Getting in touch with a gardener’s past

When I met Liz Greaves she was poring over a huge old mental hospital ledger in Bristol Archives

Art student Liz Greaves got a bit of a shock when she told her dad she was planning to develop her research dissertation by volunteering at the Glenside Hospital Museum. 

“Did you know your grandfather worked there?’ he asked. She had no idea, but suddenly her project took on added significance as she set about discovering more about Horace Joshua John Greaves.

A Shropshire lad, born in August 1901, by the age of 20 Horace was working on the farm at Bristol’s municipal mental hospital. When it became part of the NHS, it would later be known as the Glenside Hospital.

To her delight Liz was able to trace photographs of her grandfather at the Glenside Hospital Museum. He was to rise up the ranks in the hospital gardens and later work on the wards. 

In those days large hospitals, like the private asylums that predated them, sought a large degree of self sufficiency by rearing livestock and cultivating market gardens. 

“My interest in my grandfather’s working life began with a found photograph at the museum,” Liz explains. “It shows my grandfather harvesting a crop of wheat surrounded by farm labourers and hospital patients, gathering, and stacking the autumn crop. It had first appeared in The Western Daily Press and Bristol Mirror.” 

Normally quite dry academic research now brought revelations about the life of a relative of whom she had little knowledge since Horace had died long before she was born. 

While poring over the slightly water damaged hospital ledger in the Bristol Archives, Liz admits “My emotions took over and I felt a tear rolling down my cheek. I was handling a book that had also been touched and signed by my grandfather with his unique signature. Touching this book I felt a connection with a missing part of my past that I have not felt so strongly before.” 

Liz had found the wages records which Horace Greaves had to sign for every week.

While examining the Hospital Management Minutes for the 1948-49 financial year at the Board Room table, as part of my research for this article, I had a similarly eerie moment. I came across a decision on 28 August 1948 to spend £17 5s 0d on re-upholstering the committee room chairs with a synthetic covering. The self-same Rexine still covered the very chair on which I was sitting.

Horace married Elsie Anne Cole in 1936, and they settled at 1a The Chine in nearby Stapleton village. He continued working as a gardener throughout the war years by the end of which he was a foreman. 

Immediately after the war the hospital’s gardens were proving remarkably efficient, generating a healthy surplus as well as providing patients with therapeutic occupations.

Out of the extra £2,272 earned during 1947-48, the Managers boosted the Reserve Fund for capital improvements by £1,000, but they had to inform the Ministry of Health that the Farm’s Reserve Fund now stood at £2,500. No doubt the Ministry bean-counters were keeping their beady eyes on evidence of such profitability.

The Minutes also revealed much about the hospital farm and gardens. In Fishponds the emphasis had been on market gardening and included extensive greenhouses and piggeries.

The greenhouses produced tomatoes, lettuces, onions, and radishes, and there were plenty of flowering plants and cut flowers to brighten up the wards. Vegetables to the tune of £2,900 had been supplied to the hospital, up 19% on the previous year. 

The Managers ‘regretted that present circumstances do not permit of more pigs being consumed in the hospital’ when they learned from the Secretary of the Farm and Gardens Department that only 22 pigs had ended up on the dinner plates of patients and staff. However 283 pigs had been sold to bacon factories bringing in some £4,500, while sale of another 32 had raised £607. These were very handsome sums in those days,

A boar was purchased in Lichfield market for the princely sum of £100 to service the hospital sows, and the head gardener requested £16 4s 0d to buy 40 pullets as replacements for some aging hens, as well 18 cockerels to be fattened up for patients’ Christmas roasts.

The hospital’s adjunct in Barrow Gurney a few miles south of Bristol, had been requisitioned as Royal Naval Hospital during the war years. Now back in action, its farm concentrated on milk production, and growing fodder for the animals. A record total of 26,788 gallons of milk had brought in £3,361 (at approximately 4d a pint).

Two gardening labourers had proved insufficient to maintain the grounds at Barrow, so an extra gardener and labourer were appointed, with another sent over from Fishponds to help woodland replanting over the winter, returning in spring to work on Glenside’s lawns.

Farm workers on both sites were entitled to significant productivity bonuses, including 2 shillings per person for every 10 gallons of milk over the 650 gallon target set for the hospital herd. Gardening staff with more than a year’s service could also expect to share 5% of any surplus they generated.

Nine and a half acres in what is now Vassall’s Park in Fishponds, then controlled by the Public Works Department, had been put to the plough during the war as an emergency measure to help feed the local population.

Part of the Oldbury Court Estate straddling the river Frome this historic woodland dates back to the Normans’ Domesday Book. Bought by Bristol Corporation from the its last owners, the Vassal family, the land was now ccntrolled by the Public Works Department. Nearby Glenside Hospital was made responsible for its cultivation. The Western Daily Press photograph of harvesting that Liz found is likely to have dated from this period.

In September 1948 Hospital Managers were horrified to be faced with a sudden demand from the City Treasurer for 7 year’s rent on this land. Their initial response was to politely decline since no mention had previously been made of a rental charge. Following a climbdown by the Council they agreed to pay a token £7 for the last three postwar months of cultivation. 

When the Tories came back to power in the 1950s they were quick to sell off hospital farm lands and force the NHS to buy provisions from commercial suppliers.

By then Horace had switched to working as an orderly at the hospital, a position he kept until his retirement in August 1956. 

His grand-daughter Liz has produced a permanent display at the Glenside Hospital Museum telling the story of his work in the market garden.