A History of St. John's, Brighton

By Simon Smith

Over its 143-year history, St. John's has been a remarkable and enduring part of Brighton's educational landscape.This book charts the way in which Sister Jane Borradaile, its tireless and resourceful foundress, raised money to build a home for the care of less-fortunate children in Victorian England. They were predominantly victims of deprivation in the East End, who went to St. John's to convalesce. Also taken in were orphan girls who were trained for domestic service. The home adapted itself to the needs of a different world in 1957 by becoming a residential school for children with special needs. It has since extended its site and its age range to become a nationally acknowledged centre for those aged five to 25 with autism and other related conditions. The story of St. John's is interspersed with many contemporary photographs and with personal accounts from young people who went there to convalesce in the middle of the last century. Feature articles help to place it in the context of the wider world. The book makes clear that the level of care extended to young people has remained constant throughout the 100 years since the death of Sister Jane.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781784423483

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

Part I

St. John’s Convalescent Home: A History

Chapter 1: Is there really such a place?

Chapter 2: An entirely free home

Chapter 3: I have determined to build

Chapter 4: A bright, happy little family

Chapter 5: Under the management of the Community

Chapter 6: Waifs and Strays and war again

Chapter 7: Post-war: cold lamb and beetroot for lunch

Part II

St John’s History

Chapter 1: From home to school

Chapter 2: The Forster years

Chapter 3: School and college

Chapter 4: Seaford

Chapter 5: Millennials

Chapter 6: A legacy of rare quality

Chapter 7: Every child matters

Part III

Building Futures

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Panorama of Brighton from the gardens of St. John’s. (St. John’s College)

Foreword

Some of my happiest moments during my many years involved with autism have been spent while visiting the schools and colleges that support young people living with this very complex and potentially devastating condition, and the visits I’ve made to St. John’s are without doubt some of my highlights.

This fascinating history makes clear that although the approach to and methods of helping vulnerable young people at St. John’s may have changed, the ethos and caring approach that lie behind them have always existed, from the early beginnings as a convalescent home helping victims of deprivation in Victorian England through to its current status as a nationally acknowledged centre for those with autism and other related conditions.

The problems that beset our children and young adults at St. John’s are different nowadays, to be sure: coping with the physical diseases that were commonplace in Victorian England – diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, polio, tetanus and typhoid – has given way to caring for those who need support for more subtle difficulties. However, the need for the professional and humane approach that has always been the hallmark of the staff is as strong as ever.

Illustrated throughout with photographs, maps, posters, programmes and other memorabilia, this comprehensive book is a historical document in its own right, but, much more, is a testament to the ongoing need for wonderful institutions such as St. John’s and the standard of care that it provides. Long may it survive, and continue its important work.

Jane Asher

President, National Autistic Society

Jane Asher opening Scrummies on 23 October 2013. (St. John’s College)

Part I

St. John’s Convalescent Home: A History

Chapter 1

Is there really such a place?

In Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865), the elderly Betty Higden is concerned about her ailing little grandson Johnny. His breathing is difficult. ‘Me choking, granny,’ he says from his grandmother’s lap.

He is clearly in urgent need of medical attention, which his family know to be expensive. The kindly John Rokesmith suggests taking him to ‘a place where there are none but children; a place set up on purpose for sick children; where the good doctors and nurses pass their lives with children, talk to none but children, touch none but children, comfort and cure none but children.’

‘Is there really such a place?’ asked the old woman with a gaze of wonder?

‘Yes, Betty, on my word and you shall see it.’¹

The place Johnny is taken to is ‘The Children’s Hospital’, what we now know as Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, founded in 1852, just three years before the novel appeared.

Charles Dickens (1812–70) by (George) Herbert Watkins, 1858. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Once there, Johnny was ‘to find himself lying in a quiet little bed…and at the bed’s head was a coloured picture, beautiful to see, representing as it were another Johnny seated on the knee of some Angel surely who loved little children. And, marvellous fact, to lie and stare at: Johnny had become one of a little family, all in little quiet beds…with little platforms whereon were to be seen dolls’ houses, woolly dogs with mechanical barks…tin armies, Moorish tumblers, wooden tea things, and the riches of the earth.’² Sadly, Johnny’s illness, presumably tuberculosis, is too far gone and the chapter ends with a deathbed scene.

The original Hospital for Sick Children at 49 Great Ormond Street, c. 1870. (Archive Service, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust)

Johnny’s plight and John Rokesmith’s attempts to help him provide an apt illustration in fiction of GM Trevelyan’s assertion in his English Social History that ‘An enlarged sympathy with children was one of the chief contributions made by the Victorian English to real civilisation’. It also of course illustrates Dickens’ role in exposing the plight of children and engaging his readers’ sympathies. Whilst modern readers may find this scene and others like it sentimental, there can be no doubt as to its effectiveness. More than this, Johnny’s condition has come about through exposure to the appalling living conditions that were to be found in poor quarters of all large cities, where the air was foul, the atmosphere damp, the water poor and the food meagre.

The Aunt Judy Cot, sponsored in 1868 by the eponymous children’s magazine, and the first such endowed cot there. This is the sort of cot Johnny would have found himself in. Sister Jane was active in having cots and beds endowed at St. John’s. (Archive Service, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust)

Sardonyx representation of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), nurse and reformer, by Luigi Saulini, 1855–60. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY)

In short, Victorian London was not a healthy place, nor was any town centre in the industrial age. Children suffered from multiple influenza outbreaks, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, polio, tetanus, and typhoid. Merely keeping sanitary was difficult until the later ages of piped water. This, combined with the lack of vaccinations for diseases, led to an extremely high infant mortality rate amongst all classes of society. Mortality rates for the 1860s and 70s provide stark evidence of the harmful effects of polluted air and harsh living conditions. For example, the average life span in 1840, in the Whitechapel district of London, was 45 years for the upper class and 27 years for tradesmen. Labourers and servants lived only 22 years on average.

Infant and child mortality was shockingly high. The plight of Johnny is uncannily echoed by Katherine Mansfield 70 years later in her short story, ‘The Life of Ma Parker’. Again, a grandmother, Ma Parker herself, remembers the suffering of her grandson Lennie while going about her work of drudgery. She recalls the bogus remedies she sends off postal orders to buy in order that Lennie might be relieved of his cough.

From Lennie’s little box of a chest there came a sound as though something was boiling. There was a great lump of something bubbling in his chest that he couldn’t get rid of. When he coughed the sweat sprang out on his head; his eyes bulged, his hands waved, and the great lump bubbled as a potato knocks in a saucepan.³

Her employer, ‘the literary gentleman’, is no John Rokesmith, but one who totally fails to understand the pain of his charwoman’s loss, let alone the agony of Lennie’s condition. What a difference proper nursing, valid medication and, above all, clean air would have made to both Johnny and Lennie.

In the 1860s, Florence Nightingale brought more attention to the use of ventilation and site selection in preventing disease in hospitals. Her Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not, published in 1859 and still in print today, proved to be a seminal work. Her experiences in the Crimea showed her that many more men died from infection and poor hygiene than from their wounds. Cleanliness, ventilation, clean bedding, nutritious food and rigorous observation lay at the heart of nursing. She declared that a convalescent home was superior to hospital because of its healthful location and the change it provided from the dreary institutional life of hospital wards. These places would provide the domesticity of a home. ‘As long as they are hospital inmates, they feel as hospital inmates, they think as hospital inmates, they act as hospital inmates, not as people recovering.’⁴ In a pamphlet for one convalescent home of the period we read that it provides ‘…tiny sufferers with relief from the stifling courts and slums of London and big cities’.⁵

Brighton Blind Asylum, Eastern Road, now demolished. (With thanks to the Regency Society)

It was thus that convalescent homes came to be built on the south coast in the 1870s and 80s