Swindon in the Past Lane

Plans for the Medical Fund flagship building had been in the pipeline for a number of years.  The committee paid £999 for a plot of Rolleston estate land when it came on the market in 1885 but it was another six years before construction began. Built in 1891 and opened the following year, Milton Road Baths soon became the hub of the Medical Fund activities. With a grand, glass covered entrance in Faringdon Road, the red brick building was designed by Swindon architect J.J. Smith at a cost of £10,000. Keeping up with the times, the Medical Fund committee installed both Turkish and Russian baths.  The Turkish bath with dry air heated rooms, followed by a full body wash and massage was seen as being ‘of great value as a sanitary and cleansing agent.’  The Russian baths were a variation on this theme, a vapour bath created by the throwing of water on hot stones, followed by a massage that involved being hit with a besom made of birch twigs and leaves. ...

In 1948 Aneurin Bevan, Labour's Minister of Health, rolled out the revolutionary National Health Service, a cradle to grave safety net of state health and welfare care. Something GWR employees at Swindon had enjoyed for over 100 years. The World War II Coalition government had debated the whys and wherefores of creating a National Health Service but it was the radical Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan who masterminded the plan having been inspired, it has been said, by the GWR Medical Fund at Swindon. He had urged members of Clement Attlee's post war Cabinet to visit the town and see just how an employee's contributory scheme could, and did work. "There it was," Bevan is reported as saying, "A complete health service, all we had to do was to expand it to embrace the whole country." Daniel Gooch, Locomotive Superintendent at the railway works is acknowledged as being the initiator of the GWR Medical Fund. As men were dismissed or put on short time workin...