The photograph in OurTown shows part of the main building of the Delancey Isolation and Fever Hospital on Charlton Lane, Leckhampton. It was opened in 1874 and was built with a bequest from Miss Susan Delancey, who left £5,000 for the hospital’s building in 1871. The completion of the project was delayed because the legality of the bequest was challenged. This caused a reduction in the amount of money available for the hospital’s building.
Rev J H L Gabell contributed to the cost of the hospital’s site and the costs of equipping the completed building. The first buildings were designed by the local architect, John Middleton – who is, of course, a friend of the Circumspice series.
Infectious diseases – scarlet Fever, TB, Smallpox, and Diphtheria, for example – were chronic problems in urban areas in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century, and most towns and cities provided isolation hospitals at the edge of their built-up areas. Separate Smallpox buildings were built in the 1880s at the rear of the site on Pilley Lane. When the NHS subsumed the hospital in 1949, it became a geriatric hospital.
So, what does all this have to do with the War of Independence? An English Huguenot, Stephen Delancey arrived in New York in 1686, married well, and became a successful merchant. The family acquired land in Manhattan, and by the 1770s, Delancey Farm included much of the island’s southeast. They were a powerful economic and political force in the city.
At the outbreak of the War of Independence, in 1775, the Delancey families remained loyalists, raised troops, and fought against the rebels. At the end of the war, their businesses and estates became forfeited, and they were forced into exile. Many settled in Nova Scotia, and some subsequently moved to England. One such was Captain James Delancey. His daughter, Susan, died in Cheltenham in 1866.
