Wayne Spencer- electrician -1983

Just stumbled across the web blog on Sully Hospital and thought I would share some of my memories there. Yet another account from a former staff member who remembers his happy experinces working in Sully.



 I worked at Sully as an apprentice electrician for about 15 months between October 1983 and Jan 1985. Can't remember the exact dates sorry. I remember Steve Parker when I was there. I remember first arriving there after being based at Llandough hospital and thinking Oh my god where have they sent me to! It seemed miles from my home in Church Village (in reality only about 20 miles!).



 After a week I discovered that one of the painters (a lad called Ferris whose first name escapes me now, think it was Neil) lived only 5 minutes from my house and we shared a car to work from then on. I have worked at few places before or since with quite the community spirit of Sully hospital. Yes there were arguments amongst the electricians, the fitters and the engineers in charge but the hospital as a whole had a unique atmosphere. There was very much a reciprocal help each other out attitude that is definitely missing from the NHS today. I remember several times going into the canteen after a long afternoon shift and asking what was for dinner to be asked "what would you like?" I spent four months of my time at Sully installing new lighting and power cables in the underground ducts running between the boilerhouse (now gone it seems from the new development pictures) and the main hospital. I'm sure I never saw daylight for at least a week at a time! I wonder if the service ducts still run under the old hospital now it is flats.


They were large enough to walk through in places. The boilerhouse and estates buildings were located to the left of the hospital as you look up the road, just near to the "sheep labs". From Sully Hospital we also had to look after the old Barry Hospitals. This was the best day of the week for two reasons. 1) I wasn't stuck underground in the ducts, and 2) I got to drive the automatic transit van! This was the first automatic I had ever driven and I've never disclosed this before but when I first was asked to get it out from the old bunker it was stored in, I put it in drive instead of reverse and hit the bunker wall! Nobody was about so I gave the bumper a few hits with my hammer and said nothing! When the charge hand asked who bumped the van I said it was like that when I reversed it out!


 By the time I met my wife to be in 1987 I was working at the University Hospital and living in the old Glan Ely hospital nurses home. I met my wife when she moved in there. She was an Occupational Therapy student and when she first came to Cardiff School of OT, her first residence was Sully Hospital! So we both had a connection with the hospital although her memories were not as fond as mine!

Bill Watts- Sully 1956

I have received another email from Ontario,Canda. Bernie Watts sent me the above photograph of his father, Bill, taken with some friends in Sully. He says:: I came across an old photograph of my father with two of his companions and they seem to be convalescing at Sully Hospital in 1956. I thought I would take a look online and try and find out a little about the place when I came upon your website and thought that you may like a copy of the photograph. II understand that the photograph will probably not be of much value in your project but again one never knows what information may one day be yielded from a small item in an ever expanding body of knowledge such as yours. What may be of interest is that my dad was in the Royal Welch Fusiliers at the time (24 years). I have no idea why he was there apart from the fact that he had been quite ill, as you can see his colleagues were both servicemen, so I wonder if it served as a military hospital at one time. My dad is in the middle, the two scans are both of the same photograph, front and back, I am sending the scan of the back to confirm the date when it was taken, Kath was my mum Kathleen (Nee-Devlin), Dads name was William hence Bill. He adds in another email the following information: My father was born in Sarn/Bridgend in Glamorganshire and joined the Army in 1931, he spent time in Gibraltar, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Belgium and France, sometime after the war he was transferred to the School of Combined Operations located in Barnstable (I think) and it was around this time that he became sick. He’d married my mum in 1942, she lived in Hoylake on the Wirral, where he had been stationed during the earlier part of the war and where I grew up. I understand that during his time at the S.O C Ops. He was involved in providing help and assistance in the great flood in North Devon sometime in the 50’s. Unfortunately I have no further information on Sully Hospital, apart from knowing that he was very ill as my mother went down to see him and for her to leave the children would have been significant. I should add that several years later, after the army, in the early 60’s he did have a major operation which at the time, I understand, was quite ground breaking as he had apparently grown a cyst the size of a football on his liver, which was written up at the time in the Lancet or maybe another important medical journal. Perhaps it was related to the earlier problem, I don’t really know, and as my mum and dad have both passed on now I guess I never will. At the time of the operation he was told that the cyst had been caused by some sort of parasite associated with sheep which he had been carrying round, based on its size at the time of the op, since he was a young boy in rural Wales.

Hugh Thorp - Canada

I have recently received an email from a Professor in Canada who started his career as a nurse in Sully: "I was an SRN at Sully from March 1964 until October 1967. I worked in the Operating Theatres for my whole time there. My principal reasons for working at Sully were that I already possessed a Post Graduate Certificate in O.R. Nursing and I wished to obtain my BTA. I was provided with a Council House on Barry Island (103 Phyllis Street) and with the low pay for nurses this was a most inportant consideration in the 1960's. I look back on my time at the hospital with fond rememberance. The Staff and the surgeons were first class and the work rewarding ; particularly the Cardio-vascular surgery which was often on new born infants. My family and I emigrated to Canada in 1967 and both my wife and I enjoyed rewarding careers in Health Care: She as a Supervisor of an Intensive Care at a major Teaching Hospital, and I as an RN, Educator, Hospital Administrator and University Professor. The surgeons, Harley, Thomas and Rosser were all fine men with great skill. " What comes through in all the correspondence I have received from ex staff at Sully is how much they valued their time there and how much they enjoyed working there too.