Mother's memories of being at Stannington Sanatorium as a child as daughter now works with charity that saved her

Sarah Bell is part of the team at Children North East, supporting local families and young people to grow up happy and healthy.

With a 130-year history, the charity also established and funded services at Stannington Sanatorium near Morpeth, where her mother Brenda Bell stayed at to recover from tuberculosis (TB).

In September 1953, 13-year-old Brenda was diagnosed with TB – a memory that stands out because it was a time people rarely used healthcare services, so a doctor’s visit meant something was very wrong.

She soon left her family in Darlington to receive treatment at Stannington Sanatorium, which would become her home for the next 14 months.

Opening in 1907, the sanatorium was the UK’s first purposely built hospital for children with tuberculosis. In the 1950s, the infection was responsible for one in 20 deaths across the country, but rates were much higher in the North East.

Until the NHS took on the costs of running the sanatorium, it was funded by local charities – including its founders Children North East, then named the Poor Children’s Holiday Association.

Despite not being able to see her family often, it is a time that Brenda talks about fondly.

She said: “I don’t remember all the details, but there were wards of about 20 of us and we mostly stayed in those groups. Girls in one part of the building, boys down in a different ward.

“It wasn’t like today, you didn’t have TV and internet for entertainment, but we weren’t in bed all the time – we were outside and went to school.

“We did the same things any young people then would do really, except then you would have to rest a lot.”

Brenda made some friends and they would go on walks together in the local countryside, supervised by staff. One particularly fond memory includes a Christmas trip out to the theatre where she got to meet Reg Varney (who would go on to star in ‘On the Buses’), whose autograph she still has today.

She added: “When I was there, people just had to get on with it. I didn’t see my family much, because my mum would have had to get two or three buses.”

Fast forward to 2023 and her daughter Sarah, who lives in the Whitley Bay area, works with the Children North East on the frontline of young people’s health.

She currently works delivering its Ways to Wellbeing project that provides help to parents and carers supporting their children through mental health challenges.

Sarah said: “One of the most rewarding parts of my work is when you meet a young person or a parent and they are in a difficult place, but when you get to the end of the journey with them you can see they leave feeling more confident to tackle challenges and also less isolated.

“Mental health is one of the biggest health challenges faced by young people today, like TB would have been back then. It feels like this story has come full circle.”

For more information about the charity’s work, go to https://children-ne.org.uk