I was a very new Soroptimist. I joined in 1977 and that was the first major thing of Soroptimism that I was involved in.

We studied about development of the hospice because it was being discussed that it was a good thing locally for us to have a hospice and our president, Irene Overton, was very keen to be involved in starting one in the area. We looked at Dame Cicely Saunders and her St Christopher's Hospice and we studied all sorts of things about hospices and of course decided they were a good thing.

So we wondered what we could do as a club. We had an annual fundraising project and we wondered what we could do. We thought raising the first £1000 for an appeal to be launched. A meeting was arranged in the Moot Hall and we raised £1360 altogether that year and that was a record for us. But I think it just shows that the people who came to our fundraising events realised the importance of having a hospice and were very generous.

Having got the thing up and running, we were wondering what to do next about fundraising to support it.
Our past president and honorary member Betty Lyes was walking with Peggy Sparks from Altrusa and they said what a good idea if we got the service organisations together to do something together to raise funds.
So following on from that we had Altrusa, Lions, Rotary and Soroptomists all working together to fundraise. We did all sorts of things...somewhere... what did we do...we had coffee mornings, bring and buy sales, afternoon tea dances, went out for meals and had fundraising events, but two that I was involved in were the antiques fairs that we held at Marks Tey Hotel as it was then and we also had a fundraising evening at Dedham, at Alfred Munnings House, which I remember, we had raffles and food and general opportunities for people to give money.

So then when the hospice opened, we thought, what can we do now? And we thought the best thing would be to offer to cover the Sunday rota, because people do find it difficult on Sundays. It's the day for the family and we thought that was the most useful thing we could offer.

So we set up a rota from club members and every new member who joined the club was invited to join the hospice rota if they could, I mean it wasn't forced, if you could spare a session. So we did three sessions on a Sunday, 9 ‘til 1, 1 ‘til 5 and 5 ‘til 9 and it worked out that you turned up about once every four weeks. We had enough members and if we had more members it went down a little bit and if we had less members, it maybe went more often.

It was different to the weekday activities on the reception desk because obviously other organisations and businesses weren't working, so it involved just answering the phone and dealing with enquiries or passing them on to the staff if it was about patient care. If it was just ‘when is the shop open?’ we could manage that, but otherwise passing them on to the nursing staff. Chatting to visitors who came in and really the front of the hospice was very quiet on Sundays. There wasn't any other activity going on, so for visitors coming in, it was a bit strange so to have a welcoming face there I feel was quite important. Then if any of the patients wandered past and stopped for a little chat, we were there for them as well.

Sometimes it's just the little things, isn't it? If you only speak to one person while you're there, who's in need of a bit of encouragement or just wants to tell you their troubles or whatever. I think it's useful.
I'm a great believer in letting people talk. I think you don't want to give advice and you don't want to sort of tell them what to do. But if they want to talk, sometimes people putting things into words gives them a better idea of what they want to do or how they feel about things so you just have to be a sympathetic ear.

Dorothy: I’m Dorothy.

Pat: I'm Pat.

Rita: And I’m Rita.

Pat: And we've known each other for about 50 years. We started the Cherrydale Weavers in 1981 and we've been fundraising ever since. The three of us work at the Hospice shop, in the vintage shop. Well, we had we had a young lady who lived just down the road here and she had cancer, breast cancer, and unfortunately her treatment was not up to standard and she eventually died. She used to swell up so that you know she was in agony and we think that if there’d been a Hospice about at the moment, like at that moment, she would been able to be treated and cared for and she would have had a much happier end of life. And that's really how it started, wasn’t it?

Dorothy: And then we have another friend who died who asked for donations to the Hospice instead of flowers. And at the time we thought, well, we haven't got much money, but we've got a bit of time. Why don't we see if we can raise a bit of money? And we said we'd do it for a year and raise a £100 towards a bed. Well, the first year we made 1500 so we’ve been hooked ever since.

Pat: Well, when we first started though, we used to go every weekend to some sort of fete or anything like that. And if we got 30, raised £30 pounds in a whole day we were over the moon at £30!

Dorothy: We were a lot younger!

Rita: A lot of people I don't think, appreciate, or didn't appreciate what it was for because you think a Hospice is just somewhere where you go to die, basically you know but... I think we should make the world a little bit!

Pat: Chris Holmes was our main... He was the chairman right from the very beginning and he was a lovely man. Yes and we got to know him quite well and then came Pat: Gosling who was the chief fundraiser. And then we started working for him. And then it happened that they got the shop, the first shop which was Head Street. And that's how it really started. Of course we’ve got very stick ability, haven’t we? But we love going to the shop; it's the highlight of my week anyway.

Dorothy: But we've met lovely people haven’t we? We’ve enjoyed it all the time. You know, people say you know you're wonderful giving all this time, but we've enjoyed it, we’ve loved it.

Rita: We enjoy it. Exactly yeah. Just become a way of life now! We know what we’re doing. We think it's a wonderful cause. We have a nice time. We meet nice people.

Pat: We've actually raised over £100,000. That was what we were working towards, wasn't it? Well, it wasn't to begin with.

All - No it was £100!

Pat: But we then went on and we wanted to get up to 100,000 and we did it… Just before we all conk out.
Dorothy: Well yes that’s right. We always used to do big events and things which was lovely, but we can't obviously manage it now, but we did.

Rita: But there aren’t so many about anyway, are there? Events? We used to go to fetes nearly every weekend in the summer, there doesn’t seem to be…

Dorothy: But we did book sales, we did plant sales…

Pat: Oh the storage with the books was hilarious, because we advertised in the paper for garages or something where we can store them and we got quite a few garages and we used to go and put them in these garages. And then of course we had a downpour of rain and the garage got flooded. One of our garages got flooded.

Dorothy: Under a foot of water! We had to shift everything! And we thought we’d just raise this £100, or try to raise this £100.

Rita: It did seem a lot of money

Dorothy: I suppose it was back then. And I always remember Elizabeth Hall telling the story about the accountant keeping a note of everybody's name and address who donated anything because he was convinced he’d have to give it all back, because we would never raise £1million!

Pat: We started off making hessian bags, very environmentally with it.

Rita: That was 30-odd years ago!

Pat: Yes, we started making hessian bags with a shoulder strap or with small handles, and it had our logo on the front which I will show you, I've got one of our old carrier bag, one of our first carrier bags. So yeah, we worked with her closely and whenever we did a very big do, she used to invite everybody back to her house for soup and we used to go back to Elizabeth’s for soup. So we had you know, I mean there was no… class divide, was there?

Dorothy: Oh my goodness no, she was hands on with everything and everybody was treated as if they were important, which was lovely.

It came about really because several people unknown to each other, could see that we could do with looking after what we then called the ‘terminally ill people’ much better and it wasn't being done well.
Deirdre Allen, who worked in the chest ward at Severalls, she had been up to St Anne's in Manchester and had done some time there and came back wanting to do that and was supported by the consultant, Peter Kennedy.

But also at the same time, Irenie Overton, who was chair of the Soroptimists, and had been, I think, a social worker, also thought that we should be looking at hospice care within Colchester and wanted her year of being chair to raise the money for the launch, because, you know, you need money from the very beginning. And so that money would be to support a year's work launching it.

And they all went to Joyce Brooks and she had a meeting, an open meeting at the town hall, to put this over, and it was absolutely packed.

Now, I'd been thinking about it because Chris was doing general practice, I was working in the oncology department. When we were students we knew Cicely Saunders and we had been to St Joseph's as it was then, I don't think at that time I had actually been to St Christopher's, but I might have done, and I'd heard her speak and I knew her. And so I'd been thinking, really we should be doing this and I'd actually totted up how much money I thought we needed and I think it was two hundred and fifty thousand. Of course we needed about a million and a half by the time it finished!

Anyway, I was going to go to Joyce Brooks, again as a person to launch, but I came back from holiday saw in the paper that this meeting was coming up. Great, I don't have to do anything, I'll just go along and see what's happening, which I did. I think I did say something in support but anyway, a few days later, I had a phone call saying, would I chair the steering committee because they'd asked Dr Rhys-Lewis who was head of the oncology department at Essex County, and he had said, no, he couldn't do it, but he suggested that I did it. Well, I'd never chaired anything. I'd got four kids, I'd never chaired anything except a playgroup committee and I was landed with this!

But what we did was that we got all the people who were already working with similar groups, not palliative care but you know, the social workers, the district nurses, several groups of people that did things in the community, just to look at what was already being done and how we can do it. And so that's how we started.

So then we started in 1980 raising the money. We had a fantastic music hall over at Holmwood House as the kind of launch, but at the same time we’d contacted Keith Dallison, who was the lead for the district nurses, and he was very keen on setting up Macmillan nurses and he and I went to Macmillan to see if we could get funding, and we had funding for two Macmillan nurses. So the Macmillan nurses really started in 1980.
Then we raised the money sufficient, well it wasn’t sufficient, fingers crossed we thought it was sufficient to start, so that we could start acquiring a building and of course we acquired the building; Mary Fairhead suggested it because there was this lovely old farmhouse and Highwoods was being developed all round it and the developers were using it as an office really. The advantage of it was that there was plenty of room to expand but the biggest thing was the access because you were right beside the A12 and so from all over the area that was being served, except towards Mersea and Tiptree and that area, I worked out it was going to be less than 45 minutes from the hospice by car and so the area was north east Essex. We’d acquired with great help from Lord Alport who negotiated with French Kier for a reasonable amount. We were able to buy it and then in 1980 the Duchess of Norfolk cut the first sod as we called it, which was a great day, that was fantastic. And I loved it because we had a band there and they played ‘yo ho yo ho, it’s off to work we go’, as she cut the first turf. And there it was being built.

By then I was off the steering committee because I was concentrating on getting on the medical side, supporting the Macmillan nurses and so on and so forth.

They were already beavering away this idea of a hospice when I got here, so I encouraged it. And eventually it was quite remarkable and something that... it's poignant because it couldn't happen now, principally because in Colchester and the local people and the press supported the idea and raised the money but that was kind of what the local press did.

Bill Tucker, who was the big driving force, he edited this little weekly paper. I think it was a free one. Well, not strictly true. When I came, it was a Tuesday sports paper called Colchester Gazette, and we converted it from a Tuesday paper to a daily paper called the Evening Gazette.

But Bill carried on editing the old Colchester Gazette and he really was the driving force. And he never gave up trying to raise money by any means, whenever. We used to have the Colchester festival and Bill would be going round rattling his buckets for cash for the hospice. So he was a great stalwart.

I took golf when I came down here, so I made a lot of friends at golf. A local person on the team, his wife was killed in a car crash, and he established what we call the hospice cup which we play for every year. And what happens is you get the organisers of the competition to get the holes sponsored to bring in money. And my wife won it about six, seven years ago, and she was in the midst of her own medical problems herself, and had only got released from the hospital for about a month and she went ahead and won this competition. I have been trying for 30 years to win that cup and never managed it! And Palmer went out having just been released from hospital and did it!

Because I come from that era when everybody had a granny in the attic. Once you were old you were put in the attic and friends and relatives looked after you, I have to say. We knew what happened to old folk and we knew there was a need, you know, for people to end their lives with as much comfort as could be mustered. And that was it, really it was just that feeling that if you are a civilised local community, you need one. There’s the evidence and that's what pretty well drove everyone on to one degree or another. Some people are absolutely passionate it had to be done, others less so, but they all came together to make it happen.
The queen coming to open it was particularly nice for Colchester and it was a lovely day, I can remember the day. You don't actually forget them, do you? I mean, the job wasn’t over once the building had been established; it still needed money as it does to this day.

But isn’t it a wonderful thing that it is here looking after us? And it was a good example of how the local press can make things happen.