The early years (1918 - 1928)

The Cambridgeshire Tuberculosis Colony was an experimental scheme set up by Dr Pendrill Varrier-Jones, the Cambridgeshire TB Officer, in the village of Bourn in 1916. Encouraged by the results from his first patients, and following a donation of £5,000 from a wealthy philanthropist, Varrier-Jones was able to purchase the Papworth Hall estate to develop his scheme on a larger scale.

On 12 February 1918, 17 patients and 4 members of staff arrived at Papworth Hall, the first hospital building - many discharged soldiers from the battlefields of France and Belgium. During the First World War cases of tuberculosis surged and the chronic infectious disease killed thousands of people each year. In 1915, for instance, more than 41,000 people died of TB in the UK.

The move to the Papworth Hall estate realised Dr Varrier-Jones’ vision for a long-term approach to solving what he called the ‘aftercare problem’. He developed the concept of an industrial colony to treat, house and employ patients and their families.

In the earliest news story on record about the colony – in The Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal – a journalist recounted: “I made my first acquaintance with a patient, an unfortunate who voluntarily enlisted at the outbreak of the war and had broken down in training with tuberculosis. His open-air bedroom looked almost cosy, although the thermometer [was] at freezing point.”

Fresh air and light work were believed to be central to recovery – even in winter - and early photographs show patients’ beds pushed outside on balconies and others living in wooden shelters in the hospital’s grounds.

Other early TB treatments were not so gentle and focused on collapsing the lung, with doctors believing that the diseased lobe would heal quicker by resting it. Sometimes the lung was collapsed using ping pong balls placed in a cavity under the ribs (plombage), and sometimes by removing ribs from the chest wall (thoracoplasty).