Page 42 - QARANC Vol 19 No 1 2021

40 The Gazette QARANC Association
War Time Experiences at 127 Indian Based General Hospital, Secunderabad 1944-45
I completed my general nurse training in 1943 and after a few months working in theatre I answered an advertisement for qualified nurses to serve in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve. I was accepted and was soon on my way to Southampton and Netley where I joined many other new recruits who were just as bewildered as I was. We had a medical examination, we were inoculated against several diseases, we were told how to go about ordering our uniforms and in between we did the odd shift on night duty. In no time at all we had grey uniforms with great coats and white uniforms with white gloves and white stockings and were attending a farewell concert. A parting address from a senior nursing officer gave us our marching orders with a last remark that we should not be sent home pregnant. Next day we were off, complete with camp bed and canvas basins.
I trained at Guy’s Hospital in London but had returned home to work in Glasgow. I had left Glasgow for Netley, and now we were on a train back up to the Clyde coast to join a ship, going we knew not where. When we woke the next morning we had moved out of the Clyde into the Atlantic and there were ships all around us. We sailed in convoy for the best part of our journey arriving in due course in Port Said. We disembarked and boarded a train to travel the length of the Suez Canal to Tewfick and a transit camp where we spent a short time. The next ship took us to Bombay where we boarded another train for Secunderabad. We had arrived in India.
Secunderabad was a long established military cantonment and the nurses were housed in a compound of single room dwellings that had once served as married quarters. The next day we reported to a senior officer who assigned us to wards and departments. I was assigned to theatre. As we came to understand it,
this was the base hospital created out of empty barracks. A single barrack room was turned into a ward and there were many of them. A ward had 25 beds down each side, each side had a veranda also with 25 beds. From the ceiling, two rows of punkahs hung down the length of the ward and alternatively wafted backwards and forwards. The twin operating theatres had once been the orderly rooms. By the time we arrived, the equipment was in place, there were Royal Army Medical Corps orderlies in position and I have a recollection that the hospital had already begun to function.
Through an archway behind the behind the main theatre was a sterilizing room. The sterilisers were large fish kettles set on top of primus stoves and we could hear the hissing of the stoves while we were working. As the hissing sound began to fade we could hear the orderly pumping up the pressure before it gave up altogether. The bulk of our work was orthopaedic surgery and our surgeons were orthopaedic specialists. We required a continuous supply of plaster bandages that we had to make ourselves and there was always someone around theatre sitting in front of a metal mesh frame making them. A gauze bandage started at one end of the frame and as it was unwound, the plaster rubbed into the weave. It became a plaster bandage when it was loosely rolled up at the other end. Our surgical needles and instruments were kept sharp by an orderly using a whetstone, he was very good at it. There were twelve blankets on our stock used by orderlies to transport patients. We had to account for them so they were counted each evening. Occasionally one was missing, sometimes two but by the next night the count would be back to twelve, the orderlies had their own way of retrieving lost items. The hospital had X-ray facilities and extensive physiotherapy and rehabilitation departments and much more besides.
Patients came to us from the conflict
Janet celebrated her 100th birthday on 5 April 2021 and this article, first published in the Autumn Edition 2006 of the QA Gazette, is seen as a fitting tribute.
in the Burma region by way of casualty stations and hospital trains to the railway siding at Trimulgherry, the ambulances and staff went down to meet them and assign them to the various wards. All the patients were exhausted after the long and uncomfortable journey, those on stretchers and those most seriously ill were transported to the hospital first and the others followed in quick succession. Theatre was always busy but when the fighting intensified the theatre lists grew longer.
Most patients had fractured bones and wounds that required attention, some of the wounds were deep with a lot of tissue damage and there was the odd bullet that had to be found and removed. Fractured bones had often to be aligned, tissue damage had to be repaired and sometimes a stump created, or recreated, to give