Back with Westonby and the Twilight Sleep Home

As stories go it is more of a postscript but Westonby and the Twilight Sleep Home just refuses to go away.

Westonby was a big Edwardian house on the edge of Chorlton and passed from private residence to become the Old Trafford Twilight Sleep Home.*

Now the Twilight Sleep Home is not the zippiest of names and has feint comic overtones, but it takes you back to one of those fashionable medical practises of the late 19th and early 20th centuries centring on the attempt to find a painless way for giving birth.

The standard approach had been to administer chloroform but in Germany experiments 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 its name varied slightly but always retained Twilight Sleep.

And I thought I had all but exhausted the story but then when you least expect it the Twilight Sleep Home bounced back, and not in a way I had expected.

I was talking to my new friend Ann who has lived in Chorlton all her life and was helping me out at a recent talk at the Post Box Cafe.

The conversation roamed across events in the township over the last 70 years during which I mentioned Westonby and the Twilight Sleep Home, and of course you have guessed it was the type of birth Ann’s parents had opted for.

Now Ann had been born at the Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road, but she knew of Westonby and remembered it as the Chorlton Nursing Home.

All of which takes Westonby a little further in to the 20th century.

I had assumed that when the practice of giving birth asleep fell out of favour in the 1920s our house ceased to offer the service.

This was an assumption which seemed to be confirmed by the absence of adverts for Twilight Sleep Homes in the Manchester Guardian after the late 1920s and yet a full decade later Ann was born at the Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road.

All of which goes to reinforce those simple observations that there is a lot more history out there and a pointer to me to go back to the Directories and search for Westonby from the 1920s.

Pictures; of Westonby and Edge Lane, 1914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m17757 and the OS map of 1907.


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

** The Post Box  http://www.thepostboxchorlton.co.uk/ and https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Post-Box-Chorlton/565302550152568 0161 881 48