originally published December 2020
On Thursday 6th August 2020, The Reverend Paul Brothwell, the Founder of St Giles Hospice which started caring for patients in Lichfield, Staffordshire in 1983, died at St Richard’s Hospice in Worcester.
In an interview in 2017, he shared his early influences and experiences of founding a hospice with me. These are his words…
Early Years
“I went off to do national service in 1955; I did 18 months in Cyprus from 1956-57 and it was during that time that I decided to go forward for ordination. Up to that time I had been at a technical college learning about agriculture and horticulture. As my qualifications were not to the standard the church required I did a 2 year pre-theological course in Lichfield in 1962 and was ordained in 1965.
When I was doing my theological course here in Lichfield [1965], there was a course in London at St George’s Hospital, which was then at Hyde Park Corner (St George’s was a beautiful hospital). During the 6 weeks I worked on the ward I learnt how to do bed baths, working with the staff etc. and then you would have revision, lectures and people being admitted – we had Cicely Saunders come to speak and things started to work in my mind. The person who organised the course had brought it over from America. He was British and had done a lot of clinical theology in America and came back to the UK and started the course. It was fascinating to be part of it and learning about theology in hospital. He always said “your vocation is to go into hospital work at some stage”. I had always wanted to be a Parish priest but he told me to keep it in mind.
I was ordained as a curate in 1965; in those days you had to do two curacies – I had 2½ years near Huddersfield. I was then asked to be a curate at the Cathedral in Wakefield. The excellent Provost had been a Vice Principle at Chesham Theological College which closed in the 1970s. After my first sermon he said I would not make a John Wesley but he would rather have me at his bedside. A couple of years later he was very ill and wouldn’t have anybody but me at the bedside. He told me he was going to teach me how to do pastoral theology hands on – so I had a very good teaching period then. There were further courses and the Provost encouraged me to go along to any of the lectures, which I did – so again it was a development [towards the hospice].
Arriving in Whittington, Lichfield – the plan for a hospice coming together
I worked for 2½ years at the Cathedral and came down to Whittington in 1971 to be vicar of the Parish. We had a young lad in the Parish who was dying of leukaemia, so it was caring for the family. Then we had a gentleman who lived in the village who had come out of hospital. Another person was Dr Lockwood – he sat on the foundation board with us; we worked very closely together because the practice came into the village. Dr Duncan-Brown used to ring up and say: “Can you go and see so-and-so, I’ve told them you are coming” – so it was a wonderful working relationship.
We looked after a gentleman who lived near the golf course in Whittington; in the end he went into the Victoria Hospital in Lichfield. One of the things that came out of this and was very prevalent at that time was “there’s nothing more we can do”. That angered me and cogs started to work, Cicely Saunders’ [work] and working with the district nurses. There was a wonderful lady who lived in the village, Nurse Darby, who had a road named after her and was one of the original nurses who came in 1929 and was still here in the 1970s. Nurse Darby delivered and undertook general nursing. She just got on with it, was always immaculate and we would work together sometimes. She would ask me to go and see people and sit with them.
In around 1976/77, the diocese decided that the old Vicarage was too big and that they would have a new one. I had clashed with the diocese on numerous occasions – we were building a new church hall and they said there was no need for it. We decided to build a new church hall and we did this with the youth opportunities programme. The church warden, Ron Ferny, who helped with the original work on the hospice, was a builder and he supervised them. We received money from M&S because the original Mr Spencer is buried in the graveyard here. Elfield House is where he lived and died and his widow left some money to the church. The person responsible for fundraising from M&S got in touch to offer support and I asked if we could get a few extra thousand pounds if we changed the name of the Church Hall from St Giles to St Michael. He said he would take it to the Board and phoned me later in the day to see if I was serious. [Which is why we have Thomas Spencer Hall].
Then we got it [the hall] and Lord Seiff came to open it. There was very strict security as there had been three or four attempts on his life. The Archdeacon had said we were going to sell the vicarage and the money would pay for the new one. I said it couldn’t happen but he said there was nothing he could do about it. We argued about it – the incumbent has the choice of vicarage. We had a new vicarage and I said with friends: “We are going to build a hospice”.
Arnold Ward was a Councillor who was friends with former Chief Executive John Blamer Brown, who lived in South Staffordshire, and with Val Curtin they had been thinking about doing something in that area. They joined us when we got together a group of people and we went on from there. It was all about people feeling abandoned when they came out of hospital; this was the driving force. People don’t get down to what it really means at the end of life – it is the end of life for that person and their relations but not the end of life physically.
There were so many tentacles if you like; Fairy Gopsill, who had not long died, had a friend called George Briffet who was a fundraiser. There had been talk about having a paid fundraiser but Fairy said George had inroads, had been doing it for many years and knew about the Trusts. George came on board so that helped people recognise we were a serious organisation as opposed to the Diocese thinking it won’t last.
In the mid-1980s the layout was different of course. We had a lady in the family room in her mid-30s, her two children and her husband, and they came in for pain control. She was well looked after. Dr John Taylor monitored the whole thing. She stayed for a couple of days to see if the regime was right and it was. She was discharged and the local GP said to the husband “Your wife is being poisoned, the drugs are ending her life. [Because the drugs were new] most GPs hadn’t any idea about terminal care. The GP never bothered to get in touch with John and said she would be much better on antibiotics; she subsequently had to be readmitted and John gave the GP a lecture. The GP then became one of the advocates for the work undertaken.
We also had problems with the police because of the drugs: “Were they secure?”, especially the mention of diamorphine. It took ages to resolve that, so another issue we had to overcome.
In the 1980s I was instrumental with a Chaplain Reverend Leonard Lunn who became Chaplain at St Christopher’s and with a person in Scotland. We formed the Association of Hospice Chaplains. I was the first Chair and it grew.
[This biggest challenge was] convincing the diocese, the diocese of Lichfield. If they had dug their heels in harder they may have been able to slow me down, but they knew it wasn’t worth it.
Family and patient memories
On a Sunday my middle daughter would come in and man the telephone on reception because it was quiet and she could do her homework too. My youngest would also come in and people would talk to her. We had a large garden with a tennis court and a patient who was an ex-Irish international hockey player saw my youngest was playing in the garden. When I went into the hospice a patient said she wanted to see my daughter to give her a few tips and tell her to bring her hockey stick in – so the patient in his wheelchair was showing her what to do. It was lovely, she learned a lot coming in to see her and she gave her 50p for her pocket book.
One gentleman was very keen on hens. He’d been a farmer and retired, so a member of staff and I took him to see a chap in the village with many varieties of hens. Another lady’s sight was failing and I found out her favourite book was Black Beauty, so I used to read to her until she would drift off to sleep.
We took the bereavement group to Derby to see Arsenic and Old Lace and sometimes had midweek dances and tea dances in the church hall – so in a way we were looking at people’s needs. One lady didn’t want to be classed as one of those Daily Mirror readers and only did it for the crossword. At night we used to spend the evening looking at the crosswords and when she saw me she would always ask if I remembered the question she had asked me. It was a way of getting to know people and value them. You are taking people seriously, you’re not pretending; the difficulty for some people when working in a hospice is that they haven’t begun to understand their own mortality.
We had wonderful support from Lady Lichfield, Lady Leonora who was beautiful at the beginning and there is a stone somewhere. She was divorced from Patrick Lichfield and she was around helping for quite some time and was very good when Princess Alexandra came the first time; she liked to spend time with the nurses. Two or three ladies’ lives were enlivened by her as she came to visit in the morning and spoke with them and after the service she came back; one lady outlived all expectations because she knew Princess Alexandra was coming and she stayed awake to meet her and died very shortly after in the afternoon. Such happy memories.
One Saturday we had a chap who was dying and I asked him what his greatest wish was; he was a mad on cricket and it was to meet Dickie Bird. By hook and by crook I found out how to get hold of him and he was travelling from Yorkshire to Devon and he agreed to come in. The lady on reception knew him immediately and he joked he was normally known from the back. He had said he could only stay half an hour but he was there for over two hours; the chap died shortly after.
Closing thoughts
I have a book with me that was recommended to me to read: “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Tolstoy. This was in the 1960s and he saw the importance of time. In the book he says “what tormented Ivan Ilyich most was the pretence, the lie, which for some reason they all kept up that he was merely ill and not dying and that he only need stay quiet, carry out the doctor’s orders and then some great change for the better would result, but he knew that whatever they might do nothing would come of it except still some more agonising suffering and death; and the pretence made him wretched, it tormented him and they refused to admit what they knew and he knew to be a fact”. Very powerful. When reading the book again that had an enormous effect on me. By the nature of their work surgeons are not very good communicators; they may think they are but they are not because they don’t have the time.
This is what happened when we first started the hospice. Some people said: “You should be looking after people”. I said: “I am”, directly because I was going to achieve something – to care for people at the end of life regardless of their background. That was really the aim and was influenced by various things and reading and experiences that happened in my own life.
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