The Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth, a chance conversation and a story revealed

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

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

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

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

Westonby on Edge Lane and a mystery

Yesterday I returned to the story of Westonby on Edge Lane, and in the way of things it has blossomed into two stories.

So I shall start in 1923 with the birth of Winifred Constance Sheila Healy born to Francis Joseph and Catherine Maud Healy, nee McDonnell which is really how I came again to visit this house on the edge of Chorlton.

 Her daughter had come across the Westonby story and wondered what more we might find out about the house and her mother’s early life and not for the first time it led off in all sorts of directions.

Sheila Healy as she was known was born at Westonby in April 1923 but therein lies the mystery because her parents came from Trafford Park, and it was in Trafford Park where her mother died just four months after the birth.

They had been married in 1920 at St Antony's Catholic Church on Fourth Street, Trafford Park and had lived on Eleventh Street.  Looking at a picture of Eleventh Street from 1910 it is a world away from the large Edwardian house which was Westonby set in its own grounds and overlooking fields.

Fourth Street and Eleventh Street were part of an industrial community built by the British Westinghouse Electric Company for its workers.  It was laid out “on the American style grid system of avenues and streets and had shops, eating rooms, a dance hall, schools, a church and a cinema.”*

Sheila’s mother was working for Westinghouse in 1911 and it may have been there in the electric works that she met Francis who gave his occupation as an “electrical and mechanical engineer” in 1920.

All of which begs the question of how Sheila came to be born in Westonby.  The answer will lie in the street directories which may reveal a changed use for the property.  Large buildings like Westonby were not as economic to run as they had been before the Great War and it may have become a small private hospital or nursing home.  It may even be that there is a link with Westinghouse who were regarded as “progressive employers”** and so could have funded a small hospital.

And that pretty much severs the link at present between Sheila and Westonby.  With the death of her mother Catherine more usually known as Kitty, Sheila was “raised by her grandparents Thomas & Margaret Healy in Chorley and Horwich. They came to England from Ballyfermoyle, Co. Roscommon, Ireland in the early 1880s and Thomas was one of the founders of St Mary's Catholic Church, Horwich,” which predated our own Catholic chapel by just eight years.

This was St Peter on Barlow Moor Road which was replaced by the now familiar church of St John on High Lane in 1927.

I doubt that there is any connection but there might be and so along with a search of the street directories for the early 1920s there may be something amongst the church records.

We shall see.

Pictures; Eleventh Street, 1910 from Wikipedia Commons, and Westonby and newspaper extract from the collection of Averil Kovacs

*Trafford Park Village, http://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/outside/village.html

**As early as 1869 the American parent company had introduced a 9 hour day provided adequate housing for its workforce, as well as educational and cultural facilities and insurance schemes, Working Conditions in the Westinghouse Works,  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/papr/west/westcond.html

*** Averil Kovacs, Sheila’s daughter

Westonby reveals its history

Something always turns up.

It is a phrase I use a lot and I guess very much sums up the optimistic side of me.

And I was reminded just how true this was when out of the blue I got a comment to a story I had posted back in May about Westonby, a lost house on Edge Lane.*  In the piece I had gone looking for the remains of a fine old early Edwardian house which had come on the market in 1905 just two years after it had been built.


I remember saying that I thought “there was a story here about the development of Chorlton,” and a little bit more of that story has come to light.

We now have a picture of the place, or at least we think we have. It was supplied by Averil who wrote to me that having come across the blog story,

"At last I have an answer as to where my late Mother was born in 1923. On her birth certificate it says Westorby, Edge Lane but I could find no trace. Then I saw on eBay a Guide for Chorlton that mentioned Edge Lane. 

In with my late Mother's aunt's photos was a photo of a very large old house. She didn't know where it was, and I am wondering if this could in fact be Westorby. Her Mother died shortly after my Mother was born.”

So together we are beginning to look for more clues as to the history of the house, its later occupants and its fate, for this grand pile has long since gone.

The first task will be to check out the street directories and electoral registers which will give us names and a date for when it was demolished.

And we know a little bit more about the place.  According to the 1911 census it had nine rooms as well as a bathroom and kitchen which pretty much fits the estates agents blurb from 1905.

At the back end of 1910 it was occupied by Mrs Fanny Cottam, but by the April of the following year she may have died because the house is occupied by her two married daughters. Florence had married Harry Richmond in 1907 and Ruby was married to Edward Ruby Stevens in 1911.  Both were young couples and the Richmond’s had two young children.

All of which does add to the story of the township’s development.  Harry Richmond was a sub manager in  the family business which he describes as “mail contractors,” but was also according to the firm's advert "Funeral Carriage Proprietors Mail Contractors and Job Masters,"  while Edward Stevens was an electrical engineer, which puts them in that new group of people who had steadily been moving into Chorlton since the 1880s. These were professional, managerial and clerical people who are best described as the middling people who worked in the city or the newly created Trafford industrial area but fancied living on the edge of the countryside.

And in 1911 Westonby was just that.  A little down the road was Stretford Railway Station while not more than 15 minutes away was Chorlton Railway station both offering a quick service into the heart of Manchester and yet our house looked out on fields stretching down to the Mersey.

Averil’s mother was born there in the April of 1923 so the gap in years is not much and I am confident that we will have more answers soon.

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/westonby-lost-house-on-edge-lane.html

Picture; from the collection of Averil Kovacs