This week we continue with our look at the Health Centre in Wycombe which was built specifically for the care of expectant mothers and their babies.

Now the home of the Busy Bees nursery it was opened in 1938 by Her Royal Highness the Princes Royal, Mary Countess of Harewood.

On Saturday, October 29 the Princess Royal first visited the RAF Camp at Halton near Wendover, where eleven years earlier she had opened the Princess Mary hospital.

She then came to Wycombe “entering the Borough at the Amersham Rd boundary. Thousands of enthusiastic people, most of them women and many who had waited more than an hour, gathered in the High St and Queen Victoria Road, to await the Princesses arrival. Every one of the hundreds of school-children lining the route flourished a flag”.

The opening ceremony did not go smoothly. The Princess took a golden key from a cushion held by Mr Frank Biggs, the builder, and inserted it in the lock in the front door.

The door refused to open, so the Princess tried again, but the door remained obstinate. Then the Mayor, Cllr. A J Gibbs, stepped forward, stooped down and put his shoulder to the door. It finally opened!

After an inspection of the Health Centre there was a civic reception for the Princess in a Marquee on the Rye, when the Mayor gave a rousing speech.

This illustrates the confidence with which the town was approaching the future, even though the storm clouds of war were starting to gather.

“We here, treasure many things – our venerable parish church and our Guildhall; our modern Municipal buildings and fine new streets; our up-to-date shops and model factories; our schools and our housing schemes; but above all we treasure our reputation as being the centre in which the best of all classes of furniture is made and from which it is distributed to the world.

"Buildings and material things are of great value, but our true wealth lies in the inherent skills and industry of our people”.

The Mayor continued: “The Health Centre marks an important step in our efforts to show the value we place upon the health and happiness of our people, especially our mothers and children.

"Already, we can point with great satisfaction to the fact that our death rate is much lower that that for England and Wales, whilst our infantile mortality rate is less than half that for the nation”.

Before departing from the Health Centre the Princes Royal planted a purple beech tree in the grounds.

It is believed that the Health Centre in Wycombe was the first in the country to be established specifically for the care of expectant mothers and their children. 

There were in the town in 1938 two privately run nursing homes for women about to give birth.

One of these was The Shrubbery in the aptly named Shrubbery Rd, off Amersham Hill opposite Lucas Road, where the fee for a normal birth was eight shillings.

The other was Sefton House. No.113 Totteridge Road, on the corner with Lucas Road. 

The Matron was Miss Norburn-Reeve and the babies born there included one to the wife of Air Chief Marshall ‘’Bomber’’ Harris, who is famous as the head of the RAF Bomber Command in WWII.

The Princes Royal paid another visit to Wycombe in July 1944 in her role as Commandant-in-Chief of the British Red Cross Society.

On this occasion she inspected nurses who had assembled on The Rye immediately in front of the Health Centre.

She also inspected the purple beech tree she had planted during her 1938 visit and commented that it was growing well.