West
Kent Health Authority appointed us to take over the practice in Penshurst, a
village six miles south west of Tonbridge, on 1st January 1998. It
too has a history which goes back to the early nineteenth century.
Between
1828 and his death in 1840, Dr William Pickance (born 1773) practised at The
Moat in Penshurst Road, about two hundred yards from the village centre. He
was helped by a nephew, John Pickance (1800-1849), who also worked in the
practice until his death.
The
next village doctor was Dr. Baller, who was followed in 1866 by Dr William
Farrington (1838-1901) and who also lived at The Moat.
He succeeded to his father’s baronetcy in 1888 as the 5th Baron and
was thereafter known as ‘Doctor Sir William’. His practice was dominated
by travel in all weathers on horseback, trying to avoid roads around Penshurst,
all of which had tollgates. He died within a week of retirement in 1901.
He
had taken into partnership Dr. Louis Edmund Wood (1857-1941) in 1891. Louis
Wood quickly became Chairman of Penshurst Parish Council and a member of
Sevenoaks Rural District Council in 1895. This was a position he held till his
death in 1941. He campaigned for better housing and piped water for the
labourers and artisans of Penshurst. The first council houses in England were
built in Penshurst in 1900 (The six Pioneer Cottages of Smarts Hill). In 1902
a reservoir at Smarts Hill gave Penshurst a piped water supply. In the same
year an Isolation Cottage Hospital was built near Bough Beech.
In 1898 Louis Wood moved from The Moat to Petre’s Field, Fordcombe
Road, a house he had built for himself. He
developed chronic phlebitis in 1900 and slowly decreased his workload.
His brother, William Charrington Wood,
joined as an assistant.
William
Wood (1870-1955) trained as a surgeon and became a Fellow of the Royal College
of Surgeons. From 1902-1910 he lived at Elliott’s Farm House in Rogues Hill
until he moved to The Moat from where he continued practising until 1955.
Like many general practitioners in the early twentieth century, he
performed operations such tonsillectomies on a patient’s kitchen table using
chloroform as an anaesthetic. As his brother had retired through ill health,
he looked after a large and scattered rural practice single-handed, as well as
making up and dispensing all the medicines.
The Moat originally had a consulting room and dispensary, but latterly
the surgery was in a tin shed in the garden.
William’s
son Louis Arthur Charrington Wood (1911-1998) joined his father as an
assistant in 1939. Between 1941and 1946 Louis Wood
served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and his father, aged 71, looked
after the practice with the help of another retired doctor, Dr. Spon, who
lived in the adjacent village of Leigh. The practice had two branch surgeries,
in Leigh and Chiddingstone Causeway Village Hall.
In
1955 The Moat was sold after
being a doctor’s home and surgery for 125 years. Louis Wood moved to his
uncle’s house at Petre’s Field. He retired to Wales in 1970 and published
a series of his 818 consecutive obstetric cases from 1946-1970 in the Journal
of the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Dr.Louis
Wood was succeeded by a husband and wife team of Denzil and Evelyn Law. The
practice moved from Petre’s Field to its present location behind Penshurst
Village Hall. This was the first time the surgery was not at a doctor’s
home. On Denzil Law’s retirement, he was succeeded by Dr. Kevin Blewett who
worked as a partner from 1995 until 1996. Dr Evelyn Law retired in 1997 and
died two years later.
The
Penshurst practice is now fully integrated with the main surgery in Tonbridge.
Doctors and staff are shared between both sites, which are connected by a
permanent telephone and computer link.