New Exhibition at the Cardiff Story Museum

February 23rd, 2018 by Admin 1 comment »

We are very pleased to announce our next exhibition from Saturday the 3rd of March at the Cardiff Story Museum based in the old library building on the Hayes in the City Center.

We will have the City Showcase space which is downstairs and the exhibition will share some of the stories of those who worked and were treated at Whitchurch Hospital. There will also be some artefacts on display from Whitchurch.

The exhibition will run from Saturday the 3rd of March until Sunday the 3rd of June 2018

 

 

 

 

 

Photo taken by Eyes2Me Photography

New Exhibition – Whitchurch Hospital – Moving On

February 22nd, 2017 by Admin No comments »

We are very happy to announce our next exhibition at Cardiff Central Library opening on the 6th of March

Please come along and have a look at the exhibition and have a look at the events on during the week

The events are listed on Eventbrite:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ysbytyr-eglwys-newydd-symud-ymlaen-diwrnod-coffa-whitchurch-hospital-moving-on-reminiscence-day-tickets-32201524627?aff=es2

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/symud-ymlaen-gweithdy-ysgrifennu-creadigol-gyda-will-ford-moving-on-creative-writing-workshop-with-tickets-32202136457?aff=es2

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/symud-ymlaen-barddoniaeth-megaverse-moving-on-megaverse-poetry-tickets-32202167550?aff=es2

Moving On Exhibition

Arddangosfa Symud Ymlaen

 

Guest blog post from Tim Bennett, Quality Improvement/Governance Nurse with Mental Health Services for Older People (MHSOP)

December 2nd, 2016 by Admin No comments »

The Summer House

What is the summer house? I can tell you what it means to me – it’s not just one thing!
It’s a school, a fear, a resting point, a home and playground too.  A community, a smoking shelter and a sanctuary for who?

mer House outside ward W1A

The summer house outside Ward West 1A, photo taken by Tim.

A School  – I remember –  warm sunny days, green trees, excitement at my new job and getting a qualification at the end of it.  Some of my learning on placement took place in the summer house. Debates and discussion with different members of the clinical team, nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, OTs and social workers.  Books, pens and note pads – patients as case studies, illness and diagnosis, treatments with talking, with medication with ECT, psychiatry, psychology  – a bewildering array of topics and subjects.  What a place to learn! This was my classroom for a brief period of time.
A Fear – someone is missing from the ward or failed to return from leave – a search needs to be undertaken.  If there was any suicide risk we were told to look up into the trees, just in case. Check the summer house – under the benches, around each corner, look up, and check on top also.  Fortunately for me and gladly for the patients that were missing – I never did find anyone who had committed suicide.  It remained a fear of mine until we left Whitchurch, the thoughts remain with me even now that I no longer work there.
A resting point – for the years I worked in Tegfan day hospital, in the grounds of Whitchurch, one of the summer houses provided a midpoint between both buildings.  On our zigzag journeys, around the site, this was frequently a resting point for those with physical disabilities to stop and rest  – for others it was a point to sit and have a cigarette.  This was always a social occasion of those gathered – one thing in common, the hospital.  Patient, staff or visitor, there was a draw to sit and stop.  Was this truly asylum – inclusion, acceptance and safety?

Summer House between Whitchurch and Tegfan Day hospital taken in 2016

Summer House between Whitchurch and Tegfan Day hospital taken in 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A home and a play ground  – during my time on nights, I saw the summer house provided a playground for the wild life of the hospital – foxes, rabbits, squirrels, wood pigeons and magpies proliferate as do the bats and may bugs. At one time a place for the feral cats too.  Moths and all manner of insects – making it their home, their living room, their bedroom, their dining room, their bathroom and their playground.
A Community – they have formed throughout my 33 years a community meeting place, not just for people of the hospital but for the general community too.  Dog walkers, wanderers and especially kids – another resting place, a chatting shop, a play ground, a teenage lovers lane, a drug den for sales and use of illicit substances, a pub for underage drinking and smoking.
A smoking shelter – with the implementation of smoking bans the summer house became an illicit smoking shelter – staff would congregate, smoke, chat, catch up on the gossip of their own and especially others lives, arrange nights out, disclose personal achievements and failures, seeking support and kindness.

 

Summer house from Ward West 1A

Summer house from Ward West 1A, photo by Tim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A personal sanctuary – This is where through 33 years I’d sit and contemplate life, and from this make life decisions and consider how to handle situations that weren’t in my control – to begin with were my thoughts about psychiatry, personal issues of career plans, relationship plans and relationship ends, either of my making or those made by others.  These summer houses know all my life secrets, and I trust that the details will never be shared. They were and still are my sanctuary, my friend and my confidante.
My last resting point after my very last 12 hour night shift at Whitchurch, was the summer house.  I sat, lit a cigarette and reflected on 33 years – I saw myself and my colleagues and friends, through the decades – some no longer with us – but they were there with me for that final resting point.  Also came to mind my family, friends and relationships – they were present with me too.  I could see and hear them; they along with my memories above are my summer house, my special place.

Thank you to Tim Bennett

Guest blog post from Mark Doherty, Lead Nurse for Mental Health Services for Older People (MHSOP)

November 15th, 2016 by Admin No comments »
A Lack Of Strangeness —A Personal Memory of Whitchurch Hospital
Since GoogleEarth accepted Wales into the international community by allowing it the unforgiving scrutiny of the high-resolution image, it has been possible to extend the godlike aerial gaze to the rooftops of Whitchurch Hospital, its spindly angular corridors, its abundance of redbrick, its green quadrants, rotting gazebos and of course the tower. I can’t help but think it must have been a Sunday when the photographing satellite went over: there are too few cars in the car park, for one thing, for it to be a weekday.
Google Earth screen shot

Google Earth screen shot

Otherwise, the image contains in detail all those elements that will be familiar to anyone who ever worked, or was admitted, or visited, or trespassed there. From about 1000 feet, it has a very particular shape; there are still many Edwardian psychiatric institutions in the country but, from space, nothing looks quite like Whitchurch Hospital.Arguably, less detail gives you more aesthetic information: in the old, low-resolution version one was forced to conclude that the blurred thing on the screen had an insectoid, or arachnoid , shape to it. There is no denying this: there is a main body, a thorax, a head, and a symmetrically-arranged number of jointed arms. This organic shape is apparent from ordinance survey maps too, and has always coloured my own view of the building and what it is, what it gets up to. But the main business of course, all the thinking, does not go on in the head—it happens in those clawed legs, where the wards are. One by one the legs are being tourniqueted-off: Whitchurch Hospital is a big rambling Edwardian psychiatric asylum, presided over by one of Enoch Powell’s isolated, brooding and majestic water towers and, as determined by Powell it is closing, forever.Once you start the process of closing down a hospital there is no turning back. The wards that close first manifest a kind of architectural gangrene, and the rot will spread throughout the building with no regard for the timescales of the planners. Wards West 5 and West 5a were already closed when I first worked here, thirty-one years ago: if you put your eye close the grimy glass in the door, and ignore the absence of floorboards, the bleached empty beer cans, the desiccated leaves, you can almost see what a National Health ward looked like in the 1950s. If there are ghosts, they are the ghosts of Dirk Bogarde and Hattie Jacques. But the Western extremity of the hospital has died along with the wards, and the communicating corridors are full of graffiti and smell of urine. Hattie Jacques would not have stood for this.The fact is that Whitchurch Hospital will not officially and completely close for a few months yet, but working in it is a vastly different experience from what it was only fifteen or twenty years ago. Then, there were two large nurses’ homes in addition to the medical quarters, and the hospital had its own social club, none of which was considered compatible with the vision of a modern mental health service. Undoubtedly in the early part of the century those nurses’ homes would have been segregated male and female, but in my time (there was a lot of Duran Duran and Boy George about; we drank cider and cheap wine when the Tube was on in the East Homes Television Room) the culture was emphatically a mixed one. There were parties. There was much commerce with the nearest pub, the Hollybush, which closed just in time for the hospital canteen to open for the night shift, where the lovely Beryl would serve sausage and chips.In fact, my office now is what once was the television room of the East Homes. I won’t go into any of the hallucinatory images from the past that now continually haunt me as I sit at my desk, super-imposed on the present-day anaglypta, but it is safe to say that nurses’ homes, television rooms and all, can be fun places to be. If there are ghosts in my office, rest assured they are all having a good time. One of the mildest memories I have is of leaning out of the window with a guitar in the middle of the night, singing the song American Pie, and waking up the patients on Ward East 1. I was young, we had been drinking. The night air on the other side of that window frame was warm and fragrant, incidentally: it was the summer of 1983 and Whitchurch Hospital was a glorious, complicated, redbrick building enfolded in thick greenery. I would wake with a hangover, reach for my fags, and go to work on whatever ward on which I happened to be placed. But work on the wards was really only an incidental sideline—what was really important was this vibrant social life I was experiencing in this liberated commune that happened to be a nurses’ home in the middle of a psychiatric hospital. As I say, I was young: it had not yet dawned on me that the real life of the hospital was what was happening out there on the ends of those spider-limbs, in the wards. I was living in a pleasant old building in a sort of leafy village; occasionally I was required to go to work.We were, of course, a little culture co-existing with other cultures in the same way that radio stations can occupy the same electromagnetic spectrum and yet hardly interfere with each other at all. There was, for instance, a whole army of professionals including psychiatrists, occupational therapists and nurses, trying to provide a range of services to people with mental health problems. There was a taxonomy of clinical areas, not all of which has survived: Acute, Long-Stay, Medium Long-Stay, Psycho-geriatrics. We can hardly be surprised that that last one hasn’t made it to 2014: when I first saw the dangling NHS green Perspex sign pointing to the Psycho-geriatric ward (I was nineteen years old, I hadn’t a clue what it meant) it was all I could do not to think of Anthony Perkins. We soon found out what Psycho-geriatrics really meant, though, and in a way it was no less disturbing: I was nineteen, and here were people who were dementing, whose very essence was being drawn away maliciously by some organic process. I was profoundly affected to learn that I would actually be obliged to feed people, and indeed one person who trained with me saw this happening one day and did not return the next.Many of the staff were from families that had long had a working relationship with Whitchurch Hospital. The Nursing Assistants, in particular, were the sons and daughters of other Whitchurch Nursing Assistants. Students and even qualified nurses were viewed as fly-by-nights. These NAs were often from north of the M4, from the valleys, where, at that time, a whole other culture was operating, and a malignant one at that: those NAs would be from families where somebody was working in the pits. Or not, as the case may be: it was 1983, 1984, the height of the time when Thatcher was making her point about precisely how important individuals and communities were in her particular vision of the future. That sense of grievance and militancy was seeping into the wards: those Nursing Assistants, it wasn’t a good time to mess with them.There was, of course, another culture in there, with its own inalienable point on the spectrum: that of the patients. Although this was a really whole range of cultures: the patients on the Acute wards inhabited a sort of existential bridge between the hospital, and real life, because they were people who had jobs, wives, children, their own houses; it was just that something had temporarily gone wrong with them, somehow. And what experts we were at categorising precisely what it was that had gone wrong, and, by extension, categorising the people themselves: this person is a MANIC DEPRESSIVE, this one is a SCHIZOPHRENIC, this one over here (on the “secure” ward, no doubt) a PSYCHOPATH (Tony Perkins again). How blithely we accepted the diagnostic labels dispensed by our medically qualified leaders, without thought for the effect this would have on the individuals. We’re better at this now, but only slightly. And please don’t assume that I think that mental illness does not exist: it does. I just don’t think we know as much about it as we think we do. The other thing about patients on Acute wards: they had visitors—evidence of the temporary nature of their illness.Unless it was not temporary. If whatever it was that ailed them did not go away, then they probably had a “chronic” illness, and would then graduate to a medium long-stay ward for “rehabilitation” which, frankly, was for life. When people talk about institutionalisation, this is what they mean. People who were absorbed into this category would join a pantheon of “characters” that extended in time back to the birth of Whitchurch Hospital. Any old psychiatric hospital has its “chronics”—people so damaged firstly by their illness and secondly by the soul-destroying patterns of existence that a psychiatric hospital imposes, that they are compelled to conduct themselves in endless circles of repetitive and bizarre behaviour. It took us a long time to understand that it was the hospitals themselves that were making this happen. This is why we try not to admit people at all, any more, in case we contort and distort them the way we used to. It is far better to let real life contort and distort people instead.

Once, one of the “characters” died of old age, in his bed. His heart stopped. I heard the emergency call, and was told to rush up the stairs with the defibrillator, which in those days was the size of a fridge. The cables and paddles fell off and got tangled in my legs. When I finally got to the “chronic” ward it was, of course, too late. The ward staff were stricken with grief. “Good old_____” said one of the Nursing Assistants, “…he was a perfect patient, he was. He never shit the bed once.” You have to believe me when I tell you that the staff were genuinely upset by the death, and that the Nursing Assistant’s comment was meant as an expression of his admiration for the old guy. With such modest levels of acceptable behaviour, it is hardly surprising that we created a group of patients whose behaviour was totally unfit, and never would be fit, to survive in the outside world.

So we don’t do that anymore. In fact we hardly ever admit anybody at all, if we can help it; and even when we do it is for the shortest time possible, lest the toxins of the institution affect them. This is undoubtedly a good thing, and yet I worry, because I have a personal conviction that the outside world is as much a deforming institution as Whitchurch Hospital and its like ever was.

It is true that, as with many old institutions, Whitchurch was built on the outskirts of the city so that the unpalatable fact of mental illness could be kept at a distance and not cause offence. It is also true that the city then advanced to encompass the area of Coryton, and for most of the last hundred years the denizens of Whitchurch and Coryton have had to live with the redbrick spider and its green-domed water tower looming over them. It is fair to say that the local residents have coped quite well with this terrible burden. People who do not live in such circumstances are faintly discomfited by the idea—it must be like living next to a high security prison or a nuclear reactor: you are always waiting for the breach of protocol that leads to the escape of convict or radiation, or lunatic. But the locals in Whitchurch know the same thing that the locals in Cefn Coed or St. Cadocs also know: that the presence of an old psychiatric hospital in your village means precisely nothing; it is almost boring, because when the in-patients come out to shop or visit the pub or bank, it is a complete non-event. There is a disappointing lack of strangeness about those who have been diagnosed as mentally ill.

But people want it to be strange. Back in 1983 I had been out on the town one evening and had taken a taxi back to the Homes. Somewhere along North Rd., Drive said to me: “So you lives in Whitchurch ‘Ospital, then, is it?”

I replied in the affirmative. Drive narrowed his eyes a bit, gave this some thought, then asked his question: “Something I’ve always wondered about that place,” he said, “do you ‘ave much trouble with ’em howling in the night?

I replied in the negative. He was clearly disappointed. He wanted, no doubt, tales of awesome lunacy, but I had none to tell.

Here is another memory from 1983. Every Saturday night, the Great Hall would be pulsing with pop music and chatter, and there would be a beery odour. Not a patients’ social function, not a staff reunion. The corridors would be full of drunken, unfamiliar people. Whitchurch Hospital was hired out on Saturday nights for wedding receptions; now, almost a quarter of a century on there must be at least some of those marriages surviving, with their memories of one humid and crapulent night in Whitchurch. It does seem an odd thing to do, and it hasn’t happened for some time, and yet only last week I was driving through the hospital’s main entrance and had to halt the car because of two young men in kilts posing with a bride and groom against a wedding car full of flowers and ribbons, a professional photographer snapping athletically away. How did people come to that decision? Where shall we have the reception, love? Where do you fancy for the photos? Castell Coch? Cathays Park? Cardiff Bay? I know, how about…

I suppose it just supports my contention that a psychiatric hospital is an ordinary place. Nothing, as Phillip Larkin said, like something, happens anywhere. And it’s as good a place as any to hold a wedding reception.

I moved out of Whitchurch for several years. Of course it wasn’t the same when I came back. It was falling to bits for one thing. Like the coal industry, it no longer has a place in somebody’s particular vision of the future, and so it has been neglected and is showing the terrible signs of that neglect.

As a Mental Health Professional whose teeth are getting quite long, I must applaud the closure of Whitchurch Hospital as a symbolic sweeping aside of the ancient asylum culture, clearing the way for a new build that will be fit for humans to inhabit. And I do applaud it. But it will be an ordinary building, the new one, a competent building; you and I know that it will possess not one hundredth of the aesthetic power and romance of Whitchurch Version 1.0. It will lack strangeness. Some of the old building is “listed”, and therefore parts of it will continue to exist to accommodate the flatlets or shopping centre or office facilities that are planned for the site, but it will be unrecognisable. It is difficult to see how the village of Whitchurch itself will retain its sense of character, unless the Water Tower is to remain.

I moved to Whitchurch Hospital to start my Registered Mental Nurse training when I was nineteen. A little room in the East Homes was pretty much my first experience of independent living.

Nurses Homes April 2016 Copyright: Mark Doherty

Nurses Homes April 2016
Copyright: Mark Doherty

But the nurse education went on in a building on the other side of the site, in a squat 1950s block. So my lessons were spent with a panoramic view of the hospital and the grounds. I started my training in February 1983. I was overwhelmed by two things: the little jars of real foetuses in the glass-fronted cabinet at the back of the classroom (I have never been able to work out what they had to do with psychiatry), and the view of the hospital with the trees in front of it. In February, the trees were bare and exhibited intricate branch-networks against a white sky, like the diagrams of bronchi, arteries and nerves I was being shown in anatomy lessons. At the age of nineteen, I thought I had been transported into the heart of a massive poem, and am still haunted by that time. If the new flats or offices find that they have a ghost, it may well be mine.

 

Thank you to Mark Doherty, follow Mark on twitter (@markdoherty1)

 

Exhibition at The National Museum, Cardiff

November 1st, 2016 by Admin No comments »
Exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff

Exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff

Exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff

Exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff

We were invited to take part in the Re-Imagining Challenging History conference by Dr Jenny Kidd, lecturer at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural studies and Dr Rachelle Barlow, School of Music, Cardiff University.

Elen Phillips, Principal Curator Contemporary & Community History at St Fagans joned us with the amazing tablecloth made in 1917 at Whitchurch Hospital.

Huge thank you to everyone who made it a great experience including Alan Vaughan Hughes from Special Collections and Archives at Cardiff University, Eleri Evans from the Museum, Jenny Kidd, Rachelle Barlow, Elen Phillips and all those who shared their stories of Whitchurch Hospital with us.

1917 tablecloth made in Whitchurch Hospital

1917 tablecloth made in Whitchurch Hospital

Exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff

Exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff

Tea Party Photos

May 26th, 2016 by Admin No comments »

Here are the photos that Craig Harper from Media Resources took on the 11th of March. Thank you to the Mental Health Clinical Board for permission to put on the website.

It was a lovely afternoon of meeting up with old friends and colleagues, thank you to all who came along.

Recognise anyone? Do get in touch if you were there or recognise some faces.

Lovely tea in the dining room

Lovely tea in the dining room

The Exhibition is now Closed

April 16th, 2016 by Admin 2 comments »

Thank you to everyone that supported and visited our exhibition during March and again this week. We have had so many visitors it has been amazing. We hope you have enjoyed the experience as we all have.

The Exhibition is Now Closed

The Exhibition is Now Closed

Updated Programme of Events for the Exhibition

April 12th, 2016 by Admin No comments »
Updated Programme of events

Updated Programme of events

Exhibition Programme of Events

April 6th, 2016 by Admin No comments »

PROGRAMME OF EVENTS

Monday 11th April – Whitchurch Hospital 1908 – 2016:
A General History
(A talk by Dr. Ian Beech, Academic Manager for Mental Health, Faculty of Life Sciences and Education, University of South Wales, Pontypridd).

At: 12:30 to 13.30pm. (Limited spaces. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Wednesday 13th April – Whitchurch Hospital 1915 – 1919:
The Hospital During WWI
(a talk by Dr. Ian Beech, Academic Manager for Mental Health , Faculty of Life Sciences and Education, University of South Wales, Pontypridd).

At:  12:30 to 13:30 pm. (Limited spaces. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment)

Both talks above will take place in the Lecture Theatre, opposite Ward East 2, Whitchurch Hospital
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Thursday 14th April 6-8pm (only)  and
Friday 15th April 10-1pm (only) On Ward East 1, Whitchurch Hospital
WWI Tablecloth Display –

An opportunity to view another important artefact of the hospital’s long history.

The embroidered tablecloth, bought in Jacob’s Market, Cardiff, in 1981, and dated ‘1917’, was made by WWI military casualties recuperating at the hospital. It includes the names of numerous staff and soldiers there at the time. It is now preserved at St. Fagan’s Museum of Welsh Life, who has kindly agreed to display the tablecloth).

End of an Era Exhibition Returns

March 19th, 2016 by Admin No comments »

Our exhibition was so well attended with excellent reviews and many disappointed that they could not visit we are opening again next month.

Please continue to support us and bring along your photos, memories and any artifacts related to the hospital.

Exhibition.week.2.IMG_4630