For Margaret Goodrick, Crossley Sanatorium has been like a member of her extended family - her story is the concluding chapter in a three-generation relationship with the hospital.  Below is her account of a life of Crossley...

Daniel Clark:  What is your connection with Crossley Sanatorium?

Margaret Goodrick:  I lived as a child in Manley from birth until aged 19, Crossley Hospital East and the Liverpool (West) Sanatorium [demolished 2000] figured greatly in my life. My mum worked there, we spent time on the wards, got to know the patients, attended the Christmas concerts and the garden fates in summer.  I roamed both far and wide across the fields around Manley and into Delamere forest - the grounds of Crossley were often one our playgrounds in the 60's and 70's.

Daniel Clark:  You mentioned that both of your parents worked at Crossley Hospital East - what were they doing?

Margaret Goodrick:  My dad worked with the gardeners at the Liverpool (West) Sanatorium which produced most of it's own vegetables, they had pigs and poultry.  The East did less in the way of producing it's own food.  My mum came from the heavy industrial town of Widnes, working initially as a ward maid with a view to training as a TB nurse when she was old enough, but she caught TB whilst employed there and became a patient instead.

Daniel Clark:  So how was your mother treated?

Margaret Goodrick:  It was before the specialist antibiotics for TB became widely available, so she was on bed-rest to begin with.  She was under the care of the then medical director called Johnny Huston, he lived in the house at the end of the back drive.  She was treated with Streptomycin and Pas, she was on it for two years - she was nursed for 3 months in the staff sick room on the second floor then moved to a single room on the same floor and stayed there until she was discharged in 1954, after two years in the hospital.  She remembers him doing his ward round and coming down the corridor singing "I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair" because that is her name. He once allowed her special privilege to get up to go to the dining/sitting room on the ground floor to watch TV.  When Dr Huston declared her well enough he allowed her to go out (accompanied by a junior Doctor) to the tearooms at Hatchmere Lake, he was Chinese and had come to England to learn about TB, he went back home and opened a TB hospital in China.

Daniel Clark:  Did either your mother or father hear about many deaths at the hospital during the time they worked there and the two years that your mother was treated there?  Are there particular memories that stand out?

Margaret Goodrick:  My dad started working at the hospital when he was fifteen and can remember seeing the morgue doors open ready to receive a body from the wards on a fairly regular basis.  My mum also has similar memories.  My dad also knows of several people who were cured at the hospital.  Liverpool (West) Sanatorium, as you know, served the people of Liverpool and Crossley served those of Manchester, he recalls a man who worked in the labs who doubled up as the mortician, I assume a local undertaker might have sent coffins and hearses down from Frodsham to collect the bodies for transportation back to Liverpool or Manchester by train.  My mum has spoken about a patient who came and went during her time as a patient in Crossley Hospital East, a very glamorous looking women (to her young inexperienced eyes that is) in fact she was a prostitute from Liverpool.  Both hospitals always had an air of sorrow about them even in the 1960's and 1970's, and as kids we always thought they were haunted. Some people from the local community who worked there when I was a kid had been TB patients as well, but the "Sani" as it was affectionately called was still a stigma to many of the elder people of the village.  When my dad was a lad one of the other medical directors had dogs that he would let loose in the grounds, they couldn't escape due to the link chain fencing being in place, they were known as the "Sani Bulldogs" and struck fear into the local Children.

Daniel Clark:  What do you feel when you see my photographs of Crossley Hospital East in such an abandoned state?

Margaret Goodrick:  Very sad, both from a personal and professional point of view (I work as a clinical nurse specialist in TB.)  I suppose in retrospect I have watched the decline of the hospital all my life.  I would have loved to see inside it again.

Daniel Clark:  In your correspondence with me, you mentioned that your grandmother lived in Manley and can remember the hospital being built - what were her memories of this?

Margaret Goodrick:  My Grandmother lived at what is now called New Pale Lodge, only a field away from Crossley and was only a little child, her uncle, who was a construction worker, lodged with them whilst he worked on the building [Crossley Hospital East].  It was his pride and joy.  He would drink at the Station Hotel (now the Goshawk at Mouldsworth) up to 15 bottles of stout a night, then bidding goodnight to his friend who lived on Manley Common he would go up to the hospital to check on "what the lads had done that day", climbing up the scaffolding in the dark without a care in the world, he would inspect what had been done and then climb back down, cross the field and go to bed. It was him who alleged there was as many bricks below ground as there were above.

Daniel Clark:  In your correspondence with me, you mentioned a myth surrounding the leasing of the land in which Crossley Hospital was built upon.

Margaret Goodrick:  My dad had an elderly friend who always alleged that the ground on which the hospital was built belonged to the forestry commission who only leased it to the crown and that if ever it ceased to be a hospital site it was to be returned to woodland.  

Daniel Clark:  You have many close connections to the hospital, can you remember what happened to the hospital when it ceased to be a sanatorium in the 1960s - what was it used for then on?

Margaret Goodrick:  My dad felt that the hospital was already declining as a sanatorium by about 1947, bed numbers fell rapidly until, by the 60's, it was no longer viable as a TB hospital.  During the mid to late sixties and beyond it was a long stay geriatric hospital, dealing with patients who needed either convalescence or long term care.  The West was a long stay psychiatric hospital that dealt with what were commonly unkindly called "burnt out" patients from the Deva Hospital [Chester] and Winnick.  Many were elderly, some had been sectioned years ago for such misdemeanors as becoming pregnant out of wedlock, or having nervous breakdowns, some had learning difficulties, but all of them were extremely institutionalised in one way or another - but they were all completely harmless.  

Daniel Clark:  Your mother returned to work at Crossley Hospital East when it was used as a geriatric hospital, what are your memories of this?

Margaret Goodrick:  My mum returned to work at the hospital in the late 1960's and stayed there until it ceased to function as an NHS hospital in the 1980's, many of the patients went into "care in the community" schemes.  Those unable to cope in the outside world went to Dutton Hospital (my mum went with them to Dutton and retired from there).  The West was eventually demolished, the East became a boarding school [Kingswood College] for a while, but then fell into disrepair after it closed. I can remember back in the 60's the patients made model windmills to sell at the annual garden fete.  They made them in OT from old TB X-rays that were stored in the basement.  I remember going to the Christmas concerts in the old recreational hall.  I used to ride through the grounds on horseback and into Delamere forest.  The woods between both hospitals were spooky, spooky , spooky - I remember my granddad was convalescing one summer from a broken leg at the East, I would get off the school bus outside the West and run like hell through the woods to the East to see him, my friend would sometimes come with me and we would sing at the top of our voices "Loving You" by Minnie Rippington - I can't hear that song without remembering those woods that always seemed dank, uninviting and full of foreboding.

Daniel Clark:  You yourself eventually ended up working in the kitchens of both hospitals when you were sixteen, what was this like?

Margaret Goodrick:  I spent a long hot summer working there, it was lovely on the West side, the staff were always nice and friendly but on the East they were less so - on the West the patients helped set up the tables and make the bedtime drinks.  Both hospitals had very different ways of working, there was an unwritten rivalry about them, very much a 'them and us' situation.  They were almost like separate entities that had been thrust together against there will.  It was not just the staff, the very buildings seemed to exude it.  I'm sure when the West was demolished that if walls could have laughed the East would have being doing so.

Daniel Clark:  And what is your final memory of Crossley Hospital East?

Margaret Goodrick:  My grandmother was cared for there in the final years - it was a place she didn't want to be, in those final years it was old and shabby, you could see the splendor that had once been and no matter what they called it it was still the Sani to her, a place of long suffering where you went to die.  When I left her she said "I won't see you again for a long time", two days later she was dead and I never went inside the Sani again.