“HER act of generosity is one I feel sure will for ever be gratefully remembered by the workmen of Thirsk and Sowerby in view of the many hardships that fall upon upon them in consequence of the want of such an institution when they happen with any accident or sickness that prevents them from following their usual employment,” said the local MP, Colonel Lewis Payn Dawnay, as he opened the Lambert Memorial Hospital on September 16, 1890.

He was praising Mrs Sarah Lambert who had given £2,000 to build and equip the five-bedroom cottage hospital in Chapel Street, Thirsk, and who had invested another £7,000 in railway stocks and shares which would provide £220-a-year to run it.

Now, though, the NHS has decided that it can no longer afford to run the hospital, and so it is to close. In last week’s letters column, Marion Moverley of Richmond challenged us to find its opening report in the D&S’ archives.

The report was published in the paper of September 20, 1890, and it told how Mrs Lambert had dedicated the hospital to her three closest men, all of whom were called William Lambert.

The principal dedicatee was her late husband’s father, who was born in Newcastle in 1786. He served as a surgeon in the Grenadier Guards in the Peninsular War (1808-14) before settling down in Thirsk, where he took over the medical practice of his father-in-law, Dr Jonah Wasse. Dr Wasse, noted the D&S, had been an army surgeon during the Crimean War of the 1850s.

Mrs Lambert had married Mr Lambert’s son, William Jonah Lambert, and they had had a son – yet another William – before William Jonah had died in 1853 of tuberculosis on the Isle of Wight.

Mrs Lambert and William Jnr had then returned to her native Manchester to live with her uncle, Dr James Whitehead, who had been a pupil of Mr Lambert Snr.

Dr Whitehead had died in 1885, and Mrs Lambert had inherited all of his £45,000 estate (more than £5m in today’s values, according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator).

When TB carried off William Jnr, Sarah was left as the last of the Lamberts, and so she returned to Sowerby to do good works, the biggest, and most enduring, of which was to endow the Lambert Memorial Hospital.

The hospital’s five beds on two wards were overseen by a matron, and fitted with the most up-to-date equipment. For instance, the D&S noted, that “the sanitary and other appliances are of the most complete character, and include Boyle’s air pump ventilators in each ward…and Twyford’s Unitas water closest have been fixed”.

A “fashionable company”, said the D&S, gathered for the opening ceremony, and included the hospital’s five trustees: Lady Emily Anne Payne Frankland of Thirkleby Park; Mr Reginald Bell of The Hall, Thirsk; the Rev W Teesdale-Mackintosh, vicar of Thirsk; the Rev LG Maine, vicar of Sowerby, and Dr Reginald Hartley of Thirsk.

In its opening year, the hospital treated 26 in-patients. They were nominated by local doctors as deserving cases for treatment, and each of them paid a weekly maintenance fee during their stay.

From its earliest days, the hospital relied on community fund-raising to help it grow – in 1928, community contributions helped equip a children’s sunroom, complete with an artificial sunlamp, and in 1933, they bought a secondhand X-ray machine which was located in a wooden shed in the hospital grounds.

By the 1970s, through bequests and donations, the hospital had grown to 23 beds which accommodated 240 patients a year, and treated nearly 2,000 out-patients and more than 3,000 A&E cases. As the population of Thirsk and Sowerby is now only a little more than 10,000, it can be seen how central the Lambert Memorial Hospital has been to the town in the 126 years since Mrs Lambert’s gift.

On the opening day, the D&S reported that Col Dawnay, “who met with a cordial reception”, concluded his remarks: “In the name of every man, woman and child present, I beg to thank Mrs Lambert for her most generous gift, trusting that God will bless her a thousand fold for all she has done to alleviate the sufferings and hardship of her more helpless fellow creatures. (Applause.)”