The BV magazine, July ‘22 THEN AND NOW
Blandford Hospital and the Case of the Sozzled Servant
In this month’s Then and Now, Roger Guttridge finds the cottage origins still within Blandford’s hospital and discovers the very first patients
An impromptu cricket match, with Blandford Cottage Hospital in the background. Picture from Lost Dorset: The Towns, by David Burnett, from Barry Cuff’s postcard collection Working out exactly what’s what in these ancient and modern pictures of Blandford Hospital takes a bit of doing, so much has changed in 130 years or so. The hospital’s history dates back to 1883, when the Hon. Miss Portman paid for the construction of a cottage hospital adjoining the Corner Coffee House near the junction of Salisbury Street and Whitecliff Mill Street. The first patient was reputedly a man injured in a wagon accident at Tarrant Hinton in March 1883. It became known as the Nurse House, but only catered for outpatients; the more seriously ill or injured being sent to bigger
hospitals at Dorchester, Weymouth, institution of the kind within easy Bournemouth or Bath. reach of them. Such patients are The Portmans of admitted free of Bryanston House charge.’ ... one of the then financed In her diary, Julietta servants ‘spent and Forrester, wife of the present hospital, which Lord Portman’s agent, drank’ her money, was officially noted that one of went upstairs opened on the the first patients was to bed but then 15th December, a Iwerne Minster 1888. decided she needed woman whose ‘This hospital,’ incapacity occurred another drop declared in ‘rather laughable Viscountess circumstances.’ Portman and the Hon. L E Portman, In his will, the squire of Iwerne, ‘is principally intended for the Lord Wolverton, left instructions for necessitous poor of Blandford everyone in his service to receive a and those parishes in the year’s wages. neighbourhood which have no Julietta believed this sweeping
With Blandford Bowling Club in the foreground, a modern extension now obscures the original hospital. Image: Roger Guttridge 42
