THE importance of two doctors to rural communities in the Durham Dales will be preserved for generations to come after a chance discovery.

Early in March, the Weardale Museum was contacted by Suzanne Wright from Worton in North Yorkshire, whose elderly neighbour Betty Gray was about to move to a new house. Mrs Wright wondered if the museum would be interested in some old photographs and items about Weardale.

Dr Gray's father and grandfather were distinguished Weardale doctors.

Mrs Wright said: “We found these slides of photos by her dad who was a good photographer and we thought that they had not been seen for over 90 years. We thought there must be a place in Weardale that looks into local history like this and got in contact with the Heatheringtons at the Weardale museum."

David Heatherington and his brother Ken ,who runs the genealogy resource at the museum, were invited down to meet Dr Gray and see the collection, with a view to accepting it for the museum. Dr Gray, 94, a retired doctor in the York area, was only four when her father, Dr John Gray, died, but her mother Eleanor kept many items belonging to him, and information about her grandfather, Dr William Robinson. In his time at Stanhope, Dr Robinson researched lead miners’ diseases and, after leaving to become a distinguished surgeon in Sunderland, he was instrumental in setting up sanatoria for the treatment of TB at Horn Hall in Stanhope and Leazes Hall in Wolsingham.

Eleanor was Dr Robinson’s daughter, and she married Dr John Gray, her father's Stanhope partner, who took over the Stanhope practice in 1894, together with the management of Horn Hall and Leazes Hospitals.

Dr Gray was a lieutenant in the local Stanhope Territorial force, attached to the 6th Battalion DLI, and when war came in 1914 he was appointed major in the R.A.M.C., serving in Thessalonika, where he achieved the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and was awarded the OBE for his services. Many of the items in his daughter's collection relate to his war time experiences, including a set of more than 100 glass slides, which Dr Gray used in giving lectures on the Macedonian campaign.

David Heatherington said: “It was lovely to meet and talk with Dr Betty Gray about her late father’s collection and we are grateful that she wanted to return it to Weardale where he worked. Too often artefacts are dispersed, lost or destroyed and with them the history and heritage of past generations.”

Ken Heatherington added: “It is impossible to over-emphasise how important Dr William Robinson and Dr John Gray were to the development of medical services in Weardale in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries – the period before there was a National Health Service. They were instrumental in setting up and managing facilities in the form of the sanatoria at Horn Hall in Stanhope and Leazes Hall in Wolsingham for the diagnosis and treatment of TB, a scourge afflicting the working people of Weardale at the time.”