Pembury Hospital’s Hidden Workhouse: Smallpox, Stone-Breaking and the Chapel Left Standing

Day 5 of 15. Yesterday's story was a precisely tree-ring-dated archaeological find at a great house. Today's has no archaeology at all - just the paper trail of a Victorian institution for the poor, left behind under a modern NHS hospital car park. Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury, all glass and steel and en-suite patient rooms, sees nearly 100 babies born a week. Before any of that, this was the Tonbridge Union Workhouse: built in 1836 for 400 of the poorest people from ten Kent parishes, and the site of a smallpox epidemic within two years of opening its doors.

The Tonbridge Poor Law Union formed on 5 November 1835, bringing together ten parishes - Ashurst, Bidborough, Brenchley, Capel, Hadlow, Horsmonden, Pembury, Speldhurst, Tonbridge and Tudeley - under one elected Board of Guardians. Within a fortnight they'd resolved to build a new workhouse for 500 inmates. A site at “Bo-Peep” in Pembury was considered first, on land owned by the Marquis Camden, but his asking price of £350 was judged too expensive. The Guardians bought two acres at Sandhill, Newbars Wood instead, for £100. Architect John Whichcord - who went on to design the workhouses at Cranbrook, Dartford and Malling too - drew up a building for 400, built by local contractor George Cole for £4,152 and completed in December 1836.

In the winter of 1837-8, smallpox swept through the workhouse. The Guardians' response was to commission a dedicated isolation block at a cost of £600 - its exact location is no longer known. It wasn't the last time the site's infirmary drew scrutiny: in 1894 the British Medical Journal sent a commission to inspect conditions at provincial workhouse infirmaries, and its report on Tonbridge found the sick spread across three separate buildings. A 33-bed isolation block was being used for venereal disease cases, children with measles or whooping cough, and what the report called “offensive” patients, all together. The commission's verdict on the newer infirmary wing was broadly favourable - but it singled out the nursing as a serious weak point, noting that the only fully trained nurse on the entire site was a temporary night nurse.

Pembury's best-known ghost legend has nothing to do with the workhouse at all. A 1914 parish history, Luke Pearce's Historical Associations of Pembury, records that Great Hawkwell Manor - a house that once stood in one of the village's five old hamlets - burned down, and that a ghost story grew out of the fire involving an owner who died leaving two daughters behind. We haven't been able to track down a fuller, independently-verifiable account of how that story actually goes, which puts it closer to half-remembered village folklore than anything we can stand behind - unlike the workhouse's smallpox epidemic and its 1894 nursing shortfalls, both of which are on the record in the Guardians' own minutes and a national medical journal.

The workhouse became Pembury County Hospital in 1938 and joined the NHS in 1948. Shane MacGowan of The Pogues was born there in 1957; Dame Kelly Holmes in 1970. When the new £226 million Tunbridge Wells Hospital opened on the same site in September 2011, every Victorian building was demolished - except the 1870 chapel, which is Grade II listed and still stands today at the edge of the site, outlived by nothing else the Guardians built around it.

Source: Wikipedia, workhouses.org.uk, Wikipedia, Pembury