Warren Farm Road Clinics

“Oh my gosh! memories just came flooding back of visiting the clinic to pick up cod liver oil and orange juice.”

That was Dorothy Capewell, in 2012, when Voices of Kingstanding put up a photograph of the Warren Farm Road clinic and asked where it had stood. The replies came quickly, and most of them were about fear.

Built for a new estate

A city estate of young families needed clinics, and Birmingham built them here. In September 1935 the Birmingham Daily Gazette reported plans going to the Education Committee for new school clinics, one of them “to serve the Walsall-road, Perry Barr, Kettlehouse Farm and Kingstanding area”. Whether that report is about this building is not certain. But by 1940 a photographer had recorded the “Health Clinics, Warren Farm Road, Kingstanding”, and another photograph in the Library of Birmingham, dated to the 1930s, calls it the Warren Farm Road Health Clinic, an infant welfare centre.

That is what mothers used it for. John Prime made several trips there with his mother in the 1940s. Families collected the welfare foods there: the cod liver oil and orange juice Dorothy remembered. Geoffrey Elliker went for his TB jab. Clement Watts remembered being checked for lice, and, after catching scabies from the boy next door, being bathed in disinfectant and scrubbed with a brush. “It did hurt,” he admitted, but “i was cured very fast though thank the clinic.”

The school dentist

Then there was the dentist. Barbara Copson remembered having teeth out under gas and coming round at a stainless steel sink to rinse: “Nightmare memory! Have hated the Dentist ever since.” Lynnette Hodgetts remembered sitting in a line waiting for her name to be called, and her father coming home with a small present and her mother making an egg custard afterwards.

Jeff Egan could still recall “the smell of the rubber mask, disinfectant and the brain-bursting mixture of Halothane and Nitrous oxide gas”. Children whispered that there was a blob of blood on the ceiling above the chair. Years later, he said, the first time he heard Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon it took him straight back to the clinic. Cliff Gebhard summed it up in 2022: “Hated that clinic as a kid especially the school dentist.”

Across from the baths

Where exactly was it? Jeff Egan put it across the road from the little parade by the baths, next door to the schools’ metalwork and motor-vehicle workshops. In the afternoons, he remembered, buses on test from the Perry Barr garage would park by the clinic while the mechanics had a smoke. John Prime thought it stood roughly where a low, newer building stands, near 276 Warren Farm Road.

Two memories point further east. One man remembered it “down by College Road”, and Terry Raynes worked from about 1990 at a rehab clinic near the corner of Warren Farm Road and College Road, facing the side of the pub. The city’s own caption speaks of clinics in the plural, and there may have been more than one building over the years.

Valerie Buck, whose father lived round the corner in Halsbury Grove and remembered the clinic from boyhood, believed in 2012 that the old school clinic was still there, face-lifted and working as a primary care centre. Warren Farm Health Centre stands on Warren Farm Road today, across from the site of the baths.

Whether its walls are the same ones is for someone with the plans to say. The job has not changed: this stretch of Warren Farm Road has been looking after Kingstanding’s health since before the war.