Well the very first time I heard the word was a phone call from Liz… Dr Elizabeth? I call her Liz. And I’d been to a scout meeting and I’d been presented that night with a medal for 20 years in scouting, that was not as a warranted man but as a lay member, and when I came home, the minister of my church he said ‘please ring Elizabeth, she’s got something she wants to talk about, something about a hospice’. I said oh thank you, I don’t know much about that but I will ring her and I rang her and she then briefly explained what a hospice was and that it’s her intention to get one in Colchester.

I popped down to see her the following day. She explained there were three of them who were really involved with wanting to start a hospice; that was Deirdre Allen, Joyce Brooks, who was local government, Deirdre Allen was the sister at Severalls, and herself, and they were trying to gather in one or two people who were familiar with steering group work, which I was. 

Going back a long way now that was 30… beginning of 1980. We started off, we got a secretary to take minutes of those meetings and we had a meeting practically every other week for getting on for a couple of months putting the framework together as to where we should go. We went off to which was then the Westminster bank, not the National Westminster, and Bill Hickman, who was the manager there, agreed to join us as treasurer and along with him came Mary Fairhead, who did all his work on that committee, and that nearly made up the steering group. 

It still began to grow but my particular job was public relations to try and get it off the ground. And when I sat back and I looked at it I thought, well I’ve got no product, I’ve got nothing, no intelligence, and I’m trying to sell it [laughs] which is a bit difficult. So we got together and we decided that we had to sell what the hospice would be and what it would be like, so we drew up a map, which was 90 per cent belonging to Joyce and Elizabeth, what the hospice would be like; so many beds, so big a place, somewhere close to Colchester, I think they were the Colchester Health Authority then or something, something different, and we gathered in more and more people from different walks of life who could help and gather together a fundraising crowd. That was headed up by Joyce Brooks and we met a lot of times pulling that together. This meeting business was regular; twice a week, took a lot of time and I was still working in a professional capacity up to 1990, when after that it was a bit more, a bit more freedom with time. But I, we worked at it very hard indeed. 

Travelled around the county. We went to Wivenhoe, oh all over the place, Hedingham, Brightlingsea, to talk to Women’s Institutes, to talk to church, local councils, to talk to schools, to talk, and we spent, talking, talking, talking, talking, spreading the word about the hospice and getting it to be known. I had a good friend on the paper who helped, he was on the Standard, and also good partners on the Evening Gazette, who helped us along quite a lot. 

I left home life a lot to do it all, but my wife is a wonderful person, she works very hard keeping things together. And then it came to a bit of a relax because part way through, I think it was about ’82, ’83, Pat Gosling arrived, a professional fundraiser. I chaired the committee, fundraising committee, and I dropped out of it for a little while. Yes, Pat was fantastic. I interviewed him and knew that he had to be the man and he had a good, he picked himself a good, extremely good secretary. We used to meet in their office which was down, just above the shop in Head Street, that was where we used to get together and formulate all the activities that went on.
 

Dorothy: I’m Dorothy.

Pat: I'm Pat.

Rita: And I’m Rita.

Pat: And we've known each other for about 50 years. We started the Cherrydale Weavers in 1981 and we've been fundraising ever since. The three of us work at the Hospice shop, in the vintage shop. Well, we had we had a young lady who lived just down the road here and she had cancer, breast cancer, and unfortunately her treatment was not up to standard and she eventually died. She used to swell up so that you know she was in agony and we think that if there’d been a Hospice about at the moment, like at that moment, she would been able to be treated and cared for and she would have had a much happier end of life. And that's really how it started, wasn’t it?

Dorothy: And then we have another friend who died who asked for donations to the Hospice instead of flowers. And at the time we thought, well, we haven't got much money, but we've got a bit of time. Why don't we see if we can raise a bit of money? And we said we'd do it for a year and raise a £100 towards a bed. Well, the first year we made 1500 so we’ve been hooked ever since.

Pat: Well, when we first started though, we used to go every weekend to some sort of fete or anything like that. And if we got 30, raised £30 pounds in a whole day we were over the moon at £30!

Dorothy: We were a lot younger!

Rita: A lot of people I don't think, appreciate, or didn't appreciate what it was for because you think a Hospice is just somewhere where you go to die, basically you know but... I think we should make the world a little bit!

Pat: Chris Holmes was our main... He was the chairman right from the very beginning and he was a lovely man. Yes and we got to know him quite well and then came Pat:  Gosling who was the chief fundraiser. And then we started working for him. And then it happened that they got the shop, the first shop which was Head Street. And that's how it really started. Of course we’ve got very stick ability, haven’t we? But we love going to the shop; it's the highlight of my week anyway. 

Dorothy: But we've met lovely people haven’t we? We’ve enjoyed it all the time. You know, people say you know you're wonderful giving all this time, but we've enjoyed it, we’ve loved it.

Rita: We enjoy it. Exactly yeah. Just become a way of life now! We know what we’re doing. We think it's a wonderful cause. We have a nice time. We meet nice people. 

Pat: We've actually raised over £100,000. That was what we were working towards, wasn't it? Well, it wasn't to begin with.

All - No it was £100!

Pat: But we then went on and we wanted to get up to 100,000 and we did it… Just before we all conk out.
Dorothy: Well yes that’s right. We always used to do big events and things which was lovely, but we can't obviously manage it now, but we did.

Rita: But there aren’t so many about anyway, are there? Events? We used to go to fetes nearly every weekend in the summer, there doesn’t seem to be…

Dorothy: But we did book sales, we did plant sales… 

Pat: Oh the storage with the books was hilarious, because we advertised in the paper for garages or something where we can store them and we got quite a few garages and we used to go and put them in these garages. And then of course we had a downpour of rain and the garage got flooded. One of our garages got flooded.

Dorothy: Under a foot of water! We had to shift everything! And we thought we’d just raise this £100, or try to raise this £100.

Rita: It did seem a lot of money

Dorothy: I suppose it was back then. And I always remember Elizabeth Hall telling the story about the accountant keeping a note of everybody's name and address who donated anything because he was convinced he’d have to give it all back, because we would never raise £1million!

Pat: We started off making hessian bags, very environmentally with it.

Rita: That was 30-odd years ago! 

Pat: Yes, we started making hessian bags with a shoulder strap or with small handles, and it had our logo on the front which I will show you, I've got one of our old carrier bag, one of our first carrier bags. So yeah, we worked with her closely and whenever we did a very big do, she used to invite everybody back to her house for soup and we used to go back to Elizabeth’s for soup. So we had you know, I mean there was no… class divide, was there?

Dorothy: Oh my goodness no, she was hands on with everything and everybody was treated as if they were important, which was lovely.
 

My name is Joy Higgins and I worked at the Hospice from 1983 and I was there for 17 years. 

My first job was on the fundraising side and there was just Pat Gosling and he needed a secretary/PA and we worked above the offices of Chris Holmes who was chairman of the hospice for many, many years. Made huge contributions.

So there was Pat and I and I can see it now. The room upstairs. It was full of donations, all sorts of things and masses and masses of volunteers. It was just amazing actually.
It was just an amazing place to work. 

There was an advertisement in the Colchester Gazette for a secretary to the fundraiser, Pat Gosling and I’d had experience, my mother died of cancer and at the time I was working in an insurance office part time in Colchester and I thought, that really appeals to me so I went for the interview and I got the job but never realizing the commitment. I had three children who were teenagers at the time and Pat, he didn't observe working hours. You could start there at 8:30 in the morning and you could still be there at 8:30 in the evening, but then you see it was very, what's the word I’m looking for….you got caught up in it and it was just amazing how the money came in, really.

I think one day an envelope came in, we don't know how, we just found it on the table and there was like £500 in notes. We couldn’t thank anyone and we couldn't really know if it was above board! But the police couldn't throw any light on it, so we put it into the funds. 

Of course you see, sadly, when people die, obviously their relatives have this real feeling that the hospice care was so amazing that they want to give something back and I believe that's been the strength of the hospice.
 

They were already beavering away this idea of a hospice when I got here, so I encouraged it. And eventually it was quite remarkable and something that... it's poignant because it couldn't happen now, principally because in Colchester and the local people and the press supported the idea and raised the money but that was kind of what the local press did.

Bill Tucker, who was the big driving force, he edited this little weekly paper. I think it was a free one. Well, not strictly true. When I came, it was a Tuesday sports paper called Colchester Gazette, and we converted it from a Tuesday paper to a daily paper called the Evening Gazette.

But Bill carried on editing the old Colchester Gazette and he really was the driving force. And he never gave up trying to raise money by any means, whenever. We used to have the Colchester festival and Bill would be going round rattling his buckets for cash for the hospice. So he was a great stalwart.

I took golf when I came down here, so I made a lot of friends at golf. A local person on the team, his  wife was killed in a car crash, and he established what we call the hospice cup which we play for every year. And what happens is you get the organisers of the competition to get the holes sponsored to bring in money. And my wife won it about six, seven years ago, and she was in the midst of her own medical problems herself, and had only got released from the hospital for about a month and she went ahead and won this competition. I have been trying for 30 years to win that cup and never managed it! And Palmer went out having just been released from hospital and did it!

Because I come from that era when everybody had a granny in the attic. Once you were old you were put in the attic and friends and relatives looked after you, I have to say. We knew what happened to old folk and we knew there was a need, you know, for people to end their lives with as much comfort as could be mustered. And that was it, really it was just that feeling that if you are a civilised local community, you need one. There’s the evidence and that's what pretty well drove everyone on to one degree or another. Some people are absolutely passionate it had to be done, others less so, but they all came together to make it happen. 
The queen coming to open it was particularly nice for Colchester and it was a lovely day, I can remember the day. You don't actually forget them, do you? I mean, the job wasn’t over once the building had been established; it still needed money as it does to this day.

But isn’t it a wonderful thing that it is here looking after us? And it was a good example of how the local press can make things happen.