Templecombe, The Hospital c.1955

Photo ref: T183022

I was born here in June 1947. My mother was a Yarlington girl who married a farmers boy from Bratton Seamore. If they had waited one more year perhaps i would have been brought into this world under the new National Health Service!

At around the age of three, I was staying with my grandparents Richard (an ex-railwayman) and Kathleen Evett, in Templecombe, for a few days. While walking in a recreational area next to the railway marshalling yards, I twisted and broke my upper leg, ending up in this hospital, where I spent many weeks with my leg hoisted up by a 'cats cradle' of wires to ...see more

I was born in Templecombe Hospital on 13 April 1943, my mother was Lilian Game (nee Atkins) and was staying with her widowed father, Ernest Atkins of Silver Street, Wincanton, after leaving London because of the bombing during the war. My brother was also born there in September 1944.

My birthday, a very cold day 10th December 1944.  My mother had been in a horse and cart delivering milk to the area around Wincanton when the cart turned over into a ditch, this started premature labour and she was taken to Templecombe as the nearest hospital. My mother Phylis Cruickshank had been living at Bitwood Farm, Charlton Musgrove, my father, Donald Stuart Cruickshank, a seaman recently demobbed, was ...see more