Patient at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre helped design original hospital 60 years ago
Posted 28th March 2018
A patient at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre has told how he helped design the room that housed the hospital’s first machine to treat people with radiotherapy 60 years ago.
Sam Edwards, 83, was working as a design draughtsman in the 1950s when he was tasked with creating the unique retractable flooring for the linear accelerator.
Sam is currently being treated for a spinal tumour at the Wirral hospital in the year it celebrates its 60th birthday, and coincidentally as old pictures have emerged of his creation.
An image of staff treating a patient in 1958 using the linear accelerator was among a set of images bought in an online auction by a GP from Cheshire, Chris Studds, who has gifted them to The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, to help mark the diamond anniversary.
Sam, from Spittal, Wirral, said: “I was working at Fawcetts and we were asked to design a floor that could move to let the machine move round so it could treat people from different angles.
“I did the drawings for it but I actually never got to see it. There was another lad who worked with us who lived nearby so he used to go to Clatterbridge every day on his bike to see how it was getting on.”
The floor has long gone, along with the machine, but as he looked at a picture of the room he helped design (left), Sam said he feels a unique link to the past when visits the hospital for treatment every four weeks.
“It is quite nice to think we made that floor. We probably didn’t realise at the time how important it was,” he said.
The need for the special moving floor became necessary when cancer services were transferred from Liverpool to Clatterbridge and the linear accelerator was one of the most advanced pieces of equipment used to treat the disease at the time.
In order to allow it to move around the patient and deliver radiotherapy to their tumours, the machine needed space so staff could move it into position to get the best angle.
Post war fears over radiation in built up areas had prompted health chiefs to make the switch from the city to the wide open spaces of the Wirral countryside. The hospital was officially opened as the Regional Radiotherapy Centre on 28th March 1958 by Lord Cohen of Birkenhead, the most prominent physician in England at the time.
Sam, shown below at work as a young draughtsman, was one of scores of people who helped create the original centre.
As the hospital celebrates its diamond anniversary this year, the picture of the room with the floor Sam designed will form part of a collage to help celebrate the milestone.
