This August, Telegraph & Argus reader KEN CLAYTON, of Eaglesfield Drive, Woodside, will be 92. For a good many of those years, he has contributed to health insurance run by Sovereign Health Care – formerly the Bradford Hospital Fund.

On April 17, we featured Sovereign Health Care, which has been on the go in Bradford for 140 years. Mr Clayton, born in 1921, recalled that his first wage of ten shillings a week (50p) as a bobbin-ligger at Ben Hillas’s on Factory Street, Dudley Hill, was docked a penny or two.

The money was paid direct into what he remembers as the St Luke’s Hospital Fund. The set-up was the same in other Bradford factories where Mr Clayton worked before joining the RAF at the age of 20, for nearly six years of war service, the majority of them in Mediterranean countries.

After 1945, he was a tram conductor with Bradford Corporation, rising through the ranks over the next 35 years. On the very first day he and other newly-recruited tram conductors were advised to sign up to the Hospital Fund. But after the founding of the National Health Service in 1948, he made a mistake.

“...the local ‘higher-ups’ of my union, the Transport & General Workers’, advised members they no longer needed the Hospital cover and to ‘Chuck Out’. Stupidly I did just that, only to be dismayed when, later still, I was hospitalised with stomach ulcers.”

What happened next is reminiscent of the later TV hospital sitcom, Only When I Laugh. The man in the next bed, who had not opted out of the Hospital Fund, lay there extolling the benefits of being a member such as receiving ‘hospital money’.

“Of course I asked what was he talking about? ‘Why?’ he asked, ‘aren’t you in it?’ Feeling rather foolish, I admitted I’d been advised to throw out, after being a member for many years. He obviously regarded me as being ‘barmy’. He told me to join again as soon as I left hospital, which I did. I also joined my wife, too.”

That was back in the 1950s. Mr Clayton hasn’t regretted his decision to rejoin. Only recently he bought a new pair of glasses for more than £100 and was delighted to receive half the cost from Sovereign.

“May I congratulate Sovereign Health care for being in such good shape after all these years of taking care of our West Yorkshire folk. May they long continue to do so,” he added.