The museum at Wardown Park is a well known, and well loved building in Luton. But did you know, that it had a hidden history as a WWI Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) Hospital?
A bit of digging and thanks to a photo album kindly donated by the son of one of the nurses, a Dorris Florence Tomson, who we see coming second in a nurses race at a regimental sports day in 1917, we've over turned at least half a century of presuming we knew the history.
We museum staff assumed that it was an Officer's Convalescant hospital. I.e. ranks who you salute, would come here to rest and recover after injury or sickness. Instead, a phone call from Stoke on Trent, by a lady trying to trace her relative, told us that her ancestor had passed away here which, inspired us to look for others in order to truly remember their sacrifice. We did find other people who had passed here.
So Wardown V.A.D. Hospital wasn't simply a place to rest, it was a serious hospital treating serious cases, and a further documentary find reinforced this as it shows that the building possessed an operating theatre too.