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Health Conditions |
Gordon Smith |
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You didn’t have the sanitation you have today. No flush toilets, dry earth closets and middens. Quite often the sanitary arrangements were really poor. It was a breeding ground for disease. There were various epidemics at Blyth. There’d been typhus and cholera at different times.
A gentlemen who actually came from Shields but moved to Blyth and spent the rest of his life here was Dr Gilbert Ward. He was worried about the fact that we had no hospital at all, If a seaman fell ill, which happened frequently, with cholera or typhus, they’d take him off the ship, but they had to find somewhere for him to stay. There were no hospitals so he went to a lodging house. All the inmates of one lodging house caught cholera and so did the landlord and almost died. That’s when they decided they needed something done. Gilbert Ward appealed for somewhere. Matthew White Ridley stepped into the breech and gave them two workmen’s huts at the bottom of what’s now Ridley Avenue, and that became the first cottage hospital. |
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