THE photographic archives at Burnley Library include this century-old shot of an East Lancashire hospital which treated soldiers injured at war.

During the First World War, Queen Mary’s Military Hospital was housed in the County Asylum – Calderstones – at Whalley.

A plaque shows that the institution was handed over ‘voluntarily to the War Office by the representatives of the whole of the ratepayers of Lancashire, for the purposes of a military hospital’.

There were 2,000 beds, and from April 1915 until the summer of 1920, 56,800 disabled soldiers were treated there for wounds and sickness.

The military cemetery associated with the hospital is at the eastern end of the hospital cemetery, and was handed over to the War Department in February 1916.

The cemetery has a Cross of Sacrifice, and there is also a memorial to all the servicemen, almost 300 of them, who died in Queen Mary’s.

This is only a part photograph of the hundreds of injured soldiers and the local ‘Florence Nightingale’ nurses and doctors who cared for them, who lined up in the hospital grounds in July 1917 for the camera.