Our History

The Trustees of the Home of Compassion, which was a local charitable Church Foundation, ran a local nursing home by the river in Thames Ditton from 1981 until the building was sold to a private nursing home operator in September 2008.

The Home had served as a nursing home for more than 100 years after Anglican Nuns of the Order of the Sisters of Compassion of Jesus brought their work with the poor and elderly from the East End of London to Thames Ditton in Surrey. They took in elderly people who were ill and had nowhere else to go.

The Church took over the administration in 1980 following the demise of the nuns and appointed local trustees under the patronage of the Bishop of Guildford to run the charity.

The main house by the river is a Georgian style building which hides a much older house built in 1792 by Charlotte Boyle Walsingham, hence the name of the charity. The old house was used and adapted for over 100 years in a cottage hospital style with up to 50 beds for the frail elderly, but the Trustees, despite a long struggle, were unable to raise the capital to modernise the Home to the latest care standards required by Government.

With the agreement of the Charity Commission, the Trustees sold the Home to a private care company and used the proceeds to set up a new local charitable fund to give grants under the name Walsingham Care with the following objective: to make grants or provide other assistance to poor elderly people or to organisations providing assistance to such people.

For further information about the Charity, please see our entry on the Charity Commission website.