The Brentry Certified Inebriate Reformatory
My next post is going to focus on the Brentry Certified Inebriate Reformatory, located in Brentry, Bristol. Built formerly as a country house for the Payne family in 1802, to the designs of Humphrey Repton and John Adey Repton, Brentry House was converted in 1898 when it became the Royal Victoria Home under the auspices of the Reverend Harold Nelson Burden and his wife Katharine Mary. Burden, an Anglican minister, began his evangelistic career in the East End of London, and eventually becoming the chaplain of Horfield Prison. It was the living conditions of the prisoners and their inebriated wives which led the Burdens establish homes for drunkards and the feeble minded.
In 1898 the Inebriates Act became law. Under this new law, an individual who “convicted on indictment of an offence punishable with imprisonment or penal servitude, if the court is satisfied from the evidence that the offence was committed under the influence of drink or that drunkenness was a contributing cause of the offence, and the offender admits that he is or is found by the jury to be a habitual drunkard, the court may, in addition to or in substitution for any other sentence, order that he be detained for a term not exceeding three years in any State inebriate reformatory or in any certified inebriate reformatory the managers of which are willing to receive him.”
The 1901 census for Westbury-on-Trym gives us a glimpse of life at the Reformatory. It seems from this census record that most of the inmates were women, as were most of the staff. They include individuals such as Mary Ann Harlow, of Tipton Staffordshire who on 26th June 1899 was convicted under the Inebriates Act, her 25th conviction. Reading through available primary source, it would seem that Mary Ann Harlow led a somewhat tragic life in the time leading up to her residence at Brentry, As this article in the Staffordshire Chronicle on 1st February 1896 states:
It is hard to know exactly what the circumstances were for Mary Ann Harlow to be incarcerated in the Reformatory, but the information that we have offers us a glimpse of the lives of such individuals.