Annual Parish Meeting – 30th March 1909

Minutes of the fifteenth Annual Assembly of the Parish Meeting
held in the School-room, Great Longstone, on the 30th of March 1909.

Present:
Mr G. Hambleton (Chairman)
Messrs A. W. J. Eyre, J. Turner & I. Shimwell

The Minutes of the last Meeting were read & signed.

Charities

An account of the Charities sent by the Rev. G. Andrew was inspected at the meeting, but as the balances in hand & the amounts received by each person were not stated, it was decided that this meeting recommend the Parish Council to request Mr Andrew to give a more detailed account of the Charities.

Recipients of Rowland Eyre’s Charity

(distributed by the Overseers)

Total: £1 : 5 : 0

Mr Eyre

Mr Eyre, the Chairman of the Parish Council, gave an account of the various improvements which have been effected by the Parish Council during the last two years, viz:

• The provision of a public tip
• Improvements to the footpaths at Holme Bank and Longstone Hole Bridge
• The settlement as to the ownership of fences & repairs of same at Gilder Quarry
• Also the diversion of Mr Wright’s road outside the quarry area

Mr Eyre also gave some interesting particulars in connection with his work as Rural District Councillor, strongly disapproving of the extravagant expenditure of the County Council especially with regard to education.

He also complained of the needless expenditure caused by the notification of measles, and that he had endeavoured to get the Local Government Board to rescind the order.

He stated that the Small Pox Hospital at Water Grove had cost £1,400 and that it took the sum of £80 to maintain it yearly.

Signed:
March 14th 1910
Samuel Johnson

Historical note:  Water Grove Small-Pox Hospital 

The “Small-Pox Hospital at Water Grove” referred to in the 1909 minutes was a rural isolation hospital serving the northern part of Bakewell Rural District. It was built around 1906–07 by the Haddon Joint Hospital Board at a cost of £1,400, on land that was probably leased from the Chatsworth Estate. It was on the south side of A623, between Wardlow Mires and Housley at Grid Reference 188756. It lay within Foolow Parish, on the north side of Longstone Moor, just outside the Great Longstone Parish boundary. It was a remote position considered suitable for infectious-disease isolation, but must have felt very desolate at times, particular in the winter.

The hospital consisted of simple buildings made from corrugated iron, on concrete foundations, and provided eight beds, the standard small-pox capacity for a rural district of this size. A Medical Officer will have attended as required, but the buildings were normally kept locked and unused unless a case occurred. Several outbreaks elsewhere in Derbyshire prompted its construction, but actual admissions appear to have been rare. Even so, the site remained officially maintained for many years: it was still listed as the district’s small-pox hospital in 1926, and in 1944 the Haddon Hospital Board invited tenders to clear the Water Grove site and remove the hospital buildings, confirming that they were still standing at that date.

From the late 1920s the Board developed a separate general isolation hospital on Monyash Road in Bakewell, but the Water Grove facility continued to be held in reserve specifically for small-pox. It is assumed that the site was cleared at some point after the 1944 tender and the land was returned to estate use. By the time the NHS was created in 1948, the small-pox hospital seems to have disappeared from the records. No trace now remains, although the name Water Grove persists as a landscape feature near Wardlow Mires.

Thus the Water Grove hospital – once a significant local public-health investment costing £1,400 to build and £80 per year to maintain – effectively disappeared from the landscape and from popular memory within a generation.