Writing the Century: Stannington

Stannington Sanatorium collection will feature in a play broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this week by Newcastle University’s senior Lecturer in Creative Writing Margaret Wilkinson. The play will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 each day from Monday 3^rd October to Friday 7^th October at 10.45am, with a repeat at 7.45pm. Margaret often uses archival research in her plays, including working with post graduate students to tell the story of the 1649 Newcastle witch trials in The Newcastle Witches, performed at the Newcastle Guildhall in 2014. Margaret’s play Queen Bee has been performed at the Northern Stage and 8 other venues, and Blue Boy has been performed at the Durham Literary festival. She won the Northern Writer’s awards Time to Write award in 2000. We asked Margaret to tell us a little of what it was like to write the play and the sources of her inspiration for it.

My inspiration for writing ‘Stannington’ came from the wonderful resource I found at Northumberland Archives based at Woodhorn, Ashington and the kind assistance of the head archivist there, Sue Wood. The archive contained amazing photos, x-rays, patient notes, letters, and an original Matron’s Journal 1908-1914, containing the monthly reports of three successive matrons on patients, staff, and the condition of the building and the grounds. I was particularly inspired, however, by the oral histories in the form of interviews transcribed in 2013, from former patients and staff.

The drama I’ve written is part of an on-going BBC Radio 4 series called ‘Writing the Century’ which, in the BBC’s own words, aims to ‘explore the 20^th Century through real correspondence and diaries from the great, the good and the ordinary.’ Much of the series has been focused on what might be termed middle class experience as the middle classes tended to write and perhaps more significantly keep and pass down the generations, diaries and letter. Documenting working class experience for ‘Writing the Century’ seemed important to me and basing episodes of my drama on interviews and oral documentation seems to be a way to access that experience.

‘Writing the Century’ focuses on a real central character and weaves a drama around them based on factual evidence. My play combines the present day recollections of Marjorie Wilson, who was a student nurse at Stannington TB Sanatorium for Children in 1950, aged 17; and dramatic scenes set in 1950, fictionalised from the former patient’s interviews I read. Marjorie’s recollections, spoken by Dame Sian Phillips, have been constructed from her 2013 interview and from an interview she kindly gave me last February.

The drama is about a young boy, played touchingly as both tough and vulnerable by Cole Wealleans-Watts, who is admitted to Stannington, his brother who is already a patient there, and the student nurse who looks after them. It also features music as Marjorie was, and still is, a singer, and in 1950 she was requested to sing at various Sanatorium dinners. Fortunately the wonderful Jennifer Carss, who plays Marjorie at 17, had a beautiful singing voice and she was accompanied in the recording studio by a live pianist. Along with others, BBC assistants and technicians, I was persuaded to play a member of the audience for the dinner at which Marjorie entertains.

The drama will be broadcast in five episodes of 15 minutes each which is an interesting challenge for the writer, as each episode should end on a cliff-hanger to keep the listener tuning in the following day to hear what happens next; and begin with a catch-up so that those listeners who are tuning in for the first time mid-week can understand what is going on.

I emphasised the emotional content in this 5-part drama as one of the things I felt reading the patient’s interviews was how affecting their time at Stannington had been and particularly the sense of shame, the stigma they felt having suffered from TB, some saying that the interview was the first time they had ever spoken of the disease to others. I understood this quite well as my own mother had TB, was confined to a sanatorium when I was a child, and never spoke of it. I was also told never to speak.

All the characters in the drama respond in some way to the various social conditions of the time, which were of great interest to me, such as deference to authority and discipline. Hope in, and fear of, the future was also evident. Hope in a new changing social order and fear that those changes would bring chaos are enacted in the drama too. I particularly liked the idea that damp dusting the wards and keeping them tidy seemed as important a role for the nurses at the time as caring for the patients. It was an era of repression but also freedom particularly for children who were let out to play unsupervised. My husband has clear memories of playing on the building site of new homes for the working class that were being constructed in Blyth, walking on rafters and hanging from half-built staircases, as the boys in my drama plan to do.

In order to fictionalise from fact, I often find myself using the non-fictional details I accumulate to discover, then to show, a deeper truth, an emotional truth. I hope this is the case with ‘Writing the Century: Stannington’. After my initial encounters with the Stannington archive, I came away with a jumble of diverse ideas and images from the late 1940s early 1950s such as: brothers and sisters were often hospitalised together as the disease appeared to run in families; there was a pine forest surrounding the sanatorium; children often tried to escape; TB in children often infected the bones and joints; some children were confined in what was known as plaster beds, immobilised for months; patients often knew very little about their condition; there were strict regulations surrounding visits even from parents; there was a posh nurse’s dining room and a lounge with a grand piano; quite a few of the nurses married airmen they met at nearby RAF Acklington; and more. I knew I wanted to weave all these elements into a coherent story, like a hold-all, which was emotionally truthful, and hope this is the case. Listeners can tune in, notice the different strands I started with, and consider how I plaited them into a story that tries to honestly recreate a time and place.