Dr William Reginald Grove

Dr William Reginald Grove

Reginald Grove, pictured above aged 22 years in 1891, was a true son of St Ives. He was born in the Bullock Market (today the Broadway) in 1869, a year after his father and mother were married and set up their home there. After boarding school and medical training in London, he lived the rest of his life in St Ives. The house where he was born was also where his father, Richard, practiced as a family doctor. The house is now number 33, The Broadway.

Richard and his wife Maria had four more children. Reginald’s only sister, Mabel, married Revd Bernard Wilder, who was the vicar of a parish in north Cambridgeshire. His three brothers were Ted, who became a civil engineer in Malaya; Richard, who was an architect in London; and Ernest, who became an officer in the Royal Artillery, was stationed in India and later served in the Boer War and then on the Western Front in the First World War.

When his father died in 1895, aged only 57, Reginald took over the thriving practice and ran it until his own death in 1948, when he was 79. Reflecting on his life in his 70’s, Reginald said that he had ‘been born in a country practice and destined from my earliest years for a medical career’.

Richard's obituary in the British Medical Journal said ‘Dr Grove made personal friends of his patients and knew their past history and domestic troubles. He always emphasised the fact that doctors have to deal with human beings, with troubles mental and physical, and not with diseases. Acute observations of his patients and a keenness to absorb and try out new ideas in medicine were characteristic of him, but always with the belief that the latest cure-alls have their day and vanish.’

Early life

During Reginald’s childhood the family had three live in servants besides the medical assistant employed to help in the practice. This person was generally a young, newly qualified doctor and there was a succession of them over the years. In the 1881 Census they employed a cook, a housemaid and an under governess who looked after the younger children. With the growing family needing more bedrooms, the groom did not live in, as he had in the past. Most of Reginald's father’s work involved visiting patients in their homes, but he did have a consulting room on the first floor of their house in the Bullock Market.

Reginald was 12 when the family moved. At that time he was a boarder at King’s College Choir School in Cambridge, where he was in the chapel choir. Their new home was in Cromwell Place, which his parents called Slepe House.

Reginald studied for a natural science degree at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and became a medical student at Guy’s Hospital Medical School, where he qualified as a doctor late in 1893. He then joined his father’s practice.

Marriage, home and family

Reginald and Hilda became engaged in 1893 and were married for 51 years. She was one daughter of the well-known forensic pathologist Sir Thomas Stevenson who gave evidence at many trials of notorious poisoners such as the serial killer Dr Thomas Neill Cream in 1892. He was convicted of killing using strychnine and hanged at Newgate Prison.

Reginald and Hilda brought up ten children, all educated privately. They went on to have varied professional careers as adults. Edith Pratt was employed by the Ellis family in Stanley House (now the Town Hall) in 1913 and stayed for eight years as a parlour maid. In her autobiography she painted a fascinating picture of the Grove family: ‘I remember all of Dr Grove’s children’, she recalled, ‘there was Veronica, Bill, Mary, Norah, David, Sylvia, Jane, Frances, Lettice and John, the baby, quite a large party. They always walked crocodile style in twos with doll’s prams and trikes etc with their nanny’.

The medical practice

GPs often worked single handed. Days off and holidays were infrequent. When Reginald took over from his father he could not recruit and or retain medical assistants for very long, and so he was sometimes running the practice on his own for long periods.

Initially, he frequently worked 15 hour days, six or seven days a week. As locum doctors were not easy to find, and expensive, getting just one week's holiday a year, or perhaps two, was common. In an 1895 letter he wrote of the gruelling work ‘I have still to see over 40 people, 19 miles to drive, 12 by train … a massive workload … tomorrow 33 miles to go and over 40 people to see not counting the workhouse …’flu and measles outbreak.’

Reginald also had a personal commitment to look after his patients, even when he was about to go on holiday. Sometimes he delayed a holiday to ensure a patient was on the mend. Thankfully, from 1898 onwards, there was stability among his medical assistants and two weeks' holiday became more frequent.

He also had a kindly nature as this charming story illustrates. Reginald (or ‘old Dr Grove’ as he became known once his son joined the practice) safely delivered a baby girl called Gillian in Houghton in 1935. Later, as a small child, he vaccinated her on her thigh instead of her upper arm as the smallpox vaccination often blistered and left a scar after healing. With a smile on his face, he remarked to her mother that ‘she might be a duchess one day’.

House calls

Most consultations took place in the patient's home, not at the surgery. Middle-class patients expected a house visit rather than coming to the surgery where they might end up in a waiting room with their own, or other people’s, servants. The practice did a consulting room and working-class patients who could get to the surgery waited in an adjoining room or queued in the street.

There was little let up to the work as patients might need help on any day of the week, or any hour of the day or night in an emergency for a birth. Reginald’s mother, and later his wife Hilda, acted as receptionists if a maid was not available to receive patients who called. They also booked in patient visits if the doctor was out on his rounds.

Long journeys along unlight roads and tracks at night to attend emergencies in freezing weather was accepted with little complaint. Even when Reginald moved to motorized transport, most cars before 1914 were open to the elements. Roads that were little more than tracks could also be icy and treacherous in winter. Journeys alongside the river, Fen dykes and ditches were dangerous, especially at night when oil carriage lamps or the light of the moon lit the way ahead. Thankfully, Reginald never fell into the river or a dyke.

Reginald rode horseback, but a more comfortable journey was by horse and trap, which was also more convenient for carrying a medical bag. His groom, Barker, often drove the trap. The speed of the trap varied with the horse, the weather and the state of the road. Reginald recalled on one occasion that his horse was driven on a 17-mile journey home ‘at a splendid pace, 12 miles an hour all the way. Barker knows his peculiarities and can get him along better than I can.’

On another occasion, on a Saturday morning in 1895, Reginald had to travel on his rounds ‘in every direction at once, Earith on one direction (6 miles), Boxworth in another (7), Hilton (4) in another, besides Hemingford and Houghton.’ He could travel these distances by using the trap, rather than riding a horse.

An alternative was a bicycle. Reginald used his bicycle during his school holidays when he went on errands for his father, taking prescriptions to patients in the villages. When he returned from Guy’s to run the practice, bicycles came in handy, as they were a quick and easy form of travel for short distances. There was also the added advantage of not needing to saddle up, or put a harness on the horse for the trap. But whether travelling by bike, horse or horse and trap, the journey could be dangerous. Accidents were quite common, as horses were temperamental, stumbled or could be spooked. There were several occasions when Reginald was thrown out of his trap.

In March 1896 Reginald described an accident at Church Farm in Fenstanton in a letter to his fiancée. ‘Barker and I had a great escape yesterday. Coming out of Howard Cootes gateway which is not very wide I was driving and the chestnut horse shied or started or quickened for some reason with a swerve; before I knew where I was, we had just caught the gatepost. Snap went my shaft, followed at once by the other and I was thrown on the road just behind the horse. It was all done so quickly there was no time to think and my only thought was what a pretty pickle I shall be if he kicks, but luckily the traces snapped as well and the horse got clean away and galloped over two miles nearly to Hemingford before he was he stopped. Barker got wedged by the wheel and had his wind taken but was otherwise he was practically unhurt while I had nothing to show but a dirty pair of gloves and a little dirt on the rim of my hat. It was a most providential escape…’

The lure of mechanised transport soon loomed. There were three options being developed in the 1890’s – the motorcycle (generally a tricycle), the car with seats for two and lastly, the car for four to six people, generally chauffeur driven. Due to the cost, this type of car was effectively outside the means of doctors.

To begin with, Reginald bought a three wheeler motor bike, possibly a Rayleigh. This was then superseded by his first car, the New Orleans Voiturette bought for £150 10s 0d (£19,000 in today’s value) from a dealer in Twickenham in November 1900. Reginald’s second car was a Peugeot 5 horse power two-seater, which he bought in 1902 and it served him until 1908. It was the first of his cars which needed to be registered, in December 1903. It was the sixth registered in the county of Huntingdonshire and the registration number was EW6. This registration has been passed down through the family and continues to be used.

The problem of a growing family & the 2 seater Peugeot 5hp, taken in 1908.

By 1908, with six children, they needed a larger car as Reginald and Hilda wanted to use it for family outings. His purchase was an 8 horse power cylinder Rover, painted in dark green with polished acetylene lamps and an oil rear lamp. It was a two-seater with a detachable ‘tonneau’, which was a double seat, often used to carry three passengers. This hooked on to a platform at the back and was used for family outings. Those children that could not go in the car followed on bicycles. After Reginald sold it during the First World War, the car was often seen in St Ives market, its rear platform loaded with crates of chickens for sale.

The transition from horse power to petrol power was swift. Within ten years of taking over his father’s practice, Reginald sold the horses. He paid off Barker and the practice relied on motor transport and the push bike.

Reginald had two motoring accidents. The first occurred when he was driving the New Orleans in May 1901 from Swavesey when the steering failed and he was thrown into a ditch. ‘I tied it on behind a cart and towed it to Fen Drayton. A blacksmith said if he tried to bend it straight it might break so he drove me home and Barker has gone over to fetch it on a trolley’. Jude, a local mechanic in St Ives, later repaired the damage.

His second accident, in April 1915, happened when he was driving a motorcycle in Godmanchester. Reginald swerved coming round a corner to avoid a car and was thrown off. He had to be taken to Huntingdon Hospital as he broke his right leg above his ankle. He made a good recovery.

Dispensing drugs

While chemists like Barton, the chemist sold a variety of remedies, doctors also sold medicines which were made up in their own dispensaries. The three main items were pills, plasters and ointments.

Sometimes doctors prescribed other cures. Edith Pratt became ill with ‘flu which resulted in a dreadful cough. Reginald told John Ellis, her employer, that he should give her something that would do much more good than any medicine: a glass of claret twice a day warmed with an orange. After that she was ‘full of beans and my cheeks were rosy’.

Operations

Major operations took place, especially in later years, at the Huntingdon County Hospital where Reginald was appointed an Assistant Surgeon in 1929. But minor operations took place in patients' homes where Reginald carried out the operating procedures on their kitchen tables, which were carefully scrubbed beforehand. He removed tonsils, lanced boils, cut out cysts and so on.

Coroner’s Courts

Reginald was regularly faced by sudden, unexpected death and in many instances he knew the person well - sometimes socially, as a friend or merely as a patient. Inquests were held before a jury of men by the local coroner in a convenient hotel or public house.

Reginald, like other surgeons, carried out post mortems and gave evidence at these courts. The local newspapers reported the inquests in great detail and they give a glimpse of the day-to-day deaths in a country town in this period. Sudden death was a fact of life whether through accident, ill health, suicide or, in one instance, malnutrition. These are some of the cases for which Reginald gave evidence:

1898 - Frederick Warren, aged 58: heart attack

1895 - George Watson, aged 17: drowning

1897 – William Hand, aged 47: industrial accident

1900 - Unknown man: malnutrition and hypothermia

1913 - Harry Burgess, aged 50: suicide 

1913 - Philpot, aged 5: kicked by a horse

1913 - Joseph Childs, age 66: suffocation

A case in 1913 caused intense local interest because the coroner’s court had to decide whether the death of a man and a woman was the result of a suicide pact or murder. The bodies of Elizabeth Warnes and Gustave Kunne, who worked at the chicory factory in Fenstanton, were found in the Central Temperance Hotel, Crown Street, run by Mrs Warnes. The Hunts Post reported on the case under the title 'Dr Grove's Remarkable Narrative'. Reginald gave evidence as he was called to the scene of the crime and carried out a forensic examination of the bodies. His conclusions were compelling and the jury’s verdict was that Kunne killed his lover before killing himself.

The ever-growing Grove family in the summerhouse, 1912.

Public service

Reginald's father was the first Medical Officer of Health appointed in St Ives and Reginald took over this role until his own death. He submitted Annual Reports on the state of the public health of the town as his father had done, tracking the number of births and deaths with comparisons against the national statistics for infant mortality, children and the elderly over 65. The report of 1901 recorded the tragic death by exposure of an unknown tramp on the outskirts of the town. Newspaper reports throughout the period show how public health gradually improved. A selection of his reports are available for 1913, 1915, 1917 and 1921.

As his father before him, he was also as the Medical Officer of the St Ives Union Workhouse. This involved seeing new arrivals, visiting those who became sick, vaccinating the children and inspecting the sanitary conditions of the building. In February 1885 he was asked to investigate the water from three public pumps to find ‘evidence of injurious contamination’. The contamination of drinking water was a recurrent problem; an outbreak of a serious epidemic of diarrhoea and vomiting in the St Ives Workhouse over a three-week period in January 1915 is one example. It affected all the staff and most of the inmates. Reginald took samples of the water. The Workhouse did not have piped water and relied on water pumps. He also advised the Workhouse Master and his wife on the right diet for inmates, and supervised the medical work of the nurse.

Not every workhouse resident was grateful for the doctor’s services. In the early hours of one Sunday in June 1890 when Reginald was back from Cambridge after his final examinations, he was woken up by his mother in the middle of the night:

‘[She] called me out of a deep sleep about 2.15am to say someone was smashing our windows. I went down with the Pater and found a late inmate of the Workhouse very drunk. He had smashed three windows in the drawing room, thrown half a loaf of bread through one, and, in kicking at the front door, taken some of the paint off. It seems he doesn’t like the food at the House and thinks he gets better in prison and he doesn’t like the Pater [his father] because he won’t order him chops and tea in the House. So, he did it to get into prison.’

While his father went to call the police on their new telephone, Reginald watched over the man as he stood swaying in the road. Reginald asked him if he was all right and was told ‘Oh, I’m alright, doctor, except the fright’. The man was up before the magistrates at 11.00am at the regular Monday Petty Sessions. For smashing the windows at Slepe House he got two months’ hard labour.

Dr Reginald Grove in the 1940s.

Outside interests

Outside his medical work, family and faith, Reginald's two passions were rowing and photography.

He developed an enthusiasm for rowing at Sidney Sussex, where he captained the college eight in his last term. Reginald also rowed with St Ives Rowing Club. After his rowing days ended, he helped run the club for many years, as his father had done.

The Grove family connection with the St Ives Rowing Club has continued until today. There is a rowing four named the ‘Dr Grove’ and the ‘Dr W.R. Grove Challenge Cup’ is awarded each year.

Reginald’s second passion was photography, or more particularly, stereoscopic photography. The Stereoscopic Society was founded in 1896 and Reginald probably joined in 1910 when he was 41. He became Vice President before being elected as President in 1925. He remained in office until his death.

As President he organised annual meetings of members. The first was held at St Ives in 1927. The visit was very much a family affair, with his wife and daughters acting as hosts. Reginald became well known for the quality and composition of his work over many years and more than 200 of his stereoscopic photographs are held in the Grove Family Archive. The value of Reginald’s work was recognised in 1980 when over a thousand of his negatives were acquired by The National Stereoscopic Association in the United States for the Holmes Library.

The Stereoscopic Society meeting at St Ives in 1927.

All Saints Parish Church

Like his parents, Reginald and Hilda were Christians and faithful members of All Saints Parish Church. They were acutely aware of the growing schisms within the Church of England; the endless doctrinal arguments troubled them. All Saints had a succession of vicars who took a combative approach in pushing ritualism, Anglo-Catholic doctrine, elaborate furnishings and clerical dress, which was often against the wishes of many of the parishioners. Revd Salisbury Price, appointed in 1894, was firmly of the High Church tradition and determined to force through his beliefs despite strong reservations from Reginald and others. ‘We have been getting high church sermons with a vengeance: doctrine to me seems so fearfully unsatisfactory, it gives you nothing to think about, it gives you the poorest opinion of everyone else’s opinion except your own and makes one’s faith weaker.’ Reginald wrote.

His difficulties continued with Price’s successor, Revd Oscar Wilde, who was the incumbent until 1931. In one notable incident in 1916, Reginald’s courage and obstinance resulted in the Church Courts ordering Wilde to remove two altars for which permission had not been granted. Wilde’s replacement was Revd William Strowan Amherst Robertson (nicknamed Father Algy) under whom Reginald served as churchwarden. Father Algy was a Franciscan monk who established a small religious community in the vicarage called the Brotherhood of the Love of Christ. Reginald got on well with the new vicar and they became close friends.

Reginald died in 1948, aged 79 years. Reginald, Hilda, their son John, and daughter Mary lie in peace in All Saints Cemetery in Westwood Road, near the church where they worshipped. On the base of the memorial cross, under Reginald’s name, are words from Psalm 57 verse 8 ‘Awake, lute and harp! I myself will awake right early.’

Authored by Peter Flower, one of Reginald's grandsons.