The building

Well, I got involved in the first place because my mother was very ill. She died of cancer and it wasn't at all nice. This was before they knew anything about it.

My best friend, Joyce Brooks, she knew my mother and she knew me and she was the first one that started it and with two other ladies, they started to organise this meeting in the town hall and Elizabeth was elected as chairman. I heard about this and Joyce was telling me about it and they formed a committee and as time went on, they thought they'd have to put out an appeal. Well, I had done several appeals in the town and I was a councillor at the time as well and they asked me if I would take on the job of appeal organiser. So I was only too pleased to do it because I felt that I was giving something for my mother who didn't benefit from this and I think it was one of the happiest times which sounds silly but you were doing something that was so worthwhile.

Anyway, long story we kept going and we kept going and we were looking for premises. Dr Hall and I went round and looked at several. Joyce looked at several, but they were all uninteresting; they weren't suitable and there wasn't any ground with them or anything like that. And then one day, which was quite extraordinary, fate steps in and I was on a site visit to Highwoods. We had to walk from Mile End Road through a little lane. We were walking in and I sort of looked to my right. I mean, I knew Mile End Lodge was there because I'm a Colcestrian, but I hadn’t come to mind you see and I didn't know what had happened to it and there was all this bramble and everything like that and I could see this lovely old house amongst it and I thought golly, golly, I couldn't wait to get home. I phoned Joyce and said ‘I think I’ve found it, I think we’ve found a site’!

So, through one thing or another, nothing was done for about 3 months. I think it was about that. I kept on about it and Joyce and I went and had a little look. I can't remember whether we took Elizabeth then or not, but however, we thought well we've got to do something about this, so eventually Elizabeth, Joyce and I asked French Kier if we could look at it. They were using it as their headquarters because of all the building that was going on and they just had two or three rooms and we looked at it and thought God, lovely. Absolutely lovely.

So we put it to the committee and they said well go ahead and see what it is and this, that and the other and we had another few months of bitter upset because we didn't know how to get the money.
We scratched our heads again. Well this went on and it didn't happen so Joyce and I knew Lord Alport, who was High Steward of Colchester, very well and I went to see him and he said, come and see me. So the three of us went.

Well would you believe in two months, we had it with two acres of ground. I mean what he did for us was fantastic. And so we went on and we started to build on the new house, completely fell in love with the old house. It had a lovely atmosphere. We got to the stage where we had to consider building the new block.
We had £50,000 left in the bank and we had this meeting and the then chairman, he went round to every member of the committee and said, shall we stop now and just concentrate on that or should we keep going and we all said go on.

Well, the most extraordinary thing is, ‘cause I went every day to Elizabeth and picked up the biscuit tin where the donations came in, I’d got the appeal running and everything and the money was coming in. I have to hesitate now ‘cause I'm bringing it back to memory. Oh yes, I went and got the biscuit tin in Colchester. I went back to the farm, I took over my dining room for the Hospice because...nobody else could use it, we had to eat other places. I opened up the tin. It was full of envelopes and there was one very big bulky envelope there so I thought we’ll start with that one. So I opened it. I can't remember exactly how much. There was three envelopes inside a large one and I can't remember exactly the amounts, but they were for some trusts from a big company which we've never mentioned, because they don't want any publicity, one was 20,000, one was 15,000 and one was 5,000; 40,000 pounds. I couldn't believe my eyes, so I phoned up Elizabeth straight away and I said ‘are you in?’, she said ‘yes’, I said ‘don't go, I'm coming’. And she did the same as me. I think we both shed a little tear actually. And that was an answer, £40,000. So we now had £90,000. So it was miraculous. I'll never forget that feeling.

We started stripping out the old Myland Hall building and went on to refurbish that and build the hospice building because it wasn't an extension then. It had been used as temporary offices for French Kier, the builders who were building parts of the estate over here.

We came here early '84 when it was just a shell really and there was I think that the big… when I first came here, the slab for the actual extension, as we called it was down and they'd started building the brickwork and we had a lovely gent and I can't remember his surname it was Fred and they used to call him a gentleman bricklayer because he always wore a shirt and a tie and he had a flat cap and he was very well-spoken compared to the rest of us ruffians! He was a lovely old boy and he was in his 60s then.

It was a bit poignant when we put the morgue in you think, well... and there's a chapel somewhere in the middle. And that was going to be a chapel for everybody, even people who didn't believe in God. And that was... that was something that was it was a job to work out how can you have a chapel for people who don't believe in God, but it was a you know, obviously a quiet place for them to go and collect their thoughts.

There was a time one of the digger drivers was driving over the back and it was very boggy and he got stuck and he couldn't get the digger out, it was one of these JCBs, and he got his boss in and his boss actually walked the digger using the front bucket and the rear bucket out of the boggy… with the wheels up in the air! And he just walked it out, which was again, was something that we'd never seen before but that was, you know, he did it rather than lose his digger!

Because you were on this job and you were together with guys, because a lot of the times you went to somewhere, you were there for two or three months or whatever, and then you went on somewhere else and you probably never see anyone again. But a lot of these guys we'd been working with on Huttons, 'cause a lot of the guys were actually employed by Huttons although I was a subcontractor, it became like family.
I mean, when my son was born, they took me over the Rover's Tye and we all had a... I got home that day!
Yeah, it was quite incredible.