No doubt the transport engineers who have spent a lot of time and money widening the road outside what is now Calderdale Royal Hospital would be jealous of the wide open spaces on this real photographic postcard from the early twentieth century.
The hospital was opened in 1901 and went under a variety of names in the early part of the twentieth century including the Halifax Poor Law Hospital, the Union Infirmary, St Luke’s Hospital, St Luke’s Military Hospital and finally the Halifax General Hospital. By the twenty-first century it had become the embryo of the new Calderdale Royal Hospital.
When it was built it was the largest public building in Halifax and it cost somewhere around £130,000 to construct, and that is equivalent to about £15 million today. The total cost of the current Salterhebble Hill roadworks is seemingly about £20 million. Discuss!
In the late 70s, my then-husband was a junior doctor here. I spent one Christmas Day helping wash up and tidy, in one of those round wards you can see on the left.
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Yes, Andree, I remember those old circular wards myself, both from visiting relatives there and from the time Isobel worked there. When built, they were quite an innovative feature seemingly, copied from the latest designs in London.
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Quite an impressive building. Was it for looking after WW1 wounded when it was a military hospital?
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Yes, it was one of the many institutions that was taken over for looking after the wounded during that most cruel of conflicts.
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So many hospitals did that. I’ve a photo I downloaded a long time ago from Flickr (with a Creative Commons license) of a hospital with some WW1 soldiers on the lawn, playing with dogs. They look happy and then you notice their injuries.
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