In the late nineteen-fifties it was quite something as a young man to give up my science subjects in a soon to be set up University in Regent Street, London. Offhandedly, as it were, to join the British Army.
I reasoned it was something I had to do.
Leaving behind a small rural parochial village, home to my parents, brother and sister, for a bigger landscape, and joining untold numbers of like-minded men to be garrisoned in Catterick Camp was hardly likely to be a holiday.
It was bleak midwinter when we struggled out of our beds and into a run for ablutions, to don denims and then make the parade ground where we stood to stiff attention. We then suffered in silence to the drill sergeant’s outpourings of coarse and profane words which adorned the soldier’s new English vocabulary.
From then on, it was to be drill, drill and more drill with occasional stops for a cig and a breather in brass monkey weather. Now and again, a NMFI break for a cuppa and another fag and a riff perhaps of “Something in your mind cannot be denied …. smoke gets in your eyes.”
One day I was found wanting performing a tricky drill piece. We had to ground rifles, straighten up and then retrieve them from a squat position. Of course, I tumbled over during its execution as a small smile crossed my face.
‘Sergeant, that man there? Take him to the guard room, on the double quick march.’ I was shown the austere cells of the guard room and threatened with custody if I ever as much as smiled again during drill practise.
I will say that I joined the army at a moment of transition. Whether it was a favourable or unfavourable time is hard to say. For instance, if you liked the use of guns I was in the army when Sten guns were dropped in preference for new Sterling machine guns, for which I was incidentally hailed as a marksman. And old style Second World War .303 Lee Enfield manual rifles were substituted for automatic Belgian FN’s. Let alone that metal studded boots were replaced by rubber studded boots!
And cleaning brasses of uniforms and such forth was discontinued as all brasses contained stay bright ingredient.
This all meant more changes in drill practise. At any rate whatever the kit and weaponry we marched up and down the parade ground in all weathers ad infinitum.
Of course, there is so much more I could say about army life but I need to cut it short.
I live in not so much as a one horse town as a one shop village. So it came as a great surprise to me that, my other newly arrived residents included the small lithe looking Tom Cruise, of Mission Impossible fame, and the equally illustrious, willowy attractive Nicole Kidman.
For such time as they were making a film called Eyes Wide Shut they had taken up residence in High Canons estate, just a mile from my front door. Whilst Nicole seemed to take a back seat in their new surroundings, it was Tom who took to a bicycle with such alacrity that you could see him tanking through our by-ways and highways with what looked like glorious abandon.
He was not averse to stopping off at our only shop, equally serving as post office, in our quaint backwater surrounds, yet on the periphery of London.
However, this tranquil setting with its two hundred acre grounds hosting numerous sheep and a backdrop of lakes, surrounded by woods, was the ideal setting for the two stars. From this Elysian paradise it would only take them ten minutes or so to be driven safely to Britain’s second Hollywood, namely, Elstree Film Studios.
As the film progressed it seemed that while Tom became familiar with his surroundings he was at his best whilst Nicole remained more reticent. The star of Mission Impossible and other great films lost any inhibitions he may have had and was in his element, more gregarious and light hearted. A sense of freedom pervaded him in a place with such a history, dating back to the time when it was a nunnery.
It was on one such light hearted occasion that he bounded out of High Canons to fully introduce himself to a great friend of mine, running the motor mower over the fine front lawn.
‘I’m Tom!’, he enthusiastically blurted out.
My friend, stopped the mower and stood back observantly, and within an instant replied:
‘I was wondering what all the fuss was about?’.
I’m pleased to meet you Tom; of course, l’ve heard a hell of a lot about you. Tom Jones!’ Well of course, Tom Cruise fell about laughing, taking it all in good sport.
Needless to say, I don’t care what anyone says now, or in the future, about these supposedly overpaid film stars, but more especially in the case of Tom Cruise. For me, and all residents in our village, we found him to be an extremely nice guy.
There was a great deal of disquiet evidenced in the parish, when it was first mooted that a mental hospital was going to be built on the doorstep of their small rural village.
Well, the hospital was to contain a couple of thousand inmates staffed by five hundred nurses who were to be drawn from the four corners of the British Isles and eventually, even further afield.
It put shivers up the spines of not a few people.
On looking back, one can, as it were, witness the first elements of the ‘not in my backyard’ approach.
Along with this of course, was the controversy caused by Cecil Frank Raphael’s sudden, and to some extraordinary, decision to up sticks and sell Porters Park Estate, of which he was the owner, to Middlesex County Council, by which means they were able to establish the hospital on its grounds.
At the time, rumour abounded that he had sold up in umbrage at the Parish Council’s decision, of which he was a member: the Council went against his advice to have trust houses built, rather than a memorial to commemorate the dead of The First World War.
Whatever the feelings in the village, the building of the ‘model hospital’ got the go ahead.Work started in 1934 and the first unit was opened by King George V and Queen Mary on the 31st of May in that self-same year.
It was not to be too long into its stride when the Second World War took place, necessitating the building of air raid shelters, the digging of trenches and the installation of a fire service, along with the hospital taking in the casualties of war, and in the event, being also classed as a military hospital.
During those dangerous years, the hospital suffered from a few fire bombs being dropped on its premises
Despite these attacks, the hospital post war made a number of medical advances.However, the war effort had left the country pretty well impoverished and this was reflected in the patient’s personal clothing. Due to the lack of funds it was not unusual to see shell-shocked patients somewhat unkempt, with an uneasy gait shuffling through the village with shrunken trousers at half mast, or females with loose ill-fitting dresses that had seen too much time in the laundry press.
Societal changes brought urgency to new thinking on the institution of the hospital, in particular its vast expenditure.
Into the picture, at this time, came the eminent, not to say unorthodox psychiatrist, Dr R. D. Laing, with his forward thinking views, who operated from the Tavistock Clinic London.
Now, one of his disciples, Dr David Cooper, took up the reins of reinventing the purpose of the hospital; again not without controversy.
His aim was to create smaller units of patients who were self- sufficient, to exist in ‘half way’ houses as a stepping stone towards independent living in the wider community.
Many were those in the boxing world claimed Tommy Farr, our very own heavyweight, beat the brown bomber, Joe Louis in a world championship bout in America.
No need to name the date, for it was held at the time of bare stairs, no carpets on the floors, and cold draughts through half open doors.
I was living in a Shenley nurse’s cottage in North avenue with others. It was not an easy gig, relieved only by the arrival of newcomers from Dartford, the Lucia’s.
The father and son were both alike, apart from age. Today they would have earned the sobriquet Godzilla. Of such girth, they would frighten anyone, within or without
Despite the son, Billy’s, wayward proclivities, I made a mate with him, that’s what kid’s do. Of course, he towered way above me, being six and a half foot tall. Bill lived in Shenley’s nursing cottages, down the hill from Black Lion in North Avenue.
Now, Billy’s old man had secured a job in the local mental hospital by Shenley, above the hill, alongside our quaint old village, not twenty miles out of London.
Being days of non PC it was referred too, indelicately as the ‘loony bin’, and those confined, called ‘lunatics’.
It was not long before I learned that Bill senior would take himself on occasion to the Thomas A’ Beckett pub in the Mile End Road, to spar with our very own British heavyweight champion, Tommy Farr.
At the same time, Bill junior was taking on well bronzed fighters in the boxing booth at Barnet Fair, to earn a mean five pounds.
Times so bad in those days it was not unusual to find Bill’s dad in his potting shed filtering blackcurrant juice or such like, through his old aertex pants, flaring up on our chivvying him.
Yet, I believe those hard times, sharpened one’s senses, to strive for the eternal goa of making money, making Bill’s dad fearless, to take on the mighty Tommy Farr, in the boxing ring. No small feat.
It had its consequences. Arriving on Bill’s ward as Shenley Charge Nurse the staff would note his dishevelment, his punished, bruised body. It being, more black then blue, and say, ‘he’s been at the Beckett again, Farr’s given him a right seeing too, a real pasting, bet he belted him from one corner of ring to the other!
Twenty or thirty years ago they actually said: “Time Ladies and Gentlemen. Please!” and sometimes they added ‘and others!’ that is if it had been a trying night with some unsavoury characters drawn into the brew. Not alone that they would ring a bell to din some idea into the muzzled brains of the people that it was indeed time to depart. They had the motley crowd trained in something of the manner of Pavlov’s dogs.
The Black Lion Pub sat at the top of Shenley Hill commanding a ridge four hundred feet above sea level about 15 miles north of Nelson’s column, near about the centre of London.
At the same time it would lie about five miles south, out of St. Albans City. It is difficult to get one’s thinking cap on when you are pickled in alcohol but I remember on this night so long ago with winter fast approaching it is what a small gang of us from Shenley village endeavoured to do. Fortunately an unspoken thought hovered in the air concerning a night club in the vicinity which was said to be open all hours into the night. It was down a dark and leafless lane which forked and turned back on itself occasionally to put one in mind of the network of veins showing through the visages of the late night drinkers.
In those days the Pubs closed at the healthy time of ten thirty, and so when mention was made this proposal to ‘invade’the night club we set off alcoholic fuelled with great alacrity. I am sure that our minds were fixed on beautiful creatures of the night, a whole genre of saucy French films swam before our eyes and the excitement was intense.
To add to the attraction was the knowledge that a wartime spy was said to conduct proceedings at the establishment and kept a tight rein on the customers.
We gathered ourselves together at the entrance to the club. The moon a silver shimmering scimitar with clouds passing over cast a scythe like shadow over the grim imposing entrance. We gained entrance as pissed in the mill poseurs and made for the bar. The optics at half mast were suffused in smooth lighting. Holding up the bar I could swear was Robert Mitchum along with Charles Brosnin and some more movie cronies. I took it to be the authentic star because he was over here for ‘The Big Sleep’ playing the part of the private eyes sleuth Robert Marlowe, and as we were not far out from Elstree Studios, that fixed it in my mind.
With drink in hand we took an open eye look at the place. In one corner sitting on a whicker chair diametrically opposite Mitchum a man with legs askew and arms stretched out and balanced on the palm of his right hand what looked like a glass of milk in a small stumpy crystal glass.”That’s Eddy Chapman” my mate declared,”the man with milk!”.
He was eyeing it with his body stretched out languidly. My recollection is of a man pasty faced who wouldn’t you imagine say boo to a goose. Whatever his drink was fortified with I’m not to know. I did hear that he suffered from the guts.
It seems an unlikely tale but this was the man, Eddie Chapman who raided Odeon Cinemas in the thirties and was pursued along with his gang, by Scotland Yard to Jersey where he was locked up.He was born near Newcastle, and had a notorious career as a crack safe-breaker. After the war he was involved with the criminal Kray brothers and ‘mad’Frankie Frazier, but at his life’s end he received the ultimate accolade being described as one of Britain’s greatest and bravest war heroes. A film was made of his exploits mostly featuring shots behind enemy lines, called Triple Cross.
I suppose he was the only man who could have been said to applaud the German invasion of Jersey, for they interrogated him and then signed him on as a double agent with promises to secure his freedom. First of all he was lined up to face a firing squad in a bid to fool British Intelligence service that he had been well and truly disposed of and then he was sent to Germany for intensive training.
He was to be parachuted into England and attempt to blow up the De Havillands Aircraft Factory at Hatfield and the Mosquito Development at London Colney which incidentally only lay about a mile from his night club set up which he set up after the war.
After parachuting in to the mainland he made himself known to MI5. They set about a ruse to foil the Germans with his help. They prepared bonfires around the airdromes to look as though they had been damaged intensively thus providing Eddie with an alibi for the Germans.He returned to Germany a hero and was awarded the Iron Cross military honour,110,ooo Reichsmarks, his own yacht and a job teaching a spy school in occupied Norway. Chapman was known to MI5 by the code of Zig-Zag. He was sent back to Britain in 1944 to report on V1 rocket damage bringing vital intelligence for the Allies. After confessing to telling his Norwegian girl-friend he was a British spy he was retired by MI5, fearing it would be too dangerous to continue. Chapman was given a lump sum of £6000 and the outstanding criminal charges laid against him were quietly dropped.
After the war Chapman and his wife Betty, bought a health farm at Shenley Lodge, in Rectory lane which they continued to run until the late 1970’s and it was in these latter years I found myself there one day.
The story of Chapman was made into a film ‘Triple Cross’ and starred Christopher Plummer as Eddie.
When I saw Eddie he struck me as a self-effacing fellow with little outward sign of machismo.Last year a friend told me he had seen him with friend in what would have been known as ‘The Water Splash Inn’during the war years but of late is now called ‘The Fox’. A crowd alongside Eddie’s table became increasingly raucous and after giving them due warning about the level of noise and having to take their taunts for some time Eddie set about them and laid out two of the bruisers there and then on the floor.The rest of them up and fled. I have no reason to dispute this story.
Would you believe that in the early weeks of the football season –a particular sparkling Sunday- I was way down on my knees saying my prayers beside the head grounds man of Watford Football Club, at All Saints Pastoral Centre, London Colney.
Things couldn’t have been that desperate, could they? Well, yes they were.
Back in the day, we had just exchanged our manager, stable well doing Sean Dyche for untested Gianfranco Zola, he with the most marvellous football pedigree, but as yet, a largely unknown quantity, as supremo of our beloved football team.
That we needed faith was in no doubt. The certain belief that Watford could be raised up from the middling ashes of the championship, to the pinnacle of success, promotion to the Top league. Was this an impossible dream?
To clear my head I made my way up Bell Lane, and turned into a side road leading on to a perfectly straight wide concrete path which put me in mind of Wembley Way. An optimistic, forward thinking déjà vu experience, only distracted from the real thing by the bordering long strips of grass, at edges of which young trees predominated in colourful beds of variegated shrubbery, leading to Watford’s own training ground.
The mass of fields immediately took my eye, as they reach up to Ridge and relegate the modern dark glass side gym, dining and changing rooms, to the appearance of minor buildings.
A close friend first drew me to these grounds. He had worked at the London Stock Exchange, but yearned for the wide-open country. Eventually he found tractor work at four hundred acre Woodhall Farm in Shenley Village. Unfortunately, no sooner in the job than word spread like wind shaking barley, every tractor was to be fitted with a cab, and of course Alec railed against this restrictive cocoon. Free spirited, he took off for the fresh green fields of London University College grounds, to pull a gang mower to make grass fields friendlier for our home county footballers.
At that particular time I had lapsed, -like a small boy loses his faith on coming of age- in my support of Watford Fooball team. But subsequently came the day I caught a snatch of an enthralling commentary on Three Counties Radio, with Watford clearly in fine fettle and in the ascendancy. That was when I got my mojo back. This redeeming moment set me on the right track.
Hadn’t I a zillion years past rejoiced in Nigel Callaghan’s flighty jinks down the wing and with great excitement watched Luther Blissitt and John Barnes destroy opposing football teams in brilliant, chequered careers? They remain legends.
The buzz of taking my girl friend Josephine Morris along to the terraces was not to be outdone, and watching her pure conversion to the beautiful game was sublime.
To return to training field. I spoke to Steve Read, who is marking a field meticulously. He works two weekends and takes three off, but what is more, he is rewarded with free match tickets. My envy grows.
He uses his dandelion coloured Kobuta tractor blades to draw through and aerate ground when he’s not cutting grass, scarifying, rolling or putting fertilizer down. The pitches manicured to perfection lack for nothing, and Steve a full on member of back room staff, says his work and loyalty is dedicated to Watford’s Football Team.
You could not fault the pitches, I saw footballs rocket off the surface like Sputnik’s in space lift off. To stop their reckless wayward flight there is netting higher than the wire mesh around tennis courts.
The team goes about its training in thin, red, green, yellow and blue weather proof tops, easing into practise with knee bends to settle hamstring, quadriceps and cruciate ligaments.
The goalkeepers break off to do a round of pitch, warming themselves into session and then coaches encourage random shots between the posts, from different positions, in sharp succession. One, two, three shoot!
I guess the players, whether they know it or not, need look no further for inspiration than the huge Shenley Water Tower on the distant four hundred feet ridge, south west of ground.
Brickies’ from Borhamwood, most notably the Cane gang, built it in record time. Every morning they raised the bar, until the high building pierced low clouds, and what is more, reaches down into earth’s core, as far as height of structure you see up above.
When they were done, the stokers came to fire the furnaces, which heated huge water tanks to service the hospital, whose building covered area now containing a nine hundred-house estate.
You could get a glimpse of these men through grimy coal dust spattered windows, faces blackened, sweating from the brows enough to dip your fingers.
Talk had it that the penthouse suite went to a famous footballer, one of the noveaux riche.
With my newfound enthusiasm for the Watford team, in the spirit of things, I walked from Bushey Gym to the football ground on match days, bumping into the odd enthusiast early on and more stragglers past The Avenue.
By way of smoky car beaten Bushey Arches, there would be some three or four more characters, maybe in surly mood depending on the last weeks result, which they would still be morosely chewing over. Then past the old Benskin’s Brewery area, with a lightening of step, leading on to an increased level of anticipation as supporters got Dutch courage, their bottle back, from, we’re looking for a draw to, we’ll blow them apart, in quick easy strides.
A fastened pace up Vicarage Road, to where our fans converge, then a shambling gait bubbling inside with excitement, a confluence of water held back as at a weir, the stadium itself, with all it holds in store.
It is gob smacking amazing that the team, the best in our county, is taking to this almost sacred place, all that it has learned out in the Hertforshire country. To be replicated in the glorious grass arena of Watford Football club. Into this field of dreams we conjure up all manner of inner thoughts. Can we attain promotion to the top league? Will my partner be watching at home, on TV, or browsing through the Harlequin shopping parade? Disparate thoughts churn through players and spectators alike.
Police look kitted up in funeral garb, black apparel, black boots and conical hats. Officers are peak capped with small regular chessboard patterns about the rims with upper body jackets wrapped in luminescent yellow bibs.
They see us through to ticket office; adrenaline fuelled as Z cars starts to play. We have a quick shufti around the ground. Our old warrior John Eustace has dropped by wayside after back operation. Myron Nosworthy joined the squad, a much need newcomer. But this long legged diamond also got laid up with serious injury.Still it was not the time for what might have been. Indeed, for me, writing does not come without its own brand of pitfalls. I was initially engaged and encouraged to write this piece for Hertfordshire Countryside, by Richard Walker, head of media, Watford Football Club, but the magazine sadly hit the dust, and folded overnight.
We must go on like our favourite football team and surpass ourselves as Watford have done, and conquered all adversity.
It would not be fair to selectively go through attributes of different players, in this spectacular season, but strike wise we were suspect until the brilliance of Matt Vydra and Troy Deeney showed itself.. Marvin Sordell was no more, but these two took over the goal scoring where he left off, with incredible determination and much craft. Skill did not reside with them alone, but was displayed in large measure throughout the rest of super team. From the indefatigable goalkeepers, captain Manuel Almunia and reserve John Bond there was this element of magic and steely resolve, not forgetting our nineteen year old, much fraught, but ready to face the music, debut. .
We have endured a long tense journey. You could say we all took part in this fine pilgrimage, players and supporters alike. Starting out from Borehamwood’s own Meadow Road ground, on a sun drenched evening which contained a strong hint of thunderous rain, and was to prove a suitable metaphor for our tumultuous cliff edge end of season matches. At times it was hard going but the players sensationally pulled it off, combining together so unselfishly as singularly demonstrated by the Johnathan Hoggs headed ball to Troy Deeney during the penultimate Leicester match, which result sent us on our final heart warming way to Wembley, hugely cheered on by our loyal supporters to a make or break, famous play off final.
It is a held view in the old village that Mr Raphael sold Porters and moved from the village in his displeasure over the type of War Memorial to be erected to commemorate the dead of the Great War.
Cecil Frank Raphael improved the cricket ground and built the pavilion, as his son John was a successful cricketer captaining Surrey. Sadly he died in the Great War 1917.
It has been said that the owner of the estate at that time fell out with the leaders of the Shenley community and it seems to spite them he sold off the land to Middlesex County Council for the express purpose of building asylums in the large acreage of land.
Asylums in and out of wars
(Dare to cross the line)
No crossing the line.
It was Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s administration which put through the Mental Health Act of 1959 which began the process of freeing large numbers of people from what Enoch Powell, as Minister of Health would later call those ‘isolated, majestic, imperious asylums brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined rising unmistakeable and daunting out of the countryside.’
No matter that Powell was much maligned for his view on the racial problems of the country during his political career it seems that Enoch was right on all counts regarding these institutions, and he may have been right on another score when in a typical piece of drollery he opined that if people wanted a sense of purpose they should get it from their archbishops rather than hoping to receive it from their politicians.
That being said, in the Second World War years, 1939-1945 the economy and resources of the country was not of an order to release patients who were deemed unfit to work, some of whose number were indeed classed as feeble minded, and where there was not the follow up medical services such as we fortunately have today.
I knew these people well, having been so to speak born in the very middle of them, at the periphery of London. My parents worked in these hospitals, as did I also, in later years. We had asylums as mental hospitals were in earlier days called, to the right and to the left of us, and had they not been in the process of demolition at the time the orbital motorway M25 was in construction, it would have near a bouts swathed through the vast majority of these, mostly old Victorian hospitals.
It was for a purpose they had been set this rough fifteen-mile or so distance from London, out in the twilight zone away from the broad mass of the population.
When as a child the first school I attended was London Colney Primary School, two miles north and just along the road from the self styled, Fred’s 18-mile transport café. That was the final stopping off point for a touch of food and chitchat for the lorry drivers who congregated here before their final push to London.
I would catch the 358 British racing green bus at the bottom of our road, opposite the hospital orchard, to follow in the footsteps of my elder brother and sister who had both attended the same school
Our avenue comprised sixty semi-detached nursing staff houses, red brick, metal-framed windows and blue- black welsh slate roof. This North Avenue stretched its way like a lasso up to Cow bank wood, where it coiled snake like into a grass roundabout, the pavement surrounds being tree lined.
Even today I would not be hard put to name everyone that lived there during the war years. First I must tell you about our family, as I knew it, from the age I first took life. I awoke to the experience of having an elder sister and brother. My sister Theresa was born to my mother Mary AnneMcGinley and my father Hugh McEnhill shortly after they married in July1932, Newmains, Lanarkshire, in Scotland, where they had first met, both being by that time nurses. Being as there was a short distance between the time of the marriage and the first baby’s arrival and knowing the temper of the times, my father might not have been scrupulously truthful to me when he later told me of his reasons for leaving his old country, as he proved not to be in other matters, as I was later to learn. At any rate my brother Ian was born a few years later, on October 13th 1935, down South in Shenley, and I followed spot on, a couple of years later, hinging on the outbreak of Second World War in October 1937.
My grandparents Sarah and John McEnhill had originally lived in Belfast, in Balfour Avenue. My aunty Jo Gliori was never able to understand why the Catholic Church allowed first cousins to marry, however I came to learn that they were more first cousins twice removed which somehow put a certain distance and somehow different shine on the matter. Probably Jo says that is the reason that the offspring in some cases have been blessed with very high IQ’s but at the same time have been cursed with genes, which made them prone to disease, in particular coronaries and meningitis.
Jo’s earliest memory of grandma was when they were staying in Newmains in a one-roomed house with an outside toilet and water to be collected from an outside well. She could still remember that room. There were two beds (these were like holes in the wall-quite high off the floor with curtains in front). Then on the fireside wall there was a long black leather couch, which was also used for a bed for Uncle Jimmy who was an invalid, and eventually he was transferred to a home for incurable people and he died there. Grandparents had seven children, Jimmy, Eddy, Hugh, Jack,(Jo’s dad) Henry, Josephine and Cathie. In front of the couch there was an old treadle sewing machine and on top of that there was a really large thick photo album, which Jo enjoyed looking through and particularly liking to see a large photograph of grandma dressed in a ball gown. She was the belle of the ball. It was very sad after grandma died for some of the ‘treasures’ to be thrown out. On the wall where the couch was there was a very large framed portrait of a little girl- this was Josephine and apparently she was quite a gifted pianist.
During the period of the depression Jack and Eddy left for America to seek work as there was no work in Scotland.
Jo was confused about it as they had a nice home at the time and they (Mum and three children) had to leave the house and move into the same sort of house as Grandma. One advantage of the house was that it got a lot of light whereas Gran’s house was always dark. While there Gerald and Jo had a lot of illness, Gerald ending up in a sanatorium while Jo had pleurisy and the doctor wanted her hospitalised but her mum would not give permission.
It must have been a grim time for all the adults but children although they are sensitive to a change in their comfort; they can cope as long as they have loving parents. Jack talked about someone they met who had some link with the family tree – she lived in Boston and she wrote children’s books. Her name was Norma Butler. It was odd when you think of it as Deborah writes and illustrates children’s books.
At a later date he was to tell me that after working deep below ground on his bare belly in the coalmines in the notoriously difficult ham and egg pit, so called for its layout, at Shotts Colliery, Lanarkshire, he took all the men out on strike.
He said he was laid off, after a fight to the finish strike, and consequently went from one extreme to another, for in a follow up job he was to then find himself balancing precariously on steel girders on the great ships of the Clyde, at the same time having the dangerous task of catching red hot rivets fired up to him from below, for the welding.
However, as I run this episode through my mind, I am thinking he might have taken more fright from long running exposure to wrath of parents’ and kin, of fellow faith, for his shotgun wedding, rather than the all redeeming theme he occasionally ran past me, that the best thing out of Scotland, was the road South.
It must have been more in his line and a boon for him when he was eventually to find work at Craigavon House, in Edinburgh, looking after a variety of old, sick patients. At the time my mother was also nursing and after their paths crossed and they got hitched and a baby born early to them they decided to leave Scotland, and make a go of it in a brand new hospital development at Shenley, six miles from St.Albans City, Hertfordshire. For a short period of time I gather they worked at Hill End Hospital which was somewhat on the same style as Shenley Hospital while my mother’s sister Susan coming over to join them in the hospital house allotted to them worked near enough alongside, at Cell Barnes Hospital. What with all these hospitals gathered together at that time in such a cluster, it could almost be termed the Bermuda Triangle of mental hospitals. Unfortunately my aunt’s nursing career faltered as soon as it started. In many respects it is not everyone that can take on such a situation, as you would meet at Cell Barnes Hospital, especially the likes of my aunt coming as a greenhorn from Ireland just about sixteen years of age.
So many years later my mother told me that the hospital did not think her up to it, that is capable of the work, such that my parents had to go in to see the medical supervisor to plead for her job. He in turn responded to the extent that he thought ‘she would never make a nurse’. I daresay it was this miserable analysis prompted them to altogether up sticks and move to Shenley when a hospital house became available. I have to say here that the supervisor was no doubt correct in his estimation of my aunt’s abilities for she was particularly clumsy and inept about the house and later in the homes we came to share. In retrospect, I can say that she would have been better staying on my uncle’s farm in Ireland. My father took to nursing much better, although I happen to know he was ill disposed to the medic’s in general and always carried a suspicious mind as to their motives. I understood all this because he told me that when he lived in Scotland, one of his brothers Jimmy had to have a spinal injection (lumbar puncture) on account of an illness, however, it seems by all accounts the doctor was negligent in the practise of inserting the needle, with the result that Jimmy was to a large extent left paralysed and it fell to my father to thereafter carry him about the house and anywhere else he possibly wished to go.
It was not for nothing that my father was termed the Herenagh of Shenley Hospital. It must have been the worst day in his life shortly after the Second World War November 15th 1947 to be precise. He had just completed his ward round when a patient sprang at him from behind his office door; he quickly sank his teeth into the thumb on my father’s left hand, while at the same time he had his hands around his neck, clamping the oxygen from his brain, and rendering him nigh unconscious. Hugh responded instinctively. He kneed the man in the groin so fast that the patient dropped to the floor like a brick lobbed into a bottomless pit. Hugh was granted a week’s leave to allow him time to reflect, to ponder life’s iniquities, but no cause to chastise himself, for this was at a time prior to the advent of major tranquillisers and phenothiazines. And how can you act kindlier to a man set on killing you?
These thoughts must have plagued him, as, hospital issue black-rain coated he leaned like a Lowry figure into the wind as he laboured up the steep ‘service drive’, to resume work at Shenley Hospital on the hill.
Rooks screamed overhead, whirling dervishes, like blackened twigs and smuts thrown up from an autumn fire, then swooping down to settle on the highest trees, pine and fir by the Cow Bank fields.
It grieved him sorely to hurt anyone, maybe more than most, for he stemmed from a highly respected family from Omagh, Northern Ireland. The family with deep religious roots had the name of herenaghs: custodians of church land and property over many years especially entrusted with the safe keeping of the Black Bell of Drumragh, An Clog Dubh. Which rang annually on the feast day of the national apostle, and more especially on the death of the senior-most members of the McEnhill family to bear witness to the faith embraced in these parts for more than one thousand years.
Due to a business failure Sarah and John McEnhill distant first cousins had been forced to emigrate late in the nineteenth century. They settled in Newmains, near Motherwell leaving Omagh behind, but not the tradition of faith and good fellowship. This tradition had been passed on to their son in due course and was he not now as a Charge Nurse in the same mould as the herenagh, looking after the well being and attending to the lives of so many poor souls.
He had taken a long hard road since his parents had put down their roots in Scotland. As a young man he had worked on the ships on the Clyde. Atop the steel whalebone of a ship he had felt the bitter wind. As he perched precariously astride the metal carcase of the ship so high up in the elements, deadly burning hot nuggets of steel shot up to him from the portable furnace on the ship’s belly, and he hammered them home like bullets into the plates of steel.
When times were bad in the shipyards as often they were he could not but help some small bitterness creeping in remembering his dear father’s words: ‘it’s the effort not the prize that counts!’
However, he soon found employment nearer home, down Shotts Colliery in Lanarkshire. He told me the coal mine he worked in was called the ham and egg pit because of its peculiar layout which belied its notoriously dangerous underground seams of coal. A narrow shaft dropped deep down and at its ‘knuckle’ with the ground broke forward into a large cavern from which a series of tunnels set forth, shored up at short intervals by thick wooden props, and then threading further into the deep, all the while the tunnels growing ever smaller, such that the end fingers of which were no more than three feet high.
Scrabbling about on all fours he would be sodden with dripping cold water, whilst he hefted his pick at the coalface. The pick grew heavier as the day drew on until he eventually emerged into the evening light, begrimed, exhausted, all energy spent, but with no little pride in his endeavours.
For all his efforts, such as they were, in 1925, he was paid just over one pound a week, and being increasingly depressed by the dire poverty of not only himself, but his many good friends in the mines, he led them out on strike. The private pit owner unceremoniously sacked him, and like many a good man before him.
His experience led him to resolve to help others in even more difficult straits. With this in mind he obtained a position in Craig House, Morning side Edinburgh. Whilst there he chanced upon an attractive Irish girl, who was also a nurse, Mary Anne McGinley, from Altaneerin, Breenagh, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal.
At Craig House he studied diligently for three years to gain his Registered Mental Health Nursing Certificate after which with Mary he decided to take up the opportunity of a post in the south of England, at Shenley Hospital, (There was to be a short interlude of work in Hill End Hospital not far from Shenley) in 1938 a completely new mental hospital was finally constructed which was to house two thousand patients, just a short way from London near the city of St. Albans.
My mother, also devoted to the sick and disabled was not to be outdone and consequently took a position as a night nurse at Middlesex Colony, which could be described as a sister hospital to Shenley let alone the patients were classified at that time as mentally sub-normal or mental defectives. In spite of a young family and whatever the weather, she would be seen in the early night cycling to work a mile or two first down the Avenue and then on to main road down a great hump back of a hill past the St Botolph’s graveyard to then cut into and past the bleak square of staff houses in Shenleybury, known as ‘little Moscow’and on down the long winding cinder track to attend to ‘her boys’ and to tuck them all in bed for the night. Sometimes there were so many bodies to a room that it was said you could have ridden a bicycle over all the beds.
When I was a little more than a lad I treasured this memory of my mother’s sally into the great beyond conjuring up the image as such, a cold smack of rain across my face held me in check after I had scrambled up onto an old Valor stove and pushed open the metal-framed window of my aunt’s box room in order to catch a final glimpse of my mother as she cycled to work. I could just about make out her dark crow like shape or I thought I could as she as if crested the waves of the dusty brown corn away in the distance. She would have left the Avenue and gone down the steep hump past historic old St Botolphs flint stone church, and graveyard in to Shenleybury past the bleak staff house lined square which we labelled ‘little Moscow’ where I would just about catch sight of her, depending on the weather, re-emerging on to the thin black cinder track little more than a scythe wide, almost in miniature, crow like, speeding past the fields of wheat to the hospital.
I took this heroic impression of my mother to bed with me, seeing her again with her nurse’s navy cap pressed firmly down over her head and matching rainproof coat buttoned into place, she would crouch low over her handlebars facing into the wind and pedalling so hard the cornfields would as it were part and she would appear to ride above the damp, dusky brown ears of corn, like a jockey in flight along the rails of a race course.
As the night pressed into the half-hours journey to work at Middlesex Colony, she would have still been able to make out by the hedgerows, giant rods of light searching the gathering dark, the silver white lights making a pin cushion above, while flabby grey barrage balloons with long cables from their bellies cheese cuttered the sky dragging for planes and creakily holding the earth to the sky.
My mother never fussed over her own safety for she had an indomitable spirit. However, she never ceased to hurt me when she left for work saying, ‘I have to see my boys to bed’.
That would sting my brother and sister too. However, life had to go on.
She worked from eight at night to eight the following morning with maybe an extra night thrown in as overtime. You were expected to do it or else the matron may mark your card, or you would be in the manure.
She was paid about three pounds a week all told, and she felt herself in clover when here wages were raised to half a crown an hour.
The hospital was built in 1928 on an old aerodrome site four miles from St. Albans City. At that time it was ostensibly set up for the protection and care of the mentally handicapped in the community but its primary aim was to be an institute for the prevention of an increase in the numbers of the disabled. A high metal fence about eight feet high ringed the perimeter of the hospital.
As a qualified nurse my mother had to be well turned out. A white starched apron enfolded a light blue one piece uniform. She also wore a hard rigid collar, not unlike a cleric’s but gold studded and un joined at the throat, also white starched cuffs and cap. And of course, thick dark stockings, and sensible shoes. A robust silver whistle and a master key on a chrome chain completed her ensemble.
There would be up to seventy patients on her ward and she had to cosset and comfort them as best she could. At that particular period in the care of mental patients, times were bad; there was not to be the same order of financing as we see today. They were indeed a tragic scraggy looking set of patients as I remember them putting you in mind of Oliver Twist and his gang, at another remove were fluid of the brain, hydrocephalus patients who put you straight to thinking of the elephant man. They were looked on as ‘no hoper’s’ outcasts or dregs of society malformed in many cases, unwanted in most cases. Indeed, many in those days were in awe of them, so frightened by their appearances that they were veritably shunned like lepers. Shambling about half in pyjamas and half without, they dribbled phlegm. Their hair was hacked off to prevent lice leaving them looking much like punks.
Much to my later shame I’m certain sure when I was grown and with another mix of boys we sped past these patients faster I am sure than my mother sped to them, with hoots of derision we threw up hot summer’s dust from our bicycles on our wanton ways seeming not to get to the cool blue water hospital swimming pool fast enough, just near to where they put the bowling green later on, near the entrance gates.
My mother would look after her charges throughout the long drawn out nights. She would soothe any temper tantrums, quieten down and contain those with almost uncontrollable rages and reassure the sufferers of seemingly endless epileptic fits.
On occasion an air raid siren would shrilly cut through the incessant babble of the dormitory. It would then be time for my mother to usher her patients down the corridors and into the dark damp musty brick shelters for safety.
They would shuffle and sway out into the courtyard sideways and back on their heels like prisoners of war emerging into the early mist of the day. When the all clear sounded she would redress them all the best way she could
They would wear ill fitting old granddad type shirts, a jacket and trousers nearly up to their knees. There was a small smile on their faces for the little they got. The whites of their eyes would fix on your face while the pupils would tip back to the cast of their brows.
After a breakfast of porridge they would go to work at the various therapy departments open to them like shoe making, tailoring, carpentry and upholstery.
On her nights off work my mother would attend to her own family with the same love and tenderness.
It was the time of the notorious V1 and following later on the V2 rockets, so called Doodlebugs or flying bombs. Then the air was alive with the unremitting hum of these deadly weapons, seeking out targets in London. Unfortunately for us, we seemed to be in their flight path or it may have been they overshot their target, whatever way, when you heard the motors cut on the engines you felt mighty fearful they were dropping right over you with a massive bomb and you would scuttle for safety under stairs and pray like hell.
Air raid patrolman doing their rounds with their familiar cry, put that light out now would beat it for a safe shelter while there would be a shriek, a shattering whiz and the house would tremble on itself as a bomb began its fall.
Deafened, groping and praying hard we would emerge from under stairs. The plodding hum of German bombers continued overhead, then a rocket overhead cut off its engines, a paralysing silence followed as its deadly cargo rushed to the ground, heart stopping moments as we snuffed out our candles and made for the Anderson Shelter in the garden by the apple tree.
As mother and father carried us in blankets a splinter or sliver of burning hot metal scalded my arm. My mother soaked it with a rag and kissed it better. She said it had been glanced by a touch of shrapnel and not to worry. A further bomb would shiver the darkness, dust would rise at our feet, everything was a blur and the shelter would seem to stretch and float an inch or two above the ground. Soon the small scorch to my arm faded away.
If that were not enough to frighten the family we later learned a landmine was caught suspended by its filigree of lace and parachute straps from a high Royal Oak tree above the wood near the boiler room of the hospital not a half-mile from our house. My father said just a brush with the ground and our street would have been blown to smithereens.
How my mother managed these days was a mystery to me. Being born in Donegal, Ireland, she had experienced extreme poverty as a child. Her hard upbringing enabled my mother to equate most closely with the neglect hurt and injury suffered by the mentally handicapped in the community at that time before they were taken into Middlesex Hospital. She was working there close to the start of its development as a ‘pioneer nurse’ and lived to see the evolution ot the hospital from its raw beginnings and then experiencing great joy at its transformation. The original aircraft hangars gave way in time to the Kennedy Galton Research Centre into sub-normality.
From the dark days of the war there emerged new learning in behaviour modification and Makaton sign language, along with art and music therapy. She was able to witness a retreat from the harsh policy of segregation of the sexes to a more relaxed regime such that in time certain patients, friends I made over the years the likes of Terry and Janet were able eventually to marry and get a home to themselves after first living in a group home for experience and then to go on and live very happily together in Radlett.
On my father’s eventual return to work there was never any talk of reprisals to be taken against the violent, errant patient, rather than that, there was an earnest discussion of the patients difficulties-no time for looking back!
In normal times, Hugh would be slow to anger, so that when a patient Hubert Clarke took it on himself to order six wee bicycles for his sons and a wedding cake for his daughter still at school, the folly of his purchase was put to him in kindly terms and it would not have been the first time the Shenley shopkeepers received extravagant orders, for they well understood.
Patients invariably had trifling little spending money throughout their years in hospital, they would often be seen trawling the streets, gutters or litterbins for cigarette, and dog ends, which they would drag at ceaselessly.
And when the red faced Pat Bolton talked excitedly of throwing himself under the local train Hugh spoke long and low to him. Pat was a veteran of the First World War, and when disturbed he shook his head from side to side and clenched his fists to quell the tremor in his hands, and then he pummelled at his brow to stop the voices in his head.
Hugh spent more time with Pat, talked about his anxieties and got him working on the gardening side such that Pat gained in confidence. Soon his mind relieved and health restored he was able to forget the brutalities of war and thereafter was discharged. Thus by instinct and sensitivity Hugh carried out counselling before such words were to echo down the long corridors of the institutions.
Now he’s gone from Shenley and the fine tall trees have long been felled, the rooks no longer circle there. In 1963 he retired to Portstewart in Northern Ireland and saw the best of life there before the ‘Troubles’ of ’69 got under way. It was not so far from his ancestor’s home. Oftentimes he returned to Omagh and shook the tenth century bronze bell, which is now kept, safely in the cathedral. He had no trouble making friends, and when everyone seemed to be at each other’s throats his ready wit and impartiality held him in good stead. Once in a bar in Antrim Town, a young man snarled across at him:
‘You’d be a taig?’
‘We’re all disciples in this life,
For good or no,
Including you my friend!’
Was Hugh’s reply?
When he died on August 30th 1969 a loyalist helped to carry his coffin to the grave in a cemetery overlooking the River Bann. A church bell tolled, but it was not the Black Bell of Drumragh, but that of the ‘Star of the Sea’ church, Portstewart. For Hugh it would have been enough that all religions and none were represented at the church and graveside- that he had brought the north and south of both sides together.
Shenley Hospital was the third and last mental hospital built by the Middlesex County Council. The first was Springfields at Tooting built in 1841 with 1805 beds, the second Napsbury, at London Colney built in 1905 with 1964 beds. Shenley was opened in 1934 being designed to provide 2000 beds and 15 padded rooms. Of the 24 Villas, two had enclosed gardens. The three main ward blocks each comprised six wards also had enclosed gardens, enclosure of the gardens being affected by 6-foot iron railings with locked gates.
When Shenley Hospital was opened ‘chronic patients’ were transferred from Napsbury and Springfield to relieve over crowding in these hospitals. From 1934-1939 these transfers amounted to 384 male and 857 female patients making total of 1241.
During the war years, for considerable periods Shenley took all female admissions form Napsbury’s catchment area in North Middlesex in order to relieve overcrowding in the hospital. Thus within five years of opening, Shenley was provided by its sister hospitals with a ready made patient population to which it then proceeded to add.
British institutional psychiatry during the nineteen thirties was operating at a depressingly low level of efficiency. Wartime restrictions contributed to this long drawn out decline in standards. At Shenley, post-war developments and changes in staff attitudes did not start to produce visible results until 1957,when the peak patient population of 2370 started to decline. This decline continued until February 1998 when the hospital finally closed.
Two major factors changed British Psychiatry for the better. The first was the 1939-45 war during which the army was persuaded mainly by the late J.R.Rees to develop a relatively efficient psychiatric service. This service introduced psychoanalysts and mental hospital psychiatrists to social psychiatry. Army psychiatrists being predominantly recruited from these two groups.
British institutional psychiatrists prior to 1939 had barely begun to see psychiatric problems in their social context. In the armed services they had no choice but to learn social psychiatry very rapidly. In service psychiatry it was hardly possible to consider problems other than in their social context.
The second major factor resulting in improvement was the inception of the National Health Service, which made money available for adequate staffing and made Hospital Consultants responsible as equals for the standard of medical service.
In 1940 there were just six doctors in graded hierarchy, and one psychiatric social worker and one occupational therapist. With less patients in 1975 there were18 doctors, 9 psychologists 10 social workers and 21 occupational therapists.
In point of fact, it was in 1934 that the project first started. Land had to be surveyed and contracts awarded. In this case, John Laing’s builders got the development.
Well the building developed apace, most of the builders came from the locality. Fortunate they were that the drums of war had not yet sounded and they were to get a clear road to finish their tasks before the declaration of Second World War. It was not without fanfare that the hospital was eventually opened in 1934 for the Porters Park Estate had a sterling history. At the time of Edward the Confessor the ownership of Porters Estate belonged to Asgar the Staller. The land of the estate is mentioned in Doomesday Survey. By fine dated 1256 and by deed dated 1263, John son of Saehr granted the manor to Adam de Stratton , Chief Baron of the Exchequer. In 1290 Adam de Stratton was convicted of forgery and his lands confiscated. In 1291, a messuage was conveyed by Robert de Kendal to John Tokey of Aldenham and his wife Agnes, and there is evidence in the cellars of the mansion of a building dating from the Middle Ages.
It is not quite clear how the building acquired the name of Porters, Porters Lodge or Porter’s Park. The name Porters most likely comes from the fact that in 1340 John de Thoky settled this property on himself for life and then on John, son of Roger le Porter of Aldenham. In 1386 Margery Porter leased the estate and in 1391 Geoffrey Porter of Titburst was shown as a tenant of Porters and ‘Porterlees’ In 1403, John Stevens and his wife were tenants and in 1487 Ralph Werall conveyed the manor and the lands to Humphrey Coningsby. It passed from the family to that of Margaret, daughter of John, son of Humphrey, with John, son of Richard Harvey, and in 1539 it was in the hands of Richard Harvey who settled it with Salmons on his wife Christine for life, with the remainder to Robert Harvey and his heirs male, in default to John the elder, John the younger, Thomas, Isabella, Margaret, Elizabeth and Catherine, his children and their male heirs successively. From John Harvey and his son Henry it passed to Sir Richard Coxe d.d., one of the Masters of the household of King James1, and the founder of the local charity for the needy, which bears his name and its benefits are still distributed. Sir Richard died in 1623, Alban Coxe, Sir Richard’s brother lived there from 1610 and on his death, his second son William Coxe, whose daughter and co-heir married Sir Edmund Anderson and died in 1674 leaving a son Edmund who died in 1685, without surviving issue and John Mason acquired the estate.
In 1714 Sir Nicholas Hawksmoor, the famous architect and pupil of Sir Christopher Wren was in residence, he died at his Millbank home in London but is buried in St. Botolph’s Churchyard, Shenleybury. At some time prior to 1800 it was briefly known as Weld Hall. ‘The Manor of Weld’ was originally based on the moated farm of Weld (Wild farm in the grounds of Harperbury Hospital) it was incorporated into the Porters Estate during the time of John Mason, a distiller of Greenwich and Deptford who died there in 1750.
Emily widow of John’s son George, with her husband George Jubb conveyed the estate in 1772 to , Richard, Viscount Howe. Admiral Lord Howe 1726-1799 lived at Porters 1772-1799. Admiral Howe had been Commander in Chief in America. He also achieved a famous naval victory off Ushant on 1st June, which helped to end Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.
It was Admiral Howe who provided the land for the construction of Radlett Lane to join his Shenley Estate to Watling Street.After his death Queen Charlotte visited Porters and stayed with the widowed Countess.In 1799 the manor went to his youngest daughter Louisa Catherine, Marchioness of Sligo who in 1816 sold it to Luke White. At his death it went to his fourth son Henry White, afterwards Baron Annaly, who sold it in 1839 to Samuel Clarke Jervoise. He sold the Manor to William Joseph Myers in 1859, father of Thomas Borron Myers whose son William Joseph sold it to Michael Paul Grace.
In 1881 the Sanders family were in residence. During the tenure of James Harris Sanders, Mrs Sanders turned South Lodge into an Orphanage and Home for poor children of the village. One of the daughters became the novelist Ann Bridge, who wrote of her childhood in a biography ‘Portrait of My Mother’. In this she expressed the view that the house owed its curious name to the fact that in John of Gaunt’s day it had been the porter’s lodge to ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ of Gloucester’s Castle in the valley below. A subterranean passage had once connected the two buildings, parts of which had the habit of caving in under the weight of horses and cows. Ann Bridge refers to features of the house which until recently could still be seen. In the drawing room of former days, there is a window immediately above the fireplace. With that in mind running the chimney flue sideways provided a wonderful view towards St. Albans. She also commented on the thickness of the inner walls, and remembers that, as children if they had misbehaved their fathers would make them stand in the dark space between the reception room and dining room doors as punishment.
The castle site was (Weld Manor) Wild Farm which had the remains of a moat partially filled in to allow the passage of wagons. One has only to stand on this spot to appreciate its commanding position.
The Mansion in Porters Park was the subject of a watercolour painting around 1800 by Henry George Oldfield and depicts a late Georgian building. Since that time the building has grown both in height and girth. From Michael Paul Grace it passed by conveyance to Cecil Frank Raphael in 1901. In the 1902 reconstruction the house was enlarged and new servant’s quarters added. A plaque immediately below the bell turret commemorated the major additions to the house. The cottages in Radlett Lane are named after two of his children.
In 1923 the estate was sold to the Middlesex County Council. The council wanted land to build two hospitals- one for the treatment and if possible the cure of persons suffering from mental illness- Shenley Mental Hospital and one for the care of mental defectives of all grades and ages, the Middlesex Colony, Shenley, (later renamed Harperbury Hospital) and to relieve the overcrowding of the other institutions. The mansion continued to play its part; patients transferred from Napsbury were housed there awaiting the completion of the new hospital, the first part of which was opened by King George V and Queen Mary on May 31st 1934.
The walled garden dates back to the seventeenth century and was part of the Porters Park Estate. It was enlarged in the eighteenth century. The garden is an elongated octagon in plan and 1.8 acres in area. The ground slopes some 7 metres from top to bottom so that the sense of enclosure you normally experience in a closed garden is lost-only to be replaced by fine views across English countryside at its quintessentially best. For many years the garden provided the occupants of Porters Mansion with all their fruit, flower and vegetable needs.
When Shenley Hospital became the owners in 1934 the fine tradition of running the garden was maintained under the direction of Stanley Lord-the head gardener. Mr Lord and his family lived in the gardener’s cottage and his staff of gardeners totalled over 30. However, after the Second World War the gardening staff was progressively reduced and slowly but surely the garden area fell into decline.
The ethos of growing fruit and vegetables to supply the hospital kitchens disappeared, as did the involvement of the patients in helping to maintain the gardens and harvest the apples in the orchard. By the early 1980’s the garden was effectively abandoned and in 1989 the garden wall had collapsed in parts and the glasshouses adjoining the wall had been demolished for safety reasons
Shenley Park is sited on the former Porters Park Estate, which has existed since medieval times. Famous past occupants of the mansion that dominates the estate from Shenley ridge includes Nicholas Hawksmoor and Lord Howe of the admiralty. The estate was enlarged twice. Once in 1748 to include the old Manor of Weld (Wild Farm today) and secondly in the mid 19th century to include land around Shenleybury as far as the M25 and around the Black Lion pub.
It was this large estate that Middlesex County Council acquired in 1924 but it was a further ten years before Shenley Hospital was built culminating in the opening by King George V in 1934. What remains of the mansions grounds forms the basis of Shenley Park. The park was created as a consequence of the outline planning decision in 1989 to allow the building of up to 900 houses on the hospital site as the hospital was progressively wound down and the patients relocated to their homes and communities. The park is owned by Hertsmere Borough Council but then leased to the Shenley Park Trust (a charity and limited company by guarantee) to develop and manage the park. The trust has ten trustees and was created in 1990. The development of the park is linked to the phased redevelopment of the hospital site. This has accelerated significantly leaving Shenley Park Trust with the challenge of putting the Park in place much more quickly than was anticipated. We have made a good start and as you look around do look at the features listed below.
Porters Mansion. This is not part of the Park but the lawns (once used for tennis courts) in front of it are. It is a Grade 11 listed building and it was last used for hospital administration and accommodation. Its most likely future use is residential. It is of half H plan, extended to the east, built of brick with stucco facing and is based on Edwardian Classical/Baroque style. C.J.Harold Cooper significantly altered it in 1902 for Cecil Raphael, the last private owner. He also added the cupola in the centre of the roof, which bears his initials and date.
Adjacent to the mansion to the north east is a two storey building, the Clock Tower, a remnant of a large octagonal building originally attached to the east end of the mansion. In front of this hidden in the shrubbery is the Buttery, which was built earlier in the century.
Buildings in the Park.
The Chapel- This is the most imposing and was built in the 1930’s in the Byzantine style. John Laing who constructed the hospital donated this building to the hospital. Not many builders do that today!
Villa O. The O stands for orchard, which it overlooks. It is one of the original hospital villas and used as a residential ward housing about twenty patients. It will eventually be the only example left of what a hospital ward building looked like once the redevelopment is complete.
The Engine House. Dating from earlier this century as its name suggests it was used to house the power supply and batteries for the estate. The hospital housed their standby generators here and used it for storing apples which were collected by the patients.
The Coach House. This dates from the turn of the century and held the coaches for the estate. Heating pipes from the glasshouses extended into it to keep the coaches warm and frost free in the winter.
A small dairy was sited here but was also used to store apples and served as offices for the Head Gardener.
The Stable Flats. The building has been much altered over the years. The northeast part has different roofing and is the clue to this being the oldest part, probably 17th century. The stable boy lived on the first floor with the horses below. It was extended first to the south as a U block and then at the turn of the century into its present H shape. The coaches were housed in the middle garages with the stables to either side. You can still see the archways for the stable doors and the pulley hooks for the haylofts. The clock tower was added at the turn of the century.The hospital then converted them to residences in the 1930’s . The Shenley Park Trust completely renovated them in 1993/4 and they are now let as private residences to generate income for the Park’s upkeep.
Porters Lea. This was built in the 1930’s as a residence for the Medical Superintendent. It has rather a plain frontage but an imposing rear elevation. It was set in extensive grounds befitting the importance of the Medical Superintendent.
South Lodge. Located at the entrance to the Park it was built around the 1870’s. It was used as an orphanage at one time when a Mr and Mrs Sanders were in residence in the Mansion but since then has been used to house ground staff.
The walled garden and environs. The walled garden covers an area of nearly two acres and is an original feature of the estate being built in the 17th century. (enlarged in the 18th c) on an elongated octagon plan. The wall stands between 3 and 4 metres high with buttresses added in the 19th century. Parts of the wall collapsed in 1987 and were rebuilt by the Health Authority before transfer to the Trust. It is worth noting that it was fine example of a typical Victorian Kitchen Garden. Even when the hospital was built the tradition of the walled garden to provide produce for the hospital was maintained. Sadly the facility was closed down in the 1970’s and the area fell into serious disrepair and all of the glasshouses against the walls were demolished in the late 1980’s. The Trust is now renovating the garden as an events area.
The Gardeners Cottage. This dates from c1840-50 and attached to the wall of the walled garden, this and the wall are grade 11 listed. The head gardener would have lived here rent-free and was handily placed to keep a good eye on his domain and staff.
The glass houses. Only one bank of glasshouses now remains. The Trust has renovated the lower three and they are a fine example of Victorian craftsmanship utilising the southern aspect to take skilful use of the light. Even rainwater was recycled into each glasshouse for watering the plants. The largest house- the Banana or Carnation house (as it was used in the 1950’s to develop new varieties of carnations) remains un restored but forms part of the Trust’s plans for the walled garden as an events area.
The Bothy- stands derelict but not forgotten. Bothy is Scottish for a humble cottage or hut. Bothies are normally situated on the shady northern side of the kitchen garden and housed the unmarried male garden staff. This one was built early this twentieth century and included an office at the rear on the ground floor.
The cricket ground. The cricket ground is sub-let to another charity- the Shenley Park Recreation Centre Trust. After initial pump priming restoration work by Shenley Park Trust, to build a new cricket table and restore the outfield, the SPRCT have undertaken extensive refurbishment and expansion of the pavilion and constructed a nursery ground. The ground was laid out at the end of last century by W.G.Grace. Mr Raphael in the early 1900’s then built the pavilion and as his son was captain of Surrey laid the ground out to the same dimensions as the Oval, Surrey’s home ground. The ground is beautifully situated and a must to visit and enjoy.
The Social Club.
Built in the 1960’s and extended in the 1970’s the Club was at the heart of social life for the staff of Shenley Hospital. The club had a complete range of facilities including a hall, snooker, table tennis and darts rooms. The swimming pool was also extremely popular. Sadly in the 1980’s usage declined dramatically and the club closed in 1984
Between Shenley Park and the new houses of Porters Park stands Porters Mansion. For centuries this house and its surrounding estate were a dominant feature of the local landscape and witness to many changes not least its encirclement by Shenley Hospital in the 1930’s. Sixty years on the new housing surrounds the mansion but still it defiantly dominates the landscape. The Mansion has had a fascinating history.
The Porters Park Estate was bought by Middlesex County Council in 1924 for the purpose of building a new mental hospital. The estate dates back to at least the medieval period although its early history is uncertain.
Throughout its history the estate has variously been referred to as Porters, Porters Lodge, Porterlees and Porters Park. The earliest references to the estate date from the thirteenth century; in 1291 John De Toky acquired an estate of 72 acres, which in 1340 he settled on John, son of Roger le Porter of Aldenham from whom the estate probably takes its name. The name Porter occurs several times in the old registers of Shenley and Aldenham- in 1318 there was a Nicholas Porter living in Shenley, in 1391 a Geoffrey Porter lived in the area and a Sir William Porter is also mentioned in the fifteenth century.
This we know: the estate passed through several families over the centuries.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century it belonged to Sir Richard Coxe. Coxe who died in 1623, was one of the Masters of the Household to King James 1. During his lifetime Coxe gave £50 to help the poor. The money was put in trust and income derived from the gift was distributed among the poor. Porters then passed to the family of Sir Edmund Anderson.
A century later the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor was at Porters. Hawksmoor was born in Nottinghamshire in 1661. He came to London in 1679 and became a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren. Hawksmoor held several important posts under Wren and shared in much of the work done by Wren and Vanbrugh before undertaking work on his own. In 1694 he was employed to supervise the construction of Wren’s design for the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich. In 1711 he was appointed one of the surveyors for 50 new London churches, and designed six of them including St Mary Woolnoth. A few years later Hawksmoor acquired Porters and divided his time between Shenley and his house in Greenwich. Around 1730 he moved from Greewich to Westminster but kept his country house at Shenley. He died in Westminster in 1736 but expressed a desire to be buried at Shenley. He is buried in St. Botolphs churchyard.
18th Century. John Mason, a distiller of Greewich and Deptford, then acquired the estate. Mason was described as a man of the most unbounded benevolence. In 1748, Mason bought the manor of Weld to add to his estate. Wild farm occupies the site of the old Manor of Weld, which ceased to exist as a separate manor and was incorporated with Porters Park from this date.
John Mason died in 1750 and the estate passed to his son George. After George died, his wife Emily married George Jubb and they sold Porters to Richard Lord Viscount Howe in 1772. Howe was born in 1726 and entered the navy in 1740. He was rapidly promoted rising to First Lord of the Admiralty in 1783. His most memorable victory was the battle of Brest against the French in 1794, which helped to defeat the tyrant Robespierre. Lord Howe was known as ‘Black Dick’ by his men and it was said he was as ‘solid as a rock and just as silent.’ Howe was responsible for building Radlett Lane linking Shenley to Watling Street.
According to historian Clutterbuck, Howe suffered from ‘gouty and rheumatic affections in his limbs’ which ultimately attacked his head and on the 5th August 1799 put a period to his existence.
19th century. The estate then passed to Howe’s daughter Louisa Catherine Marchioness of Sligo, who then sold it to Luke White in 1816. From him it passed to his son Colonel Henry White, who sold it to Samuel Clarke Jervoise in 1839. Jervoise then sold it to William Joseph Myers in 1850. Myers greatly extended the site by buying Shenleybury Farm in 1853 and the land around the Black Lion pub in 1856. Myers died in 1858 but was succeeded by his son Thomas Baron Myers who completed the addition to the estate by purchasing a strip of land that joined Shenleybury and Porters together. Thomas Myers was a magistrate of Hertfordshire and Middlesex and was described as ‘Lord of ther Manor’ in the county directories of that period. After he died in 1882 his son William Joseph Myers inherited the property. He does not appear to have lived at Porters as the house was occupied by James Harris Sanders who had made his fortune in the metal industry. He met his wife Mary Louise in New Orleans whilst on a business trip to the USA. He enjoyed his wealth but also put it to good use and the family were prominent in village life during their time at Porters. Mrs Sanders persuaded her husband to convert Radlett Lodge(now known as South Lodge) into a home for orphans and poor children of the village. The children were educated and trained in household tasks and placed in service. At Christmas time Mrs Sanders prepared presents for all the children and in addition to sweets and oranges they received and appropriate gift ordered especially from London.
Mrs Sanders was a very keen gardener and improved the already well-established gardens around the Mansion. She had a hollow cleared out and converted into a rose garden and also planted the avenue of lime trees leading up from South Lodge. One of her eight children was the author, Ann Bridge; her book ‘Portrait of my mother’ describes their time at Porters.
The Raphael’s and the Great War.
The Sanders left in 1893 and in 1896 Myers sold Porters to Michael Paul Grace of London. Around this time W.G.Grace is said to have come to Porters and laid out the cricket ground. Cecil Frank Raphael then bought the estate in 1902. Raphael improved the cricket ground and built the pavilion, as his son John was a successful cricketer captaining Surrey. Sadly he died in the Great War in 1917.
During the Great War the estate was used as an airfield. This was known as London Colney Aerodrome in order to avoid confusing it with the similar sounding Kenley airfield and was situated in the field east of Black Lion Hill alongside Harper lane. Opposite Shenleybury farm were wooden flight sheds and accommodation huts and was the home to 56 and 54 squadrons. The first flying officer of 56 squadron was Captain Albert Ball VC one of several notable pilots who served at Shenley. The RAF retained the airfield until December 1919 when it was closed down.
Raphael helped the war effort in other ways. He built a soup kitchen by the front gates to the estate and also gave a reception to returning servicemen in 1919.
Raphael made several alterations to the estate. The house was extensively renovated and he built staff cottages in Radlett Lane, which were named Frank, and Winifred Cottages after two of his children. The buildings known as the Bothy and the Engine House were also built then. He extended the range of glasshouses and planted the apple orchards.
In the space of sixty years a state of the art hospital will have come and gone in Shenley. Apart from the mansion those buildings left in Shenley Park and probably the water tower-here will be little left as a reminder of a hospital that once housed over two thousand patients and a feature that was an important part in Shenley’s physical and social history that existed on our doorstep.
Middlesex County Council built Shenley Hospital on the former Porters Park Estate in the 1930’s. The council already had two mental hospitals, a Victorian institution at Wandsworth and Napsbury Hospital near St.Albans. By 1911 Napsbury had been extended but an additional site was needed to care for the patients from the old London Boroughs of Harrow, Wembley, Acton, Willesden and parts of NW2, NW6, NW9 and NW10. The County Council first chose a site at Heston but the outbreak of First World War prevented its purchase and the project was put on hold. In 1923 the council resumed its search and viewed a large number of sites before deciding unanimously on Shenley. Its location close to the Middlesex boundary, and Radlett Station plus the size of the estate on offer made it an ideal choice. It was in 1924 that the council purchased the estate to ‘build a new mental hospital and a Colony for Mental defectives(which later became Harperbury Hospital)
Building the hospital.
Although the council had acquired the estate specifically for building Shenley and Harperbury Hospitals, there was much agonising over the type of institutions that should be built. The council even considered abandoning the scheme but in the end the need to build the hospital was too great and in 1928 a scaled down scheme was approved that saw the hospital being built in two stages. The first phase for 1000 beds and the administration buildings was approved and in January 1932 construction began at last. Middlesex Coloney having begun in 1929. both institutions were built by John Laing and employed up to 700 men at times. The first phase was completed on schedule and within a contract price of £520,000. The second phase began in 1935 and was completed in 1938 providing a total of 2300 beds.
Opening of Hospital
The culmination of the project was the opening of the hospital on the 31st May 1934 by King George V and Queen Mary. The opening ceremony took place in the recreation hall, which seated 1000 people. The Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire, Brigadier General Viscount Hampden, received the King and Queen in a marquee in front of the mansion before proceeding to the hall for the ceremony. Afterwards the king and queen made a tour of the hospital and according to the local press ‘expressed their pleasure at all they had seen’. The king was reported to have remarked ‘it is a splendid institution’.
War Years,
At the outbreak of the Second World War many of the patients were discharged as the country prepared to receive war casualties both military and civilian. About half of the hospital was taken over by military and army nurses who were housed in the mansion.The hospital maintained its separate military and civilian functions although the medical superintendent( who lived in Porterslea) was colonel in chief of the local territorial unit. One physica reminder today of the war is the gun emplacement alongside Radlett Lane opposite the Cricket Centre. The hospital escaped bomb damage although a land mine on a parachute became entangled in an oak tree near the boiler house but failed to explode. An underground reservoir was built above the Gardeners Cottage as an emergency water supply in case of fire. Today it is being used to irrigate the walled garden.
A new type of hospital.
Shenley Hospital was built at a time of a fundamental change in its attitude to the mentally ill. It was built on the ‘Villa’ system where patients were housed in its more homely units of between 20 and 45 people, set in parkland environment.
Although Shenley strived to be modern it still retained some traditional ideas. The hospital had a central axis(which housed the administration, medical treatment units and domestic units) with male and female accommodation to the east and west respectively. In the early days the two sides of the hospital were completely separate and high iron railings surrounded nearly all the wards so that patients could not stray beyond their own ‘airing courts’. The wards were kept locked. The nurses spent most of their time carrying out domestic chores and were provided with police whistles for use in emergencies. However, in the 1950’s things began to change. Nurses were encouraged to have a greater dialogue with patients and teach them simple tasks. The railings were removed and the doors unlocked. Patients became involved in the agricultural and horticultural activities on the hospital estate as part of their treatment. The kitchen gardens remained in use and the hospital grew a large proportion of its own food.
They were involved in the picking and storing of the apples- not only from the present orchard but also from a large Bramley apple orchard opposite the Church of the Good Shepherd. Some patients were even involved in the construction of additional buildings which were then used as occupational therapy units, where patients were then taught trades such as carpentry, cookery and arts and crafts. At one time over sixty patients were employed in the hospital laundry before the introduction of modern machinery in the 1960’s. There was even an industrial unit where patients were employed in outwork for local industries. Another unit trained patients in clerical work and also helped those who already had office experience to keep up their skills for when they rejoined the community. Shenley was also one of the first hospitals in the country to introduce mixed dances for staff and patients. Coach trips to places of interest were also introduced.
Staff and Social facilities.
Both patients and staff used some of the hospital facilities. However, there were also additional facilities for staff which included an Arts Centre, the Staff social club, the cricket field and football pitch and even squash courts.
The cricket team was the best hospital team in the London hospital area. In the 1960’s and 70’s in particular the Social club was at the heart of social activities for the hospital. New facilities included the hall and many former members of staff will recall with fondness the many events and dances held there. There was something ‘on’ almost every night. Many also learnt to swim in the pool. During the late 1980’s the use of the club with falling staff numbers declined significantly and eventually closed in April 1984.
Shenley Hospital in 1953 housed 2300 patients but from then on with the shift away from institutionalised care the number of patients began to fall. In the mid 1970’s it was 1400 but by 1986 was down to 900. The policy of ‘Care in the Community’ was further developed in the 1980’s with the belief that patients would benefit from being cared for in smaller hostels or sheltered accommodation closer to their own communities. Shenley Hospital was set in 150 acres of beautiful Hertfordshire countryside, 450 feet above sea level, Shenley’s beds and facilities have for the past six decades provided various forms of treatment and rehabilitation for mentally ill people from the Brent and Harrow areas of North London. It was eight years after purchasing the land that work finally began on building the hospital which was to be called ‘Shenley’ The eight years were put to use intensively designing and planning the two hospitals in minute detail. John Laing and Co built Shenley Hospital, in two stages. The design of the hospital was such that as many buildings of the existing estate as possible were incorporated. As well as the mansion, buttery, walled garden, both South Lodge and Shenley Lodge remained. In 1933 a further lodge was built at the end of the service drive called North Lodge, thus making three entrances to the hospital, only two, North and South Lodge were gated.
At the outbreak of the Second World War the hospital contracted to accommodate the Queen Alexanders Military Hospital and Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses (VAD’s) occupied the mansion
The South Lodge was built in 1905 replacing the previous lodge, which had been used by Mrs Sanders as an orphanage and home for the poor children of the village.
Planned on the villa system with each villa housing 50 patients, Shenley was described at the time as ‘innovative, exciting and modern’ the new hospital cost £900,000 to build. Patients were in residence 22 months after commencement of the work, which was quite an achievement considering the fact that 13 million bricks were used, 7 acres of reinforced concrete pavements were constructed and 50,000 cubic yards of earth were excavated.
When finished the hospital would be able to care for 2000 patients and had 500 staff.
The administrative offices and departments formed a line through the centre of the hospital, on the west of which lay the female wards and on the east the male. There were three large blocks, each block composed of six wards, in which were housed the chronic patients. The rest of the hospital consisted of no less than twenty-five villas, which varied in capacity from 20 to 80 beds. It had a fully equipped operating theatre, dental clinics, x-ray rooms, a dispensary, 15 padded rooms and water, wireless, telephone and fire alarm systems running in three and a half miles of subway under the floors The orchards gardens and farmlands were to be operated by the patients and were to be an integral part of the treatment. The hospital staff and patients farmed the land, the hospital was virtually self-contained and produced half its animal and vegetable supplies, slaughtering its own cattle and pigs. The total acreage was over three hundred with a hundred and thirty acres set down to lawns, gardens and recreation areas.
The work of building the hospital employed varying numbers of men, at times reaching about 700. The good relationship on the hospital contract is illustrated by the following incident. There was one notable piece of organisation the building of the water tower. It is similar to the campanile of St Mark’s at Venice, about one hundred and fifty feet high and four square. The brickwork is thick at the bottom, diminishing towards the top. The manager, W M Johnson, chose eight skilled and loyal bricklayers and told them he wanted a special effort from them. Two were to work on each wall, raising it to scaffold height (about 5 feet every day). No one must be absent for that would break the rhythm of the work. At the end of each nine hour day labourers were to be standing by to raise the scaffolding and hoists ready for the start next morning. The bricklayers were promised a wage and a half to cover ‘height work’ and to encourage their efforts. The weather was good, not a man lost an hour and every day the work reached scaffold height. In the lower part each man laid 2000 bricks a day and in the upper part 1,000. All the brickwork was pointed inside and out.
They were as busy as bees and full of enthusiasm; if you spoke to one of them he would answer without looking up from his job. They were happy while they worked and proud of their achievement when it was done. It was an example of teamwork at its best.
After a contract is completed there is usually a maintenance period at the end of which the contractor is responsible for rectifying any faults that may come to light. It was so in this case, and at the end of the maintenance period Mr Robertson with an assistant, had to look over the whole place and see what remedial work was needed. After half a days thorough inspection he said: ‘this is marvellous. A contract amounting to over a million pounds and not a pennyworth of maintenance.’ The explanation was that Mr W. M. Johnson had wisely left a capable joiner in the place, and had told all the departments of the hospital to telephone the joiner’s office at once if they had the smallest trouble. So if a door or window stuck through some slight shrinkage of timber, or any other little fault appeared, it was put right immediately without waiting for the inspection. ‘It was a very happy arrangement in every way’ Biog of John Laing. The cost of equipping the first half of hospital was over forty one thousand pounds.
The garden staff received thirty-six shillings per week. In those days they used spades and forks, horses and carts and consequently everything took a long time.
The king and queen opened this ‘progressive hospital’, on 31 May 1934.
A matron reigned (it would seem to be right word for the time) over the female hospital and a chief male nurse over the males. A medical superintendent in those days was in overall charge of the administration. High iron railings were sited around nearly all the wards. These provided what was known then as ‘airing courts’ where patients were counted in and out three times a day, weather permitting. In the early days of the hospital the patients looked very thin and scraggy in the main and it was difficult to define their individual features because of the overall mish mash of impressions. Non-descript, desolate and abandoned they appeared only making inanimate slovenly looking forays on access or entrance by the tall impregnable green gates. Most of the wards were locked and the nurses issued with police whistles.
My Aunties war was somewhat different as she worked in a tuberculosis hospital. Francis Thomspsons word are very apt:
And some are sung and that was yesterday
And some unsung, and that may tomorrow be.
‘Stop there!’ A hard voice came out of the darkening night. Susan McGinley, my aunt brought her bicycle to an abrupt stop at the very top of steep Black Lion Hill, Shenley. Preventing her from going any further and shining his torch directly into her dazzled eyes, the village policeman surveyed his ‘catch’. Close up, he took in the firm set face with blue rebellious eyes. Perched on her head was a navy blue cap, which matched her coat, of such a length it draped her knees, outlining the sheen of fine strong legs.
He pressed her with questions.
‘What was she about at this time of night with a war on? Where to? Where from?’
Apart from giving her name, she told him that she lodged at the base of the hill with her married sister, but that she was originally from Altaneerin, in Donegal, if he would know where that was.She was going to her place of work, until he had prevented her. She had still more than a couple of miles to travel to Clare Hall Hospital in South Mimms. She was a State Enrolled Nurse in an urgent hurry to get to her work in time, war or no war, and attend to desperately ill patients.
The policeman was obdurate, showed no inclination to be rid of her or to listen to her entreaties as to the plights of her patients or indeed her own personal position.
Rather on this cold latter part of January night 1941,the policeman officiously pounced on the fact that her rear light was not functioning, to which Susan replied to the effect, that she had tried reviving her low battery by warming it up on the old kitchen range, but that now it must be ‘whacked out’ and she would have to purchase a new one. This was certainly not good enough for the policeman who summoned her to appear before Barnet Magistrates Court. Added to which she would have to push her bicycle the remainder of the way to the hospital.
She struggled along the lane, fearful, solitary and weary. At times a rake of searchlights sent up pillars of light into the black sky to laser back and forth. At ground level anti-aircraft emplacements were ready to puncture the night air, the banter of the crews reached her across the leafless hedges.
When she at last arrived at the hospital the matron Mrs Spaley, gave her a severe talking to.
However, it was not until a few weeks later after Susan was fined ten shillings by the court for this wartime offence and the case had made the columns of the Daily Express, that the indignant matron gave full vent to her feelings. She caustically upbraided my aunt, declaring cynically that she admired her fine words in court, which had found their way into the national paper, ‘as a nurse it was my duty to get to work to relieve the sick and the suffering’, but she declared, ‘I take grave exception to the fact that you have made the location of this hospital thoroughly well known to Mr Hitler and his cronies, and I don’t doubt that myself and all my staff will be forever up and down to the air raid shelter from this time on! I’ve a really good mind to sack you, girl’.
In fact she discussed the merits of firing her with the Medical Superintendent, Dr Simmonds, who opined that it was for her only to decide. Fortunately, Dr Laird the surgeon of the hospital came to her support, saying that Susan was an excellent nurse and should continue to be employed by the hospital.
Thereafter she lost herself in her work, the little I saw of her was akip her box room bed the springs sagging down to floor in evening time when she was taken a cup of tea, and then all fusty she would get up, hurry a quick egg on toast, then off she would go into the black night to collect her bicycle from shed.
‘Self’ in those days was a luxury one could not afford, one’s patients foremost in thoughts.
The hospital at South Mimms had moved from Clerkenwell, and was originally devoted to the treatment of smallpox diseases and had a history of two hundred years, being situated there in 1896. The incidence of smallpox was high in 1901, and the surrounding village suffered, for which the hospital was blamed for the contagiousness of disease.
At that time nurses were recruited from the old Nurses Cooperative Society at three guineas a week, a sum regarded as a high reward, for only the best nurses were to have charge of such serious disease.
It was in May 1911, that Clare Hall Hospital treated patients with tuberculosis. It was used for treating advanced tuberculosis patients so there was an air of gloom and despondency about the place in 1935. Then 39% of the patients were discharged by death; with better investigation and treatment results were more cheerful and patients were happier. Although the known causation of the disease at this time had been isolated as Koch’s Bacillus it was still maintained by medical practitioners that one could not cure a fool of tuberculosis owing to the treatment being so long and troublesome. With the diminution of smallpox cases medical forces were directed against this more prevalent scourge and it took all the resources of the medical and nursing staff to forestall its ravages in the population.
U.S.A Army Surgeon-General Bushnell’s famous remark lies at the base of its treatment:
‘For tuberculosis we prescribe not medicine but a mode of life’.
This was where Clare Hall Hospital and its nursing staff came into their own
As the disease was highly infectious the patients had to be isolated. Endless steadfastness, courage, self-discipline, and self-denial were required of them. They were housed in a hutted sanatorium, which was part of the Emergency Medical Service. The ‘huts’ were built of brick construction with asbestos sheeting roofs.
At the onset of the war it was adapted as a general hospital to meet civilian casualties, acting as a base hospital receiving local and transferred air raid casualties from London. However, very soon the need for a special effort to combat tuberculosis under wartime conditions meant that all the beds were occupied with TB patients by December 1942, a total of 540 beds.
Surgical methods of radical character only began just before the war. Susan worked throughout the war. Several hundred nursing staff was employed at the hospital at this time.
Susan told me that at least half the nursing staff was from Ireland, from the four corners. She said that they were a credit to her country. While others were fighting a mighty battle in Europe and in the desert sands of Africa, she was fighting with her colleagues the furious scourge of tuberculosis in the sanatorium of South Mimms.
The nursing regime at that time was arduous for the disease required very skilled treatment, the essentials of which are: rest, both of mind and body, fresh air and sunlight, routine and discipline, and correct feeding. By its very nature of confinement, owing to the disease being so highly infectious, the disease was doubly trying and the barrier nursing required scrupulous attention to the rules of hygiene. Patients were confined to bed at night for ten to twelve hours, necessitating more blanket baths, more bed linen changes and all this with very difficult and demanding patients.
Along with the tremendous bouts of coughing, pain and all round debilitating ill-health, the patients exhibited what was known as a TB temperament when they would be very irritable and show extremes of temper to the nurses or for that matter anyone else who happened unfortunately to cross their firing lines. Nurses would expect to suffer many a ‘tongue lashing!’ At such times the patients could also ‘act up’ when smuggled cigarettes would be secretly smoked under sheets in beds. They would also abscond by donning a flying jacket or pulling an army greatcoat over their pyjamas and make great haste for the ‘Old Guinea’ pub a few hundred yards away from the main entrance gate with invariably some nurses detailed in fast pursuit. They would be read the riot act and threatened with expulsion from the hospital.
Dr Simmonds says: ‘with the decline in the incidence and mortality of TB the hospital could be used for pulmonary, cardiac and other chest conditions. Tuberculosis at that time had been largely beaten and the nursing staff deserved to be honoured for relieving the suffering of thousands. That was then and this is now. It returned with quite a vengeance years later, even though as the good doctor was to elaborate, they had made known the essential cure in their day, which was also combined with socio-economic origins of housing environment, diet and life styles. Now there is nothing left of that place to tell the tale but for the sycamore tree with fresh branches where the nurses used to sit so many years ago.
At the outbreak of the Second World War it was decided –I suppose to clear the decks, in the advent of receiving war wounded – to discharge a number of voluntary patients.
Many of the staff were to be seen in the hospital at this period in uniform as part of a territorial unit of the RAMC. I well remember seeing ‘fatty Johnny Johnston’ as us kids used to call him serving in the hospital church, he would be clad in a territorial outfit and if he hadn’t got that on he would wear a ‘dicky’ black bow tie against a gleaming white shirt while he was invariably sweating profusely as he clasped his rather dainty hands together and bent low to chime the bell on the green carpet stage of our catholic church in hospital
Really speaking the hospital was hardly up and running before the dark shadow of war intervened so to split up the hospital in two, the military authorities taking over half of the accommodation and this was serviced by the unit on their behalf.
The war years were an extra exciting and busy period for the hospital at war. The water tower so comparatively recently erected was used for many military purposes not least of which was the radio communications surveillance of the enemy, and of the Russian forces.
Three thousand wounded servicemen were treated at Shenley because Queen Alexander’s Military Hospital at Millbank was unable to cope.
While British soldiers were recovering inside the hospital, high-ranking German prisoners of war were being escorted in the grounds on their exercise periods. Shenley housed Field Marshal Von Rundstedt during his period as prisoner of war
There was not a Sunday during the Second World War that my mother did not see to it that the whole family went to the makeshift church at the end of the long low lying glass and wire net roofed sanatorium, (‘The Sands’) alongside Rookery Field, above the wood and below the large laundry block over which the tall Shenley Hospital Tower cast its long shadow.
In many ways the church was quite convenient for us as it came within the very hospital my father worked at. During the war years the normal rules that applied to the hospital were somewhat suspended with roughly half of it being given over to attendance on military casualties.
Father Foley, more a version of a Clement Atlee than a Churchillian figure, -though taller and without the moustache- took the service, facing for the most part the altar, to which all eyes of the congregation were directed.
A sizzle of excitement passed through the mixed gathering, offsetting the sound of the rooks, screeching like the rip of a saw biting into a loose metal plate, as they dived and danced, madly hysterical over their ragged flat stick and twig nests up in the high trees, which stretched alongside the whole width of the sanatorium.
A pair of military policeman with their red peak caps, brass buckled whitened belts over khaki uniforms that had seen much of a hard iron press entered the poorly lit room in high polished heavy boots.
Between the two of them an old frail man appeared with head somewhat bowed and then lifted up as he was escorted to a wooden seat to the side of the altar.
This scene from out of my childhood recently came back to me like a blur in my vision as though through a drizzle of rain. As the service drew on and my eyes adjusted to the changes of light in the dim surround I took in the people who had gathered that day.
Some of them were the usual, Ted Crowley and wife, Mrs Nichols and daughter, Irene, and some of the others I cannot now put names to. I know the greater part of them were off duty nursing staff, who lived like us in North Avenue, at the bottom of the cinder track, down the length of the wood.
There were of course the nurses dressed in uniform as part of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Johnny ‘Fatty’ Johnson, was the altar server that particular day. No cassock and cotter for him, he struggled out of his jacket and knelt at the altar in army shirt sleeve order, making his responses in Latin and plain song.
Now and again he would glance over to the side of the altar, resting his eyes on the old man sitting there. As the beams of the sun rose up and fell into the room you could see his discomfort grow as the sweat built up under his armpits and the back of his head.
Along with the nurses were the patients, the shell-shocked and the wounded, those on crutches with coarsely bandaged stumps of legs and a rare few full amputees in wheelchairs, so that there was much shuffling and muttering, half-retching and swallowing as people tried to get a good view of the proceedings and settle into the prayers the priest was now intoning.
Some were simply in pyjama tops and trousers; others pulled close their greatcoats over flimsy full pyjamas.
The rank attached to the men, designated by the various pips on shoulder straps, or by the stripes on the jackets counted for little in this room. There was a commonality of respect graciously granted and silently acknowledged by the mass of the people who had suffered the gross indignity and danger of a people under fire by the same ruthless enemy.
Sometimes a navy or an air force man who was on leave, or visiting his sweetheart nurse or local girl would join the service, sticking out like a rare flower in a field of corn. Around about could be seen the full plethora and paraphernalia of war. A solitary brown painted steel helmet with a scrim of green string sat discarded along with peaked caps and berets along a side shelf. And further along rubber gas masks were in an untidy clutter in a corner of the room.
At the middle of the sanatorium was a road that led to the mansion. Stationed there was a fire tender and an army truck that stood ready to race to any emergency within the hospital grounds.
When the service was over we were delighted to go home for we had been fasting since early morning. With ravishing appetites we could have eaten more than a horse, but in those days of rationing the best that could be afforded were a few rashers of bacon, fried on the small paraffin oil primus stove, in the kitchen.
Was it an element of my imagination or did the conversation over our small, hot meal, linger on the sudden mysterious appearance of that old man under military escort? It seems that my father had picked up more than a whisper that it was no other than a German General, notably Field Marshall Von Rundstedt, who was being held in the hospital for medical treatment, observation and diagnosis.
It was hardly credible in those days that such a top brass member of the Third Reich was then in the hospital along with other high-ranking German officers, but word creeps out, no matter the top security. However, as my father Hugh was then a Charge Nurse, it is safe to say he had his ear to the ground and was cognisant with the latest happenings.
Not alone was he privy to the latest happenings on the nursing front, owing to his position as a ward manager, he was located in an ideal position to survey the comings and goings at that time, being as his Villa 21 was strategically placed. The hospital had originally been designed in a village or Villa system, and its very openness made it easy for anyone determined on surveillance. It was also a custom of his at the end of what was termed a ‘long day,’ working from early morning, 7 o’clock, until the night time, 9pm, to take a walk by way of the Black Lion Pub, at the main entrance to the hospital, and indulge himself in a few pints of beer. If he didn’t pick up anything of worth on his walk he would more than likely hear a little more of the gossip about the hospital while downing his drink.
At any rate whisper grew into fact, a great deal more of which emerged after the war.
I daresay had the rumour become more widespread, that indeed Von Rundstedt was being confined their for treatment, a lot of people would have liked to have got their hands on him, not least our own family.
This was the same man who had not only fought in the First World War –enduring a heart attack in the process- but was a prime mover in the Second World War.
Hitler recalled him for the successful invasion of Poland. Turning his attention to the west he supported the approach to the invasion of France, and after a promotion to Field Marshall in July 1940, he took part in the planned Operation Sealion, namely the invasion of the British Isles. When this fell through he was prevailed upon to set up Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, and as a result captured Kiev. He had a further heart attack in November ’41, but insisted on carrying on.
When things were going badly after a further deeper push into the Soviet Union he insisted on withdrawal against Hitler’s firm orders to the contrary.
He was sent to France in March 1942, where he had prime responsibility for defending the Atlantic coast.
He was outraged by the July plot to kill Hitler, and saw to it that the conspirators were either eliminated or widely dispersed where they could be of no consequence. Once again put in command in the west he rallied his troops to fight Operation Market Garden, and emerge victorious.
However, he was to meet his match during the Battle of the Bulge, and had to admit defeat. Subsequently, after being relieved of his command in March 1945, he was captured and on being interrogated suffered another heart attack.
He was taken to Bridgend in Glamorgan, as a prisoner of war, and after an attack of phlebitis; he was transferred to the military wing of Shenley Hospital.
It is incredible that this man who was 70 years of age, – known as ‘Papa’ in Wales-who had been purged twice by Hitler from the same ruthless German army, yet remaining a stalwart defender and loyalist, found himself in the heartlands of Hertfordshire, not many miles from London, the very capital of the country. It would have made our minds boggle if we knew all this when we first became aware of the old frail man, who was being escorted around the grounds of the hospital.
It could well be that when Rundstedt first looked out from his quarters, he could quite easily have mistaken the dominating Shenley tower for the campanile of St.Marks at Venice, thinking that he was much nearer home. While I at the same time, looking out from my bedroom window would have been reassured by its tall presence- overshadowing North Avenue as it did-with its tall chimney belching out thick smoke, paradoxically a beacon of hope, making us feel tremendously alive and secure throughout the long war.
However, it was not quite sufficient in itself to stop the nightmarish dreams I had, of unopposed German tanks and trucks driving into the avenue, throwing lights around my bedroom walls, circling the roundabout and returning on to the main road, during those frightening years.
It was not for nothing that the Southern Area Defence precautions were positioned throughout the hospital. There were machine gun, ‘pill-box’ posts, positioned at the perimeter of the hospital and about other roads and lanes in the area.
Searchlight emplacements and artillery pieces were also at the ready in various places. Barrage balloons like enormous grey whales floated above into the clouds. And scattered around the hospital were a large number of air-raid shelters above ground in the form of windowless, long brick buildings, with flat, tar treated roofs, hardly the width of a lorry wide, entrance being gained at either ends, open for easy access, to take a hastily evacuated ward full of patients and staff. Trenches had been dug and sirens were established at various positions, to screech out whenever an air raid was likely. An anti-aircraft gun and searchlight were also established in the dusky gold cornfield behind the tall thorny hedge at the bottom of our garden, beyond our chicken run. From above the meshed down straw, whispering voices would carry into backyards through the warm evening summer air, silencing the corncrakes, and giving ghostly reassurance that friendly eyes were committed to searching the skies.
There were also Air Raid Patrolmen who saw to it that blackout curtains were in place and that the area was in total darkness. One of them was so over zealous that he had my near neighbour Jack Barnet run down the stairs at the point of a bayonet, making out he was a spy, for leaving a chink in his curtains.
However, what would have particularly upset my aunty, (who lived with us as part of family) about Rundstedt’s local presence, was the very fact that she had been as good as treated as an alien herself, during the early stages of the war.
One night, when she was going to work at another local hospital, she had been seriously taken to task by the local policeman for not displaying a rear light on her bicycle, and much to her annoyance and embarrassment, had been hauled before the local magistrate at Barnet, and fined ten shillings.
She was further upbraided by the matron, with the threat that she was liable to the sack, for making known the position of the hospital to Hitler’s forces. All this would not have made for an easy temper.
Also, prior to taking up nursing, she had worked at a munitions factory not far from St.Albans, near the Mile House. She then had to walk a long ill lit lonely road to get there, passing an armaments factory on the way, where she saw turrets being lowered on to heavy armoured tanks. She was a courageous woman would think it a sad affair if she could not get out of an evening to the King ‘Billy’ pub, in the village, share cigarettes and play a few rounds of darts with the air force ‘boys’ as she called them, who went about with a confident swagger, and invariably had a Vera Lynn song on their lips.
Sometimes, she would take off to a dance at Watford, and on missing the last bus, would walk all the way back home. I recently received a letter from a girl friend of my aunts, during that period, a Betty Griffiths, who wrote to say that, ‘on the walk, because of the bombs dropping, we had to stop off at Aldenham, to take shelter, until the bombing ceased’
At the same time, we ourselves as a family would have not been too all forgiving, for indeed, we had come to great danger during the early part of the war, from the dropping of giant land mines from the heavy droning German bombers. The first one in September 1940 smashed down to earth just as my father was finishing duty for the day. It brought down ceilings and doors and broke windows, in a large number of the wards. A second huge mine fell, within the precinct of the main hall and kitchens, beneath the shadow of the tower. That it did not explode was declared as little short of a miracle. It seems that the fine filigree and straps of the parachute, attached to the mine, became entangled in a large oak tree leaving it suspended a few feet above the ground. A naval disposal expert consequently defused it. Had it exploded, my father said, it would have blown a large part of the hospital and North Avenue to smithereens. Of course, he was wise enough to hold this frightening piece of information back from the family, until the end of the war. In the next couple of days four incendiary bombs fell, draping the hospital in a cloud of smoke, but causing little real damage.
The fear created by the relentless early German bombing campaign would have racked up our rat like hate for the perpetrators as we scuttled to the air raid shelters in the thick of the night.
In their mission to destroy London, they headed our way, not realising until too late that they had overshot their mark, when they off loaded their bombs in our direction. It is horrifying just to recall the cement and dust flying up in our faces like doom thickening smoke clouds in the low set Anderson Shelter, with its corrugated iron cover, and its spades of clay banked overhead. It did not seem sufficient protection in those days. The way the shelter seemed to take off with the vibration of the bombs, and to float for what seemed like two minutes in the air before returning, back to ground.
The hot searing scorch burn that I felt on my arm, the tears and the crying out loud, from the shrapnel, that fell from out of the sky from where we previously thought heaven lay. Later, the thought of those V1 or V2 rockets, ‘flying bombs’ or ‘doodlebugs, call them what you will, put grave fear in us. The shocking silence when we hid under stairs, listening to each other’s frightened prayers.
The rocket cut engine. The deathly silence enclosed us. We could hear our heart beat and the fear was upon us like treacle that smears and gets everywhere you don’t want it. And now we were for it as it was falling, fast gathering speed, from miles high above.
It takes me no time to recall: Closeted under table or stairs, or a shelter smaller than a prison cell, waiting for annihilation, affects you for the rest of your life.
No matter the fast embrace of your mother at such a desperate time, the kisses and warm cuddles, it never takes away from a child’s mind the internal torment that it endured. It remains a puzzle to a child who continually explores the question of why someone hates them to the extent that at this formative time in their life, they were reduced to an animal existence, underground.
I found it hard to carry on at school, and when I went to college, it did not get much easier. However, the sight of open fields through modern wide clear panes of glass helps in giving you some measure of tranquillity through thinking on the slowly fertile growing grass.
In my case I derive little pleasure in being invited to a pub, a restaurant, or any other such confined building. I tend to run, my heart will race and it takes time for me to slow it down. Nowadays, I am not quite so bad, I don’t feel that smothering sensation that I felt, those frightening days when particular large roars of thunder burst around my tender, still child forming ears. Don’t ask me about those close girl friends, I found I let them down, for when they came too close, they found me wanting, and I was not the right boy friend material.
However, I always remember that when things were at their worst, in those threatening, – some would say, far off days, – my mother would look up at the fretwork of clouds in the sky and point out the pattern of silver linings and take comfort from them. ‘There’ll always be a silver lining’, she would say. I nowadays do the same.
It has been some help for me to learn that, after the war, my father’s brother, Jack, a top scientist, helped research into the V1 and V2 rockets that had created so much pandemonium. He worked at Harlow, at the Atomic Scientific Research Establishment
Finally, it must be said that due to Rundstedt’s part in the invasion of Poland, many Polish, and indeed other Eastern European people found themselves permanently displaced, if not during the actual war, then certainly after, for these countries were left effectively in the Russian zone, and sphere of influence, when hostilities finally ceased.
A lot of these displaced people, who were for the most part Polish, worked as porters in the kitchens, next to the main King George V Hall. (So named after the opening of the hospital by King George V and Queen Mary in 1934.)
During the last years of the war, in wintertime, the children from North Avenue often made use of large baking tins left unattended outside the kitchens, as toboggans, to sledge down the service drive, the two metal runners set apart soon becoming fast silver blades, gathering great speed down the long snow packed slope. It was such an elemental experience of freedom and liberation, after being hunkered down for such a long time, that we defiantly chanted. ‘We’re winning, – winning, – winning the war!’
Field Marshall Gerd Von Rundstedt was eventually sent to Hamburg, for trial as a war criminal. Some people may think that he was treated over leniently due to his age, frailty and continued ill health. Others may conjecture, that as he was regarded more as a soldier’s soldier, a professional, he got off lightly. The fact remains that he was released in 1948, to spend his remaining years in Hanover, when he was released in 1953.
War preparations at Shenley commenced as early as 1937 and in 1938 Air Raid Precautions training was in full swing, indeed by August 1938 and September 1938 refresher courses in anti-tank training were being undertaken. In September 1938 the Metropolitan Commissioner of Police issued Emergency Air Raid Warning Notices banning the ‘normal’ use of sirens on selected key premises. These sirens were henceforth to be used only as air raid warnings, the telephone switchboards in these premises were to be manned continuously twenty four hours a day and answered at once.
The second half of the building program was still going on, the grounds and gardens being laid out, and in fact were not completed until after the war.
During 1939 war preparations gathered apace, 4 acres of land at Wilds farm were given over as a training area for air raid precautions. In March it was decided that it was vital to London’s defence to place searchlight units at the hospital. In April consideration was given to convert the old engine house to an apple store and the old forge and the paint shop would be converted into garages. In May the Minister of Health decided that Shenley could accommodate 600 army casualties and sent a ministry doctor and engineer to assess and report on the necessary expenditure required. July saw an ARP post established at Shenley Bury farm. The requisitioned part of the hospital formed the 2nd London General Hospital. The Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, drafted to the hospital were billeted in the mansion. Three acres of waste ground to the south of Jubilee was converted into a garden for the occupation of military patients.
Thus the hospital was divided into two parts, one administered by the military and the other managed by civil authorities.
The occupation of parts of the hospital by the military created many difficulties and some members of the committee wanted the hospital taken over by the military authorities in its entirety.
Two temporary needle room assistants were appointed for a period of three weeks to make dark curtains for the protection of the hospital windows for air raid purposes. Their pay was two pounds and eleven pence per week.
Early in the year the hospital committee considered demolishing rebuilding the head gardeners cottage because of damp. In the event they discovered cause of problem and repaired it for seventy-five pounds, it is now a listed building. During the summer a number of working patients of both sexes were sent on summer holidays to homes run by the mental after care association and each patient was allowed two shillings and sixpence. September was a crunch time and the medical superintendent requested that the relatives of all the voluntary patients remove them from the hospital as soon as possible. No further voluntary patients would be admitted for the duration of the war. It was reported to the committee that all possible land at the hospital was now under cultivation and that one third of the greenhouse production had been turned over from flowers to produce. It was reported that together with outside grown varieties over six tons of tomatoes were produced. During a four week period ending twenty third March, the value of produce from the grounds and gardens amounted to £1,176-7-2.On Saturday April 13th new paper rationing orders came into force, paper supply was to be reduced to 30% of pre-war levels and special licences already issued would be reduced by a further 50%. Steel helmets were purchased at a cost of nine shillings each for the use of staff when engaged on outside duties.
During 1940 preparations for air raids continued with arrangements being made for emergency water and electricity supplies and cooking arrangements. In the early part of the year Princess Arthur of Connaught visited the hospital. A two-week reserve supply of diesel oil was approved for storage in barrels or drums at various locations on the hospital estate. Internal glazing on wards was removed and stored and the diggings of temporary trenches for the emergency use of patients were approved in July.
Over a ton of fruit was bottled, plums and damson and 17 hundredweights of jam was made.
Members of staff living in staff cottages would be allowed to offer board and lodgings to relatives of wounded soldiers but only in exceptional circumstances. Every building with a glass roof was to be covered with ‘chicken wire’ mesh to reduce danger from flying glass.
The cost of all wool white blankets rose from ten shillings five pence to twenty shillings four pence.
The committee voted one hundred pounds to provide Christmas extras for the patients.It was during September 1940 that the war suddenly descended on Shenley with a vengeance. At seven minutes past 9 on the night of 25th, two land mines were dropped, one fell and exploded just outside the hospital grounds causing some damage to the hospital, in three villas parts of ceilings came down, seven villas had damage to door locks bolts and frames. Two villas had windows displaced and split jambs, the church leaded lights and numerous windowpanes throughout the hospital were broken. The second mine fell in the male patients recreation ground near the new coal dump and failed to explode properly because its parachute became entangled in a tree breaking the mines descent.
On the advice of the military eleven wards and all the administrative buildings were evacuated. Despite the fact that shrapnel was continuing to fall there were no casualties and all the patients were given a bed by midnight.
On the morning of the 26th volunteers entered the stores and carried out sufficient food to provide the patients breakfast. The Middlesex Colony hospital came to the rescue with cooking facilities and all the patients had a meal of hot stew during the afternoon. A naval bomb disposal expert, sub-lieutenant Taylor started work on defusing the mine at 2pm and at 3.15 had completed the task. All the patients were immediately returned to their wards. Sub-lieutenant Taylor told the medical superintendent that had the mine exploded it would have razed to the ground the whole of the centre of the hospital including the water tower.
The committee wrote to the lords of the admiralty expressing their appreciation of the brave action of Sub-lieutenant Taylor and offering a small presentation to him. Their lordships pointed out that many brave officers were engaged in similar duties and it would be unfair to single out one. In the event the hospital committee sent a hundred guineas to the Royal Navy Benevolent Fund.
More air-raid damage occurred at the hospital on the twenty ninth September when at 12-20am four-oil bombs fell on the hospital. The first one fell in a field at the rear of the male block, northern fields, the flames dealt with by spades.The second bomb fell through the glass roof of the covered way at the laundry causing a fire in the linen room. The hospital fire brigade got the fire under control in ten minutes. Bomb three fell on the roadway at the rear of the sewing room, and was extinguished by stirrup pump while the last bomb fell in the garden by the west entrance to the maids home, which was also extinguished by a stirrup pump.As a result of these air-raids it was decided that each ward should carry forty eight hours of emergency food rations for the patients together with emergency medical supplies.
The emergency cookers were to be distributed around the hospital estate instead of being kept in one place, and work was put in hand to erect blast walls 13 inches thick, the interior being lined with white glazed brick in vital positions before windows in the wards and departments in place of sandbagged protection.
In February 1941, Villa 10 was requisitioned by the military to house patients from the women’s auxiliary services.
April 1941, saw the forced landing of a plane on the farm, the hospital lodged a claim for damages against the military for twenty pounds. In the event the damage was finally assessed at five pounds.
The committee expressed concern over the water consumption by the military in the mansion and approved the introduction of three water meters in the mansion. Despite the vicissitudes of wartime living some pre-war activities carried on, Mr Stanley Lord, Head Gardener continued to win prizes at the British carnation society shows and received the congratulations of the committee. The board of control during their rota visit complimented the committee and staff for continuing to give active and progressive treatment to the mentally ill despite the difficulties resulting from the war.
The minutes of the hospital committee record that the committee continued its support of Shenley District Nursing Association by a grant of five pounds. The ban on admitting voluntary patients was relaxed a little to deal with urgent cases. Fire hoses damaged and deteriorated were becoming difficult to replace so the committee had them stored around the hospital inside buildings. The committee also approved the construction of a shelter for firewatchers in the top of the water tower.
The more mundane and routine business of the hospital carried on amidst increasing difficulties caused by shortages –coal stocks fell to a three week reserve- the farm lorry used for transporting coal was small and inadequate, it could only carry five hundred weights at a time, this was resolved by putting a larger body on the chassis. The boilers had to be retubed. No 8 North Avenue needed a new stove, the old one being worn out. Replacement cost eight pounds. Underneath the church had to be converted to hold storage for furniture from wards occupied by the military costing one hundred and twenty pounds. First aid repairs to war damage to laundry cost one hundred and ninety eight pounds. ARP post thirteen had a badly smoking chimney and this had to be replaced.
Barnet Rural District Council provided Anderson Shelters for the Staff Cottages but the residents found them unable and in some cases unwilling to use them. The committee complained about the shortage of male nurses and an investigating committee was set up to examine this problem, this committee met with the unions and it was agreed that the working week would be extended to sixty hours or more with the possibility that there would be no annual leave.
The load on the electricity supply became dangerously close to overload and the committee decided to purchase another transformer together with impounding any unauthorised electrical appliances in use by the staff and the military authorities. The acting medical superintendent was empowered to search all rooms to this effect. Brick built shelters were authorised at the laundry, builders yard, farm and kitchen. In August 1941 lightning damaged the maid’s home. Work was put in hand to improve the blackout precautions throughout the hospital at a cost of one penny over a shilling.
Treatment of patients continued and the visiting board of control continued to compliment the hospital on its treatment of patients. Doctors from Napsbury and other Middlesex County hospitals visited to study electric convulsive therapy treatment.
11,000-gallon circular emergency water supply tanks were approved for siting in strategic places around the hospital.
It was also decided that the shoeing of horses would in future take place in the Colony.
Gas proofing of wards was approved for the decontamination of wounded and walking gas cases.
The Maids home was taken over by the military for their administrative offices and the Centre Administrative block vacated by them.
In June 1942 a tender for £3,550 was approved for the sale of timber from twenty six acres of Coombe wood to timber merchants and the regional war committee approved the County Council claim for five shillings each per day cost of maintaining the military patients.
The acting medical superintendent complained of he difficulty in obtaining materials for patient’s occupational therapy and he started to deploy more patients into producing garden produce when appropriate.
In August 1942 approval was given for a searchlight unit to be based at the cricket pavilion and the hospital charge for electricity was twopence per unit of electricity.
A medical library was started at Shenley Hospital funded by a grant of thirty-five pounds from the hospital committee, the library was to be shared by the colony and Napsbury Hospital.
1942 saw the hospital committee granting approval for the hospital engineering facilities to be used for the production of small munitions parts for the government. By December 5 members of the maintenance staff had been trained and over 1,400 Shell bends had been produced in their own time.
1943 saw the reintroduction of Insulin Therapy for the treatment of schizophrenia as treatment had stopped at the outbreak of war. Villa 7 accommodated female patients and villa 8 male.
1944 saw a nurse training film on ECT being completed and used.
There were experiments with outdoor tomato plants, and to make maximum use of the land, lettuces were planted between each tomato plant. The results were that 13,600 lettuces were cut and 6.6 tons of tomatoes produced. The surplus being sold to other Middlesex County Hospitals.
Problems with cooking arrangements continued between the hospital and the military because of sharing the main kitchen. To ease part of the situation the military built a new butchers shop and store for their use, when complete the new refrigerators arrived but could not be installed because the doorways were too small, alterations to the doors had to be made by the hospital maintenance staff.
In 1945 with the war drawing to a close the committee started looking forward to the normalisation of the hospital, the blast walls were removed and the rubble dumped in Nineacre wood. Approval was given for removal of the railing round the male wards because these no longer served a useful purpose. Patients and staff celebrated the cessation of hostilities. At this time the hospital suffered its first death during ECT.
Normalisation continued slowly throughout 1945-46, the committee taking the opportunity to purchase the medical equipment, furniture and supplies that were surplus to military requirements. The military withdrew its presence and plans were put in hand to upgrade the street lighting through the hospital from Black Lion Hill to the South exit at Radlett Lane.
In April 1946 the hospital had 1,724 patients and 581 staff. Patients dances were restarted and they were to take place on thirty weeks of the year with the band costing £156 per year. The mansion was vacated by the military and approved for the use of a nurse training school,
With the main body being used for residential accommodation.
The fire alarm system throughout the hospital was upgraded. Planning started on providing more staff cottages at the end of North Avenue, to be called Queensway.
Coronation villa was returned to use for private patients at a cost of £3-10 per week £3-50 for Middlesex County patients and £4-11 for out of County patients. Approval was given for the employment of female porters and telephone orderlies. Musicians on the staff were to be paid 2 shillings per rehearsal and 5 shillings per performance.
In 1946 the National Health Service Act became law. The changes consequent on this Act were mainly administrative. On balance the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, more money and better staffing ratios were possible but were slow in arriving.
Post war 1947-1998
The immediate post-war years were a time of repair and getting back to normal, rationing continued in force for almost everything. Every repair and replacement required permission or a license from one government department or another. In 1947 the hospital was divided into three autonomous divisions, one male and two female.
On the 5th July 1948 Shenley became part of the National Health Service, and the hospital had its own Hospital Management Committee. The one big administrative advantage was that decisions became more immediate; it no longer took months, in some cases years to obtain approval for goods and changes. No longer had requests to go through various County Council Committees, the HMC could with its annual budget make decisions on the spot, only large or additional schemes required approval from the Regional Board or the Minister of Health.
Advances in the treatment of the mentally ill started to gather apace. All mental hospitals were searching for ways to combat the growing problem of chronicity, the number of admissions was increasing and the number of deaths and discharges falling. Shenley was no exception having inherited large numbers of chronic patients from its two sister hospitals. Shenley was carrying out acute work in a relatively low number of beds. An improvement in medical treatment and drugs for physical illness was reducing the death rate. Searches were underway for more effective drugs in the treatment of mental illness. The staff had more scope for experimentation in social approaches to psychiatric problems. The steady increase in the number of those who failed to respond to medical treatment and remained unfit to leave institutional care gave impetus to the need to provide more recreational activity and explore all forms of medical and social therapy. To this end Shenley increased its occupational therapy departments and experimented in Industrial Therapy utilising skills acquired by its staff prior to working in the mental illness field. In 1953 the Regional Board in response to a request from the HMC provided a capital sum to fund an Industrial Therapy project- the erection of workshops to provide more occupational therapy space.
The project was so successful in terms of patient improvement and the provision of extra space that over the next three years the project built four large buildings to provide extra occupation and recreational space for patients. The building teams cleared the site, made the concrete blocks with which the buildings were constructed and all internal plumbing, connection to the main water and sewerage and all electrical work being done by the hospital maintenance department.
The buildings provided space for patients to do outwork from commercial firms, domestic science on a domestic rather than institutional scale, artwork
and therapy, dressmaking, shoe making and repairs and woodwork. The experiment turned into a permanent feature of hospital life and the making of concrete blocks and paving slabs continued until the early 1980’s with the other occupational work continuing until the end of 1996.
The peak patient population occurred during 1957 with 2,370 patients being housed in accommodation designed for no more than 2000 patients, after that the numbers declined steadily.
In 1959 Shenley started an experiment called the Ferring experiment, in which the patients from the chronic hospital population were selected at random and after some preparation by doctors, nurses and the occupational therapy department sent to Ferring House to see how they could manage outside the institution. On return to the hospital they were reassessed on their own wards before being given single occupation on the upper floor of Coronation Villa (Villa 10)
The Mental Health Act (1959) was passed by parliament and this Act came into force on the 1st November 1960. The 1890 Lunacy Act and the 1930 Mental Treatment Act ceased to hold sway. Shenley ceased in law to be a Mental Hospital and patients could enter hospital very informally much as one would go into a General Hospital. On the 1st November 1960 all patients to the hospital were regarded and with that regrading of 2,166 patients, 1,960 patients became informal and 106 were detained as opposed to ‘certified’.
Over the years patients activities took many forms, occupational and industrial therapy, recreation and social therapy were well catered for, patients had clubs, the Alpha and Gateway Clubs to name but two. Weekly dances and cinema shows, concerts from outside players and music and opera from the Council for Music in Hospitals. Music classes and tuition, staff concert and drama sections of the hospital orchestra putting on shows for patients, visits from famous bands such as Humphrey Littleton, Cyril Stapleton Nat Temple.
The staff band of the Women’s Royal Army Corps( who continued to play at Shenley every Christmas until 1995) Patients in later years were taken by staff on holidays to resorts both at home and abroad, these holidays were often funded by the hospital’s League of Friends who ran a hospital shop and over the years raised many thousands of pounds to be spent on patients amenities and comforts along with Christmas card and present every year.
The sixties and seventies saw many changes starting to take place. The administrative side of managing mental illness was undergoing profound changes –1962 saw the Minister of Health,
Enoch Powell, announcing a programme to start the closure of large mental hospitals. This was followed by numerous and various reorganisations of the management of the Health Service and its staff, some of which are still going on today. Running parallel to this were enormous changes in the methods of treatment of mental illness. The sixties at Shenley saw many different theories and types of treatment being tried, ranging from experiments of Langian Therapy under Dr David Cooper in Villa 21, the establishment of a mother and baby unit in Villa 10 under Dr Bardon. The publication of Dr Russel Barton’s book on Institutional Neuroses, the use of experimentation with the new and very powerful range of drugs for the treatment of mental illness to psychotherapy.
The Pharmacy Department was cooperating with the Pathology Department by manufacturing its own antibiotic preparations to combat infections. The Pharmacy also manufactured beauty preparations for the newly opened Beauty and Hairdressing Salon in Villa 10 The Pathology department was involved in different types of research not least of which was a study of neuro-anatomical work published in the German General Medical Journal. Another piece of research was the discovery that the blood picture of patients on the new drug treatments was changing and that with some drugs the patient was liable to jaundice. A further discovery was that bacteria were becoming resistant to antibiotics.
When I was a ‘teenager’ a new found term of the times, I was frightened at the time, when as a gang of Avenue boys we climbed a long run of ladders attached to the long chimney beside the water tower at the hospital. Repair work, I suppose pointing was being carried out, and the steeplejack had left site.
The ladders were lashed together with lengths of rope and supported by metal stays against the brick wall which kept them a couple of feet out from the chimney. We climbed, as it were inside the ladders with backs to brickwork which was solid and reasurring , but on the other hand, the view of the vast void beyond the tower was very unsettling. As I climbed a smell of soot rose up with me above the adjoining boiler house which throbbed and hummed in close accompaniment. Eventually, near to the top I had a good look round from my lofty perch. I had a brilliant view over the rainbow haze of fields, northward to a blue horizon, and I could see St. Albans Cathedral, clearly, sitting as if it were in the plum centre of the universe.This hospital tower has been likened to St.Mark’s in Venice, 150 feet high with four majestic walls.
Shenley Hospital took twenty-two months to build with up to seven hundred men employed at one time. The water tower, which serviced it, was built by eight men and was completed in eighteen months in 1934, at which King George V and Queen Mary opened the hospital that year in month of May. You could say, it was to be the Titanic of asylum building and the mother of all such hospitals.
Over the years the tower has not only been a symbol of steadfastness to all who worked in the hospital but it has also been a conspicuous landmark for many other people especially returning from holidays near or far. ‘There’s the tower’ they say, ‘we’re safe home again’.
For my own part I thought of it as a giant pointer on a great sundial, casting its masterly shadow over the ward blocks and all around the many assorted buildings.
No mention was ever made to my parents of the escapade on neither the tower nor a later trolley run ever brought up.
In this instance the Avenue gang found a mortuary trolley unattended outside the Pathology lab.We glanced through the fast shuttered sash windows, glimpsed the blue-eyed Bunsen flames and the white coated laboratory attendants busily occupied with micro-slides, and swiftly one of our party hopped up on board the trolley, the lid of the metal box was closed down and leaving the strong whiff of disinfectant and medical smells behind we scooted off down the custard coloured corridor bowling aside staff and patients alike.
At the base of the tower lay the laundry block. Broad licks of paint about the glass had weathered yellow like army camouflage. Gone the days when enormous washing machines gulped and groaned and prewash rocket like machines discharged filthy watery waste into channels like an open sewer and in a place apart huge Hoffman presses shushed out clouds of steam.
Now there are no piles of clothes, the steaming, sorting, sterilising days are done. It was just a little distance from the laundry that our small gang would on occasion gain entrance to the
Underground ducts on ‘special missions’, making arrowed chalk marks on sewer pipes. These would come alive intermittently rumbling and roaring with waste from a thousand and more souls.
On the other hand we fashioned swords from the canes of bamboo bushes lying near to the supreme Cedar trees set alongside the mansion house. Inside the mansion, the junior doctors had their quarters, and we were in awe of them with mysterious snakes of stethoscopes issuing out of white overall pockets, and we were uneasy in our hideaways.
The alarm soon passed and with false bravado we sorted out our groups. ‘You be the black bishop, he’ll be the white earl, and I’ll be the king and we’ll meet up and duel beneath the tower at twelve?’
Plain, innocent, good fun, I guess. Sometimes we resurrected Robin Hood and his merry men, picking bows and arrows and staves from Cowbank wood, below the glass fronted sanatorium, the cocoon or chrysalis where the chest patients slept, coughing and wheezing and where during the war years the military wounded lay taking solace from the warm rays of the sun.
Maid Marion was our beauty queen from the staff cottages, the most fanciful girl of the day being wooed in the wood.
In my late teens I got a job in the hospital gardens. It gave me a lift, for previous to this as a nursing staffs son, I had a limited license to roam, but on gaining this post, I had the run of the place. Some days Paddy Traynor the tractor driver and I, would do a round of the hospital taking cut and pot flowers to the wards. Carrying them on long slatted trays up steep flights of stairs, we would be weighed down with the most beautiful begonias, cinerarias, coleus, fuchsias and other exotic plants from the hot houses bordering the kitchen garden on Radlett Lane.
Quite frequently after our long haul up highly polished steps and down long corridors we would be met with a mixture of contempt and disdain: ‘Not those again’ they’d say, but with a quiet chuckle and a twinkle of the eye, much as to say, I can’t take it out on the patients but I can wind these two yokes up. As long as they look after their charges I thought what matter if they give the flowers scant regard with the water-can. Male and female Villas were set apart around the perimeter of the hospital.
Entrance would be through a high iron gate surrounded by equally high iron railings. Paddy would gain entrance by using a master key, maybe entering through the lower door and be confronted by a second door with a double lock, when a bell had to be rung for admittance.Sometimes standing at the door you could hear screaming from a distance and distant slamming doors. As an experiment, Villa 21 became self-dependant. For a period of time a mixed complement of patients, including schizophrenics were largely left to their own devices, catering, caring and cleaning for themselves. Looking through the windows you could observe how uncared and unkempt they looked in various degrees of lassitude. The whole idea at the time set staff against staff, a sort of civil war in the hospital ensued. Yet at a later date it was deemed to be all for the good, as the forerunner of the therapeutic community and group homes. If at the time it was thought to be ill thought out, in retrospect it may be seen to have advanced the day when high dependency patients received care in the community. It must have taken great courage for some of the far seeing doctors to bring that day closer, although they faced the scorn at the time of many of their immediate colleagues, with their revolutionary ideas.
In the early days, the staffs were drawn from all parts of the compass of these islands, and it was rare to see a person from a foreign shore.
The nursing staff were mainly working class, being drawn from diverse stations; coal mines, steel mines, all sorts of heavy industry. Even some men in uniform gave in their arms to attend to those in need. Some became extremely well qualified in anatomy; there was not a bone they could not put a name to. Others entered with more dubious talents, some with musical or sporting prowess not failing to put these attributes before the job panel at interview. There were others whose faces fitted for reasons you could never explain.
On our return to the kitchen garden we would pace up and down waiting for the five o clock finish.
The gardeners from the grounds would return bent double over their wheelbarrows perspiring over their jumble of implements.
In those days the garden manager Stan Lord would take a final look around the grounds to satisfy himself that everything was in order, then it would be time for us all to make a move.
Eventually the tennis courts took on a sad a site of disrepair. The nets hung low, heavy and slack such that the breeze could not whip them up. The hedge surround had odd shaped sides, grass grew in tussocks on the manicured lawn with dandelions spread around, a yellow carpet to the mansion house.
At evening time I would step aside from my gardening loyalties, meeting up with our gang in their adventures, especially in the autumn. Often we would make raiding runs into the hospital orchard across from the Avenue. Night runs were the scariest; for we filled our shirtwaists with the choicest fruit, even today you’d be hard put to find in the nearest Tesco. Then we’d return with our loot like from a Stalag wartime camp, solo runs, until we were all perched like pregnant mums on the high wire. The wire fence would sway and someone would shout: ‘Lookoout here comes old Orrox!’ and we’d jump back down as if our lives depended on it, for Mr Horrods was the orchard keeper, to whose lot it fell to protect the fruit trees from us scrumpers. Fred, I believe was his Christian name. He cycled quietly through the village every night after work to his home in Green Street, his khaki shirt tucked in to an old pair of trousers, held secure by belt and brown piece of string tied just above turn ups, to stop oil from cycle chain smearing them. Now the orchard is no more, where it stood the field is fresh ploughed and in its place rapeseed grows.
Tuesday or was it Wednesday evenings we would invade the patients picture shows We watched enthralled black and white films, whilst astride hard wooden seats like a line of jockeys at the starting gates.
In later years we would invade more formal functions. We would get smart, pull up our socks, dust our trousers down, adjust shirt and ties and then making out we were invited guests we would sidle into a grand function in the big hall only to invariably spoil our guise by giggling as we did having to face such an expanse of tableware, on one occasion dropping a quarter of a Battenberg into a delicate cup of tea, and sometimes we would shuffle away shamefaced in silent defeat.
Another time we shimmied up on to the roof of the King George V Hall and spied on the Luton Girls Choir far below. It seemed that in those days we were in our element on the outside looking in, such that we were thrilled to be creeping round the high roof and skylights of that immense building , while looking down on those girls innocent looking upturned faces.
When a grand dance was held in the hall, the stage would have been bedecked with pink and blue hydrangeas from the gardens, arranged in tiers. Cyril Stapleton, Nat Temple and orchestra or even later Humphrey Littleton and his jazz band would play for the annual dance, and finger points of light from a revolving crystal ball would pierce the dark. As the years passed and the annual dance came and went our partners changed. No longer were they from these island parts but they came eventually from all around the globe.
There was more freedom opening up, unlike the early days of the hospitals life when the regime was very strict. In those days a nurse could be given her notice for simply losing her ward keys. In many ways the staff were as restricted as the patients, living as they did, in this world within a world.
But times have changed as change they must. The social changes that went on outside the hospital in the community rubbed off on those within its very walls. Patients could be provided for in another setting given proper funding. The hospital outlived its purpose May 1994 marked the 60th anniversary of the hospital.
The sixties and seventies also saw the greater movement of psychiatry into the District General Hospitals with the establishment of small units of in patient wards. Shenley medical staff had held outpatients clinics in general hospitals since the second world war. The seventies saw the construction of purpose built psychiatric units in general hospitals and in 1988 Shenley opened just such a unit at the Central Middlesex Hospital and transferred most of its acute work to that site. This was followed in the early part of the 90’s by the opening of purpose built accommodation at Central Middlesex for the mother and baby unit and patients requiring more secure treatment and thus Shenley became a long stay and continuing care hospital with a closure date of 2005. In 1984 Shenley Hospital entered into a joint funded project with Brent Social Services and over the next few years sixty five patients who had spent many years in the hospital were discharged into a number of community settings. A hostel and a number of group homes were opened, some opened for most of the day, others with only visiting staff. A resource centre was provided and a joint team of health and social service staff continued to support these clients to this day. During the middle and late 1980’s planning started to reprovide the remaining Shenley Hospital service nearer to the patients homes, leading to the eventual sale of the Shenley site to developers. These plans developed a momentum of their own and the Shenley closure plan accelerated and brought the final closing date forward to February 1998. In January 1998 only 10 patients remained at Shenley Hospital and most of the site was largely built on or being prepared for development, plans for the remaining 10 patients saw them vacating the last occupied villa by the end of February. All the patients have now been provided for nearer their homes and communities, in purpose designed and in some cases purpose built small homely accommodation. The better understanding of psychiatric problems over the past three decades, the earlier intervention and better control of symptoms, more effective drugs and increased public perception and understanding have led to the demise of the large institution and allowed the treatment of psychiatric illness to take place within the community.
The building of houses on the Greenfield sites of Shenley Hospital caused much protest and furore from the inhabitants of the old village of Shenley and parallel in today’s terms the protest and furore caused in the twenties and thirties with the decision to build a Mental Hospital on the site of Porters Park.
It is a held view in the old village that Mr Raphael sold Porters and moved from the village in his displeasure over the type of War Memorial to be erected to commemorate the dead of the Great War.
Cecil Frank Raphael improved the cricket ground and built the pavilion, as his son John was a successful cricketer captaining Surrey. Sadly he died in the Great War 1917.
It has been said that the owner of the estate at that time fell out with the leaders of the Shenley community and it seems to spite them he sold off the land to Middlesex County Council for the express purpose of building asylums in the large acreage of land.
During the 1914-1918 war a part of the land had been hived off as an airfield for mostly Canadian pilots to take part in the ongoing war at that time.
The aircraft hangars post war, were used to build Middlesex Colony Hospital.
In 1923 the estate was sold to the Middlesex County Council. The MCC wanted the land to build two hospitals- one for the treatment, and if possible the ‘cure’ of persons suffering from mental illness- Shenley Menal Hospital, and one for the care of ‘mental defectives’ of all grades and ages, the Middlesex Colony, and to relieve the crowding in other institutions. The mansion continued to play its part; patients transferred from Napsbury were housed there awaiting the completion of the new hospital, the first part of which was opened by King George V and Queen Mary on May 31st 1934.
It was eight years before building actually started and these years were spent intensively on designing and planning the two hospitals in minute detail. In the meantime the Porters Estate continued to be maintained, managed and cared for by a Steward and Bailiff. The design of the hospital was such that as many buildings of the existing estate as possible were incorporated. As well as the Mansion, Buttery, stables and coach houses, walled garden etc both South Lodge and Shenley Lodge remained. In 1933 a further lodge was built at the end of the service drive called North Lodge, only two, North Lodge and South Lodge were gated.
It was said that in the early years of the twentieth century feeble- minded meant something quite definite in medicine, as well as in law, and because the meaning is so well expressed in the Act of Parliament passed in 1913, it will here be quoted: ‘The feeble-minded are persons in whose cases there exists from birth or from an early age mental defectiveness so pronounced that that they require care, supervision and control for their own protection or for the protection of others’.
This statement puts in a nutshell the whole history of those unfortunates whose brains have not fully developed, or who have as a result of some illness of the brain in early childhood, lost the power to think like normal people.
The feeble- minded are unfortunate, first, in that their brains are not normal, and secondly, that only too often the real existence of an undeveloped brain is not recognised, and they are branded as lazy, unwilling individuals. This is especially the case when, as so frequently happens, no bodily disease or deformity is present such as occurs in persons whom the brain is yet more undeveloped. But the trained eye can pick out the feeble-minded at a very early age. Quite often the doctor is consulted because an infant is ‘backward’ and has not sat up, walked or talked at the proper times. Although this backwardness in development may be due to bodily ill-health or to improper feeding, in the absence of any such obvious cause it is probable that the backwardness is due to poor development of the mind. If there is a family history of any nervous or mental trouble, very marked ‘backwardness’ in a child-especially in talking, walking and learning clean habits-must be regarded with very grave suspicion. During infancy and early childhood this ‘backwardness’ is noticed more and more in the case of the feeble minded.
Such children do badly at school, though not every child who is an apparent dullard at school is feeble-minded; there are thousands of children who, for one reason or another, varying from enlarged tonsils to a too vivid imagination, do badly at school but become excellent citizens and even Cabinet Ministers. But it is generally possible by the time a child reaches the second year of the school age to find out whether he is incapable of learning his lessons because of lack of development of his brain, or because there is something at fault, which can be put right. With the wonderful system of school supervision there is in England at the present day, this task is undertaken in all elementary schools, and those children who are not, and never would be, capable of benefiting by ordinary school teaching are sent to special schools at which most is made of what intelligence they possess, and where they are trained for such occupations as it will be possible for them to manage after leaving school. The type of work the feeble-minded are able, to do is only routine work, which does not call for any responsibility; and unfortunately, in many cases, the feeble-minded are so impulsive and difficult to get on with that they cannot keep any situation that may be found for them because they do not get on with their fellow-workers. They lack that power of control, and also the common sense which most normal individuals possess, and so find it impossible to live truly independent lives; they require all through their lives constant oversight and supervision.
One example of this may be given: a feeble-minded person may be earning quite enough to pay for his keep by some mechanical job, such as labourer’s, but he will be incapable of laying out the money so earned in a proper manner, and will squander the whole week’s income on some absurd fancy if not prevented.
As a rule the feeble-minded are easily managed, but a few are obstinate to a degree, which taxes the patience of those who are dealing with them. In a few cases they show moral defects, which may bring them within the reach of the law; petty thieving, especially of articles, which have appeal to the senses, rather than for their money value, is perhaps the commonest offence. They steal because ‘it looked pretty’ or ‘it glittered not because the article would be saleable. Sexual offences are not infrequent, particularly against children. It is in these cases, which show moral defects that the question of diagnosis of feeble-mindedness arises, for the same distressing anti-social conduct may be seen in the late stages of encephalitis lethargica (‘sleepy sickness,’) and in some other states of mental disorder. It is of the greatest importance from the standpoint of the law to distinguish between these forms of mental trouble, for there is a special Act, which deals with the feeble-minded and provides for their safety as well as for the safety of those with whom they come into contact.
Although feeble-mindedness is incurable in one sense, being a lack of development of an essential part of the mental equipment, yet much can be done to help those unfortunate people to make the best of what Nature has given them by way of a brain. It has been indicated already that much is done in the schools to ‘sort out’ the feeble-minded from their normal fellows, and the institution of special schools is a step forward in the right direction. When adult life is reached the problem is more difficult.
The feeble-minded are generally healthy physically, the bodily health being as a rule proportional to the degree of feeble-mindedness, and as most of the feeble-minded are only slightly below the normal standard of mentality, their expectation of life is good, many living to fifty or sixty. The object of all treatment should be to make the best of what they can do and for this purpose; simple, non-technical occupations are the most satisfactory. The out-door occupations, such as farming or gardening, which can readily be supervised and in which physical exertion is required are perhaps the most suitable. For women, domestic work in large establishments where, again, ample supervision is available, or the simpler types of handicraft is advisable. Even in adult life much may be done by skilful management of such cases and by wise training, but the earlier the training is commenced the better will be the final condition of the feeble-minded individual. In children an intelligent mother may raise the standard of intelligence of a feeble-minded child to one little removed from the normal, and later on in adult life his difficulty in adapting himself to the normal world may be reduced to a minimum by kindly and sympathetic understanding of his difficulties. But only too often the feeble-minded are found to be ‘more bother than they are worth’ and they wander through life bewildered and useless.
With increasingly informed attitudes amongst workers as to the nature and needs of mental handicap the roles of community and hospital are now seen as complementary. Through active partnership the anomalies of over-crowded frustrated hospitals and communities lacking provision for placement of the mentally ill will end. Through this partnership it will moreover be possible to give due attention to individual differences thereby working towards the greater happiness of each individual.
Coverage of the life story of an institution is a far more complex task than is in the case of an individual. This is particularly so when dealing with what may be termed a world within a world It has been said that institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Harperbury has been fortunate in having the lengthened shadows of many in the field of medicine, care and training of patients, research, administration, psychology, rural development, workshops and not to be forgotten long stay patients such as Fred and Stanley. One comment: Of all three types of nursing, I chose to work with the mentally handicapped. I have a job because these people are here. Only the best is fit for them.
We ought to first understand the social climate, which prevailed in the period that saw the foundation of Middlesex Colony prior to it assuming the later name of Harperbury Hospital.
The first charitable homes for the feeble minded as they were then known were founded in 1890. Until then, attention had been concentrated upon the severest forms of mental sub-normality. Those less afflicted were often looked upon as either lazy or wicked. The certification of large numbers of feeble minded together with a need for economy, led to the advocacy of large institutions with populations of at least 800 but preferably up to or beyond 2000. The foundation of the Eugenics Society in 1909, followed soon after by the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, expressed the belief of many that the segregation of the mentally handicapped was essential. Increase in the birth of defectives would thereby be prevented and society would receive the protection which it requested against the likely dangerous consequences of having the mentally handicapped living in their midst. With this support the policy was enthusiastically implemented by building large institutions in isolated country areas where the land was cheap.
The Mental Defficiency Act of 1913 came into operation in 1914 but the outbreak of World War 1 held up the services it envisaged. The establishment of the large mental subnormality hospitals proceeded less quickly than had been hoped and up to the early1930’s the majority of the mentally handicapped were still living in the community-living with their families or in small groups run by untrained private individuals. A Professor Penrose who at that time was beginning his clinical and research work the mentally handicapped, called attention on several occasions to the fact that the number of complaints regarding ill-treatment and neglect of the mentally handicapped then living in the community far exceeded those later associated with hospital neglect.
Thus it was that in accordance with the majority opinion in the community, Middlesex County Council in 1928 purchased the Porters Park Estate, so named after Roger le Porter, the first owner, who took possession in 1340.
The land later acquired became the site for both Shenley and Harperbury Hospitals, both being designed to take 2000 patients.
On October 25th, 1928, eight male patients, mainly known as high-grade feeble-minded adults, were admitted to what was then known as the ‘Hangars Certified Institution’. One of the longest surviving patients of that first ‘small band of brothers’ namely Fred Pilcher declared, ‘it was a Thursday, a lovely day, and I remember we had soup and rice pudding for dinner’. Harperbury was given its first name because it adapted the three hangars, which were survivors of the aerodrome on that site during World War 1. During the 1930’s the name was changed to that of the Middlesex Colony since the authority was at that time the County Council of Middlesex. (The word ‘colony’ according to Faucault came into use in the Middle Ages with the formation of leper colonies). The name ‘Harperbury’ was assumed by the hospital on 1st April 1950.
In the following years building proceeded in earnest, in the midst of the beautiful rural setting of Hertfordshire. None of the features of a prison like fortress were incorporated in the building plan. Villas and workshops were successively erected and there resulted the pleasing aspect of the whole as seen today. In those early days, while the workshops were awaited, the patients were involved wherever possible. There was much to be done in cleaning out the hangars, digging and gardening. The large hangar was partitioned to provide dining room, day room and dormitory and had accommodation for forty beds rising finally to eighty-six. Villas accommodating sixty beds were established and the hangars were retained, according to Fred ‘for those to keep an eye on you!’
By 1934 the main buildings were completed with the erection of further villas, staff blocks, workshops and the De Salis Hall, so named after the chairman of the governors.
It was during the 1930’s that a great national depression with widespread unemployment occurred. This inevitably rendered it more difficult to obtain employment for patients in the open market. This was disastrous from the point of view of returning patients to the community but it was seen to have happy effect on the relationship within the hospital. According to one contributor there developed a family feeling; staff were grateful for their jobs and there was a feeling of dependence on each other, on the job and on the patients.
Hand in hand with the erection of the pavilions and wards came the increase in the number of admissions from the community. Pavilions were designed for children, low-grade adults, cripples and infirmary wards. Villas were to accommodate medium and high-grade adults. The outbreak of World War 11 gave further impetus to requests for residential care within the hospital. It was found to be less expensive to direct the mentally handicapped to the care of the Health Authorities than to provide accommodation within the community. In addition of course during the post-war years housing conditions worsened.
Stress from cramped living conditions was further aggravated if there was also the problem of caring for a mentally handicapped relative.
The figure of 2000 patients was never attained but got close to 1700 patients. Then the pendulum swung back with a steady reduction in numbers. Over time there seemed to be little opportunity for taking stock of the prevailing situation at any one period. Energies were dissipated in the steep climb upward and scant regard was taken in any evaluation of the schemes underway as happened again with the reverse swing of the tide.
The allowing of a plateau would have given time for reason and recognition to hold sway. In its absence it is all the more exciting to note the positive reaction by the staff to the ‘volte-face’.
In 1948 the Verulam Group Hospital Management Committee was established, taking in both the Middlesex Colony and the Cell Barnes Colony. Lord Farrar was appointed the first chairman. He was succeeded by Sir William Acland in 1952 and during the next six years extensions were made to Harperbury.Additional Villas were built. In 1960 the Cerebral Palsy Unit was established with funds from Nuffield Provincial Hospital Trust. Clinical and training facilities with increase in occupational and industrial therapy developed. The Kennedy Galton Centre and the purchase of the Broadstairs Centre took place in this period.
This brief historical approach indicates that during these 50 years buildings and new developments have gone on unceasingly. This in part reflected a change of policy within Harperbury and provision for mental handicap.
The early years may be seen as a period of establishment of buildings and patients and management of farm and training workshops.
The Second World War had its impact both on the shaping of decisions within the hospital and in delaying the absorption of new theories and research findings from education psychology and social science.
Before and during the war, Harperbury was largely a self-supporting rural community. In addition to farm resources, the workshops included training for patients in tailoring, shoe making, brush making, carpentry, upholstery. Selected patients were allocated to these industries and they gave a service to the hospital. Some of these patients obtained employment in the community on completion of their training.
Now there emerged during the second period of its history a different environment calling for adjustment on the part of all, particularly staff, to the intake of new ideas and procedures. Cattle, pigs, hens and farm were no more.
Training workshops gave place to a structured regime to which science, statistics and methodology were all contributors. In this new ‘world with a world’, trials and experiments were continuous. They were not sensational events but usually represented quiet, steady work between groups of staff.
One contributor saying,’ we haven’t time to talk about what we’re doing, we’re to busy getting on with it.’
Behaviour modification, Makaton sign language, activity centre, and music therapy, art therapy, extended occupational and industrial therapy were all entered in to by patients on the wards to the enjoyable extent that it seemed like, ‘Christmas all the year round’.
Then and Now.
Those searching for the ideal way of life for the mentally handicapped population will have noted the need for on-going planning and experimentation by the multi-disciplinary team. The theory of individual differences rules out generalized solutions for the task is the highly complex one of discovering what will make for the greatest happiness of the particular child or adult.
There were obviously differences that follow attitudes, behaviour patterns and policy expresses convictions at particular stages of time. They afford a timely reminder that it is not given to any generation to have the last word on major issues currently debated.
Any review of the differences between Harperbury as it was and now is represents the system that prevailed in earlier days and is not a reflection of personal policies and desires of staff or administration.
It is interesting to study Standing Orders and Regulations concerning appointments and conditions of service in 1939, issued by the County Council for use by the Middlesex Colony as Harperbury then was.
The Regulations call to mind the spirit and tone equally noted in relation to the Poor Law Institutions and the Prison Service. One instance noted for example was that the loss of a key by any member of the staff was to be met by summary dismissal, twenty minutes being allowed to vacate room and leave hospital.
This example highlights the tremendous importance attached to custodial care. An earlier indicated fear on the part of society as a whole was one of the factors in the establishment of mental sub normality hospitals. This is again evidenced with regard to the absconding of an inmate. This was interpreted as serious failure on the part of a member of staff. Locked gates and wards were regarded as essential safety precautions. In the social climate of today those have been discarded and with them the rule of escorting patients from place to place. Now they move freely throughout the ground and to their different locations. In the words of one of the longest serving patients, ‘they were very strict then. The rounds of Dr Beasley really were rounds and officers were flying in all directions’.
As time went by a degree of integration between the sexes was also introduced. Where it was formerly forbidden for male and female patients to communicate, walk or dance together, time came when they could be seen walking arm in arm down the drive, dancing with their partners, enjoying the tea bar together and even going out together as with normal living.
Integration extended to ward groupings. As authoritarianism lessened, a friendly and warm approach developed. That was mirrored in the change in society’s attitudes. The wider degree of social interchange between staff and residents led to an informality of atmosphere in general yet was professional when needed.
It became the choice in rehabilitation wards as to whether or not they should wear uniforms. Dispersing with uniforms was often found to help in the building up of relationships. Similarly the use of Christian names for nurses’ on all wards was seen to equally work towards breakdown of barriers.
Wards were updated with walls attractively papered. Sensible furniture was obtained for severely handicapped and disturbed types of patients. Personal lockers, colourful bedspreads and curtains were acquired. Less overcrowding was the order of the day, no more the long rows of beds over which it was said a cyclist could ride, were replaced by small bays giving a more intimate and friendly atmosphere.
Instead of compulsory bedtime after an early tea, patients were free to go to bed when they wished except for children attending school. For them 9 to 10 was allowed at weekend.
Over protection also diminished. Entry into kitchen no longer forbidden and hot drinks may be made. Small tables, with teapots. The simulation of home like conditions made for a sense of happiness. Greater attention was then paid to dress, encouraged to take interest in style and fit. Colour TV, and brighter wards helped to alleviate the stress for those who worked and lived there, counteracting phases of disturbance.
Fred Pilcher was the only surviving member of the group of 8 male adults admitted on the foundation of Harperbury in 1928.
His story in itself a commentary on the lack of knowledge and lack of facilities at that time for dealing with such cases. Fred has an I.Q of 120 and may be would today have been termed socially inadequate and found his way into school for the maladjusted or received treatment at a child guidance clinic. It was a moving situation to listen to Fred as he clearly unfolded his memory of happenings at Harperbury during his lifetime. No suggestion of resentment was evident, but a feeling of thankfulness and a positive acceptance of the way his fortune had developed. An excellent memory enabled him to recount in detail and with many touches of humour the changing pattern of life at Harperbury Hospital during his fifty years of residence. He spoke of his setbacks with a degree of relish and amusement. I gave a fellow a good hiding and when I was only twenty one I took a broom and smashed 14 windows. As there was no medical superintendent just then a doctor was sent for from Napsbury and then Dr Beasley took over, and Fred was sent to bed for fourteen days presumably to match each window he broke. He used the time to read Lorna Doone. Visited by Beasley every day, he was then sent to Hill End Hospital for three months.
‘They couldn’t find anything wrong with me so back I was sent to Harperbury and was classed as an epileptic. The food was always O.K’ commented Fred but in those days it was tight. I couldn’t walk around as I do now’. He tells how when the girls were admitted in 1934 a boundary line was fixed. ‘If you crossed that boundary line in Dr Beasley’s rein you were for it. You were punished by being sent to bed, down at the Hangars. It was almost a crime to talk to the girls. You don’t know what it was like in those days. Of course I couldn’t really blame Dr Beasley. He was under orders from people above him you see, but things have altered a lot since then’.
At that time Fred was sent to Villa 4, a locked ward for epileptics. ‘Mr Fuller used to bring a big bag of buns for us 10 to 15 boys’. On Wednesday evening, 15th June 1930, a Scout Troop was formed with 4 to 5 patrols. This ran until 1947, when a youth club was formed. The scout troop dwindled away as a result. ‘I was very sorry at that’ remarked Fred’ but when Mr Price’s son went, there was no one as good to take over’. He remembers vividly the gang show in 1937. ‘We got permission to go from Dr Beesley and took our band of drums and bugles along the A6’. He spoke of the way pocket money was gained. In the first year he had none. ‘I had all I needed. We were given two packets of Woodbines. I didn’t smoke so I sold mine. My father gave me a little pocket money. Then Dr Beesley started his system. We were divided into classes-A, B, C, D, and E. Class A received sixpence per week or four packets of Woodbines; class B, four pence per week or three packets of Woodbines; Class C, three pence and Class D; two pence with Woodbines accordingly. You had to be very good for class A. If you were extra good you got eight pence and I did manage that. Class E got nothing –you were a bad boy! After the war you got all money and no cigarettes’. In spite of his fifty years residence in Harperbury Hospital it was said Fred had never become institutionalised but remained alert in mind and body.
He would tell of the time he walked all the way to London on a Saturday starting at 10 o’clock and returning to the hospital at six for the evening meal. ‘I can’t go so far now though’ he remarked. In 1964, he became resident at Harper House, a hostel set aside by the hospital in 1953 for those men working in the open community. Fred breakfasted in the hostel, had his midday meal in hospital canteen, and tea about 4pm, hot drinks from 7pm but Fred said he wouldn’t miss the Archers for the late drink.
Fred’s working years was spent in the tailoring department, which was closed in 1977. He became skilled at his trade and used to seat himself cross-legged on the bench in the finest traditions of tailoring. After his move to the hostel he enjoyed his retirement in his room at the top of Harper House with his wireless set and was as he put it, ‘Far from the madding crowd’. On Sundays he rose early and walked to church for early service, breakfasted at the vicarage until the 10.30 services. He then went on to the home of friends for lunch, remaining there until evening service.
Fred summed up his reminiscences: ‘I’ve been looked after very well here. Everybody’s been very kind-very kind indeed’. When asked if there was something special he would like to see happen at Harperbury if he could do something about it, he replied: ‘I would like to see everybody who lives and works at Harperbury be grateful for being here and know how lucky they are to be here’.
It is tempting to reflect on how the story of Fred’s life might have run had he been born more recently and lived in the open community with psychological aid and community resources. Since early deprivation in the form of an unhappy home background, and constant job failure he militated against the use of his high I.Q, possibly the enclosed community with its fulfilment of the need for hierarchy was in his case the prime contributor to his life of happiness.
Fred returned from a visit to friends in Canada and continued as before to make his way through the grounds and buildings helping with the post and messages and chatting cheerfully to staff and patients.
Fred’s story typifies the realities of life with its light and its shadows, symbolising in its course the fluctuations within the world of Harperbury.
Consideration of the changes in attitude and practise of the Harperbury of 1928 and the Harperbury of today of necessity involves the content of nurse training. The disappearance of the authoritarian approach, the warmth and friendship between nursing staff themselves and between staff and patients stem from a number of causes, but one important factor is the increased width of approach in the three years training for the Registered Nurse for the Mentally Subnormal. Removal of monotonous repetition where possible and inclusion of broadening facets in the curriculum have been achieved. The concept of patient care now emphasises the social, educational and psychological aspects.
Harperbury was always a rural community and in the earlier period of its life the hospital largely centred round the farm with its splendid cattle, pigs, chickens, greenhouses fruit and vegetables. Patients were selected for different types of work on the farm, which, could be said to be ‘the old original occupational therapy department’.
As a commercial proposition, the rural venture did not yield a wide profit margin. The aim of the farm was to avoid over-mechanisation in order to ensure a maximum degree of practical work for the patients. The particular benefits here involved for mental and physical health were borne in mind. The farm manager felt it significant that throughout the whole of his period in charge of the farm only one case occurred of a patient showing cruelty to an animal. The cost of the therapy had to be recognised. More cabbages could be lost in the course of production than were finally gathered; the production of eggs could suffer if the hens received too hearty a welcome. Even so great benefits were gained in those early years. Sufficient milk was produced for both Shenley and Harperbury Hospitals and for the surrounding districts. During and after the war, patients assisted with threshing not only for Harperbury but also for farmers around.
It was ultimately decided on economic grounds to close the farm and this was finally completed by 1973. The cows were the first to go, followed by the pigs, and fowl pest determined the fate of the 12,000 or so hens. The ‘salad days’ were over in more senses than one.
Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped proposed at that time or somewhat later that no more large hospitals should be built but that there should be instead a network of hospitals to serve local populations. Harperbury had its own ideas as to how best to deal with its own large population. It realised that the root of the matter lies not simply in the size of the numbers but in the manner of their distribution. To some the answer was felt to be in the establishment of a rural village community with small houses and the many half-way houses needed for successful return into the community. This was not seen as a viable proposition and the frustration went on of going through all the preliminaries for the discharge of patients with the outcome of nothing taking place.
Care of the profoundly handicapped and most severely disturbed members of the mentally handicapped population is likely to form the major task for the days ahead
One of those committed to Shenley was Sheila Gaylor’s mother. Throughout her early childhood, Sheila’s mother Lily was in and out of mental hospitals. In 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War Lily, fourty three years of age had her final breakdown. She was committed to Shenley, one of the most modern mental hospitals of the time. There she remained for the next fifty three years until she died at the age of 96 in 1992. She never went home again, apart from a short spell of four months during the Sixties, which ended when she attacked her husband Percy with a knife.
Sheila was twenty-eight years old and a mother herself when she and her mother were reunited. Now 75, Sheila writes of her early life in Child of the Thirties, a book of reminiscences that she hopes will also explain how attitudes to the treatment of mental illness have changed in the last six decades.
According to Sheila, Lily’s mental decline started after the death of her 18-month old baby Peggy, eight years before Sheila’s birth. She only discovered Peggy’s existence after accidentally finding a christening spoon inscribed with the baby’s name in a tea caddy. Peggy had been born deaf, blind and epileptic in the early Twenties when talking about a severely disabled child was considered taboo.
My arrival in the summer of 1931 came as a surprise to my parents,’ Sheila says, ‘my mother was never able to mourn Peggy properly. She probably suffered from post-natal depression after my birth. It was diagnosed as ‘mania’, and later changed to schizophrenia. It was untreatable in those days before anti-psychotic drugs. On the day my mother was admitted to a mental hospital for the last time, my father woke me early in the morning and gently told me to get dressed quickly. There was no sign of my mother as we left the house. My father knocked on a neighbour’s door and I was left in her care for the day. When we got home, my mother wasn’t there. I had no chance to say goodbye and I did not see her again for twenty years.
After that I knew my father visited her in a hospital but no mention of her was ever made at home. My best friend Joan once asked her mother where mine was. She was told, ‘Sheila hasn’t got a mother’.
After her marriage to Maurice Gaylor in 1952 the couple and their two small sons shared her childhood home with her father. One day her father said he was going to visit Lily and Sheila suggested going along for the ride with Clifford her baby, who could be taken for a walk in the hospital grounds.
Once there she asked if she might see Mumma. A nurse said, ‘it wouldn’t do any harm’. Mother and daughter were reunited for the first time in twenty years. Sheila instinctively hugged her, but Lily couldn’t accept that Sheila, the woman, was her ‘little girl’. ‘I had two daughters but they took them away,’ Mumma said sadly.
‘In effect, my mother had been wiped out of my life. I assume now the medical authorities banned me from seeing my mother because they thought it would be too unsettling for her. And although my father and I were fond of each other he had so many worries- the war, his wife’s illness, what to do with me-that he had little time to show me affection’. It wasn’t until after her father’s death in 1982 that Sheila felt able to discuss Peggy with her mother. I asked her how she felt after Peggy’s death. She was a very old lady then, but she rocked her imaginary baby in her arms. ‘She had a lot of fits,’ she said. ‘On Friday I took her to the doctor. She was alive. The doctor took her away. On Monday, she was dead. I can’t understand it’. We sometimes took her home for Sunday lunch and for Christmas Day, but it was like entertaining a sweet old lady. She was interested in all our lives but emotionally detached. Perhaps it was the drugs or the electric shock treatment she’d had.
After my father died, the staff set aside a room where we had afternoon tea with sandwiches and homemade cakes. We became very close which is more than many other mothers and daughters can say. She used to describe me as ‘her best friend’. I do regret her terrible life. But she died with dignity in Shenley, and I think the care she got was probably better than some mentally ill people receive under the Care in the Community system today.’
Closure of Shenley Hospital
Shenley Hospital closed on 28th February 1998. For over 63 years, this hospital provided care for the people of North West London with mental health problems. It was an important place for many people, and its closure is worth comment.
The story of the hospital has mirrored the search for the best in mental health care over the years. When it was built in 1934, the ‘village’ system of ward blocks spread over many acres of ground, was highly progressive and a sharp contrast to the huge Victorian blocks of some hospitals. By the end of the 50’s there were over 2000 residents, and the hospital was one of the leading centres of training and practise for psychiatry and other professions. It was also a leader in the development of new ways of thinking about mental health.
In 1959, mental health care in this country reached a watershed with a new Mental Health Act. From then to today, the goal has been to provide care in the community. In the 60’s and 70’s, many people benefited from new treatments and the new approach, and by the end of the 80’s, Shenley Hospital had approx 500 residents. In its last ten years, the steady build up of local facilities led to the further contraction and eventual closure of the hospital. From today’s perspective, Shenley Hospital with its large wards and its location outside the area it served may seem old-fashioned, but there were many people who found much to value in it-patients relatives and staff alike. However, there were many problems with the long-stay hospitals in that the care was at times unintentionally institutional, and that people became dislocated from society.
The facts to the redevelopment of Shenley Hospital go something like this:
Shenley Hospital was owned by North West Thames Regional Health Authority managed by North West London Mental Health Trust and subject to phased closure by 2000/5
In February 1989 following a public enquiry, the Secretary of the State for environment granted outline planning permission for a new mixed development of housing retail and light industrial accommodation with vehicular access to Black Lion Hill together with 45 acres of landscaped public park and buffer whilst retaining the listed buildings.
Hertsmere Borough Council in consultation with the Regional Health Authority, County and Parish Councils, and the residents of Shenley Village have published a planning brief entitled ‘Securing a good future for Shenley’ to guide the future development of the site. The main feature of the brief are:-
A housing programme of up to 900 units at an average of 11.9 dwellings per acre and ranging from size one to five bedroom units. 38 per cent of the dwellings should be for local needs.
Up to 30,000 square feet of light industrial floorspace for small businesses.
6000 sq ft of retail floorspace.
Over 45 acres of public open space providing a variety of leisure and recreational facilities.
Conversion of the Grade 11 listed mansion to an appropriate use, and the provision of school, library and health care facilities.
Hertsmere wishes to promote a high quality garden village development, which will provide an attractive living and working environment integrated with existing village.
Particular emphasis has been given to the establishment of the rural park which comprises.
45 acres of woodland, meadow and orchard and the formal garden in front of the mansion.
A fine cricket ground and pavilion, a football field and tennis courts, and a swimming pool forming part of the social club currently run by the hospital staff.
A seventeenth century walled garden and attached gardeners cottage, the former stables, two lodges, the church and a number of other buildings and a 30 ft wide buffer zone around the development providing part of the landscaped footpath network.
All these facilities are to be managed by an independent charitable trust, The Shenley Park Trust.The site is being developed in phases. So far the following approvals have been given.
Part of the phase 1 housing comprises 187 units for sale and 20 units for Health Authority staff.
Lodge Centre including shops/pub/restaurant/community health clinic/police station and small business units.
All phases of the construction of the spine road/ junction improvements and the realignment of Radlett Lane.
Two phases of park landscaping, use of the Bothy as Shenley Park Trust Offices and flat and the conversion of outbuilding to craft workshops.
Phases one and two of the development of a Centre of Excellence for cricket at Shenley Park.
The first phase of the housing development will comprise no more than 306 units. It is anticipated that the land for Phase 2 will be released in the summer of 1993.
All planning applications will be the subject of public consultation and the council will seek to ensure that all phases have a common design theme.
The run down and eventual closure of Shenley Hospital by the year 2000/5 presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is what to do with a sizeable Green Belt which is largely built up and which includes many fine trees and some historic buildings. The opportunity is to make a major contribution to the heavy demands for land for housing which creates considerable pressure on the Green Belt. Hertsmeres response has been to guide the development of a new village which will help to meet the housing, employment and recreational needs without detracting from the existing amenities of Shenley Village and the surrounding countryside.The guidance contained in the planning brief is based on three priorities:
1 To strengthen the Green Belt by concentrating development in areas where it will have least impact and making use of land and buildings that would other wise go to waste.
2 To ensure that new housing is of exceptional quality and variety with provision for creating a balanced community, responding to its special needs, and
3 To attract employment to replace what will be lost. The key features of the brief are summarised below:
The establishment of a Landscape Framework will create a permanent green border round the site, planted with a mixture of tree species and containing a circular pathway.
Retain the cricket ground, nursery complex and landscaped areas in the southern part of the site and exclude them from any redevelopment and create a compact area of development and incidental open spaces.
The Conservation of Fine Trees and Buildings will enhance the value of whatever is built. A Tree Preservation Order covers many of the trees, and the areas of woodland on Cow Banks and alongside Radlett Lane and the lawns and yew hedges in front of the mansion will be retained as part of the rural park.
A forty five acre Rural Park has been established and is being managed by the Shenley Park Trust. Most of the park has been landscaped and new uses such as craft workshops are being found for some of the buildings. Amongst the many sports facilities within the park is a cricket pitch and pavilion which is hoped will be developed as a centre of excellence for young cricketers.
The concept of the Garden Village not new to Hertfordshire is being used to guide the development at Shenley through a respect for the natural landscape.
The provision of a range of housing and other facilities to suit different ages and social classes and the creation of a settlement that is large enough to provide all necessary facilities and small enough for people to develop a real community integrated with the existing village.
A housing programme of 900 dwellings at a density of 11.9 dwellings per acre will create the place that has the characteristics of a garden village and not a housing estate. The four-phase development is likely to spread over a 15-year period. As each phase is on sites with different physical characteristics, different densities and mixes of house types are proposed.
A proportion of the dwellings in each phase will be social housing, bringing prices within reach of the existing community. To enable the area to develop into balanced community different groups of people, the young, elderly or others with special needs will be catered for.
To compensate for the hospital jobs that are lost a range of New Employment opportunities will be created through the provision of premises for small firms, the conversion of the mansion, and within the rural park. A few small local shops will be provided in Phase 3, when customers have built up. Other community facilities may include a school, library, health clinic and police station.
Community Involvement has been the key to development from the beginning and local residents will continue to participate in the planning process as the development progresses.
The board of the Shenley Park Trust includes representatives from the local community and Shenley residents are actively using the park’s facilities.
A substantial part of the Park bordering Radlett Lane is now open for the public to enjoy.
A wildflower meadow at its best in Spring and Summer managed in the traditional way.
An apple orchard with ninety varieties of apple and a play area for young children.
A network of footpaths around the park for a breath of fresh air in a lovely countryside with fine views.
A historic cricket ground which is now the Shenley Cricket Centre promoting cricket excellence and nurturing young cricket talent in Hertfordshire.
A walled garden currently undergoing restoration. Cow bank woods on the north side of the hospital site. Access can be gained off North Avenue.
Shenley Village Society was founded in 1966, further info, miss m keegan st botolph’s
01923-857261
The society believes shenley’s rural character should be preserved and enhanced as much as possible, its main aims are:
To stimulate public interest in and care for the beauty, history and rural character of the village and its surroundings and support the principle of the Green Belt.
To encourage the preservation, development and improvement of features of general public amenity or historical interest.
To encourage high standards of architecture and town planning in Shenley.
To pursue these ends by means of meetings, exhibitions, lectures, publications or other forms of instruction and publicity.
To cooperate for these purposes with local authorities and with bodies, both local and national, having objectives similar to those of the society.
Chapter Rule 103
It was much later in the day when I took up the reins of psychiatric nursing to follow in my parent’s footsteps. I was to mix with company on staff and patients side as they say larger than life.
‘Get you’se all going then’ the implied threat carried with it a soft Irish drawl, for there was not mistaking Bill O Shea at the end of it. I looked up while taking a quick dab at my bleary seven in the morning eyes, but before I could say, ‘Nursing Officer’ our domestic was half ways into his performance. He had whipped his handkerchief out of his pocket, twirled it into a short ‘rope’, and while gripping both ends he vaulted over it, to come down with a great clatter of noise, on to the hard parquet floor.
This was my cue as ward manager of Syringa Ward to set the nurses to their tasks in the dormitories, while Bill made ready for the patients breakfast. Bill, well into his seventies was indeed remarkably sprightly for his age. He had started work as a cowman in Napsbury but when the cattle were slaughtered, or sold off, he went to work in the boiler house in Middlesex Colony. On retirement from that arduous job he could not release the reins of employment and so returned to Napsbury as a domestic. His son Kevin told me that his father would be out of bed at four o clock in the morning to say his rosary, and then get ready to cycle the two miles to work. Knowing all this I was not about to chastise Bill for his harmless caper thinking at the same time it would gee up the rest of the staff to get stuck into the job of waking and dressing the patients. This was not an altogether easy job in Syringa Ward. There also happened to be a rule I was familiar with which was drawn up at the birth of this hospital. It decreed that happiness and cheeriness should abound about the place. However when I looked beyond Bill at the rest of the staff of mixed nationalities, Spanish, Italian, Filipino and Irish, and these virtues at that moment seemed to be in short supply. Although they seemed extremely reticent to get in at such an early hour amongst wizened heavy-laden eyed patients in their languor and pong already imagining the backlash I hurried them about their tasks after a quick cup of tea
Far be it for me to disagree with this hospital policy written in the stone of the hospitals birth. For sure, on occasion Bill’s antics put a smile on the faces of my mixed team of foreigners.
Of course to create a healthy pleasant ambience in any large institution is easier said than done so that in a two thousand-bed hospital the likes of Napsbury there was a long hard road to cover, which was not without its pitfalls and casualties before one even approached such a model.
The architect Ronald Pumb, along with the medical superintendent first brought the hospital into being by conducting a fact-finding tour of supposed advanced asylums in Scotland in 1898. They decided on a ‘blue-print’ for the modern practise of psychiatry. The building of the hospital commenced in 1901 and was completed in 1905. It was set in a large expanse of land, a couple of miles southeast of St Albans, and on the western fringe of London Colney.
The hospital was built on ‘colonial lines’, having a mansion set apart from echelon villas, which were to contain the less dependent patients and which were to be further set apart from the main blocks holding the more disturbed chronic patients. Male and female patients were to be separately warded.
Within the grounds, there were to be a beautiful proliferation of trees and shrubs, from which the wards derived their names. Given the benefit of hindsight, or, so to say the knowledge one acquires from medical history, we can say that at that time, to undo the cliché, everything in the garden in point of fact, was not so lovely’ for at the outset the structure and set up of the hospital can be seen in retrospect to have been far from ideal.
For instance, the medical superintendent reigned supreme, having a chauffeur driven carriage at his disposal. Within the hospital there were four doctors betoken to him, and on every ward there was a nurse directly under his orders and command. Unfortunately, in this era, and this particular structure the patients came somewhere down the lower scale of things. It was little wonder that the patients were in awe of the medical staff, seeing them as superior mortals, almost omnipotent! Meantime to add to the patient’s woes, they found themselves hemmed in and constricted by the high perimeter fence surrounding the hospital, the only access being by huge wooden gates, like the gates of Troy.
Within this hierarchical system a great number of patients and indeed nurses spent long periods on their hands and knees scrubbing and cleaning the floors of wards and long dark corridors to a mirror finish, which owed more to the home spun philosophy that ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ than to any real constructive therapy.
In those early far off days the bulk the remaining bulk of patients were woken early for a six o clock start on the five hundred acres of farm estate. After toiling long hours they were rewarded with two ounces of tobacco and in the case of women with sweets. It could be said that they benefited from the fresh air to loosen them up mentally and physically but all the same herded into gangs and subject to a harsh rigorous regime could have broken many a depressed soul. In earlier years, in my summer holidays, before I joined the nursing staff I had worked for a brief spell as a domestic. I remembered how the ‘difficult patients’ were kept in side rooms of the wards. It was not unknown for the patients to take gulps of their own urine from pots by bedsides. I went in with my broom at the ready in case I was attacked. One day a giant of a man called Tongay, maybe it was a name dreamt up, came back from farm work in big disgrace. He was put in a ‘padded cell’ to cool off. I was told he had upended a woman in the potato field and ‘had his way with her’. He was observed through a narrow slit of reinforced glass in the double locked door. Only when he appeared to have settled down did I enter and exit this room with a dinner tray.
It might be that the authorities thought that work at that time was to be and end all answer to everything, inclining to Carlyle’s maxim, ‘I must lose myself in work lest I wither in despair’.
Yet even with this work behind them the patients could be quite truculent agitated and difficult to manage without the necessary medication to control their disturbed behaviour. I recall them jostling in from the fields on edge unsettled and morose trooping in to the lower end of ward, where they would flay their arms around and maybe punch themselves with clenched fists. The staff in white short coats would congregate alongside ward office as if it was safer there and seemingly ready to take on any trouble brewing up before dinner or suppertime.
It would not be true to say there was no fisticuffs because there were incidents I witnessed when I saw more than a few times a patient would get a thwack or two or maybe three, or even might be wrestled to the ground by the staff and given a poke in the ribs for ‘good measure’ if he had ‘played up’ of course he would have been ‘out of it’ all understanding gone, not aware of the high standard of dignity and decorum he should display to those supposedly possessing more insight, and essentially in charge of these troubled patients.
‘Playing up’ was overtaken in modern jargon by doctor speak, thus a patient doing anything out of the ordinary, what might be thought of as a trifle bizarre, would be deemed by doctor or disciple nurse, to be ‘acting up’, like I thought you would imagine someone to be doing in a Shakespeare play.
In truth we would have to wait until after the two world wars when eclectro-convulsive therapy, E.C.T was introduced along with the arrival of anti-psychotropic drugs in the fifties before there was to be a ground breaking ‘wind of change’ that would come to better the patients lot.
As I earlier stated, it was into this scene that I first arrived at Napsbury in the fifties during a college break along with fellow students Bernard Stanbury and Charlie Crowley, to be taken on as part-timers doing domestic work, at a time when the outer fence was taken down and finally removed. We cleaned and polished our way through the endless claustrophobic corridors, nurses now being free of such chores.
I was well place to visualise what went before and to imagine in what way the hospital would now evolve. At this period, in the midlife of the hospital, remnants of the restrictive and repressive practises still remained. Patients who did not respond to medication or who were unmanageable soon found themselves in isolated side rooms, which were kept double locked. We entered the room, cleaned it, and left it, with alacrity!
However at this time there was a positive atmosphere of betterment, created for the patients at this period.
The staffs made up of thirty-five different nationalities in all were most kind considerate and professional with the patients, that is not to say there was not the bad apple or two amongst them. Throughout my time I never heard a hint of racism.
My friends mixed so well with these foreign nurses and became so proficient in a second language that I eventually lost them to different climes. As social ‘mores’ changed in the outside world this seeped into hospital life influencing the direction it was going. When I rejoined Napsbury in 1970 as a student nurse the hospital was then responsible for half a million of the population in North London. Doctors were then aware that there could be a build up of young schizophrenic patients becoming long stay institutionalised patients.
The consutants Doctors Scott, Farewell, Montanez, Ratna, and others evolved methods of medical and nursing management to befit patients who had suffered faulty family and personal relationships, in the belief that those difficulties in so many cases, may have contributed more to the breakdown of the personality, than in the genetic material they had inherited.
This of course was the same direction in which Shenley Hospital and no doubt other institutions were proceeding with haste.
Dr Scott involved families in the treatment situation and endeavoured to get each individual patient to be responsible for his own actions, so increasing their own independence, to let them grow.
In this situation, the patient was expected to make his bed, clean his locker, and keep himself tidy. The ward in essence became a home.
Dr Montanez was not beyond railing against the visitiors who seemed to overpower his patients and on occasion himself with their demands. A classic aside he made to me was that,
‘If you had teats like a pig, they would want to suck you dry’.
A patient Andrew was left to flail about on the floor of the ward, exhibiting what was called occulo- gyric crisis, his eyes staring hypnotically up to the ceiling. Montanez would have none of it, believing the condition to be one of ‘attention seeking’, a near cousin to ‘acting up’ he ’ he maintained vehemently, little more than what a layman would speak of as a fake or foul, seeing due cause in the over bearing attitude of Andrews mother, whom he banished from thereafter visiting patient.
Well, Montanez could be sharp. A Spanish man, he seemed to me to be devoid of religiosity, once telling me it was the do gooder’s who brought their kids down with their fake hypocritical lifestyles.
He told me, ‘they have a rosary in their hands, a dagger in their pockets and evil in their hearts’.
This new form of ‘tough love’ treatment of course caused anxieties within the patients and their families, you have to say many of whom where composed of matriarch cal families not least the Jewish and Irish who could take great exception to being told in effect that they were in danger of strangling or suffocating their offspring with too much love and kindness.
This new home life in the ward where the patient became his own boss cut across traditional methods of nursing in which the nurse was expected literally to cater for the patients every need.
You can see how this new programme could cause problems for no sooner did the patient become more independent then discharge was strongly contemplated. However, the patient still had mixed feelings regarding the hospital now as the best sanctuary he had or was ever likely to have such that you had the phenomenon of a patient on being discharged breaking windows of the hospital in order to gain readmittance.
However, things were moving fast and it was not long before an ‘emergency crisis intervention’ team was created to be on hand twenty four hours a day to take care of those patients who in simple terms had fallen foul of the system. That is to say a psychiatrist, nurse and social worker would be ready at a minutes notice to deal directly with a flare up of emotional and traumatic situations within the family in community. This would hopefully forestall the necessity for potential patients admittance to a hospital. The reasoning behind this goes is along the lines of the avoidance of a dangerous outcome, once admittance is in motion. The outcome being historically seen as one of long term institution which takes a devil of a long time to resolve leading to a happy solution.
The multi disciplinary team as it was called got straight into the process of evaluating the persons difficulties in the home or work environment where they had been first affected giving more chance to fully evaluate the mental disturbance at its root and influence positively its outcome. Of course, if it was thought right and proper for his or her admittance to hospital due to a situation beyond resolve that ultimate decision could be ascertained there in the community.
Due to the success of these developments, and then allied to evolvement of group homes and hospital units where a number of patients could successfully live together the numbers in hospital consequently diminished to such a stage where the hospital run down was considered an option.
With financial strictures to the fore and the flexibility of the management and treatment of the patients towards the latter end of the century becoming manifestly apparent the run down of the hospital was set in train.
In this regard four wards alone remained viable at the end of March 1999. A public inquiry was convened into the future development at Napsbury.
On Monday 15th March I spoke to the Director of Planning, Mr Alan Moorhouse, St. Albans and District Councils. He told me that in the Planning Inquiry, under the Secretary of State, there was a proposal to build four hundred and twenty houses on the site. There may be the residual of existing buildings for residential use and preservation of echelon villa wards, dairy farm and water tower, as they would contribute to conservation area and other key sites.
Spokesman for the developers, Weatheril, Greene and Smith declined to comment. The hospital trust proposed a care unit by North Cottages.
The Inspector for the Inquiry was afflicted by a bad back and had to call off a planned on-site visit recently.
I had cause to take my mother to the pathology laboratory at Napsbury recently and recognised two patients who were about to be discharged.
A most cheerful pair I ever saw, and as we departed from the company they made a short remark, ‘thank you for all you did for us’, and I, well I treasure that.
Finally I made enquiries as to how long the hospital expected to remain open and was told,
‘We were expected to close at the end of April 99 but they keep putting it on hold!’
The hospital like a fine old English batsmen, reaching for his century sees the distant crease beckoning.
Seventy years ago the newspapers both here and in America and most especially the Daily Express wrote up a piece about my Aunty, Nurse Susan McGinley of Clare Hall Hospital, on the extraordinary quirky circumstances of being fined ten shillings at Barnet Court, for riding a bicycle to work without rear light in dead of blackout night, during height of the World War.
She was a hardy soul. During the early years of the ‘Troubles’, in Ireland, when the flying columns under General Michael Collins were out on their feet, some of his men commandeered the family home. They put the frighteners on everyone, even went so far as to turf the children out of their beds. . One or two of them would have a gun under their pillows during the night, and in early morning as children left the house, they’d be warned, ‘not say a word until you’re at school gates, and not even then.’ Even so she later on became a stalwart of IRA. Maybe because she felt good land had been taken from under family’s feet, and somewhat deprived. Who knows?
She was not even thrown by tragedy of the death of brother Charlie in ambush by IRA by holding to their mantra of a Free Ireland Susan, this remarkable girl, was born in 1913, growing up in a land not many years distant from the great famine. There was to be no hopscotch and conkers for her. In her formative childhood, she was just three years old at time of Easter Rising, a fast growing girl in a chapter of years, which took in the War of Independence, and Civil War.
She was a great worker on the bare farm that they had, feeding cows and scatter of chickens, bringing buckets of water up from the spring, I suppose she was a tomboy but yet a good-looking colleen. And fast forward, to 1922, during the Civil War, she was witness to the family grief when her elder brother, Charlie, met his early death.
He had been called on to join the Volunteers, President De Valera’s men by the prominent influential local Senator, Doctor J McGinley who was no small man in Donegal. He stirred my grandma to release her precious son Charlie, for the national cause.
‘Keep fast to the Treaty, on solid ground standing
Refuse to be bullied by others astray’.
It was to be a fight to the finish, between those who wanted what had already been agreed, by their general, in Downing Street, namely, a twenty-six county free state, – a bird in the bush, against contrarily, the presidents men – who yearned blood and soul for a full and free, thirty-two county Irish Nation.
So it happened that one day, July 11th 1922, Charlie found himself in the invidious position as a Volunteer, driving a lead car, before a truck –hardly a convoy- with twelve fellow soldiers, got up in civvies, -it’s doubtful that in the early days of the Treaty, they had enough new uniforms to go round – with eyes skinned for the enemy, on a route to take them to Letterkenny Town
Charlie slowed down on seeing a man with his hands held over his head at Drumkeen crossroads. It proved to be an ambush. Immediately, a volley of bullets was fired at them by upwards of fifty Irregulars. Charlie was wounded, so dove out of car for the safety of near wall. Unfortunately, he was again struck down. ‘I’m done. Carry on’ he cried.
Later that day, the same gang of IRA surrounded my grandma’s house, when shots were fired by way of warning against touting to the authorities.
Charlie’ died at Lifford Hospital, following which his coffin was draped in the tricolour, and given full military honours, followed by a requiem at St Eugene’s Cathedral, Letterkenny. Many a woman lined the bleak road, the whole crowd shedding churns of tears, for he had been a joy to their thoughts with his curly locks dangling over effervescent dancing blue eyes, as he often took a dander down high street, from his work at Avery’s well known shop in Letterkenny. He was buried at Church Hill, soon joined by brother Hugh, who died of self-neglect. With no thought for himself and no cover to his head, he went about wistful and worn in the worst of all weathers. He had no power in his hands as he clinched a cattle sale, and soon followed Charlie, down to his grave. Long running healthy grass lies over both graves bordered by the ruins of the old church; much battered by the elements, which still survives, crumbly and poignant not far away from Gortan, where St. Columchaillne was born, in a house, no bigger than a shed, where he first started out, on the missions track.
Dr McGinley’s son, Niall sent the family, a biography of his father, ‘His Times ‘ in which he wrote a personal foreword, in pen and ink. ‘I hope you are happy about the account of Drumkeen, and about Glen Swilley generally. My father was very disturbed about Charlie’s death’
I suppose these happenings hardened Susan, to the extent that she would not take any old buck from anyone, not even a future prime minister?
And this was borne out by the clash that came about one day.
When years less than her teens, just hardly nine, she spotted a party coming down the Meenaroy Road.
In their arms they straddled long shot guns, and were making to cross our boggy land.
‘What’s it you’re wanting?’ Susan called out.
And as they closed on her, the lead man haughtily responded.
‘It’s not the first time we’ve strayed on to your farm, I’m Lord Brookeborough and I came here last year, for a pot at the grouse’
‘Well hold you fast. You’ve got on our farm’.
‘Where’s your ma? And he spouts some old guff. ‘Last time she gave us a drop of buttermilk’
‘That may be so, but just now me mither’s away in Dublin, on business, and you’ll just skeet off our land’
Brookeborough and his cronies, had to turn tail, after Susan stymied him. Of course, she delighted in recounting this story to me. How the great man had to get back to his friends in the black North. And I never doubted it.
Didn’t he have a cheek, against me, and me, such a small thing?
(It was Lord Brookeborough who as Prime Minister infamously proclaimed his intent of running, ‘A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people, which in no small way put in train the eventual dissolution of Unionist rule in the North of Ireland. Not content with that little misdemeanour he further defamed himself by saying that he would have no truck with Catholic workmen. His apartheid outlook was going on in Britain’s backyard, but Parliament and its people proved to be conveniently blinkered With the sadness of Charlie and Hughie’s deaths behind her and the poor patch of farmland unsustainable Susan joined her sister, my mother, over in nursing cottage on outskirts of London. Coming over from Belfast in an old cattle boat more or less cheek by jowl with dung-ridden cows it wouldn’t have taken a beat out of her.
Well she would have been getting on sixteen when she left those wars behind, not knowing she would arrive on England’s shores shortly before Second World War.
When asked about her first impression of the English, her answer was: ‘they’re cold as ice, mostly mute, and stiff as blackthorn sticks with their prickly bits.
She must have been a sad item then, for she was leaving behind a mother she treasured, ever grieving her sons, the heart of her life. There was to be no Caid Maillie Faillte, hundred thousand welcomes to England.
‘When I first came over you couldn’t get to the end of the village, with the stones being thrown.’
As one of nine children, Susan had left no great comforts, but the share of a curtained off, out shot bed. A big peat fire took up centre of room above which would be suspended a heavy black pot and large kettle, from chain hanging from crossbar of cast iron crane. Smoke would swirl about, before it took off for the straw thatch in ceiling where it would make its escape from a vent cut in the roof.
During the Second World War years, there was a pattern to our evenings, when at a singularly precise time my mother would glance up from her ironing board across the small divide of clotheshorse, set in front of the coal range, to take in her wedding present clock, on the mantelpiece, and then call out to me, ‘ Give your Aunty Sue a knock, it’s time she was up’.
Susan now a sixteen-year-old; young strip of a girl, fortunate to squeeze into the upstairs box room, not the size of a prison cell, in my parent’s house.
I would waken her at six in the evening with strong cup of tea to get her juices moving, and take thought for the road. I could see her bed was showing its age, suspended like a sailors hammock, set up fast against a cold gable wall. I would catch the faint smell of a fag end or two, and see some Senior Service cigs, stubbed out on the cut glass ashtray, on small beside locker.
‘It’s your time’ I would mutter, in a small civil way, and she would stretch out for the sugarless tea, murmuring into another night ‘is the weather holding?’ or ‘are the batteries okay, been primed on warm stove?’ So okay I would hurry down the stairs to buff up hers shoes with a sanitary rag from an old cardboard box under the stairs.
And as she hoisted her slacks, I suppose you could see in her eyes that they were on happenings back home, before she tramped downstairs for a likely egg on toast.
It could be that she imagined the cramped room as some sort of luxury, after early years, spent in her parents mean thatch cottage, on a poor scratch of land, on the side of the mountain Crogh Mor, Donegal.
Granny in a black shawl would get about in bare feet, with scatter of children, seeing to cows and chickens before returning for a bite to eat and some prayers. Most evenings a rosary was recited for relatives, friends and exiles abroad
My Uncle Mickie would hurl a pillow at my head, for the Craic . My grandma would scowl at him, dressed as she was in a black shawl and long widow’s weeds. Her husband had long been taken for the grave, since putting back too much poteen. Sometime you could hear through the divide of thick wall, the troubled cows, always clammy, and restless for feed.
Susan had obtained work at Clare Hall Hospital, whose premises were originally at Clerkenwell devoted to cure of smallpox. Back in 1901 nurses were recruited from the Nurses Cooperative Society at three guineas a week, thought to be a great wad of money for only the best of nurses, to take on this serious disease.
Now at time of war, the hospital was transferred to a location in the backwoods, on Middx/Herts border, two miles south of the better known, Fred’s Eighteen Mile Transport Café.
Its brief was to fix up the war wounded, in particular the unfortunately injured men of the Air Force, the so-called Brylcream boys, more dandyish than other services, and at the same time in the sanatorium, take on treatment of Tuberculosis, which was rife in the country.
In mid nineteen thirties nearly fifty percent of TB patients were discharged by death. Even with the isolation of Koch’s baccilus the idea was put about that one could not cure a fool of TB, due to the long and troublesome treatment. An army surgeon elaborated on that, when he said, ‘For tuberculosis we prescribe not medicine but a mode of life’..
Of her hospital work she told me that, if there were to be any disagreement with the Ward Sister she would insist on taking the argument into the office to sort out. She told me about their annual dance, and the dress she had dreamed up, which she created with colourful odds and ends, from a ragbag of material. She had been a top sprigger in embroidery, at national school. Could sew and knit to a band playing, but was quite surprised when chosen belle of ball. Some ward sisters were quite snotty about it, envious like cats deprived of cream, and sniggered at her early efforts in the wards. She refused to be put down, this great looking colleen. She said to me, ‘they never put one over on me, those girls in royal blue’.
Another time she won a trip to Llandudno with a slogan compiled for a John Bull magazine: As Nice as Pie: and she added finishing touch: Fritz. Remember those Ovens?
So it was not all work and no play, but she never got away from the wars. Even when going to a dance in Watford with her best nursing friend Betty Griffith’s from the Rhonda, they managed to miss the last bus home, and had to walk the seven or eight miles, when halfway, they were forced to take shelter from falling bombs, in a church at Aldenham.
There were no buses or other means of transport, other than the bike, to get her the three miles to work. At start of her journey she pushed her heavy black, sturdy, ladies- no crossbar, Hercules bike, up the sheer face of Eigher like, Black Lion Hill, into Shenley Village. (Four hundred feet above sea level)
Some nights in bleak midwinter, a bitter freezing cold would await her journey. With hands numb from icy cold handlebars, she would take to the blustery road, overhung by high snow wrapped hedges, leaning in to the lanes. She would struggle through snowdrifts, the whole length of the quick rise and fall of those corrugated lanes, which at times almost doubled back on themselves.
The nights, black as the stockings Suzy wore and the coal we fed in our cast iron range.
At the height of summer on hot sticky nights, huge clouds would get up with rolling thunder, plying sheets of lightning. The rain so incessant if not mixed with sockets of hail, that combined to flood the Catherine Bourne, taking all her real grit when drenched and soaked through to tender young skin, she would have to ford with heavy bicycle slung over shoulder. It was to be mind over matter in 1941 when she faced the enemy along with the elements. For it was then the Germans went on vast bombing raids, when she would only too distinctly hear the rumble and drone of huge planes overhead, either over flying London to release their deadly cargo, or intent on De Havilland or Handley Page factories, so inconveniently was she in their flight path in her solitary ride. I daresay, knowing the cut of her, she would have lost herself in prayer. While Susan was mending her way to work, the rest of family took shelter under the stairs or way out in the Anderson Shelter. An insalubrious, bent over, corrugated iron device, which seemed to take to the sky, after any bomb landed close. One moment it was as if, all a tremble, only then to take off, staying to hover a second or two, before crashing back down to earth, leaving our hair, nose and ears, full of powdery choky cement.
It was about that time that a heavy incendiary device, a land mine, became suspended not far from our house, in a large oak tree, caught by its filigree of lace, which my father said, had it touched the ground, would have sent our road, numbering all of sixty houses, to smithereens.
It was on one such night near top of Black Lion Hill, Shenley. Susan was involved in the incident, which made the news both here, and in America.
She had topped the steep climb when a policeman in full uniform emerged out the black shroud of night, waving a huge torch like a big gun in front of Susan.
‘Stop there!’ he challenged his catch. The sharp light pinched a hole in the blackness to take blind siege of Susan’s eyes.
Close up, he could see into her blue Irish, eyes. On her head, a navy blue cap, which matched her coat draping her knees, and outlining the sheen of fine, strong legs.
‘Where are you from?’ and ‘where are you going?’ he said officiously.
And, staccato like ‘ don’t you know there’s a war’s on?
Big pause. ‘Where are your lights?’
Susan, you can be sure, did not take kindly to his attitude.
He wasn’t inclined to listen to her story of how she had tried to revive her batteries on top of warm stove, to give them some life. They were whacked out, duds, and given leave; she would get new batteries.
He told her that wasn’t good enough and she’d get a summons to appear at court.
She reared up, and smarting said, that war or no war, she needed to get to desperately ill patients.
The constable demanded she push the bike the rest of way, to work. At times a laser light searchlight would reach up into the wide blackboard of sky. The shrill orders of army crews reaching from across the high hawthorn hedges, under the tall, dripping wet, oak trees. Anti- aircraft emplacements were being readied, with their long tough metal barrels, to puncture the night,
When Susan reported late for work after being stopped by policeman there was no sympathy from matron, but that was for nothing compared to a further bust up when she later on read a full report of the incident in the newspapers about her spell in the dock at Barnet Court. She became something else, not so much a dragon as a fiend in female uniform. She spattered bullets of hyperbole, at Susan. Threatened her with the push, ‘ I have a mind to sack you’. Then you could be given twenty minutes notice, just to pack your bags and leave main gates.
‘By inclusion in the papers your case has shown up the location of this hospital.
Now it’s known to Adolph Hitler’, the matron ranted. Our staff and patients will be at wits end, forever up and down bomb shelters’.
The Medical Super was asked, if she should be fired in the circumstance.
Mr Simmonds, equivocated…. ‘Of course it’s down to you.’
Dr Laird, the hospital surgeon came to her support. Said she was an excellent nurse who should be retained.
The national newspapers in particular the Daily Express wrote up the episode that transpired at her court appearance, in February 1941, which soon enough made its way across the pond, to America’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
Lady without the lamp
Nurse Susan McGinley of Clare Hall Hospital South Mimms Middlesex, was fined ten shillings at Barnet Magistrates Court, for riding a bicycle without light..
She said, ‘As a nurse it was my duty to get to work at all costs to attend Hitler’s wounded and mutilated victims. With the words of Herbert Morrison ‘Go to it’ surging through my ears, I, unlike Florence Nightingale- the lady with the lamp- went to it without a lamp, thus falling foul of the law, in the honoured purpose of alleviating pain and helping my country to defeat Hitler’s death dealing blows’.
The magistrate’s clerk: she might have dealt a death-dealing blow with her bicycle.
The American papers trumpeted the story, making her a bit of a celebrity. Why she would be paraded up and down Main Street, hundreds of marriage proposals made and any numbers of bikes would be hers for the asking, in fact a new bike would be manufactured in her name, The McGinley Flier.
Susan was unimpressed, saying, ‘Oh the Yanks, they’re big blowers.’
Not alone that, the now snazzy, healthy Air force men, closed ranks, and in particular took up and supported Susan’s cause with special vigour, arguing for her retention. Why there was some argy bargy of a night if Susan did not put in an appearance with a regular Guinness to hand, ‘ Where’s Mac?’ they would say. Susan was delighted, tearful and redemptive. She learned that there was great good in them. Though never disclaiming the notion of freedom for her own native land, thereafter never held a bad thought for those brave fighter pilot boys, coming to love them all. Susan took the memory of her hard work with tuberculosis patients, along with treatment of fine young airmen who fought the war for this country’s freedom, into old age, and laughed heartily at remembrance of their youthful antics and indiscretions .She could deservedly pat herself on the back for getting those young air force pilots back in the air, flying free once again to combat our common enemy, like birds in the sky..
I have that certain earlier picture in my head, of her chasing after them, for when given half a chance; they would take off in high spirits no matter their condition, to the local Old Guinea Pub, South Mimms, Hertfordshire.
I have put sex to the side, while I am swimming in sleep.
When I first dropped off, I could see the pool of my dreams, like I was somehow, looking down from above. And I was delighting in this out of body experience. It was a Hockney blue pool that I looked on, yet fully enclosed.
To one side could be seen fifty, royal blue, plastic, fold back seats in amphitheatre style, rows. To the other side of the pool, there is an enormous black board, which, somewhat to my surprise, indicates the swimming team of my own local pool, in big, broad white lettering. Home of the Hertsmere Flyers.
At the far point, is the deep end of the pool, the depth of which is measured at 1m 90 cm. and beyond that a huge wall of glass, through which in daylight, passers by could take a sideway glance into pool, but there was as yet, not a soul. My brain, I believe, rapidly conjectured, my dreamland encompassed all within the pool, and not without.
The pool is divided into four sections, by orange ropes, carrying red white and blue floats. Each swimming ‘pathway’ has a large placard at each end, determining whether swimmers should proceed clockwise or anti-clockwise, in their section. The middle lanes are set aside for the fast swimmers.
The shallow end of pool is denoted by a sign 1m 5cm deep. There is another pool to the side of this one and I can see children evidently learning to swim. The screams of enjoyment break into my sleep, and I am overjoyed at their determination to grasp the basic strokes, that will in turn reward their endeavours, in learning to swim.
Something tells me, that it is in this pool for beginners, that the floor can be raised higher, or lowered for advantage of older people, to take aerobic exercise
In the background are identical cubicles, grey faced doors, presumably for either sex, no misogyny here! There are a few larger rooms, no doubt for school groups and the like, and on a facing wall the ubiquitous clock, showing the midnight hour.
It seems with some trepidation that I now descend into the pool. Tip my toes in to ascertain its temperature. When all seems well, its not too cold or even too hot, I gently climb down the shiny, gleaming, silver metal steps situated alongside pool, There are signs on wall, indicating, ‘no diving’ or ‘jumping’ into water.
I begin with my breast stroke, and am not put out by other swimmers in an unseemly rush. With something of a somnolent approach, I seem to easily gain a slow rhythm, which is all to the good, and I am not inclined to get into competition with fellow swimmers. On this occasion, it is a refusal to be showy, to race overmuch, my mind seems to inform me, and it holds me in good stead. Not to be too profound, but take due regard for humility in whatever you do, even in the swimming pool
Of course, determination to succeed comes into play, even while you indulge in such torpor; you are never far from the mechanics of success.
While my brain chunters on, there is an undercurrent of ambition to be assuaged. Mentally, buried in recesses of brain, in this kind of hypnotic state or trance, swimming lore comes to your aid. Such that, on completion of my breast stroke, I am usefully informed, not to swing out my legs too far forward, such that they finish up under my rear end.
Rather, I should give my legs a hearty thrust backwards, frog like, imagining oars attached to feet, in order to push water strongly behind me. This movement has the required effect of propelling my whole body briskly forward, while having arms outstretched, and then together, meeting like a sword, which lances the surface, jettisoning me onward, like a fast craft, in the pool.
In the breast stroke, my legs seem to be doing most of the work, which is about right. Meanwhile, my arms do not harass the water, but reach in together, fingers slightly splayed at ten degree angle- to give five percent more pull.
My dream breaks up and I find myself basking by the Herring Pool, in Portstewart, Northern Ireland, where I stayed with my parents a while ago, by the Atlantic Ocean.
The sea subverts the pool sometimes, all but taking over. The great ocean is wild at times. I feel the dangerous surge of undercurrent, so powerful that I could be drawn out to sea. It’s so cold, you think of ice floes. The waters can remain turbulent at any time of year, the pull and displacement of the water can make you fearful, for the sea reaches into pool with such force that were you not to hold back, it could deposit you in the deep dangerous ocean, never to be found.
I can see the harbour cubicles up above on the rocky edifice. Very basic, with crude, pink painted doors A few of them, maybe four or five, rudimentary, below the Water Splash Hotel.
My mind’s eye takes in the Mull of Kintyre, across the water in Scotland, not far distant from the headland, in Donegal, South of Ireland.
In a flicker of time, I switch back to the enclosed dream pool and see that from my breast stroke exercise, I am now splashing, while running forward, which movement simulates, more or less, the same type of pull on my legs, and upper body, that I had experienced during time in Herring Pool. I am delighted in knowing that it is brilliantly good, especially, for the quadriceps and hamstring muscles.
I now find myself attempting to go into free style, the front crawl, and again like the breast stroke, I go about it in an unhurried fashion. So dream wise, I attend this stroke, more easily and assuredly to get myself into a rhythm. I feel confident that I am proceeding very well. My breathing is not laboured, but more measured In fact; it is as though my subconscious brain has taken over, deleted the error of my former ways, and is reintroducing me in the proper practise, for the crawl.
Rather than going too fast, too quickly, I have to hold back and go at the stroke effortlessly, and in my case it appears to work. Of course, with more work, the theory in mind is that I will up my speed and slice through the water. Like a dagger, through thin air. But first, I need patience and that belief in oneself.
What’s that noise I hear? An alarm clock bursts into chatter. Birds are about. I can hear their sing song.
I first learned to swim a zillion years ago, when I witnessed the Brew brothers fling themselves with reckless abandon into our deep murky village pond on a summer fete day. Being twenty miles out of London, close to civilisation you may say, it was an extraordinary event, for it was at a time and in a place where people did not act in this truly spontaneous way.
I suppose they became heroes of a sort in my mind forever trumping the stiff starched attitudes you found in other people. They were all for gay abandon in the days when gay conveyed another special sentiment. And even so they could not be proscribed as skinny-dipping for after dispensing with shirts and shoes on muddy bank side, they held on to baggy trousers hastily rolled up half-mast.
Along with other Shenley Village people enjoying the day’s fun, I was witness to the sheer exhilarating enjoyment of these sporty lads, not far short of National Service ages. This far distant summers fete day remains powerful to me seeing the lads thresh their way through the deep water which cast a dangerous reflection on those many souls who had not dared unleash their bodies on any pool, whatever sort.
Indeed, you could say the Brews were kind of outlaws in that previously undisturbed sacred space, heroes of that place without a fear in the world.
I suppose as a young mite of a lad, I was intrigued as to how they could traverse the deep menacing water in such a dog paddle crawl style, with so much relish and joint merriment that gave onlookers such hearty smiles.
This early inspiration was enough to get me on my bike and make haste for the nearest swimming pool which I found was in the grounds of a local hospital or alternatively I could go to an open air swimming pool in the grounds of a rich hotel, for an early taste of swimming under hopefully a cloudless sky, in the splendidly long drawn out days of school summer holidays.
What struck me most in my new adventure was a new found buoyancy to my body; instead of being shackled to the ground like Gulliver, I discovered new found freedom of being afloat with my whole body being uplifted, borne as if weightless in the water. In modern terms sharing something of the extraordinary feeling of a spaceman.
Floating in space.
That’s not to say that it all came easy, like getting to ride a bicycle it all takes practise, but never be daunted by early set backs and you’ll find eventually in the medium of the pool, you will find your own ambition satisfied, to swim and find your own outer reaches of space too.
Of course since the days of the pioneering Brew boys, things have changed massively in the set up of swimming pools. Gone are the magical water fountains with their never ending cascading flow of clear sparkling water splashing long into the night illuminated by adjacent low level light features. Diving areas in most pools are now largely non-existent, even the simple swimming board at deep end, and has been done away with. Diving in new type pools is like walking on new laid grass, strictly verboten. Nowadays, there is hardly what old timers would call a deep end like in the past.
In my own swimming lore I would like to introduce you to a friend, Wendy Caldwell was her name. I met her at infant school and she was a swimming heroine of mine through the years. Now, she was not endowed with a sylph like figure, a Greek goddess. Rather, she was shall we say, weight wise challenged, in modern parlance.
Yet, how she could dive, taking to the springboard with consummate ease, reborn, like someone who finds their own true love?
Transformed she was, taking on the very poise of a ballerina, with a so pure delicate spring in her step at boards end, which reverberated gently and then more deliberately gained force as she increased the momentum, upwards until she was released from its hold and dove fast into space, reaching for sky and when at maximum height, would loop downwards to pool in deft and supreme dive, now stretching nymph like, entering with barely a betrayal of a splash. Magnificent.
Of course when swimming gala came round, she was brilliant, and could surpass most people at any event.
A play she excelled at was picking up brass metal plates scattered at deep end of pool. (Deep end really meaning 8 ft six)
She would allow herself one deep breath and would then dive in from poolside and retrieve them in short order until she held last plate close to her chest, rising up from the deep to much all round applause.
Another of my heroes from back in the past, and which comes to mind, although not of my time, was one, Mercedes Glitz, born in Brighton. She as a young girl set herself one of the greatest tests of endurance, determination and skill, in swimming of English Channel. It was on a glorious day of October 7th, 1925, when she undertook the feat and with single-minded purpose and ambition conquered the divide from France in fifteen hours and fifteen minutes.
It was through her son Fergal, who works at my local swimming pool that I heard of this most remarkable woman. Not alone that she achieved this incredible swim, but more telling was the fact that she took it on in order to raise funds for those destitute who had no homes. For those less fortunate souls, in our land.
That knowledge, reinforced my own determination to improve my all round performance at swimming, knowing that Mercedes had done so much in her lifetime was more than adequate testimony to everyone, that we can all make space to succeed in every endeavour of our lives.
There is now no place for ‘wild boys’ of yesteryear, and in most cases I suppose it is no bad thing but at the same time exhilaration you will find is in short supply. The no go areas receiving most prominence. At all times it seems there must be healthy decorum. No more shouting, splashing or bombing- what we called honey potting.
Most swimming sessions I have found are confined to swimming lanes, where you are relentless encouraged to swim end to end anti-clock wise or reverse order, making me at times invariably feel like the poor mouse of tread mill fame. And whenever I swim in these modern glass frontage pools with their canyon high side walls, Olympic length or not, I still feel somewhat closed in, not I suppose as I naturally felt in open air swim pools, Dolphin free.
But lets not be mean to modern swimming pools. If they lack any spark they make up for it in other ways.
Facilities are laid on for aerobics classes. Spa pools or Jacuzzis which bubble about like newly uncorked champagne. Pools with computerized adjustable floors and false ceilings obtain to be primed at proper heights to take account of water babes in arms and quick growing infants with huge sized Olympic ambitions.
There are mod style clocks about including Speedo types for with which to time your performance in the pool, so you are not at a loss for gizmos. They even supply plastic galoshes for your feet. While any amount of hair dryers abound, emitting heat to dry your manes, and to primp and coiffeur your hair for next appointments.
Finally, I daresay its in my nature, in a swimming pool, to as it were touch the void and experience the space opened up for me, bathing in a natural light, from here to eternity.
