A FEW days ago I heard the sad news that Sister Deirdre Allen, late of Myland Hospital, Colchester, has died.

I’m sure that many of your older readers will remember Myland Hospital, along Mill Road, and some will remember Sister Allen.

Myland was the old isolation hospital, built in 1894, and even in 1972 when Miss Allen was appointed ward sister it was still on the edge of the town; beyond it were fields full of grazing sheep as far as Severalls Lane.

All houses now, of course, and the hospital itself long gone.

Coats Hutton Ward was a busy chest diseases unit, and there Deirdre found herself looking after a demanding assortment of patients with troublesome illnesses – asthma, emphysema, pneumonia, lung cancer, tuberculosis.

Lung cancer was then the killer disease. Where terminally ill patients could not be looked after at home, Coats Hutton Ward, and Sister Allen with her nurses, were there to care for them.

Then she heard about St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, founded by Dame Cicely Saunders, which was the beginning of the hospice movement in Great Britain.

Deirdre applied for a place on a course there, and returned convinced that Colchester needed a hospice.

Alongside the late Dr George Rhys-Lewis and myself, Sister Allen arranged in 1979 for a public meeting to be held in Colchester’s Moot Hall, where she spoke to a capacity audience of the need for a hospice for the town.

The response was enthusiastic, a steering committee was formed, and an appeal was launched to raise money.

By 1983 there were sufficient funds to acquire the old manor house Mile End Hall (Myland Hall), which underwent extensive alteration and modernisation, and in 1985 the St Helena Hospice Inpatient Unit opened its doors to its first patients.

Dr Elizabeth Hall was appointed the hospice’s first medical director. Sadly Sister Allen did not achieve her ambition of being the hospice’s first matron, and she left Colchester to take a nursing post in Scarborough.

From small beginnings this wonderful hospice has developed over the years and it continues to expand its range of services and care.

Long may St Helena Hospice flourish, and let us always remember the seed that was planted by Sister Deirdre Allen of Myland Hospital. The idea of the hospice really did start with her.

Dr Peter Kennedy

De Vere Lane,

Wivenhoe