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Surrey Advertiser

21 March 2014

This lithograph shows the Guildford Union Workhouse as it would have looked in 1838.

St Lukes staff pantomime they performed Aladdin in the Coyle Hall in 1962. In July 1952, student nurses re-created an operating theatre on a float for the Guildford Festival, left, and walked away with first prize.

History of the Spikes workhouse and hospital unveiled

By Phil Davie, Liz Lloyd and Kay Lakin
A NEW exhibition launched on Monday depicting the history of the Spike and St Lukes Hospital. Thanks to a 48,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, volunteers who work at the Spike Heritage Centre have traced the history of the building when it was used as a workhouse and hospital through the period of 1838 to 1967. In 1838, a workhouse was built on the outskirts of Guildford, in accordance with the provisions of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Its purpose was to house 300 people the destitute, ill and infirm from 21 parishes. Ten infirmary beds were allocated for the sick, which proved to be totally inadequate. On February 9 1856, a Poor Law Board Inspection of the workhouse reported that the infirmary was overcrowded by 30%, the ventilation was most imperfect and declared the infirmary is totally unfit and a disgrace to the establishment. A new infirmary was built the following year but by 1891, after another damning Poor Law Board report, the Guildford Board of Guardians built the new 170-bed Guildford Infirmary, the forerunner of St Lukes Hospital, which opened in 1896. During the First World War, the infirmary and most of the remaining workhouse buildings were taken over by the military, with the Guildford War Hospital treating 7,680 mainly British, Australian and Canadian soldiers between 1916 and 1919. In 1929, the Local Government Act passed management of the infirmary to Surrey County Council. Union Lane had been renamed Warren Road and Guildford Infirmary became known as Warren Road Hospital. By now there were 190 beds, including five maternity, mainly for unmarried mothers. In 1938, there were proposals to build a large, modern hospital on the site but as Warren Road prepared for another war, these plans were suspended. The London hospitals were organised to meet the threat of bombing and the Warren Road site was incorporated into sector eight of the Emergency Medical Services, under St Thomas Hospital. In addition to providing general hospital care for civilians, Warren Road treated military cases, including hundreds of casualties from Dunkirk and the D-Day landings. In 1939, Warren Road Hospital was provided with a military-style hutted hospital , built by Canadian soldiers and a group of London teaching hospitals used this new annexe to set up a temporary radiotherapy unit. The second World War brought about significant changes, with doctors and nurses coming down from St Thomas' and other London teaching hospitals. For many of them it was their first experience of working in hospitals where conditions and standards of care left much to be desired. This and the over-estimation of beds needed during the war helped pave the way for the NHS. In 1945, the association with the old workhouse infirmary ceased, in name at least, when Warren Road Hospital became St Lukes Hospital. Surrey County Council renamed the hospital after the Addison Road church of St Luke's. The hospital was incorporated into the National Health Service in 1948. Following clinical union with Guildfords Royal Surrey County Hospital in Farnham Road in 1952, St Lukes expanded and specialised and the stigma of being a former workhouse hospital began to disappear. By January 1980, the policy of centralising services in one Guildford hospital was well under way. In the first phase, inpatient services in general medicine, general surgery and paediatrics were transferred from St Lukes. This marked the end of St Luke's as a general hospital but the name lives on at the St Lukes Cancer Centre, which is based at the Royal Surrey County Hospital. The Spike was a purposebuilt Vagrants and Casual Ward, built in 1906 by the Guildford Union Workhouse. Casual Wards, or Spikes, were generally built near workhouse entrances. Men looking for work, often farm labourers and seasonal workers but sometimes jobless professional men, tailors and tradesmen, would stay overnight. Also, a few women, deserted by their husbands, or with an illegitimate child, tramped the roads, hoping to find domestic work. The poor reputation of tramps was caused by shiftless men who roamed the countryside, begging, stealing and somehow gaining the penny or two required for accommodation. Tramps slept in single cells, on hard beds with one blanket. Everyone had to have a bath, in water that became colder and dirtier, as hot water was seldom added. A nightshirt was issued, clothes were taken away to be fumigated and a mug of thin porridge, or skilly , with a piece of bread, was provided. After being locked in their cells overnight, tramps were given bread and a mug of skilly for breakfast. They had to carry out a task, such as chopping wood, breaking stones or using a tool known as a spike for picking old ropes apart, before being allowed to leave. The Spike provided overnight shelter from 1906 until the last tramp left on May 31 1962. After closure, it was used for training sessions and storage but fell into neglect during the 1990s. But in 2007, with the aid of a 1.2 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the building was transformed into the Spike Heritage Centre, with volunteers conducting tours, staging events, re-enactments and talks.

First World War casualties were pictured outside the front entrance of the Guildford Union Workhouse, below, when it became a war hospital in 1917.

Doris Laverty

This photo of staff in fancy dress was taken just after the outbreak of war in 1939.

Steve Porter SA140459

Liz Lloyd and the new From Workhouse to Hospital exhibition at The Spike.

Comic play that will Literary heavyweights brought together at Mill make your ribs ache
The Bards of Bromley Mill Studio Rating: The Play That Goes Wrong Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Rating: THERES a veritable festival of laughter at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre at the moment. Last week we had the splendid Fallen Angels and now we enter the world of slapstick and sheer lunacy with a Mischief Theatre production of The Play That Goes Wrong. Take all the disasters that can happen in an amdram (and, lets face it, the occasional professional) show and cram them into an hour and a halfs performance and you have a play that will have you laughing so much, your ribs ache and your eyes water. Mischief Theatre Company was founded six years ago by a group of graduates from LAMDA, who, faced by the prospect of likely unemployment, decided to go it alone and write and perform their Alastair Muir Lunacy and escapism in The Play that Goes Wrong, at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre. own demented dramas. And lo and behold, they found collapses in instalments and the Impaler. The part is then themselves in the West End, develops a malign life of its taken by a reluctant fellow attracting rave reviews. own. Theres an alarmingly and ultimately by (dont ask We are watching the mobile corpse and a gang of why) a grandfather clock. Cornley Dramatic Societys all-too-visible stage hands. How lovely to see a show latest production. Its the first The cast is admirably re- that is sheer escapist bliss. If, for which they have managed sourceful as they extricate as they say, laughing is good to field a full and appropriate themselves from crises caused for you, then The Play That cast, earlier attempts having by escalating disasters. Goes Wrong should be availincluded The Two Sisters and The heroine is knocked able on the National Health. Ugly and the Beast. unconscious and her part is Get yourself a ticket and Now it's the turn of The taken by an initially terrified forget your worries for a couMurder at Haversham Manor. backstage crew member who ple of hours. It runs until toNo economy has been spared becomes progressively more morrow (Saturday). in constructing the set, which diva-like and more like Vlad Margaret Burgess THE audience at the Mill Studio last week watched the punches fly as five literary heavyweights were forced into a ring. The central conceit of The Bards of Bromley is that Wordsworth, Milne, Eliot, Strindberg and Goethe attend a creative writing workshop in modern-day Bromley. Their efforts are pulled apart by Mrs Swerdlow, who runs the group, and by each other. Having premiered on Radio 4, this production by Theatre Proteus was the stage debut for the play which was written by Perry Pontac. The company tackled the writers celebrated Codpieces in 2012 and the main challenge here was to render it more than the sum of its cultural references. With a script awash with nods and winks, this was not easy. There is a fine line between a joke and a reference provoking a laugh from the cogniscenti. The cast gave it their best shot and, through ringing the humour from the caricatures, made it an enjoyable enough way to pass 70 minutes. A mention should go to Gary Griffiths, whose August Strindberg, straight out of a Hammer film, seethed and schemed his way through the story. The counter point to his nihilism was provided well by AA Milne, played wide-eyed by Duncan Partridge. At the centre of it all was Janet Gill, as Mrs Swerdlow, who did well with the shortcomings of a part with so much potential. The play is suited to the Yvonne Arnauds studio space, with just enough room for a cast of seven. Director Maggie Lilley kept the tempo up and made good

use of music to add humour to the monologues. Strindbergs first speech, and that of William Worsdworth, played by Jason Orbaum, worked particularly well. Theatre Proteus brought together a good production of a play that feigns to explore the contrasting philosophies of its literary idols. Andr Langlois

Bournes Swan Lake touching and erotic

Swan Lake New Victoria Theatre Rating: TO say that Matthew Bournes Swan Lake is an all male production is a fallacy. That line has been repeated often and does the talented, mixed-gender cast a disservice, conjuring up expectations of men in drag and tutus. Ballet purists may say it might as well be, for all the resemblance it bears to the original, considered one of the pinnacles of classical dance and featuring iconic roles only the very best get to perform. Gone is the romantic, fragile swan corps-de-ballet, the military-precision cygnet quartet and the traditional Prince and Queen pas-dedeux, replaced with a cast of menacing, virile male swans starkly made up and simply costumed. There is none of the sisterhood displayed by the swans in the original ballet, who beat their wings against the evil sorcerer Von Rothbart and console their queen when her lover is cruelly tricked. Bournes swans turn on their leader when he befriends the human prince and attack him. What remains the same is the music. The spine-tingling, stirring score by Tchaikovsky contains some of the most recognisable music ever produced and Bournes clever, often comedic, sometimes camp choreography plays off the soundtrack to great effect. The contrast of set designer Lez Brotherstons urban landscapes with rousing orchestral music is edgy and the vast white spaces of the royal bedroom and ultimately, the asylum to which the Prince is sent, are unsettling. The production of Swan Lake, running at the New Victoria Theatre in Woking until tomorrow (Saturday) is by New Adventures, and on opening night (Tuesday) featured Chris Trenfield in the lead roles of The Swan and Stranger, with Simon Williams opposite him as the troubled Prince, longing for love and acceptance after a lifetime of rejection from his heartless mother the Queen (Saranne Curtain). The ballet element is minimalist this is contemporary dance at its most vibrant, with most of the movement coming from the upper body: the swans sharp pecking hands and necks, the torso thrusts and the streamlined wrapping of the Princes arms around The Swans during their touching duets. Interpretation is key in Bournes production. The sexuality displayed by both man and beast is far more provocative than the original but whether or not the story is a gay love story or simply the tale of a lonely young mans quest for acceptance has never been unequivocally confirmed. Bourne himself has agreed in interviews that the swans are homoerotic but simply erotic would suffice. These feral birds are undeniably sexy. Amy Taylor

Magnificent performance will remain with me for years

The Dream of Gerontius Guildford Cathedral Rating: FoR its performance of Elgars The Dream of Gerontius at Guildford Cathedral on March 15, the Guildford Choral Society was joined by the Brussels Choral Society and the impeccable Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Jonathon Willcocks. Tenor soloist Ed Lyon (in place of Robert Murray) began somewhat tentatively but increased in vocal power and dramatic conviction as the music progressed. His dialogues with the Angel (Louise Winter also a last-minute substitution) in the second part of the work were sensitive and convincing. Bass Marcus Farnsworth was an authoritative, priestly voice in Proficiscere anima Christiana, well-representing Newmans views on the authority of the church and its priesthood. All three soloists displayed exemplary diction and it is to their credit that they were never overwhelmed by the orchestra, even in the notorious acoustics of Guildford Cathedral. Particular praise must be reserved, however, for the chorus and its two chorus masters, Jonathon Willcocks and Eric Delson. For a choir of around 200 voices to produce clear diction, particularly in this acoustic, requires a substantial degree of musicianship, which is seldom experienced. The choirs dynamic control was also commendable, with subtle pianissimo passages alternating with powerful fortissimos. Perhaps the climax of Gerontius comes in the final mezzo-soprano aria Softly and Gently while the chorus of angelicals reprise Newmans great hymn Praise to the holiest in the height: the memory of hearing this magnificent work so sensitively and musically performed will remain with me for years. Douglas MacMillan