Page 4 - QARANC Vol 17 No 2 2019

2 The Gazette QARANC Association
Editorial
This edition of your Gazette is certainly a bumper one, and I have had to hold over one or two items until the Spring 2020 edition. My grateful thanks as always go to our contributors who take the time to prepare material for the Gazette so that we can all keep in touch with Association and Corps matters. Unfortunately I have been unable to use some of the photographs as the images supplied are too small or not in the correct format. Please refer to the guidelines published on the inside back cover, or email me at gazette@ qarancassociation,org.uk for advice.
I have very much enjoyed reading your articles, especially those that capture the thrill of a sport or the emotion of remembrance. I might even become a football fan after reading the article on the AMS football tour to the USA, and I wish I was a bit younger so that I could have a crack at bobsleigh! As a nation we continue to find innovative ways to invoke the spirt and
emotion of remembrance, and we have all become much more active in this respect. Building the Commemorative Garden at the Royal Hospital Chelsea was clearly an amazing experience for those involved. Planting 10,000 plants and shovelling 16 tons of grey slate must have been quite a challenge.
The Association and the Corps are both keen to capture more of our recent history, so if any of you would like to write 600-1000 words capturing a memory of your time in the Corps either on deployment or about a particular posting, I will publish these in the Gazette and in time they will become a rich archive of material. Please look at Marie Cashon’s thoughtful and reflective account of her memories of OP TELIC for an idea of how you could go about this.
We have included for the first time, a short section on ‘News of Members’. If you have any items of news about yourself or other Association members that don’t suit a longer piece, I would
encourage you to send them in for publication. Contributions do not necessarily need to be about an individual’s nursing or caring career or about their military experience.
Alison Spires Editor
President’s
Foreword
Welcome to the Autumn edition of the Gazette. I know that the arrival of the Gazette is eagerly anticipated, particularly by our retired members, as it provides an opportunity to hear all the news and see all the pictures of the events and activities of the previous six months, and what a six months it has been as we have celebrated our 70th Anniversary year. This edition is packed with photographs and accounts of the activities all members of the Corps have been undertaking to celebrate and publicise our anniversary and I hope that those who have not been able to join us at those celebrations will enjoy reading all about the events.
We are now over halfway through our 70th Anniversary year and have gathered at several commemorative events which have brought together our Regular, Reserve and Retired members, colloquially known as the 3Rs. The CNO symposium in March was exceptionally well attended and, with its theme of Past, Present and Future, got our celebrations off to a fabulous start. The talks on the history of military nursing were particularly well received by our junior personnel and the dramatisation brought the challenges of early military nurses and nursing assistants vividly to life.
We were privileged to be joined by our Colonel-in-Chief, HRH Countess of Wessex for part of the symposium and it was a huge honour that she awarded our annual prizes to the Corps prize winners as well as listening to contemporary accounts of current military nursing. The sunset ceremony in the evening at the National Memorial Arboretum was
Colonel Alison McCourt Chief Nursing Officer (Army): Photo courtesy of Tempest Photography