Committed to care for the young
FOR 76 years an impressive Victorian building in what was once known as Pest House Lane, where plague victims were kept and then buried in nearby fields, provided essential medical care for many thousands of local children.
Now, about to have a facelift and conversion into 60 apartments, the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children in what became Park Street opened to its first patients in 1891, having previously been located in a former private house in Story Street.
Many will still recall being treated there, not least for having their tonsils removed, which was made more acceptable by the promise of ice cream when it was all over.
Five years after the hospital opened the adjoining house was bought for £1000 to become a nurses’ annexe and a later purchase bought another house for £650.
In the Second World War young patients were moved to the safety of a private residence owned by Mr and Mrs Arnold Reckitt at Brantinghamthorpe, this was used for almost five years until 1946 and in that time treated 2447 youngsters.
The Park Street hospital remained open until 1967 when the new Hull Royal Infirmary opened.
Transfer of patients and
staff was carried out on Sunday mornings in May that year, officials deciding that this was the only time when traffic problems were unlikely and when ambulances were readily available to make the two-minute journey.
Sixteen children were among those to make the last trip with author George Patrick later reporting in his book A Plague on You Sir: “The weather was favourable and each movement was successfully carried out so that the patients received their midmorning drink in their old hospital and were settled in the
new infirmary by lunch time.”
IT WAS just an ordinary shed in the back garden of a house in Endike Lane.
But to many Americans and in Sweden, too, that humble structure was the most famous place in a city they would otherwise probably have never heard of.
It may not have looked much from the outside but those who saw what it contained back in 1985 would have been impressed – and most probably baffled.
For here Fred Brown’s hobby created what was said to be “a clearing house of information,
an electronic nerve centre which was known by computer buffs across the world.”
Fred could claim to be one of the first in Britain to set up a system known as the bulletin board years before email arrived on the scene.
Bulletin boards, computer information systems for free public use, were becoming increasingly used in America where enthusiasts tried linking computers to telephones allowing users to dial in and post messages.
Fred had become involved in the mail business since 1980, electronics being a hobby of his. “It was really a quest for knowledge,” he told me in February 1985.
Following a visit to the States on holiday he acquired the necessary software to enable him to set up his own bulletin board.
The system was known as Forum-80 (Hull) and was said to be “a remarkable way of passing written messages through the telephone system, a sort of computerised telex service but only faster.”
As Fred said: “Computer buffs in the Hull area are lucky. They have access to a bulletin board on a local call which can put them in touch with callers from all over the world for just a few pence.”
At the time bulletin boards were likened to amateur radio or citizens band – all a bit of a gimmick.
But they heralded the birth of email and the growth of the internet. And the quiet man from Hull in his garden shed could look back with pride on his role in developing communications which today are a part of daily life for billions.