Wellington Park

Wellington Park is one of the town's best kept secrets. It opened in 1903 to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII.  It is a small formal park and is located at the south western end of Courtland Road.  It can also be accessed via Beech Grove but it is not well signposted. It covers an area of 1.8 hectares.  The site was given to the town by Fox Brothers and Company (a local clothmaker) in 1902.  They also paid for the buildings and landscaping and provided £100 a year for 5 years to cover the running costs. 

Fox Brothers commissioned the Exeter based company Robert Veitch & Son to design and build the park.  The park was designed by the German landscape gardener F.W. Meyer, who worked for Robert Veitch & Son for 30 years.  His design included a ha-ha, three Spanish colonial style entrances, a shelter, a bandstand and a caretaker's lodge,  Work on laying out the park began in July 1902.  The building work was carried out by Messrs Follett Bros of Wellington. The park was opened to the public on 2nd May 1903.

The park, which is Grade II* listed, was restored in 2000 with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund.  The park's current design is largely unchanged from its original layout.

Mature plane trees lining the walk on the north east side of the park

South East entrance on Courtland Road

North entrance on Beech Grove

Floral bedding

Floral bedding

Ornamental pond

Rockery

War Memorial - erected in 1921

Shelter

Bandstand

Caretaker's Lodge

Caretaker's Lodge

Plaque on the Caretaker's Lodge

Drinking fountain

Ha-ha

Grove of trees

Floral bedding

Floral bedding

Dandy - Weston-super-Mare Railway Station’s Charity Collection Dog

One day in around 1923 a stray spaniel wandered into Weston-super-Mare Railway Station.  He was adopted by the staff who worked there. They named him Dandy, provided him with a kennel and put a charity collection box around his neck.  He spent the next five years mingling with people on the station platforms.  By the time he died on 16^th January 1928, he had raised many hundreds of pounds for the GWR Widows and Orphans Fund.  He was buried at the end of one of the platforms. 

A memorial plaque to Dandy can still be seen mounted on the wall in the waiting room at the railway station.

Dandy the Spaniel

Dandy's Memorial Plaque

The Development and Production of Penicillin in Clevedon

Antibiotics are compounds produced by bacteria and fungi, which are capable of killing or inhibiting the growth of other microbial species. Before their introduction as medicines, there was no effective treatment for infections such as pneumonia, meningitis or rheumatic fever.

In 1928 Alexander Fleming, who was a Scottish bacteriologist working in London, first noticed that the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus wouldn’t grow in the parts of a culture, which had accidentally been contaminated by the green mould Penicillium notatum.  He conducted research on the mould and discovered that it produced a substance capable of killing many of the common bacteria, which cause infections in humans.  However he was unable to produce a purified form, which was also stable.

Further research was carried out in the late 1930s by British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain, Australian pathologist Howard Florey and others at Oxford University to produce penicillin in a form that could be used as a human medicine. By 1941 they had developed an injectable form of the drug, which was available for use in humans. During the Second World War development of large scale production of penicillin took place in the United States.  However it was also produced in Clevedon.

In September 1939 the Royal Naval College Medical School, which was working on the production of vaccines against cholera and typhoid, was evacuated from Greenwich to Barrow Gurney Hospital.  However, the site at Barrow Gurney didn't have adequate water, gas and electric supplies, so they moved to White House in Highdale Road, Clevedon.  

When the Royal Naval Medical School also began to produce penicillin in Clevedon in 1943, they needed more space than they had at the White House, so they moved to the house that is now 5 Elton Road, although at this time it was No 4 and was called Eastington House.  The rooms in the house were used for research and assay laboratories.  The penicillin was produced in a factory built on land behind the house. 

Penicillin was produced by growing the Penicillium notatum mould on a culture medium at a controlled temperature.  This was done in sterilised milk bottles.  40,000 were used at Clevedon, as each one only produced a very small amount of antibiotic.  Many local people were employed in the laboratories, in addition to the Royal Navy staff.  The freeze dried powder was packed and distributed to the armed forces and a few civilian establishments.  When reconstituted with sterilised water, it became injectable.

After the end of the Second World War the Royal Navy sold the Clevedon factory to Distillers Company Ltd.  They moved in at the beginning of 1947.  They worked on developing new antibiotics but in 1949 the research station was transferred to the Medical Research Council.  They continued research in to antibiotic alternatives to penicillin and also manufactured other drugs.  The Clevedon site closed in 1961 when their work was transferred to Porton Down.

Further Reading:

Clevedon Places and Faces: Rob Cambell (editor). Matador, 2010

Clevedon's Social and Industrial Heritage: Further studies in the history of Clevedon: Clevedon Civic Society, 1998

5 Elton Road, Clevedon

Plaque outside 5 Elton Road, Clevedon