Never ignore a memory ............ the smell of bread and hay and the Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth in Chorlton

“Oh yes I was born at The Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road.”

Advert from the Manchester Guardian, 1920s

And with that casual remark Ann set me off again with the Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth and thoughts on just how important are listening and recording people’s memories.*

In the past some historians were sniffy about oral history preferring objective and verifiable sources of historical information.

And memories can be highly subjective and unreliable but that said they can also be a powerful way of getting right to the heart of an event in the past.

Only yesterday Tina was baking bread.

It was the Doris Grant’s loaf which had been perfected by Ms Grant in the 1940s, and its claim to fame is that it is made by leaving out the kneading process. Ms Grant had forgotten to knead the bread but it turned out alright, and with a bit more experimentation produced a loaf which was a bit heavier but quicker to make.

And it was pretty much exactly like that made by my grandmother sixty years ago on a range in the kitchen of the family house in Chellaston.

Nothing more simple than the taste of a wholemeal loaf and I was back half a century ago in a tiny village outside Derby.

And in much the same way the smell of warm hay and old plaster and timbers always sends me back to the loft of their barn on hot summer’s days when the only sound was that of insects and the humming of the telegraph wires outside the hatch.

So back to the Twilight Sleep Home.

Now it 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.

There was Twilight Sleep Home which opened in 1917 on Henrietta Street in Old Trafford and moved to Westonby on Edge Lane 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

But by the end of that decade there is no further reference to it and given that the practice had received some bad publicity when expectant mothers had died it was reasonable enough to assume it had closed down.

And so our home on Edge Lane was renamed but was still operating as a rest home during the late 1940s but using more conventional methods.

Ann however was born at The Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road in 1944.

Now I can’t be sure whether the Twilight Sleep methods was used but the name was still the same over the door.

Either way mother and child stayed in the home for a fortnight which may seem a long time but will have had more to do with ensuring that mother’s were not pitched straight back into the routines of running a home which with far fewer labour saving machines will have been a tough task.

So that one chance has got me a little further along the trail of knowing more about that Twilight Sleep Home.

Pictures; of Westonby and Edge Lane, 1914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m17757 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and the OS map of 1907.

*The Twilight Sleep home for painless child birth, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20Twilight%20Sleep%20Home%20for%20painless%20child%20birth