The beginning

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.

So I came down to Colchester in 1971 as the new respiratory diseases consultant; consultant physician with special responsibility for chest diseases was how it was termed then, and I took over the small number of chest beds, when I arrived at Myland Hospital, where I had 14 beds that were largely occupied by middle aged men with tuberculosis who no longer needed to be in hospital, and I discharged them all, they could easily be looked after home. And so when I discharged them, I naturally filled the ward or the ward became filled with the sort of patients that I'd been accustomed to looking after with much more serious and life-threatening conditions than the patients with tuberculosis who by and large been cured of their disease.
And the Deirdre Allen was appointed ward sister and this is where the story begins of the genesis of St Helena Hospice.

There was no hospice. Sister Allen was a wonderful person, a lady of great Christian faith and a warm heart. And she was loved by the patients and she was good to the nurses and we all got on very well as she agreed with my attitude of end of life care for those patients that required it, largely those patients with lung cancer. The outcome of the disease was pretty grim and people needed to be looked after in their terminal days. It became apparent to sister Allen that we needed more than our few beds and we were amassing more and more patients as time went by. She had heard of the St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, which as many people realise was founded by Dame Cicely Saunders, it was the beginning of the hospice movement in Great Britain and there was a course available and applied for a place on the course, went off for a couple of weeks and came back convinced that Colchester needed a hospice.

And so in 1979 sister Deirdre Allen and I along with doctor George Rhys Lewis from the radiotherapy department in Essex County Hospital arranged for a public meeting to be held in Colchester’s moot hall and Deidre spoke and I spoke and George Rhys Lewis spoke to a capacity audience. We were amazed at so many people coming to this first meeting which was almost a call to arms, arms and alms! We needed to raise funds and the response was enthusiastic, people realised the idea of a hospice was to be very necessary and was well supported. I think on that very first occasion people came forwards in order to form a steering committee and an appeal was launched to raise money.

That was great for us because it meant there were well intentioned, civic minded people in the community who were prepared to do the hard work that was necessary. They worked valiantly, raised the funds and acquire this old manor house Myland Hall. It’s a beautiful old timber building and it underwent extensive renovations and modernisation.

And by 1985 it was ready to open its doors. I can recall Dr Elizabeth Hall was appointed as the hospices first medical director and I was invited to be the hospice’s honorary consultant physician.

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.