NOSTALGIA: Mike Pryce on Ronkswood Hospital, which served its citizens well

It eventually closed in 2002 with the arrival of Worcestershire Royal Hospital, about half a mile away on the opposite side of the road and the old site is now covered by housing. But there were plenty of twists and turns along the way.

One of the first came not long after the end of hostilities when the population seemed to have been celebrating so much the birth rate shot up. By the end of 1948 Birmingham Regional Hospital Board was being asked to spend nearly £39,000 on providing a new maternity unit at the hospital comprising a clinic and four wards.

Pleading for the cash, Mr JS Ripper, secretary of South Worcestershire Hospital Management Committee, said the need for such a facility was “urgently apparent”. It was intended the spend would create a training school with 60 trainees and teaching staff.

Ronkswood Hospital was built on part of the original Tolladine Golf Course in 1941 under the Emergency Medical Services Act as a temporary hutted hospital, later to be used by the Ministry of Pensions as a Pensions Hospital. It had a complement of 600 beds in 14 wards, some wards having as many as 40 beds.

It had its own staff, including medical, surgical and nursing and during the war treated service casualties, civilian casualties from the Birmingham air raids and other cases. Despite its intended use largely disappearing after the war, it still retained a full medical, surgical and nursing staff, although bed numbers were reduced to 450 by 1951.

It then became a National Health Service facility with the aim of reducing the long list of patients waiting for treatment in Birmingham. However, this proposal was impractical due to the distances patients and their families needed to travel to Worcester, so in 1952 it was transferred to the South Worcestershire Group and became part of Worcester Royal Infirmary and extended greatly.

The new maternity department eventually opened in September 1952. It had 49 beds, an ante-natal clinic and classroom. It catered for both normal and abnormal midwifery and later for general practitioner midwifery in a separate unit.

No further midwifery was done at Worcester Royal Infirmary in Castle Street. One of Ronkswood’s most innovative moments came in the summer of 1968 when its two operating theatres were being refurbished and surgeons took to carrying out their work in a giant sealed and sterilised tent. It was called an “Octatent”, one of only four in the country, and was basically a reinforced plastic canopy erected over a tubular steel structure, in which air could be constantly changed. It comprised a theatre and outer recovery room joined by a sliding concertina-type door.

The Octatent had originally been designed for use by the military, so in some ways the hospital went back to its roots.