From Daffodils and Little Folks to Sunny
At the start of each new year, the archives close to the public for our annual Collections Fortnight, which gives us an opportunity to focus on large collections projects, requiring us to spend long periods in the stores, or use the archives searchroom to process large accessions of material. Although our capacity was limited this Collections Fortnight due to staff sickness, we have added over 150 new items to the catalogue; undertaken scoping work for a digitisation project; and housed more than 200 large plans in protective enclosures, amongst other projects.
As part of the work this January, we completed cataloguing of the archives of the former Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, Hackney. It’s a fabulous collection (collection reference RLHQE), so we wanted to share a little more about the archives, and the story of the hospital.
The collection we hold is large, comprising over 1,400 catalogued units, and it spans the history of the hospital from its foundation in 1867 to its eventual closure in 1996. The hospital was opened in 1867, in a house on Virginia Road, Bethnal Green, by two Quakers, Miss Mary Elizabeth Philips and Miss Ellen Philips, and named the Dispensary for Women and Children. This was an era of widespread social concern about the health of children living in poor quality urban housing, when the first specialist children’s hospitals were opened across Europe to treat children away from crowded and unsanitary conditions at home (including in 1852, Great Ormond Street Hospital, the first British children’s hospital) - and it was soon decided that the new hospital should focus only on children. Renamed the North-Eastern Hospital for Children, the hospital moved to 125 Hackney Road, where it had 12 cots providing free care to sick children. In 1870 the freehold of 327 Hackney Road was purchased and the hospital grew on that site, on the corner of Hackney Road and Goldsmith Row. It was re-named the Queen's Hospital for Children in 1907.
A ‘country branch’ called the Little Folks Home was opened in 1911 on Cooden Sea Road, Bexhill Sea, Sussex. Around half the funds for the home had been raised by the child readers of Little Folks magazine, mostly through charitable bazaars. Funds had already been raised to endow a 'Little Folks' cot at the hospital c1900, as well as a 'Little Folks Ward' of eleven beds. Fundraising by children was a feature of the charitable support for the hospital - funds for the Daffodil Cot, for example, were raised by young members of 'The Daffodil Club', who compiled hand-illustrated magazines for club subscribers, while the 'Stamp Collectors Cot' reflected a hobby popular amongst the children who raised funds for it.
The hospital's archives include over 350 boxes of case notes (series RLHQE/M/11), which we believe record all of the in-patients treated at the Queen's Hospital at the hospital between 1901-1948, and form an incredible resource for research into childhood illness, East London demographic and healthcare histories, and family history. They were arranged at the hospital into bundles arranged by the doctor or surgeon treating the patients, making them challenging to search for individuals or illnesses, so for the last year or so, our brilliant archive volunteers have been indexing the notes to improve their searchability and open them up for research. Although access to notes from the later years in the series, from 1926-1948, is still restricted under the Data Protection Act, around 80 boxes, with an average 100 case notes in each, can be searched, and indexes have been created for 25 boxes so far. Indexes for each box can be searched through the catalogue; if you are looking for a particular patient name in the hospital records but don't know the year of treatment, please contact us.
In 1942, the Queen’s Hospital absorbed the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital, Shadwell (for more on that hospital, see our previous post, A Small Star in the East), and was re-named the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children (often abbreviated to QEH, or known simply to Hackney residents as ‘the Children’s Hospital’). Thereafter the hospital functioned on two London sites at Hackney Road and Shadwell, as well as the annexe at Banstead Wood, Surrey, which was opened as the Banstead Branch, Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, in 1948. As with the Little Folks Home in Bexhill, it was believed that the rural environment at Banstead would be beneficial to children from deprived areas of inner London. (Incidentally, the Banstead Branch was not the only hospital annexe in the area - the London Hospital also had an annexe at Banstead, reflecting the reputation it had had since the 17th century as a health resort, famous for its “wholesome air”!)
The Shadwell and Banstead sites closed in the 1960s and 1970s, and from 1968-1994, QEH became linked to the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, as part of the Hospitals for Sick Children group. Over 50 management files from this era have been added to the catalogue in series RLHQE/A/6 this Collections Fortnight, and the new catalogue descriptions will be available online soon.
A new research centre was opened at Hackney Road in 1972, following a fundraising campaign, and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Children’s Fund was established a few years later to coordinate fundraising campaigns and events. The Donald Winnicott Centre, named after the famous paediatrician and psychoanalyst who worked at the hospital in the mid-20th century, opened in 1978 to provide both paediatric psychiatric and medical services on a single site.
Changing models of healthcare provision in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with increasingly outdated facilities at the Hackney Road site, brought with them proposals to close the hospital and integrate services with the larger general hospitals in East London. In April 1996, QEH joined The Royal Hospitals NHS Trust, a predecessor of Barts Health, and in 1998, the hospital finally closed, with the bulk of its services transferred to The Royal London Hospital as the Queen Elizabeth Children's Service. Today, the specialist services provided at our hospitals for children and young people are known as Young Barts Health (YBH), whose mascot, Sunny, can sometimes be seen at the hospitals to welcome young patients.