This is a picture postcard from the very beginning of the twentieth century featuring a photograph of the Royal Infirmary, Halifax. When this photograph was taken the building will have only been a few years old (it was opened in 1896), and the building remained largely unchanged until it eventually closed in 2001. One of the last departments to leave was the Pathology Department and my wife was a doctor there at the time. By then the building was full of ghosts and creaking timbers and I suspect you could still hear the trams rattling past, even though the lines had been ripped up sixty years before that. Some of the buildings you can see in this photograph still remain, although they have now been converted into houses and apartments. Now the site looks domesticated, but at its height, the whole complex radiated disinfectant and invalid broth.
The reverse of the card reveals that it was sent by Lucy Ineson to “Harrold Colton” at the remarkably truncated address of “Currie Street, South Australia”. I suspect that the Lucy Ineson concerned was the then 13 year old daughter of Thomas Ineson a florist and fruiterer of Hammond Street in Halifax. The recipient of this rather brief message is far more intriguing because it turns out that the “Harrold Coltron” is not some misspelled beau, but a rather famous hardware shop in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. As with all found postcards, you long to know the back-story. I have some thoughts of my own, but as Lucy said all those years ago, “sorry to say I cannot continue to exchange”
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