BILL MCALLISTER: Royal Northern Infirmary’s (RNI) distinguished history in Inverness first began 225 years ago
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This year marks the 225th anniversary of Provost William Inglis setting up a committee which began fundraising for Inverness’s first public hospital – choosing for its location the riverside flank of Ballifeary, then a village on the burgh’s edge.
By 1803 the handsome building now so familiar on the city’s Ness Walk was completed. It aimed to serve the whole Highlands, hence its name, the Northern Infirmary.
The visit of the current Queen’s parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, to open new wards in 1929 led to the awarding of the hospital’s ‘royal’ prefix a year later. Generations of Invernessians would come to know it as ‘the RNI’.
The new children’s ward was called the York Ward in the royal couple’s honour. Later, in 1948, to mark the hospital becoming part of the NHS, the duo made a return visit, this time as King George VI and his queen.
After Provost Inglis’s group issued its call for donations in 1797, the cash started to roll in. Cheques came from prominent Inverness business people and exiles, some of whom had helped fund the opening of Inverness Academy five years earlier – it gained its ‘royal’ prefix a year later – in New Street, which soon became known as Academy Street.
Ballifeary landowner Fraser of Torbreck agreed in 1799 to sell the site and construction work began the same year. A London architect’s design was rejected as too grandiose because the poorer classes would be treated. Instead, Banff man John Smith designed the original three-storey block, with the centre three bays advanced, with Corinthian pillars, linked to pavilions for patients.
There were hot and cold baths on the ground floor, two small wards on the first and two more, along with surgery space, on the second. Provost Inglis died in 1801 but his name lives on in the inscription above the main building to mark its completion in 1803, a major step forward for the burgh.
The infirmary accepted victims of all diseases except cholera but it also had accommodation for mentally ill people. Nurses were paid £4 a year.
Local firm Matthews and Lawrie added an extension including a three-storey façade and building over the pavilions, completed in 1866. In 1898 Ross and Macbeth, headed up by Sir Alexander Ross, finished a further expansion, including an operating theatre block and the covered entrance.
Simultaneously, Ross and Macbeth were also responsible for building the cross-shaped Tweedmouth Memorial Chapel, a Gothic-style oak-roofed building donated by Lady Tweedmouth in memory of her husband, Sir Dudley Marjoribanks, 1st Baron Tweedmouth. The same firm then built the RNI’s nursing home in Scottish Baronial style.
Most of the wards still remembered by Invernessians of a certain vintage were built from 1927 by Sir John Burnet of Glasgow, who created Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Sick Children. Including a children’s ward, surgical ward, operating theatre and outpatients and radiology departments, this took the infirmary up to 200 beds.
Navy officers and men were mainly treated during World War I but World War II saw its role limited, as a new Emergency Medical Services hospital sprang up at Raigmore. Though conceived as a wartime expedient, Raigmore, with 500 beds by 1945, would grow rapidly as a general hospital.
Investment was ploughed in to Raigmore and from the 1960s, there was a steady switch of services and departments from the RNI to the bigger hospital.
The infirmary closed in 1989, becoming the offices of the University of the Highlands and Islands while new private flats occupied the rear. However, the RNI Community Hospital was erected in its grounds and its role includes physio and occupational therapy.
The ‘old RNI’, however, in its neo-classical finery, continues to please the eye of those who stroll along Ness Walk. The money raised 225 years ago has proved extremely well spent on this grand old lady of Highland medical progress.
• Sponsored by Ness Castle Lodges.
