Epsom's Hospitals Cluster

Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith.
Horton Manor 1890

Following legislation in 1888, the London County Council began building institutions to house up to 2000 pauper lunatics. Over a thousand acres at Horton were acquired in 1896. The London County Council bought the estate from Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who seems to have gone to Australia. Not surprisingly, the estate by then was in bad shape. The estate agents, however, recognised a desperate buyer when they saw one. The estate was on the market at £35,000; but to get it, the LCC had to gazump another buyer, real or imaginary, and pay £35,900.

The original plan was for six hospitals, with a total patient population of twelve thousand: the same as that of Epsom itself in 1900. The old manor house was converted and surrounded by short-term huts because of pressing need for accomodation. Work was carried on by day and night, in fine weather and in wet, and created havoc and complete ruin along the roads to the site. The Hook road, in particular, was unfit for such heavy traffic, being in places no more substantial or wider than a country lane.

Images courtesy of Jeremy Harte, Curator, Bourne Hall Museum (Opens in a new window)

To avoid further complaints and compensation claims, the contractors for the Long Grove superstructure, Forster & Dicksee, obtained a Light Railway Order, purchasing about 40 acres for the line and exchange sidings with the London & South-West Railway at a cost of some £10,000. This standard-gauge railway was first used on April 20, 1905. It ran parallel and south-west of Chessington Road as far as Hook Road, which it crossed on the level near the road turning. It then took a more westerly course, entering a small wood called Butchers Grove in which it turned sharply south to enter the Long Grove site through its northern boundary. At the peak of activity on the Long Grove site in 1905 about 1,100 men were at work, some 900 of them recruited from the London unemployed and brought down from Waterloo daily in special trains, half their 4 shilling (20 pence) return fare being paid by Forster & Dicksee. To discourage them from hanging about the many public houses in the Epsom area, the firm withheld their 7d (old pence, approx 3p)an hour wages until they were on the platform at Ewell ready to entrain for London.

Images courtesy of Jeremy Harte, Curator, Bourne Hall Museum (Opens in a new window)

Horton Hospital was built to a semi-circular design and opened in 1903. Long Grove, with the same basic design, was finished in 1906. St. Ebba's opened in 1904 as a colony for three hundred epileptic men housed in red brick villas. West Park did not open until 1924 and had a more modern design of linked two-storey blocks and pavilions.

Images courtesy of Jeremy Harte, Curator, Bourne Hall Museum (Opens in a new window)

The Epsom hospitals were at the forefront of advances in psychiatric medicine. All ran a parole system allowing some patients access to the grounds and to the town. Between the wars they were associated with London research departments and introduced new treatments such as electro-convulsive therapy, insulin treatment, and induced malaria therapy.

Image courtesy of Jeremy Harte, Curator, Bourne Hall Museum (Opens in a new window)

Recruitment of staff was a constant problem at first. The untrained male attendants and female nurses received between £18 and £39 per annum and free board and lodging. Men had to ask permission to marry and only single women were employed. Often several members of a family worked at the hospitals and their social life was often based there.

Male and female patients were assigned separate living and working areas and even received different amounts of food. The diet in the early years was closely controlled by the LCC and was balanced, adequate but plain. Like other hospital functions, food preparation was divided between a male side (baking and butchery) and a female side (cooking). Each hospital began with about fifty people employed on support services, including the farms, as against four hundred nursing staff.

The cluster hospitals were planned together to be self-sufficient for water, gas, electricity, sewage disposal and even the burial of the dead. Each had a central water tower acting as a focal point, and the footprint hospitals (Horton, Long Grove and West Park) lay over a network of access tunnels, while a central boiler house provided steam heating. The industrial plant was installed to high standards, but although services such as telephones could be introduced, it became increasingly difficult to modernise the systems.

All the hospitals depended on the labour of their patients to function. Those who were able worked on the farms or in the workshops, kitchens or laundries, or cleaned the wards. Each hospital baked its own bread, washed its own laundry, and made and repaired patients' clothes and boots, while workshops manufactured other goods such as brushes and tinware. Patients came to be paid, at first in a local economy of tokens or cigarettes, afterwards in money. In later years the tradition of work was continued in occupational therapy.

Sports matches between the hospitals were always important events; at first they were between staff teams, but more recently patients have played many sports too. Male attendants were sometimes recruited because they were good footballers, or could play a musical instrument and take part in the band that performed at concerts and regular staff and patient dances. There were also summer fetes and weekly cinema shows.

Images courtesy of Jeremy Harte, Curator, Bourne Hall Museum (Opens in a new window)

During the First World War, Horton Hospital was taken over as a military hospital and its patients dispersed. It reopened in 1920, when wartime experiences led to changes in organisation and treatment in all mental hospitals. In the Second World War, Horton became an Emergency Medical Services hospital, receiving both civilian and military casualties and, after the War, Polish refugees. The other hospitals took additional patients and the Manor suffered bomb damage.

When the hospitals were founded, they were intended to be cut off from the surrounding community. The first changes in this policy came after the War, and the use of chlorpromazine and related drugs in the 1950s led to further changes. There was greater emphasis on occupational and social therapy, more voluntary admissions and shorter stays in hospital. Out-patient and day hospitals were established and patients sometimes went for holidays to the seaside

Some extracts from the official reports on the early years of Horton Hospital can be read here Horton - Down the Years Note: This is a .pdf file so you may need to download Adobe Reader (available free from Adobe).

When a person died in one of the mental hospitals and no one was prepared to take responsibility for funeral arrangements then they were usually buried in hospital grounds - see our separate page on Horton Cemetery.

Links:
Horton Cemetery
Horton Cemetery Burial Registers.html
Horton Hospital Chaplin Rev Hockly
County Asylums
Index of English and Welsh Lunatic Asylums and Mental Hospitals
Industrial Railway Society
Hospital Records Database (Find out which archive holds which records)

Useful Links:

www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk
www.surreycc.gov.uk/surreyhistorycentre