CRHnews - Farewell St John's Maternity Dept Chelmsford

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*PHOTOGRAPHS + VIDEO featuring vandalised maternity wards, but its last members of staff have scribbled messages and their autographs clearly on the walls.

*Thanks for cover pic to silverainbow, the BBC for the Text to Audio commentary, and everyone else who has contributed, and to the maternity unit staff who did their best to deliver safe births at dear old St John's.

Chelmsford Weekly News March 19, 2010
EXHIBITION REMEMBERS ST JOHN'S HOSPITAL

A CHELMSFORD hospital that was once a workhouse will be closing its doors this year.

To mark the event, an exhibition is taking place at the town’s museum showing its history since 1837.

St John’s Hospital, in Wood Street, will have its services transferred to Broomfield Hospital when the new PFI building opens in the autumn.

St John’s began life as the Infirmary of the Chelmsford Union Workhouse and the exhibition, researched by a team including former members of hospital staff, tells the story of both the workhouse and hospital era.

Visitors will find out about the workhouse masters, inmates and children, see how Christmas was celebrated and death was dealt with.

They can read typical graffiti on a workhouse wall and meet a German girl who answered the British Government’s plea to work in a British hospital following the Second World War.

There will be a range of stories, both funny and sad, many of which came from the nurses who have worked at St John’s Hospital over the past 60 years.

Among the objects on display will be the 1930 bath regulations for workhouse inmates, medical instruments used at the hospital and a painting of Bundles, the Chelmsford tramp who was treated at the infirmary.

Keeper of social history at Chelmsford Museum, Dot Bedenham, recalls her real-life experience of being treated in a London hospital which was a former workhouse.

She said: “It was a horrible, miserable place and freezing cold.

“I had both my children at St John’s Hospital, and although I was located in the old infirmary of the former workhouse, it couldn’t have been more different.

“At the time I wondered about the ward names I saw – Fred Marriage, Grace Bartlett and Mary Munnion – and thanks to the research undertaken for this exhibition, I now know who those people were.”

The exhibition is on at the museum, in Oaklands Park, until Sunday, May 16, and admission is free.

https://www.chelmsfordweeklynews.co.uk/news/localnews/5069474.exhibition-remembers-st-johns/

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