Some history of the Hospital complexes with thank to Bourne Hall Museum
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, and because of pressing need the old manor house was converted and surrounded by short-term huts. Horton Hospital was built to the same semi-circular design as Bexley, and opened in 1903. Long Grove, with the same basic design, was finished in 1906. St Ebbas (below) 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.
St Ebbas HospitalThe original plan was for six hospitals, with a total patient population of twelve thousand: the same as that of Epsom itself in 1900. 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 London County Council had to gazump another buyer, real or imaginary, and pay £35,900. It was still a bargain.
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 utterly unfit for such heavy traffic, being in places no more substantial or wider than a mere country lane. ‘The miseries endured during that period by those dwelling along the route will long be remembered with a feeling akin to indignation. The constant vibration of houses, the falling of ceilings, and the sleeplessness induced by the night traction, and the ultimate burden of a special rate of sixpence in the pound towards the reparation of the road, these are features the memory of which will survive for a long time in association with the history of the Long Grove Asylum’ - Epsom Herald, 1905
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 old shillings 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 7 old pence an hour wages until they were on the platform at Ewell ready to entrain for London.
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.
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 London County Council 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.
West Park 1924 a design of linked two-storey blocks and pavilions.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 tin ware. 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.
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.
‘Horton Place, the seat of Mr William Trotter, lies about a mile to the west of Epsom, in the midst of an extensive park. The old manor-house was a large building, surrounded by a moat. It passed by sale to Mr John Trotter, and army contractor of Soho Square, who died possessed of it in 1790. His son and successor, Mr James Trotter, who was Sheriff of Surrey in 1798, erected the present mansion. The Manor of Horton is now (1884) owned by Mr William Trotter, son of the late Mr George Brown, merchant, of London, who changed his name on succeeding to the property’.
‘An asylum is not a place one usually conjures up as a scene of festivity, but facts are facts, and it is incontrovertible that on Saturday afternoon the grounds of Horton Asylum were filled with the laughter and merriment of the patients and the staff. Though the many hundreds of mentally defective in this, as in other asylums, need to be taken care of, a large proportion of them have, if not at all times, a capacity for wholesome enjoyment of the pleasures of life, and on Saturday, when the annual fete took place, an army of patients were to be seen entering into the ‘fun of the fair’ with a zest that showed them to be capable of thoroughly enjoying themselves. The staff ministered to their happiness in all possible ways, and one’s ideas of what asylum life is like were somewhat upset by seeing the patients having shies, amid hilarious laughter, at the coconuts and at Aunt Sally, indulging - more merriment - in rides on the switchback railway, and on intractable donkeys, and competing with much enthusiasm in sports arranged for their particular benefit’.
‘Percussion bands were formed with, as the stock of instruments gradually increased, drums, tambourines, triangles, cymbals, bells, maracas, tambours, chime bars, trumpets, and ‘nightingales’. The criterion for inclusion in these groups was that no other form of treatment had been able to hold the patient’s interest clinically, therefore, they constituted the least hopeful element in the hospital. The technique was quite simple: the piano was played with a forceful rhythm, usually incidentally by another patient, while the patients in the group were encouraged by members of staff to shake or beat the percussion instruments which had been handed to them. These instruments require no musical skill whatever; all that is needed is to determine and maintain the rhythm of the piano. The result is not nearly as cacophonous as might be expected in spite of, or because of, the limitations in tonal range. In fact, with a percussion band going full blast, and this is the desired result, the effect can be very stirring’.
The town has expanded in recent years with a number of housing developments being built.
These came about as a result of the closure of five Victorian hospital sites. These were virtually self-contained villages and their partial closure meant around 100 acres of land was released for housing development.
Around 1,500 news homes have been built on what has become known as the hospital cluster site to the west of the town. The site covers the Manor, Longrove, St Ebbas, Horton, and West Park Hospitals.
