Warminster Museum: Cottage Hospital

A few weeks ago, this column featured the development of Warminster Hospital.

We said at the time that it was a great pity that we had no photograph of the original Cottage Hospital, after its conversion from a farmhouse and before either of the wings was added. But, life is full of surprises.

 

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Just a couple of weeks after writing that column, someone offered the museum an album of photographs, all local photographs and all taken in about 1889. No local museum would turn down such an offer – and it is gold-dust.

One of the pictures is of the original Cottage Hospital. We felt that we had to devote a column to this picture. We have included a map section which shows the likely position of the camera and how it just catches the row of houses which were behind the hospital, in the close. The map was probably surveyed about four years before the photograph was taken, so some of the trees will have been removed, because the area was converted to a garden. The photographer chose the day and time well. In full sunshine, the camera would have been pointing towards the sun.

Just as a matter of interest, when the first wing was added to the hospital, the work would have caused great disruption. The patients were all moved to “Bloomin Crackers” which, for a short while, became Warminster Hospital.