This is the eventful story of the nurses who since 1918 have worn the grey-blue uniform of the RAF, from the Great War to D-Day; through the Falklands, in Bosnia and on to Afghanistan. These brave professionals dealt with snakes, malaria, desert dust and Arctic ice. Their main field of expertise is their skill for in-flight nursing, caring for very sick patients while flying back to hospitals in the UK. Over time, the caring, white-veiled 'angels' of fond memory have transformed into multi-skilled technicians, female and male, whose work has helped to advance medical knowledge and practice for all of humankind. Wards in the Sky traces their history and brings to life the drama, romance, hardship and, often, the hilarity, as told in the words of the nurses themselves.
This is the eventful story of the nurses who since 1918 have worn the grey-blue uniform of the RAF, from the Great War to D-Day; through the Falklands, in Bosnia and on to Afghanistan. These brave professionals dealt with snakes, malaria, desert dust and Arctic ice. Their main field of expertise is their skill for in-flight nursing, caring for very sick patients while flying back to hospitals in the UK. Over time, the caring, white-veiled 'angels' of fond memory have transformed into multi-skilled technicians, female and male, whose work has helped to advance medical knowledge and practice for all of humankind. Wards in the Sky traces their history and brings to life the drama, romance, hardship and, often, the hilarity, as told in the words of the nurses themselves.
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This is the eventful story of the nurses who since 1918 have worn the grey-blue uniform of the RAF, from the Great War to D-Day; through the Falklands, in Bosnia and on to Afghanistan. These brave professionals dealt with snakes, malaria, desert dust and Arctic ice. Their main field of expertise is their skill for in-flight nursing, caring for very sick patients while flying back to hospitals in the UK. Over time, the caring, white-veiled 'angels' of fond memory have transformed into multi-skilled technicians, female and male, whose work has helped to advance medical knowledge and practice for all of humankind. Wards in the Sky traces their history and brings to life the drama, romance, hardship and, often, the hilarity, as told in the words of the nurses themselves.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750962735 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Wards in the Sky
The RAF's Remarkable Nursing Service
By Mary Mackie
The History Press
Copyright © 2014 Mary MackieAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6273-5
CHAPTER 1
Hurricane Hattie
It's 1961. Yuri Gagarin rides through space. A dance called 'the Twist' arrives in Britain. The Beatles are still unknowns and Coronation Street has been on British screens for just a year. In the Soviet Union, Nikita Khruschev holds the reins of power, while over in Washington, DC, the charismatic young president, John F. Kennedy, is newly settled in the White House. Political tensions keep armed forces alert, ready to respond at the first sign of aggression.
Britain's Royal Air Force patrols the skies from airfields across Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. And, equally far flung, members of Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service (PMRAFNS) carry out their daily duties: in the Mediterranean, Flight Officer Joy Harris is enjoying 'trooping' aboard HMS Devonshire, and Flight Officer Jane Stott is in Singapore, at RAF Hospital Changi. Not so very long ago, Changi endured horrors during Japanese occupation: now, when a Royal Navy vessel passes, merry midwives wave nappies in greeting from louvered windows. At home, at RAF Hospital Cosford, Shropshire, Flying Officer Eileen Smith is beginning a romance with Flying Officer David Dodds. The same unit welcomes young Bob Williams, a boy entrant to the Medical Branch, to begin eighteen months' training as a nursing attendant; he will emerge, in due time, as Warrant Officer Boy Entrant and Head Boy of the School, ready for the next stage in his air force career.
On 30 October of that same year, the latest Soviet atomic bomb test, a massive 60 megatons, provokes worldwide protest.
On the following day, Flight Officer Dorothy 'Hutch' Hutchins was in a cinema enjoying a film when a message flashed up on the screen summoning her immediately back to her unit. A stir of curiosity rippled through the cinema as she hurried out. Arriving at RAF Hospital Wroughton, she found that she and her colleague Flying Officer Iris Rawlings, both on call for aeromedical evacuation duties, were ordered to RAF Lyneham. They and the rest of the aeromed team were to gather their equipment and fly to the Caribbean, where Hurricane Hattie had devastated British Honduras, flattening its capital, Belize. Iris Rawlings (Mrs Kerse) takes up the story:
Within a couple of hours we were at RAF Lyneham meeting the rest of the team and being issued with what was to be our uniform for the next two weeks – men's khaki drill shirts and trousers. The rest of the team consisted of a medical officer, about a dozen technicians, and an adjutant, Flight Lieutenant 'Pinkie' Pinks, whose home was in Belize and who was to prove invaluable to us.
The team boarded a Britannia and flew 6,000 miles across the Atlantic, to find the town of Belize wrecked and the airfield flooded. Their landing was tricky, on an airstrip marked out by lamps. Iris explains:
HMS Trowbridge, a RN vessel, had been first on the scene. We were met at the airport by some of her crew and guided, through knee-high water, to the town library, which they had made their Mess. They gave us a meal and afterwards, since we had brought stretchers and blankets, we were invited to choose our bed space. We elected to sleep beneath a sign saying 'Unusual Hobbies'.
Next morning, borrowing wellington boots from the navy, Iris and Hutch went out to survey the damage:
The shore was only about a foot above sea level and the tidal waves had removed the roofs from all the houses and completely wrecked the less substantial ones (the majority). The church, one of the few brick buildings, had been used as a refuge and its subsequent collapse had resulted in the highest death toll, running into hundreds.
It was decided that we should rehouse and tend the patients from the local hospital, which had been totally demolished. We commandeered the remains of the house of a local dignitary. This was the largest house in the area and, having been two-storeyed, still had one floor with a ceiling ...
Once the patients were comfortably installed (two to a bed!), we had to prepare the upper floor for our occupation. The technicians fitted a tarpaulin roof, we unpacked the stretchers and blankets, and there was our 'home'.
Dorothy Hutchins recalls:
Sanitary arrangements consisted of a bucket which, for lack of other means of disposal, had to be emptied into the sea. There was a nightly curfew because of escaped prisoners and looting, a fire watch duty because of hurricane lamps ... and the US Air Force dropped emergency food packs of tinned goods, including tinned bread, tinned butter, even tinned Smarties.
Unexpected horrors imprinted themselves on Iris Rawlings' memory:
Next to the hospital there was a water storage tank, where people would queue with their receptacles. Hutch and I would sometimes go out on what remained of the veranda and watch. One day we were told that a body had risen to the top of the tank.
One of our patients died and an army truck came round to collect the body. I talked to one of the soldiers, who couldn't have been more than 18 years old. It seemed their daily task was to go round collecting bodies and taking them for cremation on pyres by the sea shore. The ground was too flooded for burial – sheer volume of bodies apart – and the bodies could not be kept. I asked the young soldier how they coped and he said they were given a bottle of whisky each day to see them through. I imagine the memory must haunt him for life – it does me, and I only heard about it.
Eventually it was decided that we had done all we could and it was time to leave. We were to spend a day or two in Jamaica, as guests of the QAs [Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps]. Imagine our joy when we were met at the aircraft by their Matron and told she had made hairdressing appointments for us that afternoon. Only a woman would think of that! We were also told that no female help was being allowed into Belize – we had rather jumped the gun. How glad I am that we did because it was an adventure I wouldn't have missed for anything.
As a result of this 'adventure', Dorothy Hutchins was awarded the ARRC and Iris Rawlings received an AOC-in-C's Commendation, for 'meritorious service'. Just two of the many awards earned by members of the PMRAFNS.
CHAPTER 2Introducing the PMs
Once, long ago, arrow, sword and shot sufficed to despatch an enemy. The twentieth century has added the sophisticated niceties of mustard gas, the fighter plane, the doodlebug, the nuclear bomb, napalm, the 'smart' bomb, chemical and biological weapons ... All of these enable us to wage more impersonal war, with human targets obscured by distance and technology. Fortunately, our capacity for inflicting pain and death has obliged us also to learn better ways of soothing and healing not only the wounds caused by our warfare but also illnesses which have plagued humankind for generations. Many of these medical advances have been pioneered and perfected with the help of the Royal Air Force Medical Service (RAFMS) and its twin, the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service (PMRAFNS). Members of this latter Service refer to themselves affectionately as 'PMs'.
The story of this elite and specialised group mirrors the political, military and medical story of the twentieth century. Born out of the horrors of the Great War, 1914–18, in the following two decades the Service spread to aerodromes across Britain and put down roots in the turbulent Middle East. As another World War shattered yet more bodies and minds, the service's supportive tendrils reached across three continents, from Iceland to Japan. It held steady as Korea erupted, as Cyprus revolted, and as hurricanes howled. Through the Falklands Conflict, in the Balkans, through Iraq and on to Afghanistan, and during thousand upon thousand of individual dramas in between, PMs have answered the call for nursing aid.
Their main claim to uniqueness lies in their mobility. Wherever an emergency arises, even halfway across the world, specially trained aeromedical teams can fly to the scene within hours, using the most up-to-date planes and carrying the latest equipment. Their expertise in in-flight nursing has been honed and perfected over ten eventful decades.
Those years have seen many changes in the Service. Nurses are no longer simply ministering angels, offering little beyond soap and water, tender smiles and the touch of a soft feminine hand. PMs enter the third millennium as highly qualified, multi-skilled professionals, male and female, officers, warrant officers, NCOs and students. They work closely alongside naval and army nurses, as part of the Defence Medical Services. But they proudly continue to proclaim and defend their identity as members of the PMRAFNS.
The legacy of Florence Nightingale
The history of nursing, both civil and military, has been chronicled in detail elsewhere. Suffice it here to say that until comparatively recent times nursing was the province of amateurs and/or ill-paid incompetents. In warfare, while steel and shot killed a good many fighting men, far more died of wounds gone rotten through well-meaning ignorance and lack of hygiene. Not until the mid-nineteenth century did nursing become first a respectable occupation and eventually a fully trained profession, thanks largely to the post-Crimea efforts of Florence Nightingale.
By the time Miss Nightingale died, in 1910, she had established the basis of a system of nurse-training that was to be adopted throughout the world. Its military ethos spawned all those terrifying Sergeant-Major-style matrons who have been parodied down the years. But out of those schools came the women who were to form the nursing services of Britain, the various civilian branches as well as those of the Royal Navy, the British Army and, as the early years of the twentieth century drew half the world into war, the Royal Air Force.
Genesis
In 1900 powered flight was in its infancy. Few people imagined that those first flimsy aircraft and the daredevils who piloted them would ever prove as effective in war as a cavalry charge or the bombardment from a battleship. But some visionaries thought the possibilities worth exploring. An air battalion of the Royal Engineers came into being on 1 April 1911. It comprised two companies, one working with balloons and airships, the other with aircraft. In May 1912 this Battalion became the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), divided into a military wing and a naval wing later to be titled the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). With the arrival of 1914, intrepid young pilots swiftly improvised new techniques for waging aerial war.
In those early days, medical and nursing care for members of the RFC and RNAS came from whatever source lay closest. Sick or injured flyers, treated initially by unit medical officers and orderlies of the Royal Army Medical Corps, were passed on, as necessary, to the nearest military or naval hospital and the care of doctors and nurses of the army or navy. However, this state of affairs rapidly proved impracticable, mainly because flying stations (as they were then called) had to be situated on level uplands, with ample room for take-off and landing. Most of the airfields which sprang up during the Great War lay deep in the countryside, well away from large concentrations of population and established hospitals, whether army, navy or civilian. Clearly, special medical arrangements had to be made to serve the needs of flying stations.
A sick bay for flyers of airplanes, airships and balloons was opened at the RNAS training station at Cranwell, Lincolnshire, in 1916. Around the same time, a fund was launched to establish a hospital for officers of the Royal Flying Corps; the unit opened that same year at Bryanston Square, London, with twenty available beds. Shortly afterwards, thanks to the generosity of voluntary contributors, the fund was sufficient to open a larger unit, at Eaton Square. A third RFC hospital, at Mount Vernon, appointed its first medical specialist, a bacteriologist, on 11 October 1917, and soon a convalescent home was established in a large hotel with 200 acres of grounds, at Shirley Park, Croydon. These facilities were staffed by nurses 'borrowed' from either the army or the navy – Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), as it was then called, or Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service (QARNNS). As yet, the embryo flying services had no separate medical or nursing branch of their own.
On 1 April 1918, under the command of Major General Sir (later Lord) Hugh Montague Trenchard, the two wings of the RFC merged, assuming their new and enduring title of the Royal Air Force. Just three weeks later the new service won its first famous victory when one of its pilots shot down and killed the top-scoring German fighter ace, Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, the 'Red Baron'.
On 1 June that same year, the fledgling RAF acquired its own (temporary) nursing service. Qualified civilian nurses might apply, and army and naval nurses could elect to leave QAIMNS or QARNNS and become members of the Royal Air Force Nursing Service (RAFNS), at least for the duration of the war.
Four women
Looking back at those days of early 1918, we find a world in turmoil. At the front, young men were still fighting and dying, knee-deep in mud, while at sea U-boats menaced great iron-clad warships and, in the skies, the new, fragile flying machines augmented the senior forces. Meanwhile, in the background, millions of people toiled in support. They included many women, who turned their soft hands to painting and doping, to carting artillery shells, butchering meat rations or, in the more traditional way of women through the ages, tending the hurts of those who returned from the front.
Among those carers were four particular women – Margaret, Kate, Marion and Mary. Differences of age and rank separated them, not to mention geography, but each of the four was involved, in her own way, in the war effort and in nursing. Three were well-experienced nurses: Margaret was based in India, Kate in London, Marion close to the front in France. Mary, the youngest of the four at only twenty, had for some time been deeply involved with volunteer war work in England. None of them had met any of the others as yet, nor did they suspect the roles that awaited them. Their only connection, in early 1918, was the vocation that had called them.
Margaret: Joanna Margaret Cruickshank, known to her family as Margaret, was born on 28 November 1875, the second child of William Cruickshank. Her father, a Scotsman from Aberdeen, ventured out as a young man first to try life in Australia and later to settle in India. His five children were all born in India and grew up as part of the Raj, in an era when the British Empire was still a powerful force in the world.
It is thought that Miss Cruickshank's interest in nursing began in India, perhaps through working with Lady Minto's Indian Nursing Association (INA). She eventually returned to the UK to take professional qualifications, starting as a probationer nurse at Guy's Hospital in 1907, at the somewhat advanced age of 31. After completing a general nursing course she gained extra diplomas in massage and midwifery and, around 1912, travelled back to the east to rejoin her family and become a sister with Lady Minto's INA.
In 1917 she joined Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service. The Great War was at its height. In the mountains and deserts of the north-west frontier and the Middle East, Indian soldiers fought beside their British comrades. Margaret Cruickshank was one of the army nurses who cared for them amid the heat and the dust – and the mosquitoes. In common with many of her patients, she contracted a malignant form of malaria. Stricken by recurring fevers which depleted her strength and left her unable to work, she sought relief in the Punjabi hills, whose cooler air might restore her health. But sadly, in March 1918, she was invalided home to the more temperate climate of Britain.
The journey proved an eventful one, especially for a sick woman of forty-two. She recalled her voyage from India as being fraught with:
delay, difficulties and dangers. The culminating point was when the ship was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. We had, of course, been aware of the danger, but none of us realised just what it would feel like. Even now ... that moment when the ship was struck is as vivid in my memory as when it happened. We had to take to the open boats and after a few hours at sea we were picked up by a Q-boat and sent home overland through Spain. We expected at any time to be detained as prisoners of war.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wards in the Sky by Mary Mackie. Copyright © 2014 Mary Mackie. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Part I,
1 Hurricane Hattie,
2 Introducing the PMs,
3 After the Great War,
Part II The Wide Blue Yonder,
4 'Mespot',
5 The New RAF Hospital Halton,
Part III The Sternest Days,
6 Preparing for War,
7 Air Raids,
8 Faraway Places,
9 A New Theatre of Care,
10 Towards a Second Front,
11 Dressing Down,
12 Empire's End,
Part IV The Best of Times?,
13 Peaceful Days,
14 Aeromeds Increase,
15 On a Jet Plane,
16 Nurse-training, 1950s and 1960s,
Part V End of an Era,
17 The Male Element,
18 The Defence Medical Service,
19 Bosnia,
Part VI New Challenges in a New Millennium,
20 New Centre for Defence Medicine, Birmingham,
21 Preparing for War – BATUS, Canada,
22 Back in the UK,
Valete,
PS: On the Subject of ...,
Appendix A Significant Dates for the PMRAFNS,
Appendix B Hospitals and Other Medical Units of the RAF: Britain,
Appendix C Hospitals and Other Medical Units of the RAF: Overseas,
Appendix D Royal Patrons and Matrons-in-Chief,
Appendix E List of PMRAFNS Contributors,
Appendix F Key to Acronyms,
Select Bibliography,
Plates,
Copyright,