Derby City General Hospital: The day a trainee nurse rode her bicycle down the hospital corridor – for a dare

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The redevelopment of Derby City General Hospital strikes a special chord for the former nurses who trained there. Three members of the class of 1950/51 spoke to Hilary Burton about their memories.

THE demolition of a Derby landmark sparked happy memories for a group of Derby men and women.

The original entrance and old headquarters of Derby City General Hospital was knocked down last month as part of the £333m redevelopment of the site into a new hospital, due to open by 2008.

Noreen Wellings, then Acford, is one of a group of nurses who trained at the hospital and took their finals in 1950.

Nine of the former trainees still meet up for an annual reunion, when their stories and reminiscences tend to absorb them and anyone else at the restaurant.

Noreen, of Allestree, and the others in her group all have many tales to tell of their days on the wards at the City General, when the work was hard and the days filled with regulations – but the nurses still managed to bend the rules and have some fun.

Noreen (77) was chatting to Bygones over coffee with two fellow students from the late 1940s, Kath Draper (76), of Mickleover, and Keith Parsons (80), of Ripley.

The others with whom they still get together are Len Stork and his wife Barbara (nee Worthy), Keith’s wife Kay, Mavis Lymer, Pat Rayworth and Theresa (Terry) Turner.

They said they still often thought of each other by their surnames as they were never allowed to use first names.

Kath recalled: “If anyone ever used a first name, you would look around to see who it was.”

And, of course, if any woman changed her name by getting married, that was the end of her nursing career.

In fact, Kath, like many career nurses from those days, has never married.

Noreen started work at the City General in 1945 as a sub-probationer. At 17 years old she started her three years of training to become an SRN – State Registered Nurse.

Kath was a year behind her and Keith also qualified in 1951, after doing his national service. On qualifying, Noreen was the gold medal winner for the best student in her year, as was Kath in her year, with Keith winning the silver medal.

As he was that relatively rare thing, a male nurse, he was allowed to live out and worked on different wards – but never on the women’s wards.

Noreen recalled: “Everyone had to live in the nurses’ home except the male nurses, who slept in the hospital away from temptation!

“The first weeks we spent most of our time in the sluice, among the bed-pans and other unmentionables.”

The trainee nurses worked a tough schedule, with their day beginning at 7.30am and continuing until 8pm. They had a two-and-a-half-hour break in the morning, afternoon or evening, and one day off a week.

Noreen commented: “We got used to it I suppose. Breakfast was at 7am and we worked a split shift so we got a break in the day.

“It was best if you got the evening break because then your day would finish at 5.30pm. We worked six days a week as well.”

Kath wondered how many hours a week they must have worked, and Noreen admitted she had never dared to count it up – but it would certainly astonish workers today.

The trainees had a weekend off about every six weeks but, as Kath said: “It would just be time for your weekend off and then you would be transferred to another ward and lose the weekend.”

The nurses’ lives were ruled by the routine of sterilising everything and they all laughed when Keith produced from his bag a pair of long-nosed Cheatle forceps for removing sterilised items from the boiling water.

Keith said: “Every-thing was boiled up in a big steriliser, and you had different kinds of forceps to get the different things out. You would fish out the enamel bowls and put them on a trolley. Everything you handled had to be sterilised. The top of the trolley was sterile; you never touched anything. We used to use two Cheatles to shake out a sterile towel to lay the equipment out on.

“Now things are used once and thrown away. Everything is disposable – a nurse just goes to a cupboard and gets out a sterile dressing, wearing disposable gloves.”

Then there were the rules about making the beds, which occupied much of the nurses’ time.

Kath recalled: “The night staff made one side of the ward before they went off. As you made a bed, you pulled it forward. The day staff would do the same and then the cleaner would come on.

“The cleaners had a real sense of pride in their work. The wards were swept three times a day. They used to sprinkle the wet tea leaves left over from breakfast on the floor and then sweep them up. All the surfaces were wiped with disinfectant. We never had an infection.”

Noreen added: “Once the beds had been made tidy for the night, we used to say to the patients ‘Don’t move’ so that they didn’t make them untidy again.

“It bothers me now if the beds are not all made the same, and I don’t like to see people sitting on the beds in hospitals. That sort of thing never leaves you. I used to make my children do hospital corners.”

And Kath confessed that her linen cupboard was still kept to a standard to impress the most pernickety matron.

Once the beds were made, the nurses started their “proper work”. They would work alongside the doctors, maybe handing sterile dressings or preparing patients for theatre. They would work on different wards during their training so that they had a full picture of work at the hospital.

In those days there was none of the technology we take for granted in hospitals today.

There wasn’t even such a thing as an intensive care ward. If a patient needed special care, it would be provided on a general ward.

Noreen said: “It seems amazing now to think that we’d work all day until 8pm and then go dancing until midnight. And we had to be up again the next morning to work. I suppose we were all young and frivolous.

“We had to get a late pass personally from Matron. We were allowed one a week. If not, we got a friend who slept on the ground floor to let us in through the window.

“I was on the ground floor for a while and it was dreadful if you were in on a Saturday night because you would have first one person then another knocking at your window.

“I used to put a bedroom chair outside the window for people to climb on and through my window. I asked to be moved in the end because I got so fed up with it.

“We had 32 patients to a ward, ruled over by Sister, and we were always extremely busy. Sister made sure of that.”

Kath said: “If you weren’t doing anything, then someone would soon find you a job to do that would keep you busy.”

The student nurses had lectures during their off-duty time and had full-time teaching before their exams from Miss Martin “who was lovely”, said Noreen. She added: “There were some hard times but we all agree they were far outweighed by the fun, friendship and good times. Because life there was so strict, we had more fun bending the rules.”

Keith agreed: “It was a very enclosed community and we all had to learn to get on.”

Noreen recalled one funny incident when she and a colleague were dared to ride their bikes down the corridor in the middle of the night.

She said: “Donald James and I raced down the corridors and we thought no-one had seen us, but the main corridor floor was highly polished and when daylight came you could see two tyre tracks all the way down.

“We didn’t get into any trouble over it but Sister Smith, who had been in her office, told me a lot later that she knew what had happened. I suppose the marks were a bit of a tell-tale sign.”

The nurses were never allowed to have a drink or anything to eat on the wards.

Noreen said: “The food was basic and we were always hungry as rationing was still in force, but there was always Pearts Cafe on the Spot where we could get a coffee and a big cream bun quite cheaply.

“We would serve out the meals to patients on the ward and, if there was anything left, we would hope to get some of it, especially if it was pudding. But often we didn’t have the chance or the time.

“I remember one time Sister Moon, who was very strict, told me and another nurse to sit on the thrawl in the pantry and eat two puddings that were left.

“But then who should come round but Matron, who would have her nose in everything.

“When she saw us sitting there eating these puddings, we were in fear and trembling, but Sister Moon came up and told Matron that she had told us to eat them rather than throw them away. I always had time for her after that.”

She also recalled once having a hot and full teapot that she had to hide in a hurry.

She said: “I had made a cup of tea for everybody on ward three, which we weren’t supposed to do. Matron Cooper was coming round and she would feel the teapot to see if it was warm.

“So I hid it in the roller towel on the back of the door. I remember thinking that if she came in and swept open the door, it would bang on the door. In any case, she was bound to ask me what I was doing in the kitchen.”

Luckily, the teapot stayed in its place and Noreen was safe from a telling off.

Keith remembered boiling eggs for the patients’ breakfasts. He said: “They used to provide their own eggs because of rationing. We had to do so many that it was impossible to get them right. The first one out would be a bit soft and the last one would be hard as nails.”

Food for the trainees was served in the dining hall, but sometimes the nurses were too busy to have much time to get there and eat their meals. Kath said that the male nurses had their own separate table: “We weren’t allowed to mix with them.”

The hospital hierarchy was vital, too. Keith said: “If you were going in to lunch and you met someone senior to you, you let them go first and woe betide you if you didn’t. And if you were late, you had to go up and apologise.”

Noreen laughed: “I remember the third years telling us off for making too much noise and being stupid and silly. I was always being told off for singing in the sluice room.”

Times were hard in the post-war era and equipment was scarce. Keith recalled having to go to the Matron’s office because he had broken a thermometer – which he then had to pay for out of his own wages. Equipment similar to a pulseometer, a device like an egg timer for timing how long you were taking a patient’s pulse, was standard issue.

Sometimes the work was more gruesome than others. Keith told an horrific tale of how he was going to wake a patient to take him down to theatre when he saw Noreen waving at him.

He said: “I wondered what was wrong with her – but it turned out that this chap had got a razor blade and cut his throat. Noreen had been the unlucky person who found him. It came out later that he thought he had cancer, though in fact he didn’t, he had a gastric ulcer.”

Many of those who qualified with Noreen and her friends made their careers in the nursing profession.

After Noreen qualified in 1950, she took a job as a staff nurse in Devon and later worked in Cornwall. She took time out from her career to have a family and worked in Derby again at the old Chest Clinic on Green Lane for 20 years.

Kath trained in Leicester as a midwife and worked at the former Queen Mary Maternity Home, off Duffield Road, in Derby and also at the City General again. She later became a community midwife in Derby and Mickleover.

Keith worked at the Babington Hospital and at Ripley Hospital as a charge nurse. He also worked at the DRI, where he was in charge of the A&E department, as an industrial nurse, and in Ilkeston.

The City Hospital was opened in November 1929 – the year Noreen and Kath were born – by the Mayor of Derby, Alderman Grant. It was built to replace the Derby Poor Law Infirmary, which was on the other side of Uttoxeter Road. The new hospital, which will merge Derbyshire Royal Infirmary and the City General, will have more than 1,000 beds.

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