A Small Star in the East
Barts Health NHS Trust Archives does what it says on the tin! As our name suggests, we hold the records and historic collections of the current Trust hospitals. But our collections span a much wider history of health care and medical education across the City and East London; we hold records relating to over 35 current and former hospitals, as well as medical schools, schools of nursing, charities, health authorities and much more.
In this post, we're focusing on the story of one of the less well-known hospitals whose records we hold, as a case study of one of the many former hospitals you can research in the Trust Archives.
In 1868, the East London Hospital for Children and Dispensary for Women opened its doors in a converted warehouse at Ratcliff Cross. Charles Dickens, who wrote journalistic accounts of his many visits to the slums of East London, described the new hospital in ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ magazine after he visited that year:
“I found the children's hospital established in an old sail -loft or storehouse, of the roughest nature, and on the simplest means. There were trap-doors in the floors, where goods had been hoisted up and down ; heavy feet and heavy weights had started every knot in the welltrodden planking : inconvenient bulks and beams and awkward staircases perplexed my passage through the wards…. A gentleman and lady, a young husband and wife, have bought and fitted up this building for its present noble use, and have quietly settled themselves in it as its medical officers and directors. Both have had considerable practical experience of medicine and surgery ; he as house-surgeon of a great London hospital ; she as a very earnest student, tested by severe examination, and also as a nurse of the sick poor during the prevalence of cholera.”
The ’gentleman and lady’ were Dr Nathaniel Heckford and his wife Sarah (nee Goff), who had met while working in Wapping during the devastating cholera epidemic of 1866, which left more than 5,000 people dead in the space of 5 months. Heckford had trained at the London Hospital Medical College (part of what is now the Royal London Hospital).
Historically, children had been treated alongside adults in hospitals, with girls on women’s wards and boys on men’s wards. The nineteenth-century brought new understandings of the specialist skills required for children’s medicine, and with it, the foundation of the first children’s hospitals. In the 1860s, paediatric medicine was in its infancy, and few specialist children’s hospitals existed – the first in the UK was Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, which had been founded in 1852, but did not treat babies and infants.
The new East London Hospital was therefore the first London hospital for children under two years of age. The Heckfords saw the value of treating patients and their families holistically, so like many early children’s hospitals, the new hospital also provided medical care for mothers and other women in the local community, in order to support the health of their children.
The new women’s and children’s hospitals were often staffed by the pioneering female doctors who had been amongst the first women to train in medicine, and the East London Hospital was no different. Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, an East Londoner by birth, and the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon, was a visiting physician there.
In December 1871, at the age of only 29, Nathaniel Heckford died of consumption (that is, tuberculosis - which, before the discovery of antibiotics in the 20th century, was endemic in the UK and often fatal). His widow Sarah continued to be involved in the management of the hospital, and in 1877, it moved to a new location at Glamis Road, Shadwell, using funds raised through Dickens’ ongoing fundraising efforts for the hospital, which he called ‘A Small Star in the East’.
The hospital continued to expand, opening a convalescent home in Bognor in West Sussex in 1898 to allow its child patients from the polluted metropolis to recuperate in the sea air. By 1930 the hospital at Glamis Road had 136 beds. You can hear from one of our researchers, Iria Suárez Martinez, about her research into the design of the hospital in her talk, 'A Better Childhood for All Children: Designing the Modern Space for Sick Children in East London, 1850-1900', on our YouTube channel.
The name of the hospital was changed in 1932, to The Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital for Children, after the young princess, then a child herself, who later became Queen Elizabeth II. In 1942, the hospital merged with the Queen's Hospital in Hackney Road to form one organisation called the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children - although it continued to operate across the two sites in Shadwell and Hackney. Developments at the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in subsequent years were focused on the Hackney site, and by the 1960's the number of beds at Shadwell had fallen to less than 50. The hospital building at Glamis Road was finally closed in April 1963, and the building was subsequently demolished.
After the Glamis Road site was vacated, the records of this fascinating little hospital, dating back to its foundation in 1868, were moved to the Hackney Road site, then to the local library service, and eventually to the Tower Hamlets District Health Authority Archives, which was a predecessor of today’s Trust Archives service. They were later joined by the records of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children when that hospital also closed and its services moved to the Royal London Hospital in 1996.
Today, you can search the catalogues for the archives of these two fascinating hospitals online (collections RLHEL and RLHQE respectively); together they record the long history of paediatric care in East London.
With thanks to Esme Lokouta, who undertook research used in this post in 2018.