The Wellington and District Maternity and Child Welfare Centre
A specialist health centre for mothers, infants and young children initially based at the Wrekin Buildings at the bottom of Tan Bank. By late 1920, an expanded facility offering a much wider range of services opened next to the Public Library in Walker Street where it remained until 1936 when it relocated to Haygate Road.
Background
The rapid rise of Child Welfare Centres during the First World War was a direct response to the carnage of the Western Front and the need to raise a healthy underlying generation to replace the many young lives being lost. The sense of urgency in the matter was summed-up succinctly by John Wesley Clift, Chair of Wellington Urban District Council, at a special meeting held in 1917 to consider local celebrations for National Baby Week. ‘It was a painful fact’ he said ‘that a baby died every five minutes in the United Kingdom, and that while nine soldiers died every hour in 1915 twelve babies died at home’. Local medical practitioner and fellow councillor George Hollies concurred, stating the country was losing more babies every year than it was men ‘in the greatest war that had ever been fought’. ‘A great deal of that infantile loss was preventable’ he argued, so ‘if preventable, why not prevent it’? Looking to the post-war future, Dr Hollies also saw a practical side to intervening.
“There would be coming back home a great many men whose power of earning wages would be very much diminished in consequence of the injuries received, and it behoved others to see that the next generation should be as far as possible stronger than the one now going through such stress and strain”.

Joining the Movement
That effort to turn the tide was already well underway in Wellington. The Child Welfare Centre had been open since May 1916, operating on Thursday afternoons to catch the market day crowds coming into town from the wider district. State funding enabled the staffing of the facility by Dr White (Wellington’s Medical Officer of Health) and a Health Visitor, Miss Riley. A Voluntary Association also ran in tandem to raise funds for equipment and materials through organising events such as baby shows. Its annual general meetings provide a yearly snapshot of the meteoric rise of the movement, which quickly achieved impressive results. By 1919, it was a firmly established institution, having received 2655 mothers and children in the previous calendar year. Aside from providing advice on healthcare, food and milk were dispensed where cases of genuine need existed, and a clothing club operated to provide lessons in ‘cutting out and making up clothes for youngsters’. In more serious cases, referrals for specialist treatment elsewhere were also being issued.

Receipts for the year stood at a very healthy £162 (around £8200 today) but there was a nagging suspicion among the committee all was not quite what it should be. Wesley Clift thought the facility was being underused, pointing to the number of unused tickets among subscribers, while Councillor Robinson felt obliged to point out that mothers were not being ‘pauperised’ as he put it — ‘they had contributed very satisfactorily to the funds’. However, there was a general feeling among those assembled that those in outlying districts regarded the centre as the preserve of the townsfolk. Greater promotion of its activities was needed.
The County Steps In
In 1920, Shropshire County Council acquired the former Receiving Home of the Wellington Board of Poor Law Guardians that stood next to the Public Library. The YMCA had purchased the Wrekin Buildings outright the year before and the Child Welfare Centre, requiring new headquarters, made the move further down Walker Street in November ‘thus coordinating in one clinic’, as the Wellington Journal noted, ‘many branches of child welfare work’. Utilising the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act, the county authority was now playing a more prominent role in activities and appointed a medical officer for pre-natal and infant consultations (Dr P Ruth-Elliott). In 1921, 1729 infants under-five were treated at the centre, which was by then offering free dental treatment, too. Within a decade, infant mortality in Wellington had fallen from 130 deaths per thousand to 80, and over the next few years that decline would become even more dramatic, falling to 29 per 1000 by 1925. The AGM for that year heard that the breadth of services being offered at the centre had led to a deficit being reported but the impact of the Walker Street clinic (a direct forerunner of the modern day Wellington Medical Centre) was clear for all to see. It had transformed the life chances of a generation of children, just as many local people had wished for in the wake of the Great War.
