Kendal Oral History Group aims to compile a picture of earlier times through the recorded memories of the area’s older residents. Daphne Cunningham was born in 1924 and interviewed in 1999:

I CAME to Westmorland County Hospital as matron in 1962.

My mother, who lived in Kendal, was ill and the consultant who was looking after her mentioned that “we are looking for a matron for the hospital in Kendal” so it all fitted nicely and I came home.

My first impression was that this was a doll’s house compared with the big hospitals I’d worked in, such as Charing Cross Hospital and Liverpool Royal Infirmary, but I soon realised that, although it was small, it was jolly busy. In those days, the 1960s, it was a general hospital and absolutely everything came in to the casualty department.

The hospital had replaced an earlier building which was built in 1870 as a gift from Mr James Cropper and dedicated to his wife Fanny, who had died in 1868. It had eight beds and still stands at the top of Captain French Lane.

One of the big problems was that if patients were very ill and we had to send for relatives, I found it so difficult to find places for them to stay. I used to ring round all the bed and breakfast places and, being a tourist area, they were always full up. I used to get very frustrated to think that the tourists should take precedence over my patients and their relatives.

Then, thanks to a very generous donation of £4,000 in the will of a lady in Windermere (Mrs Thwaites), we had a bungalow built in the grounds of the hospital which was marvellous because the families could live there at no cost. At the time it was almost unique, as none of us had ever heard of another hospital with a purpose-built bungalow for relatives.