Page 53 - QARANC Vol 16 No 2 2018
P. 53
Mada Clare
23 June 1913 – 11 July 2018
Mada Clare, who has died aged 105, devoted her working life to caring for the sick and was one of the nurses at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Mada was a member of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS) who accompanied the British Army in its campaign from the Normandy beach-head through Belgium and Holland and into Germany. In April 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was discovered.
Doctors who went to the camp, she said, returned in tears and refused to speak about what they had seen. No one had ever seen anything like it. The first photographs of conditions inside the camp were developed in her X-Ray department.
After a hospital that had been run by nuns was taken over, Mada and her colleagues were assembled, taken to the camp and given the task of nursing the survivors. The average weight of their patients was five stones and they had to be fed on pre-digested food, a very little at a time.
Just keeping people from dying, she said, was such a struggle. She confessed that it was the most terrifying situation that she had ever been in. She would never forget hearing the words “English Sister! English Sister!” the cries of joy and relief of those inmates who first caught sight of her.
Doris Mada Laight, the eldest girl of 11 brothers and sisters, was born at Acle, Norfolk, on 23 June 1913. Known as Mada, she grew up reading stories about Florence Nightingale and always wanted to be a nurse. At an early age, she was a Girl Guide and part of the Red Cross group in her village.
In 1932, she began her training as a probationer nurse at the Beccles War Memorial Hospital, Suffolk, before moving to the East Suffolk Hospital, Ipswich. At the outbreak of war, her matron asked for volunteers to join QAIMNS.
Her parents, she said, were shocked that she was joining the Army as a nursing Sister but her mind was made up. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, Mada served with the British Expeditionary Force and was based in a chateau near Le Mans. After a bitterly cold winter, in June 1940, she and her company escaped from France through the port of Cherbourg.
The city was under fire from the Germans and the last British troops had already been evacuated from Dunkirk. “During our Channel crossing, there was a thick fog,” she said afterwards. “Thankfully the Luftwaffe did not find us”.
She was subsequently posted to the Middle East and served at No. 6 General Hospital in the Canal Zone from 1941 to May 1944. Having been recalled to England to prepare for the invasion of France, she landed in Normandy on D+11.
She expected, she said, to work in a proper hospital but she was given an Army blanket, a tin hat and a tent. During fierce fighting around Caen, she was at a casualty clearing station close to the front line when four wounded soldiers were brought in. Each of them required an emergency amputation. In an interview for the BBC, she was asked how it felt. “You did not have time to ask how you felt,” she replied. “You just got on with the job”.
In July 1945, in Berlin, she helped to establish a surgical theatre to serve delegates attending the Potsdam Conference. After a spell working in a hospital converted from
Mada Clare as a young nurse wearing her hospital badge
a former Hitler Youth hostel next to Spandau prison, she was demobilised and returned to England in late 1945. Her award of a Mention in Despatches for distinguished service was gazetted in April 1946.
Mada continued with her nursing career at the National Temperance Hospital, north London, and then at Moorfields Eye Hospital where she was deputy matron. She retired in 1955 and for many years she and her husband lived in Ipswich. In 2009, they both moved into a care home nearby at Kesgrave.
She maintained her contacts with QAIMNS and the Nurses League at the East Suffolk Hospital. She always watched the ceremony on Remembrance Sunday and found the march past of the veterans particularly affecting. “That old, wartime comradeship,” she said, “is unshakeable”.
In 2016, she was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French Government for her contribution to the liberation of France. When she reached the age of 105, she received her second birthday card from the Queen.
In 1955 she married William (Bill) Clare, a teacher of music and divinity. He died in 2012. Mada Clare died on 11 July. She is survived by five sisters.
Charles Owen
Published with kind permission of The Daily Telegraph and Graham Laight
THE GAZETTE QARANC 51