Page 27 - QARANC Vol 20 No 2 2022

The Gazette QARANC Association 27
Our VIP
guest:
Vera Hay
We were thrilled to be joined in Cardiff by Vera Hay (a holder of the Legion d’honneur no less) and who was celebrating recently turning 100-years-old.
Vera did her nurses training at St Mary Abbots hospital, London in 1940, later nursing casualties of the blitz with multiple injuries and burns. She served at Leavesden mental hospital where she met the QAIMNS nurses assisting in the care of soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk.
Vera was assigned to the 600-bed, 79th British General Hospital, which deployed to Normandy in June 1944, D-Day +4. The hospital took in more than 200 casualties per day, and Vera
slept in a trench until accommodation was found.
After the war Vera was posted to Cowglen hospital, Glasgow treating
TB patients and then in charge of a skin ward in Lincoln before retirement to marry and have a family.
Reunion guest recalls
Dame Margot meeting
Gazette Editor Steve Bax spoke to retired QA Sarah Morgan, who was once interviewed for a nursing job by the legendary Dame Margot Turner.
Sarah, one of the attendees at Cardiff, talked about how her lifelong association with nursing started. As a 17-year-old in the early 1960s she worked as a nursing cadet in a sanatorium in Pembrokeshire looking after children with tuberculous. She trained at a general hospital and was expected to go into midwifery, but felt it was not for her.
Instead, she applied for the Army and, at the office in Swansea she was invited to travel to London for an interview. “They said I’d have to wear a hat, it was a different world in those days,” Sarah recalls. She caught a train from Carnarvon to Paddington but had no idea how to get to Waterloo Station
for the connecting train to Hindhead. “I was so late I thought they would send me away, but instead they were so pleased to see me. Ever since, I’ve thought about the kindness of strangers.” A three weeks’ basic course followed, and Sarah was posted to the
Royal Herbert at Woolwich.
One day the matron sent for her, and
noted she done theatre work, adding “You will do the theatre course.” This led to Sarah’s meeting with Dame Margot, who interviewed her and signed her certificate (which she still has and brought with her to Cardiff).
She adds: “I knew nothing about Dame Margot. Then her book came out and I learned she had survived her
ship sinking and being adrift on a raft in the Java Sea. She was picked up by the Japanese and held in a prison camp. Although to meet her she wasn’t at all bitter.”
After leaving the Army, Sarah worked at King’s College Hospital in London as a night sister. She was eventually in charge of the operating theatres in a career lasting until the late 1980s.
Having become a QA in 1964, she attended a U3A meeting in Norwood, London where the chairman was a QA and persuaded Sarah to join the QARANC Association. “I’ve been in this now for a few years,” she says, noting “time goes so quickly.”