Superintendent of the UK’s first Railwaymen’s Convalescent Home born around 1850 d 1935,
Florence Jessie Dolby was born in Kensington to John and Jessie Dolby. She was a woman of independent means.
The necessary funds were raised from donations for a purpose-built Railway Mission Hall and adjoining
convalescent home for railway men on Portland Place, Hastings around 1892. Mission Halls were common nationwide for religious, social and Temperance classes but this was to be the very first convalescent home specifically for railway men.

In a promotional piece in a Mansfield newspaper of 1894 Florence, the Honorary Superintendent described the Home, hoping to encourage subscriptions and donations to help fund a much larger Home. She wrote that 200 patients from 16 railway lines had already been treated in its first two years, though only 12 at a time. Some had suffered injuries or amputation following accidents, others were treated for “ heart disease, influenza, rheumatism, and consumption being the most prevalent” though “no nurse was kept”, that task fell to Florence herself and two honorary doctors. The Home was supported by voluntary contributions. and “subscribers of one guinea are entitled to recommend one patient for three weeks at a charge of 5s. 6d. per week.”

An article in the London Echo in 1895, described how “the lady connected with it has over and over again first replaced the amputated by an artificial limb, and then successfully carried through the much harder task of inducing the railway companies to receive these men again, being quite as capable as before”.
The Home did move to much larger premises in 1897 where 40 beds could be accommodated. It was built on a site purchased by Miss. Dolby at 111 West Hill Road, St Leonards, close to Bo Peep, described in the Railway News as “one of the loveliest spots… standing on a cliff, overlooking the sea”. In 1901 Lancashire-born Jane Mercer was the nurse there with six other staff such as a cook and housemaids for its patients. Florence retired from her work in 1904 through poor health in her 50s. The following year she married the Home’s secretary the Rev. William Gray and they moved to Beckenham and later Rochester where she died in 1935, aged 85.

Research and design by:

Danny Coope / Street of Blue Plaques

http://streetofblueplaques.co.uk/