"THE nursing profession offers a life of interest and adventure in the field of medicine as new discoveries are revealed, while in itself it is satisfying and worthwhile serving humanity," said an early 1960s brochure for the Darlington Memorial Hospital Training School for Nurses.
"It appeals to the intelligent as well as the practical, and to all that is best in women."
At this time, when nurses and the National Health System are uppermost in our thoughts, it feels appropriate to delve into a collection of photographs amassed by Joan Young, who trained as a nurse at the Memorial in the 1950s, and then served there until 1988.
"The Darlington Memorial Hospital was opened in 1933 as a memorial to the fallen of the 1914-18 war, designed to perpetuate their memory in the service of the living," says the brochure.
The first nursing school seems to have started after the Second World War, with the advent of the NHS, and it was housed in the memorial hall wing of the hospital behind the cenotaph.
At the start of the 1960s, though, there was a desire to enlarge the six wards of the Memorial so that it became "a thousand-bedded district general hospital".
This expansion gobbled up nearly all of the space on the site, and was finally complete in May 1980 when the Duchess of Kent formally reopened the hospital.
This meant that the nursing school had to be found a new home. In 1964, it reopened in a semi-detached pair of Victorian villas off Woodland Road on the edge of the hospital site.
We think this property was called Elmbank when it was built, but by the time it became a nursing school, it was known as Acton House.
This, though, was only a temporary home because by the end of the decade, there was new accommodation for the school within the hospital. The Victorian villas were demolished so that nurses’ flats could be built – one block is called Acton House – although their gateposts remain. We reckon that as you walk from Woodland Road through to the hospital, you go follow the driveway of the mansion beside which the nurses on the front cover are sitting.
The Darlington nursing school didn’t survive the switch to graduate-level entry for nurses at the start of the 21st Century, and now the Memorial’s endoscopy department occupies its rooms.
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