrol and oil for eight hours, one canvas boat, two
shotguns, six sleeping bags, one tent, cooking utensils and provisions
for a few weeks. Even our splendid ski-shoes had to be set aside as
they were too heavy. Of our clothes we only kept what we could not do
without. All told it amounted to about 300 kg.
On the 15th of June we had a temperature of -3° c. with a little
breeze from the southeast, just the very wind we required. The track
was frozen fine and hard during the night, but the sky was not too
promising—low-lying clouds—but what in all the world did we care
about the sky! The thickest fog would not have kept us back. In this
light the track was very difficult to see; small black objects were
therefore placed at each side so that the pilot would be certain to make
no mistake. A little too much to one side or the other could be fatal. At
9:30 p.m. everything was clear and ready for a start. The solar-
compasses and the engines started. They were three-quarters warmed
up. I cast a last glance over the track and walked along it to pass the
time. It ran from northeast towards southeast. A few yards in front of
the machine there was a small crack across the ice. It was only a few
inches wide, but there it was, and at any moment it might open and
separate the little corner we stood upon from all the rest. For the
distance of 100 meters the track rose quite gradually in order to
become level. Two hundred meters away, on the floe’s southeast end,
there also lay a crack right across, but this was of a much more
serious nature, and had caused us many uneasy moments. It was
about two feet wide and filled with water and mush. This seemed to
show that it was connected with the sea and could give us a few
unpleasant surprises sooner or later. Should this crack widen and tear
away 200 meters of our track, the latter would be entirely ruined. The
floe ended in a three-foot broad water-lane; on the other side of it,
direct in the line of the track, lay a flat forty-meter long plain, which one
will understand was far from ideal, but absolutely the best which the
place could offer us. At 10:30 everything was in order. In the pilot’s
seat sat Riiser-Larsen, behind him Dietrichson and I, in the petrol tank
Omdal and Feucht, and Ellsworth in the mess. Dietrichson was to
navigate us homewards and should really have taken his place in the
observer’s seat in front of the pilot. But as that was too exposed in
view of the nature of the task we were undertaking, his place was
allotted further back at the start. This was undeniably a most anxious
moment. As soon as the machine began to glide one could notice a
great difference from the day before. The hasty forward glide was not
to be mistaken. One hundred meters off, we started at top-speed,
2,000 revolutions a minute. It trembled and shook, shivered and piped.
It was as though N 25 understood the situation. It was as though the
whole of its energy had been gathered for one last and decisive spring
from the floe’s southern edge. Now—or never.
We rushed over the three-meter wide crack, dashed down from the
forty-meter broad floe and then? Was it possible? Yes, indeed! The
scraping noise stopped, only the humming of the motor could be
heard. At last we were in flight. A smile and a nod and Dietrichson
disappeared into the observation compartment.
 And now started the flight which will take its place amongst the
most supreme in flying’s history. An 850-kilometer flight with death as
the nearest neighbor. One must remember that we had thrown
practically everything away from us. Even though we had managed by
a miracle to get away with our lives, after a forced landing, still our
days were numbered.
The sky was low and for two hours we were compelled to fly at a
height of fifty meters. It was interesting to observe the ice conditions,
so we eased down. We believed that in different places we observed
from the sky we could distinguish open water all around us. But it was
not the case. Not a drop was to be seen anywhere, nothing but ice in a
chaotic jumble all around. It was interesting also to see that the floe,
which from first to last had given us freedom, was the only floe within a
radius of many miles which could have been of any use to us. N 24 got
a farewell wave and was lost to sight for ever. Everything worked
excellently, the engines went like sewing machines and gave us
unqualified confidence. Both solar-compasses ticked and worked, and
we knew that if only the sun would appear, they would be of invaluable
assistance to us. The speedometers were placed. By the wheel sat the
pilot, cool and confident as always. In the navigating compartment was
a man I trusted absolutely, and by the engines two men who knew their
work perfectly. Ellsworth spent his time making geographical
observations and photographs. I myself managed to get what was
impossible on the journey north, a splendid opportunity to study the
whole flight. The course was set towards Spitzbergen’s north
coastland, around Nord Kap. In the two first hours we steered by the
magnetic compass. This had been considered an impossibility,
hitherto, so far north, but the result was excellent. When the sun broke
through after two hours and shone direct on the solar-compass, it
showed us how exactly we had steered. For three hours the
atmosphere had been clear, but now it turned to thick fog. We rose to a
height of 200 meters, flying over it in brilliant sunshine. Here we
derived much benefit from the solar-compasses and were able to
compare their readings with the magnetic-compass. We had fog for an
hour and then it cleared again. The condition of the ice was as on the
northern trip, small floes, with icebergs on all sides. There was
apparently no system in its formation; everything was a jumble. There
was more open water than on the northern tour, but no waterways,
only basins.
In 82° N. Lat. the fog descended again. The pilot tried for some
time to fly under it, and this was a flight which would have delighted
people who seek nerve-splitting thrills. The fog came lower and lower
till at last it stretched right over the icebergs. With a speed of about
120 miles at a low altitude one gets a new impression of flying. With a
rush we passed over the top of the icebergs one after the other. At a
great height one does not notice the terrific speed. One is, on the
contrary, astonished how slowly one appears to be traveling. Several
times icebergs peeped up directly under us, so close in fact that I
thought, “We shall never clear that one!” But the next moment we were
across it. There could not have been more than a hair’s breadth to
spare. At last the conditions became impossible; fog and ice blended
into one. We could see nothing. There was another matter as well
which was of special weight, namely, the nearness of Spitzbergen.
Should we fly into the high cliff walls with a speed of 120 kilometers
there would not be much left of us. There was only one thing to do—to
fly over the fog and that was exactly what the pilot decided to do.
Up 100 meters high—and we were above the fog in brilliant
sunshine. It was observable soon that the fog was thinning, it began to
lift more and more in big masses, and soon we could see territory
under it. It was not inviting; nothing but small ice with a little water.
When I speak of the impossible landing conditions it is only to show
that to land here would have meant certain death. Such a landing
would have crushed the machine and sent it to the bottom. The fog
lifted steadily and soon disappeared entirely. It was a fresh southerly
breeze which brought about this welcome change. The fog had lain
thickest in the south, but now that began to move away as well. Large
sections of it tore themselves away from the great mass and
disappeared in small driving clouds. Where was Spitzbergen? Had we
steered so mistakenly that we had flown to the side of it? It was quite
possible. One had no experience in the navigation of the air in these
regions. Over and over again the general opinion of the magnetic
compass’s uselessness in this district came back to my mind as I sat
there. The solar-compass had—as soon as we got the sun—shown a
reading in agreement with the magnetic compass, but it was set at
——? At what? If only I knew! There was probably no ground for
anxiety, yet I felt dubious. We ought to see land by now. We had not
enough petrol to last long—and still no land. Then suddenly a big
heavy fog-cloud tore itself away and rose slowly, disclosing a high
glittering hill-top. There was scarcely any doubt. It must be
Spitzbergen. To the north lay some islands. They coincided with
Syvöene and the land stretched out in a westerly direction. But even if
it were not Spitzbergen, it was still land—good, solid land. From the
islands there stretched a dark strip northwards. It was water—the great
open sea. Oh! what a delightful feeling—sea and land and no more
ice. Our course lay southwards, but to get more quickly away from the
ugly conditions beneath us, the course was set westwards and
downwards to the open sea. It was more than a clever move on the
part of the pilot—it was refreshing to see how instinct came to his aid—
because the controls were showing signs of wear. It is enough to say
before we had got right across the sea the controls jammed and an
immediate landing was necessary. The wind blew with a cold blast
from what we learned later was Hinlopen Strait and the sea was high
and rough. The forced landing was accomplished with all the
assurance and experience which always distinguished our pilot. We
left our places and all went aft in order to allow the nose to lift as high
as possible. The pilot was the only one left forward. He flew most
carefully, guiding the boat and maneuvering it against the highest
waves, which were of tremendous dimensions. We who were aft kept
warm and dry, but it was a different matter for the man at the wheel.
Time after time the waves lashed over him, wetting him to the skin in a
few minutes. It was not “spray” which we shipped when the waves
broke over us. Unused as I was to maneuvers of this kind I expected
every moment to see the bottom stove in. It was seven in the evening
when the forced landing was accomplished, and it was not until eight
that we reached land. It was a fairly shoal bay we entered and the
landing places it offered us were not of the best. We found a sloping
side of the coast ice where we could climb ashore. The wind now died
away and the sun shone on the heavy stones which lay on the beach.
Here and there a little fresh rill ran between them singing as it
descended from the hillsides. The sweet voices of birds fitted in with
our gentle mood of eventide and inspired in us a feeling of solemnity.
There was no need to look for a church wherein to praise God the
Almighty and offer up to Him our burning thanks. Here was a spot
amidst His own wonderful nature. The sea lay smooth and calm with
here and there tremendous pieces of ice protruding from the water.
The whole scene made an ineradicable impression on us which we
shall never forget. The plane was moored to a large piece of ice so
that it swung free, and all of us went ashore. There were two things
which it was necessary for us to do in our own interests. First to
discover our whereabouts and then to have a little food. The chocolate
and the three biscuits we had taken at 8 a.m. no longer satisfied us.
While Dietrichson “took the sun” the rest of us got the meal ready—a
repetition of breakfast. How good it tasted! How fine it was to jump
about among the big rocks! We became children again. All around lay
driftwood which we could use for firing if we remained here any time.
The ninety liters of petrol which we had must be used sparingly.
Omdal, who had been our cook during the whole trip, wished to set
the Primus going, as there was still a little drop of petrol left in it, and
he was busy with it when suddenly Riiser-Larsen shouted, “There is a
ship.” And truly there in the east round the nearest point came a little
cutter, gliding along. Had misfortune earlier been our lot luck seemed
now to overwhelm us. It was now 9 p.m. and Dietrichson had just
completed his observations. We found that we were exactly at Nord
Kap on Nordostland, the very spot we had steered for in the morning.
Thus the flight was a master-stroke on the part of the man who
directed the machine, while the navigator shares the distinction with
him. It was a splendid deed! But—the little cutter had changed her
course and apparently had not noticed us. She moved quickly and was
probably fitted with a motor engine. What should we do? What should
we do to communicate with it? “Nothing easier,” said the flying-men.
“Just sit tight and you shall see.” In a second everything was brought
on board the plane, the motor started and we rushed over the sea
stopping exactly beside the cutter. It was the cutter “Sjöliv” of Balsfjord
—Captain Nils Wollan. A jolly-boat was lowered and with two men
rowed across to us. They seemed in doubt as to who we could be,
dirty and bearded as we were. But when I turned slightly round I
exposed my profile—and they knew us at once. Would they tow us
down to King’s Bay as our petrol was almost done? They would be
delighted to do this, in fact Wollan would have certainly towed us to
China if we had asked him, so glad was he to see us, so beaming with
kindness and goodwill. We had a rope attached to N 25 and we all
went on board the “Sjöliv.” There for the first time we felt that the
expedition was finished. Quietly and calmly we shook hands with each
other—it was a handshake that said much. We were received by all
the crew with hearty welcome and shown down to the cabins. While
this part of the ship was not exactly a ballroom, the cabins on “Sjöliv”—
2 × 2 meters—compared with what we had had in the last four weeks,
were roomy and comfortable. These good people cleared out of them
absolutely and handed over the whole place to us. In the two broad
bunks four of us were able to sleep, while two found berths in the
men’s quarters. “Will you have coffee?” was the first question. Would
we! Yes, certainly, and as quickly as possible with a smoke thrown in.
We had been tobaccoless for the last days and now were longing for a
smoke. The first coffee was not an unqualified success; the coffee pot
was set on the fire to warm and, on a mighty roll the cutter gave, it flew
straight onto Riiser-Larsen’s back. He was thus the first to get coffee,
but if he appreciated the honor, his language expressed a totally
different opinion. They apologized to us for the egg pancake and the
seal-flesh which comprised the next course, but apologies were
unnecessary. All the food disappeared as though a whirlwind had
passed over the table—and this, despite the fact that we had decided
to eat sparingly after our long restriction.
The towing of N 25 proceeded satisfactorily in the beginning, but
during the night a southerly breeze came up blowing directly down
from the hills. The waves increased steadily and as we steered
westwards towards Hinlopen Strait we decided that we must turn
landwards and anchor. We only got to bed at 5:30 a.m., after traversing
an endless number of roods.
At eleven o’clock the next morning we were up again. It was
blowing a gale and we lay badly. We decided therefore that we should
go into the nearest bay to find a calm and safe harborage for N 25, let
it remain there while we went on to King’s Bay for assistance, return
for the seaplane and fly it down. The nearest harbor was Brandy Bay.
We looked at each other as much as to say, “Can we really permit
ourselves to enter a place with such a name?” The ice here lay at the
bottom of the Bay and we towed the machine safely through it. At 8
p.m. we steered for King’s Bay. It was a windy passage through
Hinlopen Strait. The sea was high and rough and the “Sjöliv” enjoyed
herself royally. If our feelings agreed with hers, I should not like to say.
On the 17th we sailed along Spitzbergen’s north coast in summer
sunshine and warmth. We passed a few vessels and asked if they had
seen “Hobby”—but “No, they had not.”
As we passed Virgo-havn we hoisted all our flags and the little
“Sjöliv” was in gala attire. We wanted to honor the memory of the man
who, for the first time, sought to reach the Pole through the air—
Salomon August Andrëe. Was there any one in the world who had
more right to honor the memory of this man than we six who stood
here looking over the place from which he set out on his sad
expedition. I scarcely think so. We lowered our flag and continued.
At 11 p.m. we rounded Cape Mitra and there lay King’s Bay before
us. It was a wonderful sensation to sail back through the Bay and see
all the old well-known places again. The ice had vanished, melted by
the sunshine as loon and auk gamboled in its rays. Anxiety was rife
among us as we sailed in as to whether “Hobby” was here or not? The
skipper looked out, came back and announced that “Hobby” was not
here; only a coal-boat lay by the quay. As we approached one or other
of us went continually to look out; suddenly some one cried, “Yes,
there is ‘Hobby.’ And another boat lies there also, but I can’t distinguish
which it is.” Our relief was great. There lay “Hobby” and many of our
dear friends were near. “Hullo,” some one cried from above, “the other
boat is the Heimdal.’” “No, you must be mad. What would the ‘Heimdal’
be doing here?” answered another. We had not the slightest idea what
awaited us. Nearer and nearer we approached. “Shall we raise the
flag?” said the skipper. “No,” I answered, “there is no reason to do so.”
But a little later some one said, “Surely we must greet the naval flag.”
“Yes, naturally. I have forgotten my good manners on the trip,” I had to
admit. So up went the flag and the “Sjöliv” approached the quay. We
continually had our glasses directed on the ships ahead; suddenly
some one exclaimed, “Good gracious, two flying machines are lying
there.” And, true enough, there lay two Hansa-Brandenburgers ready
for flight. Surely they were destined for a North Coast charting survey,
as that had been discussed last year. Yes, that seemed quite possible!
That we were the reason for all this excitement never entered our
minds. We came on nearer and nearer. We could now see that they
were beginning to direct glasses on us from the Coast, showing
interest in the little cutter. As we sailed in one of our people who saw a
comrade on board the “Hobby” shouted, “Hullo, Finn, how is everything
at home?” That was the signal for great excitement. We saw them run
round each other in jubilation, shouting and gesticulating. What in the
world was the reason for all this? Soon we were to know. The motor
stopped and the “Sjöliv” sailed up alongside “Hobby.”

MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION ARRIVING AT KING’S BAY

The reception we received will never be forgotten, not even when
other things fill our thoughts. Our friends wept, they took hold of us,
they looked at us with unbelieving glance—“But, Great God, is it you?”
They simply did not realize that we had returned. But they explained
how they had waited and waited, insisting that they had never given us
up, while in their hearts they knew they had. And suddenly there we
stood among them—the dead returned to life. No wonder that the
reaction was great. Not one sensible word was said during the first half
hour. There stood all our dear old friends: Captain Hagerup, Lieutenant
Horgen, Zapffe, Ramm, Berge, etc. They looked so happy. And there
were the dear fellows who had been sent to our relief: Captain Blom of
the “Heimdal” and First Lieutenant F. Lutzow-Holm with the air fleet.

ROALD AMUNDSEN AND LINCOLN ELLSWORTH AT THE

RECEPTION BY THE KING OF NORWAY
The last to come down, not because he wished to be late, but
because it took him a long time to traverse the road from the Director’s
house, was our dear host, Stakkars Knutsen. He had run so fast that
he had to stand for a time to regain his breath. It was a warm reunion.
Among all who had missed us in that time there was scarcely anybody
whom our absence had made more uneasy. Late and early, we were
told, he had scanned the horizon looking for us. Never had we been
out of his thoughts. Big, strong man as he was, he had the warmest
and softest of hearts. No wonder then that the meeting with Knutsen
was regarded as an outstandingly important incident.
We had to be photographed from all sides, although a record
would appear on the plate of a month’s whiskers and dirt. In an hour
both would have vanished. And so we set off to our old King’s Bay
quarters where we had passed unforgettable days before our
departure. It was like a delightful dream to see it again. Every day as
we had sat in our little mess on N 25 taking our humble meal, it was
remarked on every side, “Oh! if only we were back at Knutsen’s.” And
now we were there. We felt we wanted to pinch ourselves and ask, “Is
this really possible? Can you really eat as many biscuits as you wish?”
There was no time to shave and wash first. No! Berta had now taken
command, and we should first and foremost have food. As we stepped
into the room, cheering broke out. The Station welcomed us back, and
never has our National Anthem sounded finer than it did as we stood in
the little square room listening to the tones of what is our dearest
hymn. I believe there was not one dry eye in the company. “Gud sygne
dig landet vaart. Vi gir dig med glede alt.”
On the next day about three or four o’clock the steam bath was
ready and a change was effected; hair and whiskers disappeared. We
were all very thin, but we noticed it now more distinctly. It looked as
though Riiser-Larsen could have put his collar twice round his neck—
the same size collar which had even been tight for him when he set out
for the north.
What time we went to bed that night I really cannot say, but I do
know that when I came out next morning and looked around, one of
the finest sights met me, making an ineradicable impression. On the
flagstaff, right before the house, waved our big, beautiful National flag
in a light summer breeze. The sun was blazing down and the glaciers
around shone like silver in its rays. All seemed to be in festal dress.
The hills blushed with the finest little flowers, and the birds twittered
and sang. In the harbor lay the boats fully be-flagged. Yes! it was