NHS nurses in the 1950s who made a 70-year bond | books | entertainment

They were all children of World War II – rationing was still in place for some products – but they are now adults, sprouting into an independent life of their own. “In my head, we’re still Brady, Biddle, Douglas, and Farrer,” says Gwenda, using their maiden names—married women weren’t even allowed to take the course. “We had to call each other by our nicknames, we got used to that, and we kept that after work as well.”

Seventy years after their first meeting, the women – aged between 88 and 91 – hold the reunion at Gwenda’s home in Puntland, outside Newcastle. Edna and Rose both live locally, but Pat came from Edinburgh.

Gwenda was 18 when they met, and like others, she wanted to be a nurse since childhood. My mother thought it was a crazy idea. “When have you been in the hospital before?” she was saying. Or: “You’ll just go and stumble over the feet of a poor boy with gout.” But my mind made up its mind, and after the nursery nursing course – where I met Rose – I started training.”

Edna first worked in a residential nursery, caring for newborns to three-year-olds, where untrained 17-year-olds were allowed to do the night shifts on their own. “Looking back, it was awful,” she says.

Pat, 21, faced parental resistance as well, after she was warned that she would say goodbye to her social life if she started nursing. She spent three years as a civil servant before pursuing her career.

The Initial Training School – PTS – was set up in the east end of Newcastle under the tutelage of a small but terrifying Scottish woman. She ran a system that made basic army training look like a holiday camp. “Sister Gann was a complete control freak,” Pat says.

“The classroom was cold, with open windows in the back, while the thermometer was in the front, as I stood by the little coal fire. It was the middle of winter. We were all freezing in our short-sleeved dresses.”

Their first lesson was in the important skill of quietly opening and closing a door.

All the students housed, and every morning before breakfast they had to strip their beds, fold them over the mattress and roll the rug. After breakfast, they brushed and dusted the room, made the bed and washed the duster, which Sister Gann then inspected.

“We had to hang the duster on a towel rack and give it to her, with the words ‘My sister, the duster.’ I always tended to add, ‘Duster, meet the sister,'” adds Gwenda. They were tested every Saturday morning at work the previous week. I left one Their group went to school at the age of fourteen and found it difficult to go back to school.

“I had a review session in my room at 6 a.m. with this friend and another girl,” Gwenda says. “I would come up with rhymes and utterances to remember things. For example, Little Sammy Cooper’s Dead reminded us of symptoms of digitalis poisoning. And I composed a song to the tunes of The Roving Kind about how the sewage system works.

“It was good that we sat down alphabetically or else we were accused of cheating because we gave identical answers.”

Three months later, the group moved to the nurses’ home opposite General Hospital in the city’s West End. There was no heating in the bedrooms, and with any additional electrical appliances all the lights fused, and everyone was condemned to spend the night in the dark. Gwenda and her friend Margaret sleep in the same bed to keep warm.

Meals were served by maids in a large dining room. “If we want more tea, we hold the cup in the air and one of the maids will refresh it.”

Reaching the wings for the first time was exciting and terrifying. “Each ward had its own cleaner,” says Edna. “Everything was clean. In teams of two, we stripped and changed the beds every morning, and folded the top sheet exactly nine inches apart, making sure the pillowcase slots faced the same way and the bed wheels were facing inward.”

Each group stayed together throughout training, creating a great bond of friendship – which remains.

“If anyone had a particularly terrifying day,” Rose says, “there was always someone to talk to in the nurses’ house. We had two living rooms but we spent more time in each other’s bedrooms.”

In the 1950s, cars were less common on Britain’s roads, and it was virtually unheard of for a novice nurse to have their own transport, so it caused quite a stir in the hospital when Gwenda became owners of the 1934 Hillman Minx that they spotted in a market Domestic cars.

When auction day arrived, they were on a night shift and weren’t allowed out of the nurses’ house between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., so they slipped in early and spent several hours drowsily in the back row of the news stage, frightened in case they defaulted on the sale.

They were the only women in the auction.

“It cheats us more, but we didn’t even wonder why our car was being pushed inside while the others were driving,” Gwenda says. “We thought we lost it when a guy offered £25, but we screamed ‘£27,’ and it was us! We were thrilled. We only had £20 and said we’d be back on payday with another £7.”

They park their new purchases in Piggeries, one of the older parts of the hospital – once a workshop in town. The car only had glass in one window, but it used X-ray panels—which have been brushed, cleaned, and held in place with waterproof adhesive—to serve as a functional alternative to the others.

The car, nicknamed the Flatus due to its tendency to backfire, has become a familiar sight in the West End. She was seated seven comfortably—three on the front seat in the front and four in the back—but it might take another four on the floor, so Gwenda—the only driver to start with—found herself often transporting up to 10 friends around.

At a busy intersection on the Great North Road, the policeman working at one point would wave to them if he saw them coming because he once had to give them a push after stopping them.

Gwenda taught Pat to drive, followed by Rose. Wheels gave friends new freedom. They sometimes traveled to the coast after the night service, and slept on the beach.

Edna has fond memories of a trip they took to Glasgow in 1954, when Pat and Gwenda wanted to see the beginning of their Monte Carlo career while she and Rose were more interested in visiting their friends there.

Flatus suffered 14 punctures and friends had to buy two new wheels on the way. Since the front two were smaller than the rear, people kept waving them down, thinking the wheels were going off.

Gwenda and Pat slept in the car outside a large garage in Glasgow, where the next morning the owner woke them up with a cup of tea and invited them to a meal with him and his wife.

“Scottish hospitality,” says Pat.

Field Marshal Montgomery—who had worked alongside one of the sisters in Egypt during the war—provided the testimonies when they qualified as state-registered nurses in 1955. As the group photo was about to be taken, the sister was horrified to discover that Gwenda was sitting next to the war hero, who quickly moved her to an end Class.

“She and I didn’t arrive. I hated Flatus, and she once asked me to remove ‘Brutal’, which I was stopping outside the classroom. She was even more pissed when I told her I needed to take three people with me to give her a boost.”

After training, Gwenda and Pat went to London to study midwifery, before responding to an advertisement for a job in Cleveland, Ohio, and spending three years in America.

Gwenda Bedpans & Bobby Socks and I have written about their adventures in the UK and US.

She gave up nursing after her marriage in 1961 while Rose was working in her husband’s business. Pat resumed her career when her sons started school, and Edna herself became a teacher – but she wasn’t like Sister Gunn. Throughout it all, they’ve remained friends – sharing family events and holidays and seeing their kids form friendships with each other too.

Sadly, most of The General is gone, and the hospital site is being developed for the new aging and vitality campus, while the nursing home has been abandoned for several years. But reunions remained a summertime tradition, though numbers dwindled.

“Things change, don’t they,” Edna says. “But as long as we’re still here, the past lives on in our memories.”

• Posted by Bedpans & Bobby Socks by Barbara Fox and Gwenda Gofton by Sphere