Archive reveals cash plea

A PLEA for financial support from the 1940s for the city’s biggest hospital has been unearthed in Edinburgh.

The souvenir brochure during the Second World War was produced to boost morale among nurses at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and to encourage locals to donate cash.

The document includes a personal plea from Russell Paton, the organising secretary of what was the “largest voluntary hospital in the Empire”.

It was priced at six pence, or “whatever more you can afford”, and included the following rallying cry at the beginning.

“The days are dark and fateful. As a nation we carry on under the devastating realities of a world at war.”