David Barron was barely into his teens when he arrived at the Mid-Yorkshire Institution for the Mentally Defective in the late 1930s. He had been taken there by local council officials, having been rescued from a foster home where he was cruelly treated.
‘Goodbye, lad. We hope you’ll soon settle in,’ they said. He was shown into a huge dining room, filled with around 500 people.
It was not the noise that day that would stay in his memory, but the sight of the bars on the windows. The sense that he was in prison, closed in, with the clanging of keys locking and unlocking each room and corridor.
