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blue plaque · England

PC Albert Alexander

Photograph at the PC Albert Alexander blue plaque

From 1885 to 2004, this was the site of the Newbury District Hospital. It therefore seems and appropriate location for this plaque to commemorate the life of Police Constable Albert Alexander (1897-1941) the first person to be treated with Penicillin. On war support duty in Southampton on 30th November 1940, Albert was injured in an air raid. Contracting staphylococcal septicaemia, he was transferred to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where he was selected for the first clinical application of penicillin. He showed rapid improvement, but sadly sufficient penicillin could not be produced, and he relapsed and died on 15th March 1941. His place in the history of antibiotics is secure. Albert was born in Woodley, Reading, and in World Ward I served in the Army Service Corps providing transport to the front line. Joining the Berkshire Constabulary in 1921, he served Newbury 1923-29, in Thatcham, and from 1937 in Wootton, Abingdon. His wife Edith Mary (1896-1985), whim he married in 1924, is buried in Newtown Road Cemetery alongside him. They had two children.

Inscription drawn from imported open data, awaiting original TributeLegacy editorial.

Source: Open Plaques. Geographic data via OpenStreetMap.

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Data sources

Location records are drawn from open, licence-clean datasets, kept here with attribution and gratitude to the people who maintain them.

  • Open Plaques, dedicated to the public domain (CC0). See openplaques.org.
  • Wikidata, available under the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.
  • © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
  • Historic England, National Heritage List for England, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. War memorial records are drawn from open community datasets (OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, NHLE) — never from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is excluded.

Editorial descriptions, photography and tribute links are original TributeLegacy work, layered on top of the open data.

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