Now it is another one of those stories I thought had come to an end, but the Twilight Sleep Home at Westonby on Edge Lane has popped up again.*
Westonby is a big Edwardian pile on the edge of Chorlton which was built in 1903 and was grand enough to have been “cellared throughout contains three well-lighted entertaining rooms; billiard-room spacious hall, five bedrooms, box room, bathroom, and separate w.c, lavatory and w.c on ground floor, excellent kitchen, usual conveniences and large garden........ contains 3,074 square yards or thereabouts and has a frontage of about 200 feet on Edge Lane.”**
All of which made it an attractive place to live, but sometime around 1922 it 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.
And last night in a chance conversation I discovered someone who had been there and given birth to a daughter. The woman is now in her mid 90s and so this will place the birth sometime in the 1940s which was later than I had thought.
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.
Add to this by 1948 the Nationa Health Service may have made such places redundant.
Of course the key will be a conversation with the mother and a trawl of the street directories. My friend also remembered another Twilight Sleep Home somewhere in Trafford.
I have a feeling that Westonby has still more to reveal.
Pictures; advert from the Manchester Guardian, 1905 and April 6 1926, and what might be Westonby from the collection of Averil Kovacs
* Westonby, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby
**Sales advert Manchester Guardian, 1905
All of which made it an attractive place to live, but sometime around 1922 it 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.
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.
And last night in a chance conversation I discovered someone who had been there and given birth to a daughter. The woman is now in her mid 90s and so this will place the birth sometime in the 1940s which was later than I had thought.
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.
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.
Add to this by 1948 the Nationa Health Service may have made such places redundant.
Of course the key will be a conversation with the mother and a trawl of the street directories. My friend also remembered another Twilight Sleep Home somewhere in Trafford.
I have a feeling that Westonby has still more to reveal.
Pictures; advert from the Manchester Guardian, 1905 and April 6 1926, and what might be Westonby from the collection of Averil Kovacs
* Westonby, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby
**Sales advert Manchester Guardian, 1905
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