The Middy - July 8 1999

A tough life in isolation.

At the isolation hospital in Goddards Green, the work of the nursing staff was arduous, with rigorous rules on hygiene applying at all times.

The hospital, which opened in 1902, had ward blocks for scarlet fever, diphtheria and typhoid. Other illnesses covered were polio and tuberculosis.

A brown "fever ambulance" was used to convey scarlet fever patients to the hospital and children faced long stays in the ward away from their families.

Brenda Harwood spent two months in the hospital with scarlet fever in 1933.

She recalls: "my parents visited every Wednesday and Sunday afternoons but they could only stand outside and see me through the window.”

She spent her 11th birthday in the hospital but, in case of infection, she wasn't allowed to open any of her presents until she left.

Brenda remembers: "On the day I was discharged, they gave me a bath and washed my hair in Tyzol, a strong disinfectant. I had to continue using this at home for another month.”

35 children and adults succumbed to the nationwide polio epidemic in 1947-8. Four patients died while others were left with permanent paralysis.

The iron lung, which saved the lives of countless polio victims, was designed by Captain Leonard Morley from Ditchling while he was working in the American Field Service in Italy, in the Second World War.

The emotional and physical demands of caring for patients with such life-threatening illnesses contributed to a constant shortage of nurses at the isolation hospital.

In 1938, Cuckfield District Medical Superintendent Dr D. W. B. Stott, complained about the expense of having to recruit temporary staff from outside the hospital at a cost of two guineas to two and a half guineas a week.

To overcome the problem, the annual basic salary of the nursing staff was raised by £5 to £50 a year.

Better housing and drainage, combined with antibiotics and vaccination programmes gradually made the work of isolation hospitals obsolete.

The elderly infirm were cared for largely at home in the first half of the century and there were no hospices for the chronically sick and terminally ill.

Dr John Pendered, who came to practice as a GP in Haywards Heath in 1950, recalls: "the elderly at that time were Victorians and many of the disabled were First World War veterans, so there was a camaraderie and neighbourliness not much seen these dates.”

Poor people who require hospital treatment but could not afford a bed, went into the workhouse infirmary in Cuckfield.

Conditions of the workhouse were primitive and came under scrutiny in 1911 when a mother accused staff of starving her son who had been admitted suffering from consumption.

During an inquiry, she claimed her son had been given 10 bad eggs and had been "kept in a room where they let men smoke.”

The men, she alleged, were coughing and spitting at her son, who had lost his cough before he went in, but regained his cough by the time he came out.

Sister Swarbrick, who had been in charge of her son, replied: "men were allowed to smoke, and if they coughed – well, poor things, they had to cough." Mid Sussex times, March 7, 1911.

The old workhouse and infirmary later became Cuckfield General Hospital and after the introduction of the NHS in 1948, the hospital’s importance grew.

A friendly rivalry developed with the Memorial Hospital in Haywards Heath.

Emergency and surgical work moved from Haywards Heath to Cuckfield in the early 1960s and an intensive care unit opened at Cuckfield in 1968.

The Memorial Hospital gradually took on the role of Cottage Hospital catering increasingly convalescent elderly patients.

The work at Cuckfield came to an end with the opening of the new Princess Royal Hospital in 1992.

A big campaign failed to keep the Memorial hospital open, and the town mourned the loss of an institution which had served the community for 80 years.

The league of friends at Cuckfield transferred their fundraising efforts to the Princess Royal and to date have raised more than £1 million for new equipment.

In 1998, the 50th anniversary of the NHS, they purchased an £80,000 medical scanner – six times the entire annual income of the Memorial Hospital in 1948.

Elizabeth Wickstead writes: Brenda Mitchell contracted scarlet fever in 1933, not 1943 as reported by The Middy. I remember this when we were living in Cuckfield; Brenda Mitchell was my sister's Rose best friend. Brenda was born in 1923 in Cuckfield and married Tom Harwood of Lindfield in 1947 .