Westonby and the Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth

I said that there were two more stories about Westonby* that big Edwardian pile on the edge of Chorlton which was built in 1903 and demolished sometime in the 1940s or 1950s.

One was the family who lived there soon after it was built and the other was the mystery surrounding the birth of Sheila Healy who was born at “Westonby, Edge Lane” in 1923. I say mystery because Sheila’s parents lived in Old Trafford which begged the question of how she came to be in Westonby.

Now the obvious conclusion was that by 1923 our fine pile had become a nursing home.  All then that was left to do was crawl over the street directories for the period and track when it changed use.

Easy enough and there for 1922 was the answer, Westonby had become the Old Trafford Twilight Sleep Home.  Not I grant you the zippiest of names and one with feint comic overtones  which opened a new field or research.  For on the same page of classified adverts was another Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road.

It is an odd name and takes you back to one of those fashionable medical practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and centred on the attempt to find a painless way for giving birth.

The standard approach had been to administer chloroform but in Germany experiements had been undertaken to see if women could give birth while asleep.  The mother was given a mix of morphine and scopolamine and early results were so promising that by the early 20th century the method had been adopted in the USA and Canada.

Our own Twilight Sleep Home opened in 1917 on Henrietta Street in Old Trafford and moved to Westonby sometime in 1921 or early 1922.  It advertised itself as offering “Painless Childbirth” and featured regularly in the classified section of the Manchester Guardian until 1927.  During those ten years it’s name varied slightly but always retained  Twilight Sleep.

So far I haven’t uncovered a reference to the company or to its winding up.  Nor has a copy of the booklet which it offered come to light, but I travel in hope.  Along with the adverts there are a succession of birth announcements which refer to Westonby in the early 1920s so perhaps there must be more to uncover.

And again it will be the street directories which will help.  The Westonby home does not feature after 1927 but its competitor on Upper Chorlton Road was still advertsining in 1936 after which it too vanished.

The answer might lie in the loss of faith in the medical practice.  As early as 1915 there had been deaths associated with the method and much mainstream medical opinion was at best luke warm. There were also stories of poor quality care and an absence of trained doctors and nurses as well as horror stories of women having to be strapped to the birthing beds.

It may also be that Westonby was too small it had only eleven rooms.  Then there would have been the cost.  I don’t have any figures yet but such care would not have come cheap and even though some nursing homes catered for poorer clients it is hard to see that this was a first choice for all but the comfortably well off.

We shall see.  I have a feeling that Westonby has still more to reveal.

Pictures; advert from the Manchester Guardian, April 6 1926, and what might be Westonby from the collection of Averil Kovacs

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby