Nursing 1939 -1945 Chapter 3

Each day started with prayers in the chapel after breakfast and we were on duty by 7.00am. There was a service in the chapel each Sunday for patients and several of the Sisters said prayers each evening on their wards. My first assignment after PTS was a men’s medical ward, a long ward with twelve beds down each side, now known as a Knightingale Ward. On alternate days, all the beds on one side were pulled into the centre, the windowsills, radiators and walls were swept down before the floor was polished and the patients’ lockers were wiped over with disinfectant. In the older wards, there were open fires, which were lit in cold weather, the porters brought up buckets of coal and the maids raked out the ashes and kept the fire made up. It had been routine to wheel patients’ beds out on to the balconies during the day, as a precaution against TB and cross- infection, but once the air raids had started, this had been abandoned. Everybody was involved in the cleaning and tidying, Sister included. After she had dealt with the night staff’s reports and greeted the patients, she sorted and re-arranged flowers, which were always wheeled out to the sluice room each evening. It was a hospital superstition that no lilies were allowed — they were taken to the chapel — and never red and white flowers in the same vase. Staff Nurse checked the stationery on the desk in the middle of the ward and the trays of thermometers in their jars of pink antiseptic. She ordered medicines and other requirements from the dispensary and folded hand towels into pleats and tucked the “fans” behind the taps on the washbasins for the doctors’ use only. There was a brief break after all this activity for a drink and a snack in the dining room. Then a dash to the Nurses’ Home to make our beds, which had been left stripped to air before breakfast, a change into a clean apron and a hair tidy before hurrying back, neat and ready for Matrons’ round and the Doctors. Matrons’ round was much appreciated by the patients and an ordeal for the staff. Nothing escaped her and the patients could appeal to her if they were worried about anything.

The consultants at Norwich were known as Honoraries when I started as they gave their services free, they had private practices and there was a block for paying patients, the usual arrangement at the time. Ordinary patients did not pay, there was an insurance scheme for working men and their families and the hospital employed an Almoner and her assistant, now replaced by Social Medical Staff, who interviewed patients and their relatives to see if they were able to make a contribution to the hospital for treatment and also inquired into their home circumstances if they needed after care. There was a Convalescent Home for adults and Children’s Homes for those needing long- term nursing. Instead of “ Care in the Community” there was the family network — unattached aunts and cousins as well as closer relatives — who could move in and take care of the patient and the household while necessary.

Nursing care in the 1940’s was a world away from that of today. All the nurses were female, although at Norwich we did have a male orderly on the men’s surgical wards. Known as Corporal, he had been in the RAMC in the First World War and seemed old to us — probably in his early fifties! He did dressings for men who had prostate surgery and shaved others before they had abdominal surgery, to spare their blushes and their nerves, as cut throat razors were always used for “prepping”. The porters were male, one, Wilf, was a universal favourite, always with a grin, and a mine of gossip. He kept a kindly eye on us and I remember him bringing one of my friends home from the nearby pub, his local, when things got out of hand. Before she knew it, she was outside the door and being walked back to the hospital. The mortuary porter, Gidney, would put bets on for the patients and always organised a staff sweep stake for the Derby and the Grand National — I once won five shillings, a great occasion! The mortuary was by the back gate and handy for slipping out unobserved; some forms of street betting were still illegal.

There was no Intensive Care Unit and the best that could be done was to “special” a patient in a side ward, with a Senior Nurse in charge, doing treatments and regular pulse and temperature check and with medical staff paying frequent visits. There were several of the Sisters who seemed to be able to drag patients back from the brink by sheer force of personality and willpower. Before antibiotics were discovered the sulphonamide drugs in all their variations were widely used, the first and most famous being M and B 693. Before these were introduced, there was a very limited range of treatments for acute infections and pneumonia was a dangerous and often fatal disease; patients needed complete rest and careful nursing until the crisis was past, and were still put into padded jackets made of gamgeer tissue (layers of cotton wool and gauze). When penicillin was introduced, quite late in the war for civilian hospitals, it as only given under strict supervision to patients in a desperate state. It was administered by injection and only by the house surgeons to begin with, then the Sisters were allowed to give it, and careful records were kept, to be sent to some central agency to evaluate its potential. Groups of us were taken to see the before and after state of the first two or three patients and we felt we had seen a miracle; instead of weeks of slow recovery and relapses, there was steady and rapid improvement.

In there own homes, people had touching faith in Apron tablets in paper strips, iodine for cuts, Thermo gene wadding for bronchitis and other chest infections. Zambuk or germolene ointment sold in little tins for cuts and sores, castor oil, Syrup of Figs, Sloans Liniment and Kruschen’s Salts. Camphorated oil, eucalyptus and wintergreen were widely used for coughs and colds and rheumatism, Bile Beans and Iron jelloids were much-advertised favourites.

Anaesthetics were ferocious, most of the patients were violently sick afterwards and were nauseated or retched for days. Doctors hesitated to give anaesthetics to elderly or frail patients in case they did not survive. There were almost no operations for broken hips or thighs, only months of rest in plaster or in a long Thomas’s splint. We were fortunate in Norwich that pone of our orthopaedic surgeons, Mr McKee, was a pioneer in this field and by the time I left was having great success with metal pins for fractured neck of femur and plates and screws for thighs, but hip replacements were still in the future. The war, with all its horrors, did bring great improvements in the medical field, strikingly so with anaesthetics and surgery — for example Penthothal was much used for minor operations.

Norwich was quite heavily bombed, it was busy industrial area and also surrounded by airfields. To make room for air raids casualties, there was a ferry service for transferring post-operative and improving medical patients out of the city as soon as they could be moved. They were taken on stretchers in army vehicles, very basic and uncomfortable, but they didn’t complain and said how well they were looked after once they arrived. Most of them went to the Cottage Hospital at Attleborough, about 15 miles away, where extra accommodation was put up and extra staff sent from the main hospital.

When air raid casualties were brought in, they were usually dirty, with clothing torn or cut to ribbons and hair thick with debris, in a state of shock and with a variety of injuries. After treatment for shock and preliminary assessment and clean up in Casualty, they came to the ward before going to theatre. By present day standards it must have been rough and ready — when we’re shown TV pictures of the wounded after suicide bombs or road crashes being put on drips as they lie in the street, and fitted with neck supports and given oxygen — it amazes me that any of our wartime casualties survived, but perhaps people were more resilient then.

A vivid memory of an air raid, is going on duty in the middle of the night when the sirens sounded. Sister, Staff Nurse ands a third year nurse took it in turns to be on call to augment the night staff and to be on hand if it was necessary to evacuate patients. I arrived at the ward (women’s surgical) to find Sister already there and going round with night nurses reassuring the patients. They were a variety of ages and a range of anything from appendixes, hernias, gallbladder removal or mastectomy. In those days, patients with abdominal stitches were not allowed to get up, so everyone was firmly anchored to their bed, which must have been frightening, but it was an age of stiff upper lips and they were commendably calm. We checked that gas masks were to hand and distributed grey ARP blankets for the women to put over their heads and shoulders if the windows were shattered. We held the women’s hands or responded to requests for bedpans, all in the gloom of dim and shaded lights. When the noise of bombs and anti-aircraft fire had died away and the “All Clear” had sounded, it was the signal for cups of tea all round and helping to make everyone comfortable and settled down again. The “on call” staff went off to get some sleep before going on duty in the morning.

One night the Caley’s chocolate factory, not far from the hospital, was hit by incendiary bombs and the smell of burnt chocolate lingered in the air for days after. During an earlier raids one of the Nurses Homes was destroyed and part of the top storey of the hospital was hit. No-one was killed and the army came to the rescue and carried patients and equipment out into the grounds. In a later attack, the main block of the hospital was hit, knocking out the X-ray department and main operating theatres and cutting off the heating and gas supplies. I was working in the theatre then as a runner or dirty nurse and we were all promptly moved into the theatre in the Maternity block where there was water but no heating supply. I was one of a team scrubbing instruments and putting them into trays of carbolic solution to sterilise them. Gowns ran out, so the surgeons wore rubber aprons and carried on; luckily, the supply of rubber gloves lasted out. Even under normal circumstances, gloves were never plentiful and one of the jobs of the juniors in the theatre was to patch and grade used ones. New ones were kept for Surgeons doing lists and the repaired ones for minor surgery. Surgical gloves were sterilises in linen envelopes with little gauze balls of talc to make the gloves easier to pull on. One of the surgeons insisted on his gloves being dropped in boiling water before being worn. This was not popular with Theatre Sister as the gloves stretched and had to be abandoned after one wearing, unless they could be used for cleaning.

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