Gallery

Browse through our archive of the last 150 years caring for children.

Charles West (1816-98)

The founder of the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street. As a teenager, Charles West was apprenticed to a general practitioner in Buckinghamshire before becoming a medical student at St Bartholomew's Hospital. He continued his studies in Bonn, Paris and Berlin where he graduated Doctor of Medicine in September 1837.

After failing in private practice in London, he went to Ireland to continue his studies in female diseases, before returning to St Bartholomew’s to work. In 1842 he was made a Member of the Royal College of Physicians and took up a post as physician at the Waterloo Road Dispensary for Women and Children. The Medical Gazette published his lectures on the diseases of women and children in 1847, which brought him recognition, and a post as accoucheur and lecturer at Bart’s. His hospital was reluctant to acknowledge his role, however, and he resigned in 1861.

Meanwhile, he had tried and failed to transform the Waterloo Road Dispensary to a children's hospital, and so determined to found a hospital specifically for children. Three years of patient research and networking lead to the opening of the Hospital in February 1852. He continued to lecture on children's diseases, to publish learned articles and academic books, and his little guide, How to Nurse Sick Children, became a best-seller. He resigned in 1876, after which time he spent most winters in the south of France, away from the London fogs. He died in Paris on 19 March 1898, on his way home to London from Nice.

1852 exterior

The hospital opened on 14 February 1852 in a house that had belonged to Dr Richard Mead, Queen Anne’s physician. It had ten beds, a small out-patient department, and a large garden. The medical staff consisted of two voluntary physicians, a surgeon, and five nurses.

1858

The hospital attracted press attention from the very beginning. This is one of the two wards in the hospital in 1858. It is a busy scene, with the physicians attending two small patients, nurses holding the patients and attending to those confined to bed, and parents sitting by their children’s cots. Plants and toys abound, and there is evidence of patients using special equipment to strengthen their limbs. In the centre of the picture are some lady visitors, who were among the most important supporters of the hospital.

Early patient casenotes

An example of Charles West’s casenotes from the earliest months of the Hospital---the patient, Thomas Pearce, died of tubercular complications. The first IN-patient, Eliza Armstrong, lived in Marylebone, and had consumption, the lay term for phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis), which was a rampant and often fatal disease in Victorian London. There was little that the hospital could do for her, apart from giving rest, air and nourishment, and she was sent home after three weeks to attend as an out-patient. Like all patients at this time, Eliza came from a family which was too poor to pay for medical treatment. It was not unusual for patients to spend several weeks on the ward, as the hospital staff fought to counteract the effects of infectious disease and poverty.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Arguably the most famous author of the English-speaking world in the 19th century, Charles Dickens was a true friend to the Hospital for Sick Children. Born into a middle-class household that rapidly sank into poverty and deprivation, his own childhood had been marked by want, hunger, and sickness. By 1852, he had created some of the most affecting child characters in English literature – Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Tiny Tim, and his most autobiographical, David Copperfield. It was not surprising that he would be interested in a hospital dedicated to poor children. In order to publicise the new venture, he wrote articles about it in his magazine, Household Words and introduced wealthy supporters to the institution. In 1858 he helped the Hospital survive its first major financial crisis, when he spoke at the first Annual Festival Dinner and gave a public reading in aid of the Hospital at St. Martin-in-the-Fields church hall. This also raised enough money to enable the purchase of the neighbouring house, No. 48 Great Ormond Street, increasing the bed capacity from 20 to 75.

Early nursing group

The nurses at the Hospital for Sick Children had to be superior to those in general adult hospitals, because of the importance placed on their role by the doctors. It was the nurses who were the eyes and ears of the physicians and surgeons. It was the nurses who cared for the patients twenty-four hours a day, and who could recognise the smallest of changes in their appearance. It was generally accepted that young patients were not capable of putting their symptoms and needs into words, and, therefore, close observation was crucial. The small nursing staff not only had to provide round-the-clock care, they wrote down their observations, fed and cleaned their charges, read to them, and taught them prayers and lessons. A nurse at Great Ormond Street had to have patience, physical strength and stamina, a high level of literacy – but – most importantly – she had to be able to inspire love in her patients. Charles West believed strongly that love was amongst the most important of attributes in nursing sick children.

Catherine Wood (1841-1930)

The ferocious looking woman in the photograph is Catherine Jane Wood. As a teenager, she first came to the hospital as a ‘lady visitor’ in the late 1850s, before joining the staff as a ward superintendent (the equivalent to a sister today). After setting up her own institution in Queen Square for children with hip diseases, she acted as matron at Cromwell House, the convalescent home in Highgate, from 1869-1878, when she returned to Great Ormond Street as lady superintendent (matron). Catherine Wood then set up a two-tier system of formal nurse training, almost all of which took place outside the normal ward hours of the probationers. Senior nurses gave lessons in nursing techniques, and the matron was in charge of teaching the nurses about the domestic economy (including hygiene and laundrywork) of the hospital. Medical staff lectured on anatomy, biology, pharmacology, and the more scientific aspects of hospital nursing. A rigorous system of practical and written examinations was put in place, and an annual prize giving ceremony, with medals and other tokens given to the best students in each class.

Catherine Wood wrote a best-selling book, A Handbook of Nursing for the Home and the Hospital in which she stated her simple training philosophy, “What we have to aim at is the development of the individual nurse by the individual child”. Probationers worked on each ward for at least six months, and were given charge of one child, usually ”some miserable babe, neglected and forsaken by its mother”. They were taught how to hold, feed, clothe and wash the child, and, in the improvement of ‘their’ babies, introduced to the nursing system that pertained throughout the institution.

“We want each nurse to gather her little ones into her arms with the resolve that she will spend and be spent for them. They are hers, and for a time they will look to her for a mother’s love and a mother’s care”

Catherine Wood was active in the nursing and hospital reform movement, but she had to leave the hospital in 1888, to earn money to support the eleven children orphaned by her brother’s death. Thereafter, she wrote many articles for the nursing press, and remained active in public life. For many years she lectured on hygiene and nursing for English county councils, and was one of the earliest members of the Royal British Nursing Association – in spite of that organisation’s opposition to state registration for sick children’s nurses.  Catherine Wood died at a great age at Hartfield in Sussex in 1930, having lived long enough to see generations of her nurses achieve positions of power and influence across the globe.

Cromwell House 'Country Branch'

By 1868, the governors of Great Ormond Street Hospital had long realised that some patients were being re-admitted soon after discharge, because their home circumstances mitigated against continued recovery. In the late 1860s, it decided to open its own convalescent home near enough to the hospital to make visiting and transporting the children feasible, but away from the foul coal-filled air of central London.

They rented Cromwell House, an early 17th century mansion in Highgate Village. It had space for 20 beds for convalescents, and 32 for chronic cases (12 medical and 20 surgical). By 1885, Cromwell House provided care for 98 convalescent and 152 chronic patients at any one time. The children could enjoy the house and its gardens as if it was a large residential nursery school. They spent as much time out of doors as possible, and the grounds not only had vast lawns to act as a playground, but swings and chutes. Local visitors brought flowers and fruit from their gardens, and the lady supporters of Highgate came to visit regularly, and taught the patients how to read and write, and kept the fractious ones amused while the nurses got on with the hard labour of the house.

The staff at Cromwell House enjoyed more freedom, but also more individual responsibility, than their Great Ormond Street counterparts. Each day nurse had to look after between nine and twelve children. Their 12-hour day started at 7.30 am, during which they washed and dressed their children, dressed the wounds, took temperatures, administered medicines, made the beds, serve the meals, and in every way attended to their patients’ comfort. Nurses did the ward housework, washed bandages, rinsed soiled linen, and once every three weeks had to do the crockery washing-up after meals (except breakfast) for a week. The nurses had a magnificent ten minutes for lunch, and twenty minutes for their dinner. At four each afternoon they gave the children their tea, after which they put them to bed, which was a process that could easily take two or three hours.

Great Ormond Street kept Cromwell House open until the early 1920s, when it became clear that the old mansion was no longer suitable, and that metropolitan London had crept up Highgate Hill, enveloping the house and garden in pollution and traffic noise. A new mansion (complete with extensive parkland) was found near Epsom in Surrey, and Tadworth Court became the new convalescent branch of Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Thomas Smith (1833-1909)

“Sir Thomas Smith is dead, and in him we have lost not only a great surgeon, but a king among men”

Great Ormond Street’s first consulting surgeon, Tom Smith, was born in Blackheath in Kent in 1833, the sixth son of a goldsmith. When his father went bankrupt in 1850, he went to work for family friend, James Paget, at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, thus becoming one of the last of the hospital apprentices. His first post on qualifying was house surgeon at the two-year-old Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, but knee trouble forced him to resign after a few months. He worked privately for Paget thereafter, and used to take a group of medical students over to Paris each Easter to teach them operative surgery.

Great Ormond Street lured him back in 1861, and he remained as assistant surgeon until 1868, then surgeon, and remained as consulting surgeon thereafter. While here, he wrote a paper on using horsehair instead of wire in suturing wounds. One of the dogs on whom he had experimented using horsehair was supposed to have died under chloroform, and the body thrown out. Next morning the animal was on his doorstep, waiting to be let in. He was brought indoors, and lived very happily as a family pet until his death (from natural causes) some years later. Tom Smith liked operating on hare lip cases and he was such a fast worker that people used to attend his operations with a stop-watch in their hands. His record for removing a kidney stone was thirteen seconds from the first cut to the sound of the stone plopping on the dish. At Great Ormond Street, he invented a gag which enabled chloroform to be administered while the operation for cleft palate was being performed, thus enabling him to treat children at a younger age; before this, surgeons were compelled to operate on children old enough to co-operate.

As a young widower with nine children (one of whom married a Great Ormond Street man – Archibald Garrod), he declined the Presidency of the Royal College of Surgeons on the grounds that he was bringing a large family up on his own, and set up the Samaritan Maternity Fund at Bart’s in memory of his wife. When he retired in 1898, he took up golf, fishing and other country pursuits. He was appointed surgeon-extraordinary to Queen Victoria in 1895, and assisted Sir Frederick Treves in operating on King Edward VII’s abscessed appendix in 1902. Already a baronet, he was made a Knight of the Victorian Order in 1901 for his work with officers wounded in the Boer War.

1875 Building (EM Barry watercolour)

By 1870 the original two houses containing the Hospital had become grossly over-intensively used and were a danger in themselves from poor sanitation and overcrowding on the wards. Dr. West and the Hospital’s Board of Management committed themselves to raising the money to pay for the construction of a new purpose-built hospital building. In this they were successful, and the new building was constructed from 1871-75 along Powis Place, on the site of the gardens of the original houses. An additional Isolation Block, with separate wards for infectious diseases, was opened to the north in 1878. At the time of its opening, the new building was a state of the art paediatric hospital, designed by Edward Barry, the son of the more famous Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament. It contained 100 beds on 6 new wards, a purpose-built operating theatre, a substantial Out-Patients Department in the basement, and a sophisticated under-floor heating system. The Foundation Stone of the 1875 building (or “The Hospital in the garden” as it became known) was laid on July 11th 1872 by HRH The Princess of Wales. Queen Victoria had been a patron of the Hospital since its inception, but this marked the beginning of a closer interest in the Hospital being taken by the respective Princes of Wales and other members of the Royal family as Patrons, an interest which continues to the present day.

Ward in 1875

The contrast between the first ward and the wards in the new hospital is marked. The flowers and plants are still a feature of the environment, but all is order and neatness. The parents of the patients are no longer required to assist in the hospital care, and have been restricted to one or two hours’ visiting a week. The lady visitors are still welcome, but at set times only. The nurses are no longer dressed in crinolines and caps and shawls, but in starched uniforms, with hair under control and the watch as their badge of office. Where the first ward scene represents a pseudo-domestic setting, the wards in the 1875 building resemble those in every other new hospital. The Hospital for Sick Children is now a medical environment offering the latest in scientific treatment.

Chapel

This beautiful building was the gift of an anonymous donor and built two years before the official opening of the new hospital. The generous donor was in fact Mr. William Henry Barry (a relative of the architect E.M. Barry), who provided the Chapel as a memorial to his wife Caroline, who had died the previous year. William Barry endowed the Hospital a Trust Fund with an additional £40,000, to pay the salary of the chaplain and to keep the building in good repair. Two conditions attached to the endowment were that at least one service should be held each week, and that the service should be conducted in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.

At first the Chapel was illuminated with candles from chandeliers hung from the ceiling but, unfortunately, the wax used to fall on the worshippers in the pews, and it was decided that the candles had to go. Thanks to the generosity of publishing magnate, Sir John Murray, electric light candles soon replaced the beeswax originals. The plinth on which the font stands – (the gift of another publisher - Oliver Chadwyck-Healey) was made from the wood of the famous plane tree, which stood in the garden of the original hospital buildings at 49 Great Ormond Street.

Over the past 130 years the chapel has been witness to the hopes fears and prayers of patients, their families and the hospital staff. Christenings, funerals, services of thanksgiving, memorial services and carol services have punctuated the silent thoughts of visitors. In the 1920s and 1930s, patients, - upset by the departure of visiting parents on Sundays - were whisked down for a spot of brisk hymn singing before going back to the ward for bread and extra jam.

The chapel had its entrance in Powis Place, but the creation of the Variety Club Building necessitated a radical rethink of its positioning within the new 1990s hospital. It was decided that the chapel was an integral part of the hospital identity, and that it would be saved – but moved. A concrete cast was laid under the chapel, and the building was supported by jacks. The whole chapel was placed in a giant waterproof ‘box’ and moved by sliding it along a purpose-built runway, being pushed by hydraulic ram-jacks. The preparations for the move took several years, but the operation itself took just two days, and was the first time that a complete building of this architectural importance was re-sited in this way.

1893 Wing

Another new building with 3 large wards (the surviving red-brick frontage building) was opened in 1893, partly funded by money collected by children nation-wide as a “Jubilee Tribute” to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Silver Jubilee in 1887. This building finally replaced the original houses of the 1850’s Hospital. Unlike today, the Hospital’s Matron and manager (then called the Secretary) were expected to live on the premises, and had flats provided on the 1st floor. Today the old wards are used as offices and training rooms.

Astor Hall

By the turn of the Century, the Hospital’s Out-Patient Department in the basement of the 1875 building was becoming insufferably overcrowded, with more than 20,000 patients each year making over 70,000 individual visits. The Hospital was once again fortunate in obtaining funding from William Waldorf Astor (later Lord Astor), the American newspaper proprietor, to pay for a new free-standing Out-Patient building on Great Ormond Street. This was opened in 1908 on the site adjacent to the Hospital formerly occupied by the Working Men’s College and the Hospital and Convent of St. John & St. Elizabeth; the latter’s grim accommodation block for the nuns was retained by the Hospital as a nurses’ home until the present nurses’ home on Guilford Street was built in the 1930’s.

1st Electrical Department

By the beginning of the twentieth century, new technology was creating new therapeutics for sick children. This is the electrical department, staffed almost entirely by nurses, each of whom had been specially trained in electrotherapy (or ‘Galvanism’, as it had been known initially). Electricity was used primarily to treat paralysed limbs and skin diseases. Tuberculosis contracted through contaminated milk, or through living in overcrowded conditions, was prevalent in London before the Second World War. No vaccine or successful pharmaceutical treatment was available until the late 1940s, and many of the sufferers had distorted joints and bones. Electricity was one of the means attempted to instil movement and strength into the affected limbs of tubercular patients.

Pathology Lab

One of the three founding principles of the hospital was the study of childhood diseases. In the days before MRI scanners, X-Rays and even the stethoscope, the most effective way to find out more about disease was through post mortems. Where a patient died in hospital, permission was requested of the family to allow the body to be examined. As scientific equipment and the understanding of the make-up of the human body became increasingly sophisticated, the Pathology Laboratory at the hospital developed to analyse samples of blood and tissue from live patients to facilitate diagnosis and inform their treatment regimes.

ENT Surgeon George Waugh supervising operation, c.1914

When the hospital first opened, surgical operations were largely restricted to the amputation of diseased limbs, and the draining of fluid from patients with empyema. Operations took place in the ward, behind screens, and it was very difficult to keep the wounds free from infection. The 1875 hospital had a state-of-the-art operating theatre, allowing suitably anaesthetised patients to undergo more and more complicated procedures, and antiseptic and aseptic routines ensured a high rate of recovery from surgery.

WW1 staff group – women doctors

The male medical staff at the Hospital for Sick Children succeeded in keeping women doctors out of the wards until the outbreak of the First World War. By 1915, however, so many of the doctors were serving on the Western Front or in the many military casualty hospitals that had opened up in and around London, that women doctors breached the barrier at last. With the end of the

War, the situation of an all-male clinical staff was resumed, until a few women were appointed to junior specialist posts in the late 1930’s. Dr. Mildred Creak, the distinguished child psychologist, became the first female consultant in 1945. Since that time, many distinguished women paediatricians have served the patients at Great Ormond Street.

Mary, Princess Royal (1898-1963)

The royal family have been stalwart supporters of Great Ormond Street since Queen Victoria agreed to be the hospital’s first patron in 1852. Princess Mary (daughter of George V and Queen Mary) trained as a nurse at the hospital during the First World War. She became President of the hospital, and maintained that position it throughout her life.

Lewis Carroll Cot

Great Ormond Street in the 19th century – like almost every other hospital in Britain – was a charity, and entirely dependent on donations for its existence and survival. Each weekday afternoon, the wards were opened to visitors who were interested in the work of the institution, one of whom was Mrs Margaret Gatty, an Anglican clergyman’s wife from Sheffield, who edited a children’s journal called Aunt Judy’s Magazine. She published stories about the patients she met, all of who were from poor families. In 1868 she ran a fund-raising campaign, and soon had £1,000 (about £250,000 in today’s terms) to donate to Great Ormond Street. It was decided to endow a cot in the girls’ ward in perpetuity, named The Aunt Judy’s Cot. Mrs Gatty continued to visit the hospital and publish her impressions of the patients who occupied the cot for many years. A second cot was opened in the boys’ ward in 1876, and her family endowed a cot in the memories of her and her daughter, Juliana Ewing (a famous children’s author in her own right) in 1885.

Cot endowment quickly became a popular means of supporting the hospital, and was a very major portion of the hospital’s annual income until after the Second World War. Cots were named after family members of the donors, with parents naming a cot after a longed-for child, or – more commonly – in memory of a dead child. Church and chapel congregations sponsored cots, as did the public schools of England. Homesick ex-pats feature strongly, with cots being sponsored by benefactors in Simla, Colombo and St Petersburg. Clubs and societies (including The Canadian Ladies Golf Union and the Racing Pigeon Fanciers), magazines, Royal Navy ships and eleven RAF stations sponsored cots by the late 1940s. Children’s authors, such as Enid Blyton and Lewis Carroll, (whose memorial cot is featured here) had cots named after them, as did Princess Mary Victoria, who trained as a nurse at Great Ormond Street during the First World War, and was its patron until her death. Several of the cots have discernibly poignant stories behind them. In 1885, ‘The Sarah Singleton Cot’ was named after a young woman volunteer, who had contracted scarlet fever in the hospital and had died.

An example of the beautiful artwork of some of the plaques can be seen in the illustration. It is a large oval plaque with a miniature portrait of a young man in full Highland dress uniform. The inscription reads,

Jackie Cot
In Loving Memory of my Only Child
Lieut. J. C. R. ROSE
2nd Batt. Argyle & Sutherland Highlanders
Shot in the Trenches at Neape
November 1914

Sir Frederic Still (1868-1941)

Sir (George) Frederic Still was the first physician truly to deserve the title of Paediatrician. After gaining a first class degree at Cambridge, he studied medicine at Guy’s before becoming a clinical assistant at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street in 1894. His salary was only £20 a year, and he had no private income, so Still’s early days at the hospital were spent in considerable poverty.

From the first, he researched childhood diseases, and when he was only twenty-eight, he wrote a thesis identifying a chronic rheumatoid arthritis peculiar to children, which is now know as Still’s disease. He also played a major part in identifying the organism responsible for posterior basic meningitis. He was made a permanent member of the staff at Great Ormond Street in 1899, at the same time being appointed professor of diseases of children at King’s College Hospital, the first person in Britain to bear that title.

Frederic Still gave his life to paediatrics. He wrote prolifically on the diseases of childhood, and was secretary to the Children’s Clinical Club; an informal gathering of paediatricians that grew into the British Paediatric Association, of which he was the first president. He was shy and awkward with adults, but his love of children made him an instant hit with them, and he built up a thriving private practice. This made him financially secure, and he frequently treated patients for free, whose families could not afford to pay. His devotion to the welfare of children made him a natural choice to work for Barnardo’s and other children’s organisations, and he was the president for twenty years of the National Association for the Prevention of Infant Mortality. His skills were recognised in 1936 when he was made physician-in-ordinary to the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) and he was appointed a Knight of the Royal Victorian Order in recognition of his services to the royal family and to child health.

Still was a cultured man, enjoying the classics, composing, and publishing a book of poetry in the year of his death. In later life, he amazed his colleagues by taking up fly-fishing. Frederic Still was a reserved man whose life was dedicated to improving the life chances of sick children, and especially to the patients at Great Ormond Street.

Tadworth Court

In 1926 – using a legacy of £20,000 left to it by Mr Peter Reid in 1917 – Tadworth Court, near Epsom, was obtained as the new convalescent home. As in Highgate, an old mansion became the convalescent home for the mainly city-bound and poverty-stricken patients.

It took several years and £8,000, to convert this early eighteenth century mansion and grounds into a suitable facility for the patients. Although the first patients were admitted in May 1927, the official opening (by the hospital patron, the Princess Royal), did not occur until Easter 1929. The house was very handsome, but not very suitable to look after non-ambulant patients, and in 1931, the first of the pavilions was opened. The Zachary Merton Pavilion (named after a mine-owning hospital benefactor), allowed the hospital to give the children as much free air as possible, while offering good clinical facilities. More pavilions followed, the last being opened in 1966. From the opening, patients were transported from the main hospital to the Surrey mansion in an ambulance paid for by the Girl Guides.

Although the mansion house itself soon became offices and nurses’ accommodation, it was the grounds of Tadworth Court that were the greatest joy for the patients and staff. Play equipment abounded, school lessons were taken outdoors in good weather, and the Tadworth Court donkeys became valued members of staff. Once a year a grand fete was held in the grounds – and they were so close to the Epson racecourse that the place became deserted on Derby Day.

During the Second World War, Tadworth Court came into its own, as most of the evacuated patients were relocated there (the majority in Green Line buses commandeered from Carshalton). The hospital continued to send recuperating patients to Tadworth Court until 1982. Today it is run by the Children’s Trust for use as a centre for children’s care and therapy.

Sir Denis Browne (1892-1967)

Born in Australia, Denis Browne came to work at Great Ormond Street in 1922, and stayed for the rest of his life. He was the first full-time paediatric surgeon, and made his name in the ‘20s with pioneering neonatal surgery. In later years he became noted as an orthopaedic surgeon, devising and marketing a diverse range of splints and other devices for children. A colourful and individualistic personality, he nailed his office chair to the floor to avoid the cleaners moving it, and once completed a ward round and left to visit a local bookshop, still followed by a chain of overawed medical students.

J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan

Funding for the planned redevelopment of the hospital in the 1930s was greatly aided when Sir J M Barrie gifted all his rights and income from Peter Pan to the hospital in 1929. Barrie had taken an interest in the Hospital for many years, having lived nearby when he first worked in London in the 1880’s, and was a friend of Lord Wemyss, who had recently been the Hospital’s Chairman. The copyright of Peter Pan first expired in 1987 but a special amendment to the Copyright Designs & Patents Act of 1988 granted the hospital a right to royalty in perpetuity, so the hospital continued to benefit from Barrie's most generous gift. There are reminders of Peter Pan and Sir J M Barrie throughout the hospital in the form of ward names, statues and memorial plaques. For more information, visit Peter Pan.

Drinker Respirator

Polio (Poliomyelitis) was originally called Infantile Paralysis. It is an infectious disease caused by one of a selection of three viruses. The patient experiences flu-like symptoms, after which the virus may attack the spinal cord, causing muscle paralysis. The paralysis can then affect any part of the body. Serious outbreaks occurred in the middle of the First World War, usually occurring in the summer months. The most serious cases occurred when the muscles controlling breathing became affected, and this machine, the Drinker Respirator, (more commonly called an iron lung) was used at Great Ormond Street to help patients breathe artificially. Without this, death in such cases was almost certain. The respirator was imported from the United States in 1934, and was the only one of its kind in Britain for some time – it was loaned to other hospitals in London on request. A polio vaccine was developed in North America in 1955, and introduced into Britain shortly afterwards. From 6,000 cases of polio notified each year in the United Kingdom in 1955, mass vaccination means that the disease has practically disappeared in this country.

New clinical block

The new main clinical block, opened in 1938, replaced the long open wards of the Victorian Hospital with multiple smaller units, felt to be more patient friendly and reducing the risks of cross-infection. The new building, which also featured dramatically improved support facilities such as the diet kitchen and milk room, increased the Hospital’s capacity to 326 beds, including a 36-bed unit for private patients for the first time. Having been bomb-damaged in 1940, the block was reopened in 1945. It was named the Southwood Building in 1946 as a tribute to Lord Southwood of Fernhurst, the Hospital’s Chairman from 1937-46. Southwood (who as Julius Elias had had a mercurial career, rising from an impoverished childhood in the Birmingham Jewish community to become Chairman of the Odhams publishing empire) was one of the Hospital’s most dynamic Chairmen, raising large sums of money in its cause and devoting great energy to keeping the Hospital functioning during the Second World War.

Southwood Ward

This illustration shows how hospital ward design had changed since 1875. Small units that enabled control of infection were now desirable, and medical equipment was increasingly complicated. Fresh air (or as fresh as it got in London in the days before the Clean Air Act) was still an important part of the treatment regime, and the balconies of the new building were filled with patient cots in fair weather and foul.

Sir Alan Moncrieff

Alan Moncrieff joined the staff of The Hospital for Sick Children as house physician in 1925. He studied in Paris for a while after qualifying and then in Hamburg, and this period greatly influenced his thinking, particularly in regard to infant feeding. He returned to become the medical registrar and pathologist to Great Ormond Street Hospital, in 1934 became outpatient physician, and in 1947 physician. In 1945 he was appointed the first Nuffield Professor of Child Health, University of London.

He was Medical Correspondent to The Times and author and editor of many books, including Nursing and Diseases of Sick Children, Diseases of Children, 4th Edition (with Donald Paterson), and Child Health. He was deeply interested in the psychological needs of the children in hospital, and was foremost in advocating daily visiting of parents. In 1961 he was the first to receive the James Spence Medal of the British Paediatric Association, and in 1964 he was knighted.

Princess Tsahai

Princess Tsahai, the daughter of Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia (today Ethiopia) was forced to flee to England in 1936 following the Italian invasion of their country. The Princess trained and worked as a nurse at Great Ormond Street, and subsequently at Guy’s Hospital. She returned home with the ambition of using the knowledge she had acquired to develop child health services there, but died of meningitis in 1942 aged  24. A memorial hospital bearing her name was later established in Addis Ababa.

1940 bomb damage

The outbreak of war in 1939 brought more drastic changes to the Hospital than the First World War had done. During 1940, the Hospital’s remaining patients were evacuated to Tadworth Court and other temporary accommodation outside London, and the Hospital was used as a Casualty Clearing station for the still sizable local population during the Blitz, the only time in its history that Great Ormond Street Hospital has treated adult patients. The newly completed Southwood Building was seriously damaged by bombing on the night of 4 September 1940, and was narrowly saved from complete destruction when veteran stoker William Pendle was able to turn off the hospital’s flooded and damaged boilers before they exploded. His brave actions were recognised with the award of the George Medal.

Institute of Child Health

The Institute of Child Health, now a centre of excellence for research and education in paediatrics, started off life in 1946 in one room of Great Ormond Street. The Hospital had provided clinical training lectures since its early days, and had its own Medical School from the 1890’s, but attempts to create a fully-fledged paediatric research institution did not come to fruition until after the 2nd World War. Purpose-built accommodation on Lamb’s Conduit Street was opened in 1955 and extended in 1965. Although now part of University College, London, the ICH and the hospital remain neighbours and maintain close professional links.

New Outpatient Wing

The Astor Outpatient Wing was demolished in 1938, and then left as a hole in the ground for many years due to the disruption caused by the War. An infusion of money following the Hospital becoming part of the NHS enabled a new Outpatient facility of more spacious and practical character to be opened in 1954 - the frontage section on Great Ormond Street is still in use.

Modern Operating Theatre

The decades since 1945 have seen radical changes in both surgical equipment and the range of available surgical treatments. Modern cardiothoracic surgery was pioneered in the 1950s, whilst Plastic Surgery developed dramatically from techniques used to treat casualties during World War II. Kidney Surgery was another area of significant improvement, and by the 1980s heart & lung transplants and the separation of Siamese twins were possible.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hackney Road

From 1968-94, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in East London was managed by Great Ormond Street. Although the very different character of the institutions caused strains at times, the arrangement enabled medical and nursing training to be done at a more general children’s hospital before graduating to the more specialised work back at Great Ormond Street. Following the Tomlinson review of London Hospital provision, the QEH was taken over by the Royal London Hospital, and subsequently closed.

1980s corridor scene

By the 1980s, the 1875 building had long outlived its usefulness. Conditions for patients, their families, and staff, had reached intolerable depths of squalor and overcrowding. If Great Ormond Street was going to provide a first-class service in the late twentieth century, a world-class environment was required.

Wishing Well Appeal

The Hospital had planned to sell off its Country Branch at Tadworth in 1982 to fund much-needed redevelopment of the main site. This did not prove possible, and when the running of Tadworth was transferred to a charity, alternative income had to be sought. After several years’ intensive planning, a nationwide public appeal, the ‘Wishing Well Appeal’ was launched in 1987. Directed by Marion Alford, Chaired by the former Government Minister Lord Prior and with the Prince & Princess of Wales as patrons, the appeal was unprecedentedly successful, raising £54 M well before the planned deadline.

Variety Club Building

The success of the ‘Wishing Well Appeal’ enabled the demolition of the 1875 building and part of the 1954 out-patient wing, and the construction of a new state of the art clinical block, now named the Variety Club Building (VCB) in honour of  its biggest institutional donor, the Variety Club of Great Britain.

Chapel move

The Hospital’s Victorian Chapel (see above) boxed up prior to being moved 50 yards north on a hydraulic roller as part of the Variety Club Building development - the remainder of the 1875 building which housed it was demolished.

Diana Princess of Wales opens the Variety Club Building, 1994

The Princess of Wales opened the new building on a snowy February 14 (the Hospital’s 'Official Birthday') 1994. Having been Patron of the ‘Wishing Well Appeal’, the Princess was subsequently appointed as the Hospital’s President, and was a regular visitor until her death in 1997.

Camelia Botnar Laboratories

The Hospital has continued its phased modernisation into the new century – the new laboratory block was built to replace the former lab facilities at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital site.