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UNTIL 1970 Keighley had three hospitals – St John’s, Victoria and Morton Banks.
However, there had been none until 1868 when a small Infirmary was opened at the Union Workhouse in Oakworth Road. It only treated paupers and other members of society had to receive treatment at home from a doctor.
This small hospital proved to be wholly inadequate and therefore a new larger Union Infirmary was built on Fell Lane.
It stood in extensive grounds planted with fruit trees and shrubs and opened in June 1875. During that month patients were gradually transferred from the Workhouse to the new hospital.
The hospital’s first emergency came the following year when a smallpox epidemic broke out in the Keighley.
The outbreak was severe and many ‘non-pauper patients’ were accepted into care and treated by Dr Percy Milligan, who was the infirmary’s medical officer.
In 1875, the year that the new infirmary opened, a house in Highfield Lane in Keighley was acquired for use as a cottage hospital. It was to be used primarily to treat those requiring emergency care.
The house was called Highfield Villa and was the former home of Aaron Iveson, a linen draper, who had died in 1874. The property comprised of a kitchen, dining room and drawing-room on the ground floor, five bedrooms on the first floor and attic bedrooms.
Funds to maintain it were raised by way of charitable donations and money raised from annual hospital galas in the town. Occasionally individuals, such as John Pickles Heaton, a worsted manufacturer, made donations. He provided money to furnish a new ward at the hospital.
In 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, a new building was erected next to the old one.
Victoria Hospital was in Highfield and originally the cottage hospital
It increased the number of beds by 44, bringing the total available to 80 and also included an administration block, freeing up space in the old cottage hospital.
The hospital was then re-named Victoria Hospital in the Queen’s honour.
In 1904/5 it was extended once again and later further blocks and a nurse’s home were added. Eventually the hospital complex would cover almost three acres of land between Drewry Road and Cartmel Road, off Highfield Lane.
However, neither the Union Infirmary, nor Victoria Hospital, were suitable to deal with sudden outbreaks of contagious diseases and therefore an infectious diseases hospital was built at Morton Banks, Riddlesden.
The new hospital opened in January 1897 and included an isolation block, a fever pavilion, an administration block, laundry buildings and a porter’s lodge.
The hospital’s first challenge was to deal with typhoid epidemics that broke out separately in Kildwick and Oakworth in 1898 and 99.
Whilst many of the victims in Kildwick were treated at home, 15 from Oakworth were treated at the new hospital.
Deaths in the Kildwick area eventually rose to 51, however, all those infected in Oakworth eventually recovered.
During the Great War, 1914 to 1919, the Union Infirmary and Morton Banks Isolation Hospital were made available for war casualties. Additional huts to accommodate wounded soldiers were erected in the grounds of both hospitals.
Whenever possible men from local regiments were brought to them, most probably in the belief that more local surroundings and visits from family would aid recovery.
Morton Banks also bore the brunt of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, brought to Keighley by infected soldiers returning from the war.
The hospital most notably treated German prisoners of war who contracted the disease, 42 of whom died there.
After the war the Union Infirmary was renamed St John’s Hospital. It eventually became a maternity and geriatric hospital.
Victoria continued as a general hospital and Morton Banks remained an isolation hospital into the 1960s.
In 1970 all three hospitals were closed and the patients transferred to the new Airedale General Hospital at Steeton.