Why Were Women Giving Birth Inside One of Britain’s Grand Country Houses During WW2?

Why Were Women Giving Birth Inside One of Britain’s Grand Country Houses During WW2?

Today I want to discover more about one of the lesser-known parts of wartime evacuation: what happened to expectant mothers. When we think about evacuation, we usually picture children carrying suitcases and gas-mask boxes as they left Britain’s cities. But pregnant women were also among those the government wanted to move away from areas at greatest risk from air raids.

Before the war had even begun, plans were being made to evacuate expectant mothers from vulnerable areas. Once war was declared, maternity homes were established in receiving areas, often using buildings that had never been designed for medical care. “Large houses and other suitable buildings were adapted and equipped to provide maternity care away from the areas considered most vulnerable.

One of the most remarkable examples was Brocket Hall near Welwyn in Hertfordshire.

Brocket Hall was the sort of place that seemed worlds away from an ordinary London maternity ward. The house had a long aristocratic history and was associated with Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister. In 1939 its role changed completely. The City of London Maternity Hospital helped transform Brocket Hall into a maternity unit for women leaving London, while Hertfordshire County Council administered the site.

Rooms that had once been used by wealthy guests became part of a working maternity hospital. According to Brocket Hall’s own history, Lord Melbourne’s former room became the birthing room, and the Prince Regent’s Suite was used as a recovery room.

In November 1939, Parliament was told that around 165 emergency maternity homes, providing about 4,500 beds, had already been assembled as part of the evacuation arrangements. In the first six weeks of the war alone, more than 3,500 births had taken place in them.

For women leaving London, Brocket Hall offered distance from the bombing and organised maternity care. The City of London Maternity Hospital itself was badly damaged during air raids in 1940 and 1941, and after September 1940 it could no longer admit inpatients at its City Road site. Women who chose to leave London for their confinement could be sent to Brocket Hall.

For the women, evacuation brought difficult choices. Leaving a heavily bombed city offered greater safety, but it could also mean giving birth away from familiar surroundings and separated from husbands, relatives or friends. Families were already being separated by military service, evacuation and war work, and childbirth could become another moment shaped by war.

Brocket Hall continued as a maternity hospital beyond the end of the fighting. Responsibility for financing Brocket Hall passed from Hertfordshire County Council to the City of London Maternity Hospital in 1946, and the Hertfordshire maternity unit remained in use until 1949.

 Evacuation was not only about schoolchildren leaving cities with labels tied to their coats. It also involved thousands of women preparing to give birth, travelling away from home and entering maternity units created in some very unexpected places.

For a few of those women, that unexpected place was a Hertfordshire mansion where bedrooms became wards, grand rooms became delivery and recovery spaces, and thousands of babies began their lives while war continued beyond the estate.

Had you ever heard of Britain’s country houses being turned into wartime maternity hospitals?

Image info:

Nurses at Brocket Hall maternity hospital

Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer / Imperial War Museums, D 9037. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.