Mr Gouldthorpe was one of 8 workers who travelled up to Stannington from London to build the vita-glass pavilion in 1928, and recounted his experiences in correspondence with one of the hospital's administrators in 1983:

"We never ever saw the interior of the hospital, the balconies facing the pavilion I well remember - I'll try to explain as it had its funny side! We could never converse with the nurses; only from our working side glance up at the balcony & give shall I say a furtive wave to the nurses as they tended the children lying out there.

Now up there they had a hand cranked gramophone with quite a tinny sound, and it seems only one record, the name of that record I'll always remember, "Although You Belong to Someone Else Tonight You Belong to Me". I still smile when I think back because it became something like a signal; we'd then glance up at the balcony to see what nurse was cranking it up. Having identified the nurse, a small lad would then be toddling up to one or other of us with a note tightly clenched in his fist and say "Nurse so & so has sent me down with this." We would then read it and give the thumbs up sign, usually it informed us that it was their evening off and would meet them at the gate and us four lads would take them out!

To us the poor nurses seemed worked off their feet, and not very much leisure time, so we were quite happy to meet them, as we held them in so deep a respect and we felt we had been very highly honoured by them asking us."

In addition to this Mr Gouldthorpe goes on to reveal that some years later he had to visit the hospital in Enfield as his wife was ill, where he met a lady doctor who revealed to him that she had been a patient in Stannington once upon a time.

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