AT THE THIRTY-NINTH annual meeting of the governors of the Children's Hospital held at Birmingham Council House in the first year of the twentieth century, the Lord Mayor, Alderman Edwards, attempted to deflect some attention from the financial crisis facing the institution's management. He claimed that when the history of the Victorian period came to be written ‘there would be no more fascinating chapter than that which dealt with the emancipation of childhood and the recognition of the claims of women in the world’. For the time being, however, the town's inhabitants heard little else than an ‘annual wail’ from hospital governors as their subscription lists continued to shrink. More observant subscribers that year would have noticed that the institution's income was higher than ever due to an unusually large number of timely legacies. In less than a decade, however, numbers of subscribers declined by 15 per cent, down from 1,039 in 1894 to 878 in 1901. Similar declines are noticeable in the annual reports of the city's other voluntary hospitals, not to mention in those issued by the nation's other 600 voluntary hospitals. These, and many other changes affecting hospital finance, not surprisingly, made it difficult for governors at all of Birmingham's teaching hospitals to contemplate reconstruction in these years. An infant mortality rate that averaged 157 per 1,000 births in the first five years of the century, on the other hand, went some way towards convincing many hospital administrators that only greater efforts were required.

BRICKS AND MORTAR: THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL

Unlike the newly built General Hospital, Heslop's hospital for children appeared out-of-date in the first decade of the twentieth century. According to visitors, a ‘feeling of depression came upon one in going over it’. Others claimed hospital accommodation required immediate improvement or it would become more difficult to attract staff to fill vacant posts. Despite such warnings, when Miss Bell resigned as matron in 1908, sixty candidates applied for the post, which went to Miss E. H. Grime, formerly of Dewsbury General in Yorkshire. Though trade in Birmingham remained depressed in the early twentieth century, the hospital's governors decided to ‘take the plunge’ and commence reconstruction, as it was believed the public would not abandon them.