General

This blog has been researched and written by Dee 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. The blog is based on wider research exploring maternity provision in Northumberland.

Until the establishment of the NHS in 1948 maternity care in Northumberland was provided by small, local units and when plans were announced in the 1960s to centralise maternity care in the new General Hospital in Ashington, the transition was not universally popular. Questions were asked in Parliament. There was an outcry in Blyth over the proposed closure of Beulah House. Northumberland County Council had been asked to take over the running of The Mona Taylor Unit until it’s closure and they complained bitterly that the Newcastle Regional Hospital Board did not communicate sufficiently with them.

However, in Ashington and the surrounding villages, where there was no local provision, the decision was whole heartedly welcomed. As far back as 1948 there were calls for a maternity unit in Ashington which would also benefit nearby villages such as Newbiggin and Lynemouth. The Morpeth Herald reported on 26 February 1948 that a 1000 signature petition had been raised in Ashington protesting that the town needed a maternity unit as the nearest facility was the Princess Mary Maternity Hospital in Jesmond, Newcastle.

A meeting held at the Park Modern School in Ashington, which had been sponsored by a branch of the Communist Party, was poorly attended and the Morpeth Herald quoted a Mrs. Charlton saying that the question had been mooted from time to time with no result. Mrs. Clay of Newbiggin, urged local women to demand this much needed service for the district. She quoted statistics from The Northern Area Medical Association to support the need for women in Newbiggin, Ashington, Linton, and Lynemouth areas to have a local Maternity facility. “Have we got to stand in the same position as regards the welfare of our women for years and years to come? I am not speaking as a Communist or a Socialist but as a Humanitarian who wished to see a Maternity Hospital where there is need.”

Mrs. Clay also criticized the cost of £3 for ambulances to take women to and from Newcastle. “We want the best care for expectant mothers. Now is the time when this new bill is going through the House of Commons, for the women of Ashington to press for a Maternity Home”. The meeting ended with a decision to ask the County Council to meet a deputation and in the meantime, efforts were being made to obtain more names on the petition. The women of Ashington were to wait another 19 years for a Maternity Unit which was part of  the redeveloped General Hospital opened in 1967.

The Northumberland County Council Welfare Committee minutes (1962 -1965) record in letters dated  April, May and June 1948 and June 1959 the long running discussions between the County Council and The Newcastle Regional Hospital Board about the management and future of the Mona Taylor Maternity Home at Stannington. Northumberland County Council had been asked to accept responsibility for the administration of Mona Taylor Maternity Home until the Wansbeck Hospital Management Committee was able to do so itself. The Management Committee had expressed their gratitude to the County Council and recognized that the assistance of the County Council had been needed for longer than they had originally anticipated.

In 1962 Wansbeck Hospital Management Committee indicated that it was ready to play a greater part in the administration of the Mona Taylor Maternity Hospital under its NHS obligations. The minutes record the following list of responsibilities that the Management  Committee would take on going forward.

1. Wansbeck Hospital Management Committee would be the managing authority for the Mona Taylor Unit and would be entirely responsible for the care and welfare of the patients in the hospital.

2. They would also be responsible for the appointment of staff for the purposes of the Mona Taylor Unit and for the payment of salaries and wages and the implementation of recognized conditions of service.

3. Staff appointed by Wansbeck Hospital Management Committee would be directly responsible to the Wansbeck Hospital Management Committee.

4. Wansbeck Hospital Management Committee will set up a subcommittee to act on its behalf for the day to day domestic administration of the Mona Taylor Unit. The County Council could appoint a representative as a liaison between the two hospitals.

5. Northumberland County Council should continue to provide and maintain the following services for The Mona Taylor Unit and Thomas Taylor Homes. Payments will be at an agreed basis and arrangements are to be agreed between appropriate Officers of the Authority:

1. Cleaning
2. Lighting
3. Heating
4. Domestic hot and cold water
5. Laundry
6. Maintenance of buildings and grounds.

6.  Wansbeck Hospital Management Committee and Newcastle Regional Board will consult with Northumberland County Council on any developments, improvements and adaptations to the hospital buildings which are proposed.

7. The effective dates of the new administration are to be arranged and mutually agreed.

8. £30,000 of alterations and improvements are planned.

In March 1960 the County Council were still struggling with communications with the Regional Hospital Board. There had been very little progress with discussions regarding the future of the building housing the Mona Taylor Unit. The Regional Hospital Board repeatedly told the County Council that it was not yet in a position to meet them. Finally, in the same month, the Regional Hospital Board was ordered to meet representatives of the council. The County Council sent a list of questions relating to the termination of the use of this accommodation to the Regional Hospital Board on 27 October 1960. Communications between the two committees was still painfully slow.

The Committee Minutes dated 2 November 1960 report a meeting took place at Walkergate Hospital on 27 October 1960 between the Regional Hospital Board and Northumberland County Council to discuss the future of the Mona Taylor Unit.

The Board’s representative outlined proposals to increase the number of maternity beds in the Wansbeck Group. At that time there were 13 in Beulah House, Blyth, and 26 in the Mona Taylor Unit. The proposal was to provide 45 more beds in 3-4 years with further additions within 7 years in Morpeth and Blyth. The Board considered it necessary to retain the use of the Mona Taylor Unit until such time as the beds in Ashington, Morpeth and Blyth had been provided in order to bring the number of beds in the Wansbeck Group to the percentage thought essential in a population of 150,000.

On 13 March the following year, Will Owen, the M.P. for Wansbeck, asked the Minister of Health in the House of Commons about the provision of a maternity unit in Wansbeck Hospital. Mr. Owen asked if the Minister would make a statement. He was told that the Regional Board had included a maternity unit in its plans for the next phase of development of Ashington Hospital. Mr. Owen “Yes, but as I am informed that plan was included in the Regional Hospital Board’s submission in 1954. At the moment, taking the available facilities, at the Mona Taylor Home and Beulah House, Blyth, over a period of 13 years, the additional facilities have been six beds. There is an urgent need again for some intensive development for this service in this area.”

The Welfare Committee minutes for January 1961 state that The Mona Taylor Unit will be returned to Northumberland County Council not later than 3 months after the new Maternity Unit is brought into use.

In Blyth similar concerns were being raised about the future of Beulah House and The Thomas Knight Memorial Hospital. In October 1962 at a meeting of The Blyth Hospital House Committee fears were expressed regarding a newspaper article which reported that there would be considerable changes to the functions of both Beulah House and Thomas Knight Memorial Hospital. The secretary of the Committee stated that these reports did not emanate from any official source and could, therefore be disregarded. The minutes also reported that the members of the House Committee who visited Ashington Hospital on Saturday 15 December reported an interesting and worthwhile tour.

In June 1972, the House Committee at Thomas Knight complained, as had the County Council, that the Hospital Management Board did not communicate with them or “take the House Committee into its confidences.” They recommended that planning for a small general hospital incorporating a maternity unit to replace the existing hospital was required. A statement in July 1972 from The Hospital Management Board said that the possible closure of Beulah House would be considered in the light of the service now being provided at Blyth and the available Obstetric services at Ashington Hospital.

Part two to follow……

This blog has been researched and written by Dee 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. The blog is based on wider research exploring maternity provision in Northumberland.

Before the establishment of the NHS in 1948 the majority of women gave birth at home but on occasions complications would arise and they would need to be taken to hospital. Women in Ashington and the surrounding district often had to travel to Mona Taylor in Stannington, to Beulah House in Blyth or to The Princess Mary Unit in Newcastle. There were rail links from Newbiggin and Ashington to Blyth and Stannington but it would have been a long, uncomfortable journey for pregnant women. Few families owned cars at that time.

The ambulance service as we know it began in 1948 and when the Government decided that the service should be free to all patients in need. The 1946 NHS Act required the Local Authorities to provide an ambulance service where necessary. To begin with it was staffed by volunteers and professionals were gradually introduced. Eventually the service became a discrete part of the NHS.

Prior to 1948 patients paid for ambulance transport. It is documented that pregnant women in and around Ashington were paying £3 for an ambulance to take them to the Princess Mary Hospital in Newcastle. In the meantime, the Medical Officer for Health’s Annual report for 1926 on The Urban District of Amble states that the only ambulance provision in the town was the colliery ambulance from Broomhill Colliery three miles away. 

Newbiggin, Pegswood and North Seaton Collieries also provided an ambulance service paid for by miners’ subscriptions to the Miners’ Welfare Fund. The service was free to subscribers and non-subscribers paid a fee. I found no mention of how much that fee was.

The 999 number to summon an ambulance was introduced in 1937. At that time there would have been very few telephones in people’s homes. The first public phone boxes were introduced in the United Kingdom in 1921. It is most likely that in the early days of the ambulance service that G.Ps organized ambulances when necessary.

The M.O.H. Annual Accounts for Ashington in 1949 record that the County Council provided five Ambulances and nine drivers who worked shifts to provide a 24 hour service and in 1950 the County Council provided an ambulance service for Newbiggin.

As with many types of archive material, the records that have been generated by Northumberland’s courts contain two of the important characteristics of historic documents; they are both practical and interesting. Not only do these registers and files act as an administrative record of court activities, but they are also fascinating in their own right; containing valuable social and family history. Court records make up one of the largest volumes of material that we have in our strong rooms and are also some of the oldest, with Quarter Sessions and Petty Sessions records going back to 1580. You would probably (quite rightly) imagine that this sort of material – very old, faded documents with difficult to read handwriting and even more indecipherable language – is the sort of material you would typically find in an archive. However, you may not have considered that when much more recent papers from local courts are no longer in current use, their home is also within the archives, as a continuation of this series of material. And so that is why our strongrooms contain not only quarter session documents from the 16^th century but also registers from Northumbrian Magistrates Courts from 2016. 

At Northumberland Archives, we have recently begun a large project to improve the cataloguing and listing of our magistrate’s material. Our first task was to ensure that the material previously catalogued within our holdings was correctly listed. In the early 1970s, petty sessional courts were replaced by Magistrates Courts, and so it was important to make sure this administrative change was reflected in the way our court material is catalogued, and that information presented to the public via our online catalogue was clear and logical. Although this was a relatively large undertaking, the task of checking and renumbering material was straightforward, and so it was quite simple to get our current holdings up to scratch.  

Once we were sure our existing material was in order, our attention turned to the large volume of recently acquired or uncatalogued court accessions in our strongrooms. The nature of magistrates’ courts means they tend to produce a large volume of records. For example, each court within a division has a separate register for each session, which records the outcomes of every case heard in that court. This may include adult, youth, family, licensing and domestic courts. If a magistrate’s court covers a large area, this can mean these registers are quickly filled. In 2022 Northumberland Archives took in one of our largest ever deposits of material; five separate vanloads of papers and registers from Bedlington Magistrates Court. This huge accession took archive staff over a week just to get on site and onto shelves, before any cataloguing was even considered. Now this accession, alongside similar tranches of material from Hexham and Tynedale courts can be catalogued and listed together with the rest of our court material. 

As mentioned earlier, restrictions under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) means that unfortunately for current archive users, nearly all of the material within the magistrate’s series at the archive is closed to public access for a period of 100 years. This in in line with standard personal data legislation and ensures sensitive data relating to individuals is not made available during their lifetimes. Although this may be a source of frustration for anyone hoping for access to this material now, it is hopefully a small consolation that these records will be preserved to the same standards as the rest of the material in our strongrooms. Bedlington court registers from 2016 will therefore be safeguarded alongside Quarter Sessions material from 1546 and, although not accessible now, will be available as a rich source of information for future researchers.