Norwich is a special place. A ‘fine city’ is the description it has given itself, one that is thoroughly deserved.
If you don’t believe me, then treat yourself to a long weekend there. Seriously. I’ll even recommend somewhere you can stay and a few must visit places.
Norwich looking busy. Plenty of room for everyone (Shutterstock)
One little known fact about Norwich is that is was only the second city in the country to have a hospital dedicated to the care of children. London’s famous Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children was the first, in 1852 followed by, two years later, the opening of the Jenny Lind Children’s Hospital in Pottergate, part of the city centre.
So who was Jenny Lind and why was a pioneering hospital in a remote part of the country named after her?
She may not be a household name today. But, in the middle of the 19th century, Jenny Lind was one of the most popular and admired opera singers in the whole of Europe. Born in Sweden in 1820, she shot to fame whilst she was still in her teens after a starring role in Der Freischutz in her homeland, one that garnished praise from far and wide as the rest of Europe demanded that she bring her remarkable voice and stage presence to it’s great cities.
It was as if people felt she was ‘too good’ for Sweden and would be better off feted and admired in Vienna, Milan, Paris and, notably, London, where she spent two seasons before, at just 29, retiring from the stage, having already succumbed to some vocal damage, such were the demands upon her and her remarkable voice, one that saw her labelled as the ‘Swedish nightingale’.
Two years prior to her retirement, Lind had performed on two occasions to packed houses in Norwich, her popularity and fame demanding that she returned to the city which she did in early 1849, starring for two consecutive nights at St Andrews Hall that January.
St Andrews Hall in Norwich, ‘birthplace’ of the Jenny Lind Hospital (Evelyn Simak/geograph)
The money raised from her Norwich performances was almost immediately ring fenced for the purpose of building a hospital in the city specifically for sick children,. That hospital has, despite a couple of relocations since those early days, proudly displayed her name ever since.
Jenny Lind, immortalised in her home country on a stamp. (Shutterstock)
You wouldn’t need to ask around in Norwich for too long before you came across someone who’d visited the Jenny Lind at some point in their childhood.
The hospital had, in 1900, moved to a new site in Unthank Road, one that, for people of a ‘certain age’, is the repository of a lot of childhood memories, as I found out for myself when I tentatively enquired if anyone had been a patient there during their childhood. The responses, via Twitter, were swift and colourful…
“…taken there for stitches in my chin when I was six, screamed the place down as I remember”
“…tonsils out in early 60’s, remember waking up with a raging thirst and asking for an Opal Fruit""
“Lost a finger, they sowed it back on” (I loved that one!)
“…remember visiting my brother who had his appendix out…I was very jealous that he got jelly and ice cream and I didn’t”
“Spent a week there. Very scary Matron!"
“I recall a Wendy House outside to play in, plus a nurse gave me a plastic syringe to play with that I used to water the daffs with orange squash…”
“I had my tonsils & adenoids taken out there in the 70's. Remember waking up with a mouthful of blood, but was given a bowl of ice cream to soothe the pain!”
“Went there when I was 6. My mother was opening a parcel sent from my father and I was so keen to see my present, I got a knife just above the eye! Everything worked out fine but still have the scar!”
The Jenny Lind Hospital on Unthank Road. Memories! (Adam Gretton/Jenny Lind Children’s Hospital)
One of the most striking things about the above photo, taken in 1949 is not, for me, the grandeur of the main house (complete with large rocking horse just through the main doors) but of the building on the immediate left. It’s clearly one of the wards, one which has every one of its windows wide open to the world.
A little fresh air never did anyone any harm, especially if you were in bed!
My own memories of the Jenny Lind revolve around having my adenoids removed when I was four. Having either those or your tonsils removed at that age in the 1950’s and 60’s seemed almost compulsory, a ‘cure all’ for even the slightest of sniffles or sore throats, designed, you suspect, to convince worried parents that something was at least ‘being done”’
Whether there were any actual health benefits involved is another question.
I remember arriving at mid-morning and having to see my parents being dismissed almost immediately. Off they went, back to Brancaster only a few minutes after they’d reported to the ward I was due to stay in, and into bed I immediately went.
I had the operation later that same day and remember still the bearded man who have me the injection that sent me to sleep. I didn’t wake up until the next morning but do recall, as many others have, that there was jelly and ice cream on the breakfast menu.
Today’s Jenny Lind hospital is part of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. It’s good to know that the legacy of her performances and the hospitals that followed lives on in a state of the art facility that is managed and staffed by health care professionals of the very highest calibre.
But that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, detract from the efforts made by those who worked at its far more prosaic predecessor.
Everything was done with a brisk efficiency. The beds were firm, the wards were spotless and the nurses were kind and softly spoken.
And they all knew who Jenny Lind was.
As, I feel, we all should today.
And to think I thought ol' Jenny was only good for a quick pint before returning to my studies.
And to think I thought ol' Jenny was only good for a quick pint before returning to my studies!