In the beginning

Oct 7 2008 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

PARKSIDE Maternity Hospital in Park Road North, Middlesbrough, has had a significant impact on our local history: It’s where thousands of Teessiders entered the world - and perhaps you were one of them.

After 68 years of special deliveries, the hospital closed in 1988 but the memories of those who worked or gave birth there live on.

This grand old institution was conceived in 1919 when the Middlesbrough Maternity Child Welfare Committee purchased two semi-detached villas situated in their own grounds in Park Road North for £7,925.

During the 1920s the Maternity Home, as it was then, provided accommodation for just 19 patients, but its output was prolific. During these early years an average of 300 babies were born each year and by the time it closed that had risen to 5,000.

In 1931 Middlesbrough Council decided to construct an extension to accommodate the increase in demand for beds as Middlesbrough's population grew. It was opened on Friday, March 6, 1936, at which point Parkside Maternity Hospital was born.

In the official opening souvenir booklet from 1936 it explains that the building was built with Normanby red pressed bricks and featured steel casement windows.

The building, rather reassuringly we are told, was lit by means of electric light with pendants and bowls.

Three more wards with a total of 20 beds and two single bed wards were provided. There was an isolation block with nurses' bedrooms and there was a doctors’ bedroom and seven more nurses' bedrooms in the extension's main building.

The total cost of the extension was £19,607. The main building was refurbished at the same time, providing an up-to-date operating theatre.

This represented the very best that 1930s medicine could offer in maternity care, something which in the Depression years of the mid 1930s came as a welcome addition to the town.

Parkside Maternity Hospital stoically continued to serve the mothers of Teesside throughout the Second World War and for the next four decades.

During that time, the Evening Gazette covered hundreds of stories, mostly connected with fund-raising for urgently required equipment. Among them, three tiny tots handed over a cheque for £870 for a portable pregnancy viewer in February 1979. They were Deborah Atkinson, three, Nicola Ward, five, and Paul Atkinson aged just 14 months. The money had been raised by a street collection.

In July 1988 the maternity hospital that had served so many mothers over so many years had to close but the move was welcomed by many people who looked forward to the opening of the new maternity unit at South Cleveland Hospital, now known, of course, as James Cook University Hospital.