THE NHS is one of the few areas where public spending will be protected, following George Osborne’s £6.25 billion package of cuts announced last week. That is a sign of just how dear it remains to ordinary people. Politicians know they tinker with it at their peril.

Last week in Yesterday Once More we brought you a series of photographs from York’s hospitals dating from before the NHS was set up in 1948.

This week we focus on the NHS years.

If there was one woman who came to stand for what the NHS meant more than anyone else it was Sylvia Diggory.

She became the NHS’s first patient when she was only 13 years old. She was in the middle of an 18-month stay in Manchester’s Park Hospital with a kidney inflammation when, on July 5 1948, Aneurin Bevan stopped at her hospital bedside and declared he was launching the new NHS.

After that, every ten years, she found herself the centre of media attention as the NHS celebrated anniversary after anniversary.

Mrs Diggory’s son Clive studied medicine, and is now a Malton GP.

When she and her husband Peter retired they moved to Malton to be near him. Mrs Diggory passed on a couple of years ago. But in an interview with the Evening Press in 1998 to mark the NHS’s 50th anniversary, she recalled how different health care was before the NHS.

“When you went into hospital you could be presented with a huge bill that could affect the whole family,” she told the Evening Press’s reporter Janet Hewison. The NHS, she said, was a tremendous organisation: the best health service in the world. “But people’s expectations are so great now,” she continued. “Wherever you deal with human beings, in any institution, as long as they’re doing their best, you can’t expect any more.” Which summed up our attitude towards our health service and the people who work in it just about perfectly.

When the NHS was set up, 14 regional hospital boards were created for England and Wales. York and its surrounding area came under the Leeds regional board. The York A hospital management committee inherited a mixed bag of 15 hospitals, including York County Hospital, a general former voluntary hospital with an annexe at Deighton Grove; the City Hospital, a general municipal hospital with offices at Poppleton Gate and Poppleton Hall; Bootham Park Hospital; Naburn Hospital; the maternity hospital at Acomb; Yearsley Bridge, a former municipal hospital for infectious diseases; Fairfield sanatorium, a tuberculosis hospital with chest clinics at York and Tadcaster, and the Hazlewood Maternity Hospital at Tadcaster. Fulford Maternity Hospital was opened in 1954.

Our first photo today shows 13-year-old Sylvia Diggory in her hospital bed when Aneurin Bevan came to visit and – in the way of politicians with children – couldn’t resist ruffling her hair. Other pictures show Sylvia as a young woman working in the labs at Brown and Poulsons in Manchester, and as a 63-year-old in Malton at the time of the NHS’s 50th anniversary; the men’s ward at York County Hospital in the 1950s; mums at Fulford Maternity Hospital in 1981; and Sister Ellen Willey with eight-day-old James Sturdy at Fulford Maternity Hospital in 1982.