Ticehurst House Hospital was a mental health facility. It opened in 1792 and was owned and run by five generations of members of the Newington family until 1970. In 2000, the hospital name changed from Ticehurst House Hospital to The Priory Ticehurst House when it became part of the
Priory Group
The Priory Group is a provider of mental health care facilities in the United Kingdom. The group operates at more than 500 sites with over 7,000 beds. Its flagship hospital is the Priory Hospital, Roehampton, which is best known for treating c ...
.
Early years
Samuel Newington opened a small hospital in
Ticehurst
Ticehurst is both a village and a large civil parish in the Rother district of East Sussex, England. The parish lies in the upper reaches of both the Bewl stream before it enters Bewl Water and in the upper reaches of the River Rother flowi ...
, Sussex, in 1792.
At first, it housed around twenty patients and admitted both poor and wealthy patients.
In 1812, Charles Newington built himself a house in the grounds. Two of his sons, Charles and Jesse, were surgeons and worked in and later ran the
asylum
Asylum may refer to:
Types of asylum
* Asylum (antiquity), places of refuge in ancient Greece and Rome
* Benevolent Asylum, a 19th-century Australian institution for housing the destitute
* Cities of Refuge, places of refuge in ancient Judea
...
when their father died. They employed
demobilised
Demobilization or demobilisation (see spelling differences) is the process of standing down a nation's armed forces from combat-ready status. This may be as a result of victory in war, or because a crisis has been peacefully resolved and milita ...
Battle of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, near Waterloo, Belgium, Waterloo (at that time in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, now in Belgium). A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by two of the armie ...
veterans to landscape the area surrounding the buildings.
A prospectus for the asylum was produced to show off its facilities in 1830.
From 1838, only private patients were admitted and patients came from increasingly privileged backgrounds over time; by the 1850s they were 'exceptionally wealthy'.
By the 1870s, Ticehurst was considered one of the most successful and well-regarded private asylums, and by 1900 the site covered over 125
hectare
The hectare (; SI symbol: ha) is a non-SI metric unit of area equal to a square with 100- metre sides (1 hm2), or 10,000 m2, and is primarily used in the measurement of land. There are 100 hectares in one square kilometre. An acre is ...
s.
During the 1870s,
Herman Charles Merivale was a resident of Ticehurst House Hospital. He wrote of his experiences there in a book called My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum by a Sane Person.
Priory Hospital Ticehurst
Today, the hospital offers day care, outpatient, and residential treatment.
Legacy of the former private hospital
The Ticehurst records are unusually well-preserved; many private asylum archives have been lost, but the archive of Ticehurst covers the dates 1787-1975.
An analysis of records of more than 600 Ticehurst patients found that more than 80% of patients appeared to have symptoms that would be indicative of modern psychiatric illnesses, particularly schizophrenia and Bipolar disorder, manic-depressive disorder . Another analysis argued that these conditions therefore have robust validity over time.
Notable former residents
(Please only list people who are deceased and use discretion in relation to recently deceased people. See:Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons#Deceased persons, corporations, or groups of persons)
* John Bacchus Dykes (1823–1876), English clergyman and hymnwriter.
* Violet Van der Elst (1882–1966), anti-death penalty campaigner.
* Penrhyn Grant Jones (1878–1945), former Assistant Judge of the British Supreme Court for China.
*
Herman Charles Merivale (1839–1906), English dramatist and poet.
* John Thomas Perceval (1803–1876), former army officer and campaigner for reform of lunacy laws.
[G. Bateson (ed.) 1962 ''Perceval's narrative: a patient's account of his psychosis 1830-1832''. London: The Hogarth Press.]
References
External links
Ticehurst House Hospital archivesare available for study at the Wellcome Collection (parts of this collection are digitised and digitally accessible via the Wellcome Collection website).
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Psychiatric hospitals in England
Hospitals in East Sussex
Private hospitals in the United Kingdom
Ticehurst