Starcross History Society: Starcross Hospital. What the voices tell us. Instalment 7.

PART II What the voices tell us… about:

Starcross as seen from the outside

By June 1877, the original house for 40 children gave place to the first central section of the new institution. Built for £7,000 of lime stone brought by barges into the estuary of the River Exe, the stones were moved at low tide to sheds where masons “nobbled” them into their intended shapes and sizes to erect an elegant structure.

Wings for male and female classroom/dormitory accommodation were added as funds became available and, later still, a demand for two further wings of a matching stone completed the principal building.

These splendid three storey premises were part of the Starcross architecture and a welcome centre to which villagers and other country folk came from miles around for Christmas pantomimes, cricket and football matches, concerts, dances and other social functions on the lawns and gardens, prettily decorated with fairy lights and Chinese lanterns. It was a way of life.

Arthur Mortimore, Hospital Secretary, written contribution March 1988

I more or less grew up in the village and [we] were associated with the hospital. They used to have pantomimes every year where the village people used to go into, and the male patients had a pantomime and the female patients did a [separate] pantomime. Mary West, Nursing Officer

Open days were not just for fund raising [by the League of Friends]. They were also intended to open the hospital and bring the community into contact with the patients, and to some extent they succeeded.

Peter Nutley, Hospital Administrator, writing in the Health Service Journal, December 1986

Royal Western Counties comprised eight small units scattered throughout the Exeter District, and two main hospitals: Starcross and Langdon. Starcross Hospital, the headquarters, was generally considered to be of no architectural merit but it occupied an imposing site on the banks of the Exe estuary 10 miles to the south of the city. The grey stone four-storeyed main block, fronted by a magnificent and lovingly tended formal garden, was a familiar landmark to Westcountry travellers on the main railway line and road which passed Starcross [hospital] on the narrow strand between the hospital buildings and the high-water line of the estuary.

David King [2]

When I got there, the thing that impressed me most was the grounds. I thought with an institution like that, all these grounds, with the people they got in there, how can they keep the standard up? But I was surprised after I got there and settled in.

Stan, ex-resident

Going inside – first impressions

When I went there first [about 1930] it took a bit of getting used to… to start with, having to sleep with the patients…. You had to live in, at least for three years, and then after that if you wanted to get married you had to get permission from the superintendent.

Len Vaughan, Nurse

It was a strange world of mental defectives. [1931] It was such an enclosed thing that you very rarely saw the patients outside the hospital… I had no idea what they lived like.

Stormy Adams, Hospital Mechanic

I started on the Wednesday… and the Thursday morning a member of staff said: The head attendant, Mr F, wants to see you in his office… inside there, was an adult patient… and Mr F said: This lad is accusing you of saying stupid things behind my back about me… I said I barely know you. He realised then the patient was telling a lie and he made him touch his toes and he give him a whack across the backside with a cane…Mr F then apologised: That’s the sort of thing you’ll have to accept… So that was my first initiation.

Stormy Adams, Hospital Mechanic

When I left Dawlish Hospital [a cottage hospital], she said: “You won’t like it, nurse, it’s quite different.” The first day [1931], I was taken to the mess room. There was nobody there to introduce me, and one nurse came in, slung her things down saying: “Bloody this, bloody that” … and I was very shocked. I hadn’t come across it at all…

Mrs Price, Nurse

My first impression [1938] was: I think I shall be here a week… It seemed bleak and truly Devonshire and you can be accepted or you can’t… I didn’t think that was ever going to happen at Starcross… I was a “foreigner” [an outsider].

Sybil Sivyer, Nursing Officer

Poor, really poor [but on the whole pretty similar to other hospitals]. Starcross itself was old fashioned, stone stairways leading up to the dormitories. The kitchens were absolutely deplorable. In one of my early medical reports [soon after 1938], I said there was bound to be an epidemic of some type of food poisoning… Charles Mayer [the superintendent] said to me: “For goodness sake, don’t put that in your report…” and I omitted it. Dr Prentice, Medical Superintendent

When I was shown around [1950s]… I went into the villas and it was the smell and I thought: Oh God, I can’t stand this. But actually where I worked in the OT [Occupational Therapy] was in the basement, terrible rooms really, but you were on your own and you weren’t interfered with.

Dorothy Davey, Teacher

I thought we were the only hospital in the south-west where the dispensary and the toilet were in the same place! It was magnificent! The dispensary basically came to us from the newer section which was Langdon Hospital, and it was sent down twice a week or something. What there was of a dispensary in Starcross was a little glassed-off annexe off the general waiting room… that had a glass door that swung either way and you could either shut yourself in the toilet or you could shut yourself in the dispensary. So it was a little primitive in that respect but then there wasn’t all that much medication.

Dr Strange, Medical Officer

When I came to Starcross [1964] I was very surprised, comparing [it to] Hensol Castle [Hospital, Wales, where he said patients were marked with numbers]*. I would say Starcross was 15 to 20 years more advanced. Especially when I saw the patients with knives and forks. Nobody intelligent enough to introduce them [at Hensol]. I could feel there was a lovely atmosphere…that extra special atmosphere. A happy atmosphere.

Mr Khadaroo, Deputy Charge Nurse

When I joined [1965] wards deemed to be luxury by some of the longer-serving members of staff and patients, say no more than 20 in a bedroom. Conditions in the front block… were quite austere. Quite Dickensian. I can still remember in 1965 cutting lumps of soap off a large block… baths were probably weekly, shaving was in the main still done with a wet razor.

Trevor Buckler, Senior Nursing Officer

Before I ever went there, I think everyone who didn’t work there tended to tiptoe around it rather. I’d never been for any of their Open Days to look around or anything… I think I thought it was a bit on the dingy side and I think it was the staff who impressed me mostly. The majority of them were really very caring people and I knew a lot of them as patients in the [general] practice, which eased my going in quite a bit.

Dr Mary Kemp, GP

When I first walked into Starcross [about 1968] it was almost like the original, no upgrading had been done. You walked in through a tiny green door, into a very narrow green corridor, into the main corridor of the hospital. I thought: My God, where have I come. It really was terrible. They hadn’t then even moved as far as the Royal Albert [Hospital] that I had left much earlier.

Tom Harrison, Director of Nursing

At my first visit to Starcross [about 1969] I was absolutely appalled. I think it was the Bude Ward – 74 beds in one ward, some were tiered bunks, with nowhere to store clothes. There were suitcases in the corridor and clothes up on a shelf.

Geoff Bird, Parent

Funnily enough, I wasn’t shocked. It was very overcrowded; 1967 I think was a low point. I remember very much the sense of community, the village was very much the hospital, and I loved it. They made you feel very welcome…My second day [1967] … one of the charge nurses actually took me back to his house at lunchtime… and at Christmas… the night superintendent and his wife… brought me back to their house and I had Christmas day night with the family.

Tom Bush, Nursing Tutor

The conditions weren’t bad, but they weren’t good [about 1970]. It was very crowded and the beds in the dormitories, they had, I don’t know, maybe 18 inches between them… and their clothes were absolutely ghastly. I think they were still … getting through the last of the old institution clothes, you often saw that. The men had trousers halfway up their legs, that kind of thing. They looked fairly rough, then they personalised the clothing, people began to look a lot better then. The clothes fitted, which must have been good for their morale.

Dr Mary Kemp, GP

It was still a bit workhouse-ish. [1970s]

Frank Lovell, Catering Officer

My first recollection of Starcross [1973] was as a student. I was allocated to Dawlish Ward which had 45, 50 men living there… There was myself and a pupil nurse – a lady – about the same age as me… It was bathing day. We went into this bathroom where there were bundles of clothes and a bench seat… These men were obviously used to the routine because they sort of lined up in turn. It was awful because you thought this just isn’t the way it should be done, but obviously the way they had always done it.

Viv McAvoy, Nursing Officer

The actual environment in Starcross had a completely different feel to it than Langdon. Langdon was very much a unit thing and you really saw little of the rest of the hospital… But Starcross was like one big family… most of it was all in one big building and there was a tremendous sort of rapport between the wards, some rivalry as well… in the nicest possible way, like if one ward had … new armchairs or a new bedspread…

Viv McAvoy, Nursing Officer

It was very strange [1974]. Quite frightening actually. Well, not frightening really – strange, seeing those strange people acting funny… Although I’d lived in Starcross from when I was 14 and my father worked in the place, I’d not actually been around the place, it was very peculiar.… we were quite young and never come across anything like that before.

Night nurse

It was sort of [frightening] [1974] … It was a bit of a shock going on to a ward and seeing hardly any furniture, and what there was was pretty rough, no carpets on the floors, the telly bolted to the wall, [I was] shown the side rooms… It was strange. Once you worked there it was fine, exactly the way it had to be. Some of the windows had plastic, things like that. When I first went to Starcross I worked on Teignmouth Ward and all the clothes were locked away. In fact, some of the boys didn’t have their own clothes, they shared clothes.

Night nurse

Strangely enough, I was not shown round [during my interview] [1975] and I thought I knew what I was letting myself in for… When I was shown around …the wards and … peripheral hospitals… I saw cases of mental handicap that I had never dreamed in my wildest dreams existed. It was a very humbling experience… Some of it almost repelled me at the time.

Peggy Cordell, Volunteers’ Co-ordinator

Starcross: its size, its variety of scope and range of the degree of handicap… Also the feeling there particularly of the sort of team thing.

Peggy Cordell, Volunteers’ Co-ordinator

The first thing that struck me, when I arrived at Starcross [late 1970s], it seemed like it was a castle and the stones and the size of the buildings that you walked through, at night, really were so appallingly dominant, and the façade was so big, it would be there forever.

Nigel Pyart, Adult Tutor Organiser

I’d got so used to things being appalling [in institutions], I was beyond the point of being appalled. [1977] It’s incredible to think that you can be like that. I saw it as my job to see things that were awful and try to work with the staff that were there to try and make it different. It didn’t worry me greatly, I saw it simply [as] that was the job, and I had seen it in hospitals all over the country, I had seen awful things.

Dr Chris Williams, Psychologist

*Hensol Castle Hospital, Llantrisant, Wales, closed 2003. An exhibition of photos of patients taken in 1967 and an oral history contributed to an exhibition “Hidden Now Heard” in 2015, supported by the Heritage Lottery, and intended for permanent exhibition at St Fagans, the Museum of Wales. The hospital had over 800 patients at one time.

See www.peoplescollection.wales.