William John INNES
William John Innes was born on 1 January 1876 at 10 Champion Place, Upper Tulse Hill in South London. His parents John Innes, captain of a merchant vessel, and Sarah Ann Collins had married 10 months earlier in Brixton. The house at Champion Place was the home of Sarah’s parents William and Ann Collins.
A sister, Annie Elizabeth, was born towards the end of 1877.
By the time of the census in April 1881, William’s father had died. Sarah, now a widow aged just 27, and the two children were still at Champion Place with Sarah’s parents.
We know very little of William’s early childhood but his mother said in 1893 that three years previously (around 1890) he had started to act strangely. She must have found him hard to cope with for in the 1891 census, aged 14, he was resident at the Carter Home for Destitute Children in Clapham, where he was apprenticed as a shoemaker.
At this time William’s mother Sarah was still living at 10 Champion Place with her daughter Annie and her father William Collins, by now a widower.
In 1893 the medical officer at Lambeth Infirmary found William to be of unsound mind.
“Patient states that he has irresistible impulses. Does not remember the day or month or year, is strange in his manner.
Patient is restless, strange, mutters to himself. States that at times he has impulses to injure people, uses bad language without provocation and says he cannot help it.”
He was ordered to be admitted to Colney Hatch asylum where he spent the next six years before being moved to Manor when it opened in 1899.
AI restored photo
The photo was taken at Manor.
The doctors at Manor noted that:
“Is rambling and incoherent in conversation. Suffers from hallucinations. Says he is kept awake at night by electric batteries, that lights from the other side of the room are continually playing all over him”
“He believes that the matron from another asylum comes and stands by his bed at night”
William was moved to Horton when it opened in March 1902, and at the age of 31 he died there from tuberculosis of the lungs on 23 February 1907.