WE'VE seen some strange weather changes in the last month or so, everything from snow to heatwave and thunder.

However, none of it quite matches a moment in late April 1910 when lightning struck Wallingford’s isolation hospital which stood at the end of St Georges Road, opposite where Wallingford School is today.

In 1910 there were no other buildings nearby (the area was not developed for another 50 years). Built in 1904, the hospital was the place where people suffering from infectious diseases such as typhoid, scarlet fever and measles, were isolated to prevent epidemics.

Visitors were obviously kept away but letters were delivered to a post box 20 yards from the house, attached to a metal fence and gate, where there was also an electric bell push, connected to the house by an underground tube, for anyone wishing to draw the attention of the staff.

The Berks and Oxon Advertiser for April 29 reported the matron’s remarkable experience: “I was standing just inside my sitting room talking to one of the nurses, when the place was suddenly filled with yellow flame.

"There was a tremendous noise and I was knocked down.

"I thought at first that I had been shot in the back of the head.

"My next thought was that the house was on fire, and I crawled on my hands and knees to rouse the night nurse who had gone to bed.

"I don’t know how I got up the stairs, but I found the landing all blown up and alight and I was unable to reach her room.

"I called out to her that the house was on fire, and I set about putting out the flames…"

The report continues: "The landing on the first floor, with which the bedrooms communicate, was completely blown up as if by a violent explosion.

"The floor was torn up and one extraordinary effect was that some of the boards had been driven right through the ceiling above, and remained with two or three feet pointing downwards in a directly vertical position.

"The landing had been covered with linoleum: some of this was driven through the ceiling ten feet above the floor, and in another place the pattern of the linoleum was plainly discernible on the whitened ceiling.

"The cook’s bedroom and the linen room on the ground floor beneath it were completely wrecked and it was possible to look up through both rooms to the roof."

Apparently, lightning had struck the letterbox by the gate and fused the bell wire: "The current was conducted by this wire into the house and distributed through the building by the electric wires; in its effort to escape it burst up the landing and bedroom floors, passed out through the hole in the east wall, and thence up the stack-pipe, lifting the roof and bringing down the chimney."

Thankfully, no injuries were reported!