Book Launch: The Children of Craig-y-nos free download

6 May 2009

The Children of Craig-y-nos: Life in a Welsh Tuberculosis Sanatorium, 1922-1959
Ann Shaw and Carole Reeves
(Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009)

This book, written by Carole Reeves with artist and writer Ann Shaw, was launched at Craig-y-nos Castle in South Wales on 1 May, and 200 copies were sold and signed within an hour.
Craig-y-nos Castle was the estate of the world-famous opera singer Adelina Patti, until her death in 1919 when, as the Adelina Patti Hospital, it served for nearly 40 as a TB sanatorium mainly for children and young women.

The project was initiated by Ann, who was a patient at the hospital from the ages of 9 to 13. On a return visit to Craig-y-nos in 2006, she was amazed to find some of the wards still intact. The launch of her blog (www.craig-y-nos.blogspot.com) to collect the memories of ex-patients and staff was so successful that within a year over a hundred stories and 1200 photographs, mostly taken by the children themselves, had been contributed. There followed three photographic exhibitions, radio programmes, a reunion at Craig-y-nos Castle, and a Lottery grant to produce this book. The project has not only reunited people who shared their formative years in the sanatorium, but has opened a community dialogue about the impact of tuberculosis on families in the Swansea Valley.
The print-on-demand book, which will also be made available as a free download from the Centre’s website, is (as far as we know), the first-ever collective history of patient and staff experiences in a TB sanatorium. Carole Reeves, who applied for the Lottery grant and has worked on the project since its inception, said: “The book will be a permanent memorial to ‘The Children of Craig-y-nos’ and an important medical and social history of tuberculosis in the area. Because the sanatorium records have been destroyed, we have re-constructed forty years of missing Welsh history.”