This blog has been researched and written by Hilary Love, one of the volunteers on our maternity care project. Project volunteers are researching maternity care in Northumberland with particular focus on Castle Hills Maternity Home, Berwick, and Mona Taylor Maternity Home, Stannington. We are also researching in less detail some of the other Maternity Homes in the county. This blog provides a brief history of maternity provision at Rothbury Cottage Hospital, Northumberland.
The project is supported by the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust Bright Charity and the Northumberland Archives Charitable Trust. We will be posting more blog content from the project over the coming months.
The house that became Rothbury Cottage Hospital was built in 1872 for local Excise-Man, Joseph Archer. It was sold in 1905 to Miss Catherine Dawson who converted it into a hospital and donated it to the village. She and her sister, Mary Dawson, endowed it with £200 per year. Initially the hospital had only three beds with all treatment provided free of charge. Before her death in 1906, Miss Dawson registered the hospital with the Charity Commissioners and appointed a local Board of Trustees who, with their successors, administered the hospital until the N.H.S was launched in 1948.
A maternity unit was founded in 1946 as a memorial to the Second World War and, in 1948, this expanded rapidly with up to 300 babies delivered annually. As medical science advanced and treatment depended more on expensive technology, concentrated in the larger hospitals, a gradual attrition began.
In 1975, it came under a new Area Health Authority which took over its administration from the local managers. The maternity unit was closed, the Consultants’ clinics discontinued, and Rothbury Cottage Hospital was left to provide only convalescent and geriatric care.
The League of Friends of Coquetdale was formed in 1978 and, over the years, the Friends provided many extra amenities, including the total refurbishment of Hawthorn Cottage for the Physiotherapy Department in 1990, at a cost of £60,000, raised locally. In 1993, the hospital became part of the new Cheviot and Wansbeck Trust whose financial problems subsequently caused some anxiety. The following year, however, plans were laid to build a new Community Hospital. The old hospital was eventually sold and, in 2007, the new hospital was opened close to the Haugh.