SOURHALL ISOLATION HOSPITAL

Sourhall Hospital about 1902 before the enlargement.

Photo courtesy of Roger Birch

1874 saw a smallpox epidemic in the township in which 32 people died. At a public meeting at the Oddfellows Hall in Todmorden, chaired by the Rev. Molesworth, vicar of Todmorden, it was resolved to raise financial relief for the victims and their families. Collections were held at mills, workshops, churches and chapels and within the space of a month nearly £250 had been raised. At that same meeting, Mr. Samuel Fielden of Centre Vale urged the authorities to work together to check the spread of the disease. He volunteered to instruct the medical officer to isolate all cases, offering to meet the cost personally for the first 2 weeks.

A few days later the Local Board voted a £700 grant for making an isolation hospital. It bought a two storey building at Sourhall known as PEEL MILL which had been a picker making factory built and operated by the Holt family some 30 years earlier. The factory was converted in to an isolation hospital for 16 smallpox patients. The cost of maintaining the hospital was shared with Bacup and a joint Hospital Committee was set up. In 1876 a new heating appliance and some apparatus was installed at a cost of £45.

On the 11th. May 1881 the master of the hospital reported to the Local Board that the whole of the patients admitted during the year had been 10 with scarlet fever and 8 with typhoid, and that there had been a total of 71 patients since the hospital opened in 1874.

One of the patients at the hospital was John Fielden Haigh (1845-1886). He was a farmer at BROWNROADS FARM, Inchfield, Walsden. His young daughter, Mary Alice, had died 2 weeks earlier. The almanac reported:

On Dec. 2nd. 1886 Mr. John Haigh, farmer, Brownroads, Walsden, (formerly of Warland), died in Sourhall Hospital aged 44 years, having gone there the previous Friday.

John and his daughter are buried at St. Peters, Walsden. The memorial inscription reads:

In Memory of Mary Alice daughter of John Fielden and Mary Haigh

of Brown Roads, Walsden who died November 17 1886 aged 15 yrs.

Also of the above named John Fielden Haigh who died December 2 1886 aged 41.
Also of Annie their daughter who died January 13 1895 aged 23 yrs.
Also of the above named Mary Haigh who died July 8th 1927 aged 76yrs.
Also John William Haigh who died July 12th 1942 aged 67yrs.

With the decline of smallpox, patients with typhoid, and later diphtheria, were admitted. On November 2nd. 1888 there were 9 patients with typhoid being treated at the hospital. Two people with severe symptoms had died. Henry Wilkinson of Lydgate, aged 39, had died on 31st. October and Benjamin Swire of Shade had died on 1st. November.

At a meeting of the Bacup Town Council in July 1890 it was reported that since the joint agreement was set up in 1877 for Bacup patients to be sent to the hospital, the cost to Bacup had been £101.9s.3d. a year and a total of £1,217.11s.9d. Altogether they had sent 23 patients.

At the half yearly meeting of the Bacup and Todmorden joint committee in August 1904, it was stated that 187 patients had been treated in the hospital from the outbreak of the smallpox epidemic in 1902, and there had been no deaths.

In 1949 the Sourhall Joint Hospital Committee was wound up and the buildings converted to private housing.

The photo shows the buildings in 2004.

The following is an extract from the Parliamentary Papers for 1882, kindly submitted by John Alan Longbottom, which contains very interesting information on the hospital at Sourhall.

BPP 1882 Vol XXX Appendix No. 1. Pages 261-265

The use and influence of hospitals for infectious diseases by Dr. Thorne Thorne.

Todmorden Urban Sanitary District – Population 1881 23,861 Rateable Value about £72,000

In 1874 small-pox became epidemic in Todmorden, and the existing hospital was provided by the Urban Sanitary Authority with a view of staying its spread.

The hospital premises comprise an old cotton mill and two cottages which, together with a third cottage not belonging to the hospital, form one block of two-storied buildings. The mill and one cottage were originally purchased by the Authority: the second cottage has been taken on lease at a yearly rental of £4., and added to the hospital; and the third cottage referred to, though adjoining the hospital premises, is not the property of the sanitary Authority, and is tenanted by an elderly widow.

One of the hospital cottages is set apart for the nurse and her husband, both of whom have resided there since 1874, before which date they had been in service as female and male nurse respectively in the Royal Infirmary at Manchester. The second cottage constitutes the hospital kitchen, and has two bedrooms which can be used for nurses when the hospital is full, or, as at the date of my visit, for an occasional single patient. As yet the upper story only of the mill has been fitted for the reception of patients .It has been divided longitudinally by a wooden partition into two wards, opening into a common lobby which is fitted with cupboards for drugs, a lavatory for medical men in attendance on cases, etc. The nurses bed-rooms in the second cottage referred to also open on to his lobby. Each ward is 49 feet in length, 14 feet in breadth, and about 13 feet in height, the roof not being ceiled. There are 12 beds in the two wards, each bed having 114 feet of floor space, and about 1,490 cubic feet of air space. Each ward is well lighted by eight windows, six on the wall facing the beds which stand with their heads to the wooden partitions, and two in the wall at the end of the building. The windows open in the upper half only. In the ceiling of each ward there are six ventilators communicating with a space beneath the roof which is open to the air. The wards, which are very clean, cheerful, and comfortably furnished, are fitted with lavatories supplied with hot and cold water, earth closets, and a movable bath, and they are heated by means of hot-water pipes.

In addition to the main building there are also:

1) a wash-house and laundry

2) a dead-house

3) an iron disinfecting apparatus originally intended to be heated, but now only   used as a fumigating chamber

4) a pail-closet

5) an ambulance shed

The latter contains a well-built light ambulance having much the appearance of a neat private omnibus. It was manufactured by Messrs. Sherratt and Ream, of Chorlton-on-Medlock, and it is fitted with a movable stretcher, which can be carried to and from the patient’s bedside. The cost was £64.

The water supply is from a spring on the neighbouring moorland ; the drainage, which is defective, is into a channel in a field leading to a watercourse which joins the River Calder.

The hospital is situated at Sour Hall, an isolated hamlet nearly on the summit of a range of hilly moorland to the west of Todmorden, about 2 and a half miles from Todmorden town, but as much as five miles from some of the populated parts of the urban district, which covers about 16,000 acres. The road leading to it is in part rough, steep, and stony.

In 1877 the Urban Sanitary Authority of Bacup made an arrangement for the admission of cases of infectious diseases from their district into the hospital, the terms of the arrangement being they they should pay to the Todmorden Local Board of Health an annual rental of £40., half the permanent expenses incurred in the maintenance and administration of the hospital, and the actual costs of any patients sent in by them.

The Guardians of the Todmorden Union have also on several occasions used the hospital for the isolation of paupers suffering from infectious diseases, the scale of payment being at the rate of 25s a week per patient, in addition to the cost of any alcoholic stimulants prescribed, and a fee of 5s for the use of the ambulance.

The total cases admitted into the hospital from 21st November 1874, when it was opened, have been as follows :-

21st Nov to end of December 1874 – 29 Small-pox cases

1875 - 15 Small-pox cases

1876 - 3 Small-pox cases and 2 Fever cases

1877 - 1 Small-pox case

1878 - 1 Small-pox case

1879 - 1 Small-pox case and 2 Measles cases


It will thus be seen that since the termination of the small-pox epidemic the hospital has been hardly used at all. Indeed, so far as Todmorden is concerned, it should be noted that with the exception of a single cases of small-pox and of 2 cases of measles occurring in domestic servants in 1879, the hospital has not been used since 1876, for the two cases sent in 1877 and 1878 were from Bacup. This circumstance is the more remarkable in view of the mortality statistics of the Todmorden Urban District for the three years 1877-79, from which the following figures are abstracted :-


Deaths from certain specified Causes in the Todmorden Urban Sanitary Distirct 1877-79