Super centre’s echoes of past

Mum and tot unit to be built on historic site

History will be made when Oldham’s new £44 million women and children’s supercentre comes to the Royal Oldham Hospital.

It will be the largest capital investment of its kind to improve maternity and early child care in the region and is due to open in 2012.

But it will stand on the footprint of Oldham’s former workhouse, built almost 160 years ago, where the poor and destitute were cared for in Victorian Oldham.

The new unit will cover the site of the workhouse ward where elderly men were cared for.

Eventually that became part of the Oldham and District General Hospital and was converted into the pathology laboratory in 1955.

The laboratory was used by pioneers Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards for their early work on fertilising human eggs outside the body, before they transferred to the old Dr Kershaw’s Cottage Hospital in Royton.

One man who worked in the path lab has more reason than most to remember the history of the site.

John Battye, former Mayor and council leader in Oldham, worked at the pathology department from 1962 until he retired in 1996 as head of the blood transfusion department.

And he researched and wrote about the site, now part of the Royal Oldham Hospital, in a series of articles for the staff magazine. He said: “It is fitting that the new unit will occupy the space where Patrick Steptoe and Professor Robert Edwards carried out the original work to pave the way for the world’s first test tube baby, Louise Brown, who was born in July 1978.

“It is where all the blood tests were carried out on Louise and her mother Lesley during her pregnancy.”

The £44 million unit will also replace the Marron Maternity Unit, which opened in 1940, where Lesley and Louise Brown were cared for.