Heroic Elmbridge resident and Twickenham worker helps newspapers welcome their newest edition

The drama unfolded on Tuesday evening, when mother Amiee Pepperrell, 28, knocked on neighbour SJ’s door in West Molesey.

She had started going into labour at only 32 weeks, so the pair got into the company Ford Fiesta and headed to Kingston Hospital.

SJ, 50, was forced to pull into the Canbury Place car park in Kingston when her passenger started giving birth.

It was a difficult birth, so the pair were overjoyed when Jacob Albert Pepperrell, named after his grandfather, was born at 9.09pm, eight weeks premature but strong and healthy, weighing 4lb 11oz.

She flagged down two women in their late 20s to call 999 and hold the phone to her ear.

A London Ambulance operator then told SJ, who normally spends her days selling advertisements in this paper how to deliver a baby.

She said: “It was tipping down and my bum was sticking out of the side of the car getting soaking wet.

“Then I was standing outside my car holding this little thing in my hands.

“I saw my hairdresser in the car park and shouted ‘Sorry my hair is a mess. I’ve just delivered a baby’.

“What a place to be born.”

Mother Amiee, whose other two children Daniella, three, and Poppy, one, were born at St Peter’s Hospital in Chertsey two weeks and one month early respectively, had told her driver: “Pull over. This baby wants to be born now’.”

Minutes later he was.

Ms Pepperrell said: “I was worried because my other baby cried a lot when she came out but SJ said he is sucking his hands. She was trying to make me laugh and I was shaking. Then I felt him kicking me so I knew he was all right.

“Now I look back on it, it’s quite funny. I was just lucky I didn’t stay at home any longer because I would have been on my own.”

A London Ambulance Service spokesman said: “We would like to offer our congratulations to the family and are pleased that our call taker was able to help in what must have been a very difficult situation.”