Non-fiction (2)

An extract from 'Sky Wards'

A History of the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service, 1918-2000.

On 1 April 1918, under the command of Major General Sir (later Lord) Hugh Montague Trenchard, the two wings of the Royal Flying Corps 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 Royal Air Force 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), for the duration of the war, at least.

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; at sea, U-boats menaced great iron-clad warships, while in the skies fragile flying machines augmented the forces of land and sea. And all the while, in the background, millions of people toiled in support. They included many women -- girls 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, back then 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. 
     Joanna Margaret's interest in nursing began in India, through work 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 thirty-one. After completing a general nursing course she gained extra diplomas in massage and midwifery and, around 1912, she 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. Sadly, it failed to do so and 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.' 
      Fortunately, she arrived home safely.

Kate:  During July 1918 the Air Ministry had launched its nursing service by advertising in the nursing press for a matron-in-chief and four matrons, plus forty sisters and staff nurses. This first quota was filled mainly by army and navy nurses, but some civilian nurses also applied. When the first Director of Medical Services (DMS) for the RAF, Lieutenant-General (later Sir) Matthew Fell, asked the authorities at Guy's Hospital, London, to recommend suitable candidates for his new service, among the names put forward was that of Kate New.
       Kate had done her general nurse and midwifery training at Guy's Hospital, beginning in 1908 at the age of twenty-five. Once qualified, she stayed on at the same hospital. She had volunteered to join the forces as soon as war was declared, but had been persuaded that her talents were more urgently needed at Guy's. However, in October 1918, when the air force nursing service offered her a post, she readily accepted.

Marion: Another early recruit to the new service was Marion Welch, who celebrated her thirtieth birthday in January 1918. Trained at Huddersfield, where she won a Gold Medal, she too became a qualified midwife, with an extra diploma, in dispensing, from Apothecaries Hall. She worked at hospitals in England and later served in France with the British Red Cross Society, in a tented hospital not far from the battlefield. In the year before she applied to join the RAFNS, she had been nursing at the War Hospital in Chichester.
 
Mary: As for young Mary, on 25 April 1918, her twenty-first birthday, her parents agreed to allow her to apply to one of the London hospitals to become a probationer nurse. Persuading them to grant her this dearest wish can have been no easy task. Girls of her station did not, as a rule, take up a profession of any kind. But the war had changed many things. When Victoria Alexandra Alice Mary Saxe-Coburg Gotha -- simply 'Mary' to her family and friends -- became a trainee at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, the matron was advised that her new recruit was to be 'treated as one of the nurses under all circumstances'. The order came from Buckingham Palace. The new probationer was the only daughter of King George V.

First members 
If His Majesty had no objections to his daughter's working as a nurse, he did have reservations about allowing her to be named as Royal Patron of the newest nursing service. The Air Ministry considered her the perfect candidate, young and fresh, modern and caring, the personification of the RAFNS itself. But when her father was approached, as early as October 1918, with requests that his daughter's name might be linked with the RAFNS, he chose to withhold his consent until the service was 'thoroughly constituted and working on a sound and efficient basis' -- probably a wise decision, as it turned out. 
      Even in this first inchoate 'temporary' incarnation, the new service took time to organize. To begin with, an 'Acting Principal Matron' had to be appointed. 
      The successful applicant was Miss L E Jolley, another product of Guy's Hospital. She had lately been a matron at the Royal Southern Hospital in Liverpool and then a sister/acting matron in the QAIMNS Reserve. Being forty-eight at the time of her appointment to the air force nursing service, she was already well over the upper age limit for military nurses, which owing to the urgent needs of 1914-18 had been raised to forty-five; but the matter of age was waived in her case. Her officially-stated role was to act as adviser in the formation of the new service, with a salary of œ300 per annum but with 'no guarantee of permanence in the post'. In common with all other members of the early RAFNS, Miss Jolley was appointed for the duration of the war only. On those terms, she began work at the Air Ministry in July 1918. 
      Later that month, the Assistant Medical Administrator (AMA), Lieutenant-Colonel Heald, asked her to draft a document setting out Conditions of Service for the RAFNS. He added, 'this will be very simple as it is merely a question of putting down the pay and conditions of service of the QAIMNS.' 
      On 4 September Miss Jolley rather testily memoed (on economical brown Air Ministry paper, in a flourishing script and flamboyant blue-green ink!), 'Can I be informed, please, as to what units are likely to be opened and when, also of any vacancies to be filled by nurses, as I want to give applicants some idea when their services will be required'. The answer came that 'Matlock may be ready within 2 or 3 weeks -- an asst matron, 2 sisters and 3 nurses, with 1 masseuse, will be required'. Another two weeks later, the AMA advised Miss Jolley not to engage more nurses than they were likely to need, but 'the three nurses for whom you have no immediate billets... can be absorbed on to the Matlock establishment'.

As summer turned to autumn, air force sisters and staff nurses replaced army and navy nurses at the small hospital units in London and at Cranwell; others went to Women's Royal Air Force depots at Glasgow, Birmingham and Sheffield; to the convalescent centres at Matlock in Derbyshire, and at Hastings; and to station sick quarters at the recruit training camps around Salisbury Plain. With them went members of the equally-new RAF Medical Service, whose personnel included male and female doctors and dentists, with male nurses and medical orderlies. Women of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VADs, trained in First Aid and Home Nursing) acted as ward orderlies, cooks and general assistants. Later, in October 1918 and January 1919, air force personnel replaced army staff at existing hospitals in Blandford and Hampstead. From 1919 these places begin to appear in the records as RAF Hospitals.  

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