ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Identities? Intellectual Disabilities and Conscription in First World War England

• In Event: Disability's Conscription in British History

English Abstract

Recent studies have highlighted the power of self-advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities, including in challenging orthodoxies about capabilities and life choices, while the health inequalities laid bare by the Covid pandemic have pointed to the urgency of such action. However, despite its present-day significance, we still know little about such self-advocacy’s historical antecedents, either in Britain or beyond. At least in part because of a lack of archival or other sources, and despite historians of medicine’s interest in capturing patient perspectives, the voices of individuals with intellectual disabilities remain muted in the historical record.
The aim of this paper is to make use of records of appeals against conscription during the First World War to begin to access such individuals’ identities and sense of self in early twentieth-century England. The paper will be based on an investigation of a sample of individual files in the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal archive, a collection of appeals against military conscription, held by The National Archives and now digitised, which includes the records of over 11,000 appeals.
Including applications both by middle- and by working-class individuals that made reference to a mental disability among the arguments for exemption, and paying due attention to wartime shifts in understandings of mental frailties, the paper will question whether distinctive patient voices or indications of agency emerge from the files. Investigating such records ‘against the grain’, the paper will assess evidence of contestation – or indeed acquiescence – with contemporary understandings of mental ‘deficiency’, as individuals sought to navigate their way through the conscription process.

Author

• Laura Ugolini, University of Wolverhampton