Frognal House
The choice of Frognal House as the site for the Queen’s Hospital was both serendipitous and practical.
It was serendipitous because the Frognal estate and its contents had been put on the market by the Marsham-Townsend family in 1915.Their land agent, Charles Kenderdine, was one of the trustees of the new hospital for amputees at Roehampton in London, and was well-connected with senior army surgeons.
It was a practical site because the estate, over 1700 acres, offered ample space for building a hospital, as well as land to provide agricultural support. It was also close to one of the main railway lines from the Channel ports, and close enough to London to be convenient.
Frognal itself dated back to the 13th century and passed through a number of owners before becoming the house that stands today, dating from 1670. Owned by the Tryon family in 1720, when it was illustrated in Dr Harris’s “History of Kent”, it passed into Chancery when the last of the Tryons killed himself after misappropriating the funds of the Missionary Society. It was bought by Thomas Townshend, who owned the adjacent estate of Scadbury, moving into Frognal House with the the intention of rebuilding Scadbry and moving back there, but his wife died and he lost interest in the plan.
His son, also Thomas, was a politician, ennobled as Baron Sydney, but having been a successful member of the House of Commons seemed, as Webb’s History of Chislehurst recounts, to “sink into an ordinary man” with his sole political legacy being the naming of an Australian cove, later to become a convict station, after him. The third and last Townshend was childless, and on the death of his wife in 1893 the estate was inherited by his nephew, Robert Marsham, on condition that he adopted the name and arms of the Townshends.
Robert’s son Hugh owned the estate in 1915, but it did not sell. The purchase price was raised by a committee of which Kenderdine was treasurer. A number of large-scale donors, included the Queen. She allowed her name to be attached to the hospital as a means of encouraging more donations. A nationwide campaign in the press followed, and within six months the hospital was built.
Contributor: Andrew Bamji