If they were badly affected, they were sent to a mental home. Lost limbs Horace Blackburn was disabled from childhood. During the First World War, he fitted limbs to people wounded in the war. I told my mother and she said that is what happens in war. No-one wants them.
War veterans say they got four shillings for a lost arm and five or six shillings for a lost leg.
The war brought physical disability out into the open. But the government was still locking away people with learning difficulties under the 1913 Mental Defectives Act. Bill Surrey was locked up at the age of seven and spent 70 years in an institution. He said his family tried to stop him being taken away, but failed. He was told he would be locked up for 30 years, but that period got longer and longer.