by Peter Williams

At 11.47pm on July 25, 1978, Louise Joy Brown became the world's first 'test tube baby'.

Two men – Patrick Steptoe and Professor Robert Edward – had pioneered the process by which science’s most famous infant was about to be born: in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

The pressure inspired by their peers, their critics and the media was intense.

Yet even now - 40 years on - few knew that, when the pressure became too much, Patrick found peace in Blackfriars Street in Canterbury.

He had married Sheena Kennedy, the daughter of a Canterbury GP, and he was never happier than when playing his baby grand piano in the music room overlooking the River Stour.

I first met, and filmed, Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, long before 1978.

In fact, I remember the first question I ever asked Patrick, when I was working for the ITV current affairs programme This Week; it was in a theatre in unfashionable Oldham, and was simply: “What exactly are you doing?”

Explicit in that young reporter’s question was everything that Robert and Patrick had to put up with in the 1970s as they sought to perfect IVF: curiosity, moral concern, mistrust, condemnation.

For this young reporter, the film ‘To Mrs Brown, A Daughter’ was a world exclusive.

Recording an ongoing, knife-edge situation while the press of the world clamours outside is a rare and privileged experience.

The pictures of the IVF birth went around the world, and, pre-computers, were prime instruments of knowledge of what had happened for many, many millions.

Both Robert and Patrick were aware of the power of the media, from bitter experience.

Trust us they might, but for them it was always a gamble, and one of the qualities I admired most in them was they never sought to influence our films when, undoubtedly, they had the power to do so.

Both had felt the lash of media and peer criticism.

In 1965, The Sunday Times broke the news of IVF with the front page headline ‘Births by Proxy – experiments reminiscent of Huxley’s The Brave New World’.

By 1970, the barrage was at its height. Following a media leak at Oldham, we read ‘Doctors start baby outside the womb’, ‘Test Tube babies raise moral issue’, ‘Move to the threshold of genetic engineering’, and The Sun shrieked ‘Ban the Test Tube Baby’.

In 1971, the Medical Research Council (MRC) withdrew its grant from Robert and Patrick’s work, saying there were “serious doubts about ethical aspects of the proposed investigations in humans”.

But, working on a financial shoestring, Steptoe the surgeon, and Edwards the scientist, persisted.

They travelled thousands of miles between their bases in Cambridge and Oldham in order to combine their skills.

And, as Patrick would say, “when it’s all too much I can find an oasis of peace in my secret haven in Canterbury”.

At 11.47pm on Wednesday, July 25, 1978, Louise Brown was born by caesarean section.

In 2010, Robert Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Tragically, Patrick Steptoe died aged 74 at Canterbury’s Chaucer Hospital in 1988, too soon to be honoured in the manner he richly deserved.

Somewhere in the world today a baby created through IVF will be born.

Six million and more IVF babies have now been born.

I sometimes wonder how Robert and Patrick would feel, looking back on the road they travelled to make all this possible.

I guess I’d go back to a summer day in 1975, when Robert was at home and a telegram arrived.

It was from Patrick. He opened it and read: “Pregnancy test positive STOP Ring me urgently STOP Patrick.”

Robert’s wife Ruth Edwards was with him in the kitchen.

She asked: “Anything wrong?”

“No” said Bob, “it’s marvellous” and then, in a loud voice: “It’s really marvellous.”

And so many parents all over the world would agree with just that.