History

St Mary's Convent was built in 1896 in the gardens of the old Corney House, part of the Duke of Devonshire's estate at Chiswick, bought from him for £2,700.

King's College Hospital had founded the Community of the Nursing Sisters of St John the Divine in 1848. It estabished St John's House at 36 Fitzroy Square, London as a training institute. Many advances in nursing and nursing training were made. A number of nurses were recruited for the 1854 Crimean War by Florence Nightingale, who subsequently both encouraged and adopted many of the reforms pioneered at St John's. In 1856 the St John's nurses took over the nursing at King's College Hospital, where they revolutionised the ward system, the standards of hygeine and the nurses' living conditions.

Despite the fame and the expansion of these reforms, the Lady Supintendant Mary Jones found the work increasingly stressful, and hospital policy at odds with her religious life. In 1868 she and six Sisters left to found the Community of St Mary and St John Evangelist, and in 1873 they set up St Joseph's Hospital for Incurables at 39 Kensington Square. Wishing to expand, and after failing to purchase neighbouring houses in Kensington or the Godolphin School in Hammmersmith, they decided to move to a new building in the clean air of rural Chiswick. The architect Charles Ford Whitcombe was engaged, and the cornerstone laid on 6 May 1896.

The new St Joseph's Hospital was full from the start, but the Sisters of St Mary's Convent were elderly, reduced in number, short of funds, and in dispute with their Bishop over religious matters. In 1910 they applied for affiliation to the Sisters of St Margaret, an order founded by John Mason Neale. A leader of the Christian Revival in the Church of England and a pioneer in nursing the poor in rural Sussex, he was also the writer or adaptor of numerous hymns which survive in the English Hymnal and Hymns A & M and of the carol Good King Wenceslas. He died in 1865 shortly after the building of the great convent at East Grinstead, where his daughter was Mother Superior. By 1910 this order already had a number of branches in Britain and overseas.

The arrival at Chiswick of a new Sister Superior and several other Sisters from East Grinstead led to a revival of the Convent A private Nursing Home was established to bring in funds for the running of the Hospital. Better plumbing, heating and lighting were installed and other improvements made, thanks to a number of benefactors, in the years leading up to the First World War. The convent survived the war, despite the incessant noise from Gwynne's aero-engine factory next door, and various subsequent threats to its property and surroundings. The Nurses' Home was built in 1935. In the Second World War, it was evacuated to Scotland just before the first V2 rocket landed on Paxton Road in September 1944.

In 1986 new plans were made. The name was changed to St Mary's Convent and Nursing Home, and the old name of St Joseph's Hospital no longer used. An appeal for £850,000 was launched. The wards were remodelled, and an extension to the Nursing Home, the St Joseph's wing with ten single rooms, was built in 1992, partly financed by the sale of the Nurses' Home.

The centenary was celebrated in 1996 under the patronage of HRH Princess Alexandra.

Acknowledgements to "Building for the Future", a history of St Mary's Convent and Nursing Home by Pamela Myers 1996. Copies of the booklet are on sale at St Mary's.