A Brief History of St. Helier Hospital
A very modern design
By Christine Hyatt
I started my training in September 1971. We were told during training that Lady St. Helier had donated the land for the hospital for a small sum of money, provided that the hospital was surrounded by green i.e. trees and grass. I can find no actual proof of this but she was a philanthropist and did a considerable amount of charity work. Also, she had no heir to carry on the family name. We were also told during training that the hospital was a very modern design with curves rather than corners to prevent dust and dirt collecting and to make it easier to clean. Certainly the architects Saxon Snell & Phillips were chosen for their experience in hospital design. One of their designs was the Royal Victoria Hospital Montreal Canada.
An aerial view of the hospital
Sutton Local Studies and Archives
My training began just after the addition of a brand new theatre suite to A block. All the wards had numbers and letters at that time e.g. A6, A5, A4 etc. Gradually over the years some units have been named after consultants at the hospital. The Davis Unit, which encompasses the Plaster Room, is named after Mr. Davis, an Orthopaedic Consultant at St. Helier up until the ’80s. Ferguson House, the Nurses’ Home, was the exception. It was named after James Ferguson, Medical Officer for Health for Surrey County Council. To quote from his obituary “Ferguson’s visible monument was St. Helier Hospital”.* This was only part of the LCC health provision created by Dr. Ferguson for the St Helier Estate. His vision included mental health services and a school health service to name but a few.
The Nurses’ Home is a five-storey building. The ground floor contained the nurses’ dining room and a separate dining room for the sisters and other senior nurses. There was a very large sitting room and again a separate sitting room for more senior staff. The first to third floors were nurses’ bedrooms, the fourth floor staff nurses' bedrooms and the fifth floor had small apartments for the senior nurses.
The School of Nursing was a prefab at the back of Ferguson House adjacent to F Block - a four-storey building housing the children's wards, ENT and a theatre suite.
In the main hospital the wards were long with beds down each side and a window between each bed. There were also side wards at one end and a solarium at the other. G block was originally built to house TB patients and those with rheumatic heart disease - the result of rheumatic fever in childhood. The hospital was built to care for the people on the St. Helier housing estate, many of whom had come from poor housing in South London where overcrowding and disease were rife. By the ’70s most of the patients in G Block were suffering from chronic bronchitis and lung cancer.
To the left of the main building was the psychiatric wing.
Two corridors ran the length of the hospital on the lower ground floor and the ground floor. These were called the upper and lower Burma Road by a blind telephonist working at the hospital during WWII as the constant moving of baffle boards used to prevent a bomb blast made negotiating the corridors very difficult for him. The Burma Road in the Far East is known as a very long and difficult walk.