Gordon Brown reveals how tragic death of baby daughter helped save life of ex-Labour leader’s grandchild
Gordon and Sarah helped set up a research laboratory after their premature daughter Jennifer died aged just 10 days old in 2002
FORMER Prime Minister Gordon Brown has revealed the tragic death of his baby daughter helped save the life of the grandchild of former Labour leader John Smith.
The politician and his wife Sarah helped set up a research laboratory after their premature daughter Jennifer died aged just 10 days old in 2002.
Mr Smith's daughter Catherine Smith, 43, revealed work carried out at the lab "impacted directly" on the care given to her daughter Ella McConnachie, now two.
She said it had "improved her chance of survival" after she was born at 28 weeks weighing just 1lb 10oz.
Former PM Mr Brown described Catherine's father as "my friend, my colleague, my mentor", saying that even 23 years after his death the politician is still "sorely missed".
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Fifteen years after Jennifer's death, he said he and his wife are "so proud" to see what has been achieved by staff at the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory (JBRL) at the University of Edinburgh.
He said: "Sarah and I never had the joy of experiencing Jennifer taking her first steps, or speaking her first words, or going to school for the first time.
"But we have realised that after 15 years, out of tragedy some good can come."
Mrs Brown said: "It's extraordinarily important to know that Ella has survived and thrived, she is an amazing, bouncy fully healthy little girl. That's what you want every baby to have the opportunity to be."
She said: "There is nothing worse than to lose a child, but to know that she is part of our family, she is in our heart, we have the same love for her that we always will have, that won't change. Any mother who has lost a child will share that experience.
"But we have our amazing two sons, we're a brilliant family, and Jennifer is in there and part of it even though she is not with us."
Mrs Brown set up the charity PiggyBankKids - now called Theirworld - which established the laboratory in 2004 to look at ways to help premature babies thrive, including research into how much oxygen should be given in incubators.
Ms Smith said: "I knew Gordon and Sarah at the time their daughter died. It was a very upsetting experience for everyone that knew them, it was just awful."
She contributed to the fundraising effort which led to the laboratory being established, but said at the time she "didn't know in any detail about the work that they did".
Ms Smith, from Dundee, had an emergency Caesarean section after developing HELLP syndrome, an aggressive form of pre-eclampsia.
While her baby was being cared for, she said "there came a point when Ella was in hospital that I realised that Sarah and Gordon must have been in a ward very similar to the one I was in and suddenly their experience came to life a little bit more, I felt I was able to understand better just the total horror of it".
She went online to make a contribution to the laboratory's work, and started reading about the "extraordinary" research it has done.
Ms Smith said: "I realised some of the research they had done into the oxygen levels being given to premature babies had in fact impacted directly on Ella's care and had changed the way doctors treat these small babies and improved her chances of survival."
She recalled that when her daughter was born, she "seemed impossibly small to me".
Ms Smith, who like her father trained as a lawyer, added: "I thought it was impossible. I didn't think there was any possibility of her surviving those first few days, but that was before I understood how incredibly sophisticated the care of these babies is.
"Seeing Ella was of course completely shocking, I still can't really absorb now how breathtakingly tiny she was.
"But the brilliant thing about the ward was that to them it was routine, it was made very clear from the first moment I saw her that they treated babies this size all the time, she was nothing out of the ordinary. It was unbelievably reassuring."
Mrs Brown added: “One of the things that was really obvious through the thousands of letters we received was that this wasn't something that just happened to us or a few people, this is something that is just more common than we had thought or I could have possibly imagined.
"So it was clear to us, if we were to make any sense of this tragedy, that it was to harness that understanding to best effect.”
“I feel very privileged that it bears Jennifer's name. We're able to see a lot of areas where we have made a really positive effect, although we have a very long list of things to do."