Join award winning Historian Sarah Wise as she discusses her latest book, The Undesirables for another episode of the Tap Into Podcast.

The Undesirables

By 1950, an estimated 50,000 people had been deemed ‘defective’ by the British government and detained indefinitely under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Their ‘crimes’ were various: women with children born out of wedlock; rebellious teenagers caught shoplifting; those with epilepsy, hearing impairments and chronic illnesses who had struggled in school; and many who were simply ‘different’.

Forcibly removed from their families and confined to a shadow world of specialist facilities in the countryside, they were hidden away and forgotten – out of sight, out of mind.

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