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.THE HEALTH OF BARKING
The lack of hospital facilities gives your preventive and specialist services;
special significance and value, because they already do what the hospital service of
the future is to attempt: they bring the service to the doorstep of the patient. In
1946 attendances at your various clinics and out-patient departments totalled
147,254, which represents an increase of more than 30,000 over the total for 1945
Barking Hospital. Barking Hospital made its debut in 1885 in modest enough
fashion for it started as a tent erected, as a temporary measure, for the treatment oi
cases of infectious disease.
In April, 1893, the Local Board of Health (as it was then called) accepted the
tender of Messrs. Humphry's, Ltd. for the erection of an Infectious Diseases
Hospital on Upney Meadow at a cost of £401. Later on in the year, the hospital
was duly opened and Dr. F. Gibbens, the then Medical Officer of Health, was
appointed as Medical Superintendent. The hospital contained 30 beds, but it had
no nurses' home, because in 1904, Dr. C. F. Fenton, the Medical Officer of Health,
reported that " the cottage at which the nurses are accommodated is scarcely
habitable."
The 1914-1918 war deferred plans for the erection of a permanent hospital.
After the war, the Minister of Health declined to sanction the necessary loan, but,
at last, a start was made on the first portion of a new hospital in 1931 and this was
formally opened in September, 1932. The second portion was completed in 1935,
bringing the total bed complement to 108.
Upney Maternity Pavilion. Whilst the origin of the fever hospital in the
19th Century had arisen, not so much from a desire to alleviate the sufferings of man,
as from the fear that unless the infectious cases were removed from the community
the contagion might strike down the influential, the origin of the maternity hospital
was due to the flowering of that humanitarianism which had been gaining strength
for the past hundred years.
You started your maternity home in 1918 on humanitarian grounds because
there were so many people, particularly towards the end of the war, who simply
had not the accommodation at home suitable for confinement. As a matter of fact,
as I have written elsewhere, at the start of the war the building which was used
previously used for typhoid fever cases and it was here that the foundations were
laid of the maternity work which has been carried out at the Barking Maternity
Unit ever since.
It was not, however, until the passage of the Local Government Act, 1929»
that express permission was given to Authorities to provide maternity hospitals
for the accommodation of normal as well as complicated cases of pregnancy
In 1935, the Corporation became the local supervising authority for midwives
and in October, 1936, you-r new Pavilion was opened. This building is generally
recognised as one of the finest in the country. I know of much excellent child
welfare work which is carried out in unsuitable converted buildings all over the
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