Catherine Ford - Nurse in Wartime
Catherine Ford, or Kitty as she was known as, was born in 1921 at 84 Egerton Road, South Shields. Kitty started her nurse training on the 1st of April, 1940 at Sunderland General Hospital and stayed there until the 30th of September, 1943.
In Sunderland, in April, 1941 the large department store called Binns suffered a heavy bombing attack on that day and because it was largely a glass building, there was a huge amount of damage done to the building and the glass flew everywhere into the main street in Sunderland, so there was a lot of casualties. People were killed and a lot of people were injured by this flying glass. Kitty being a student nurse was called into action because a lot of the doctors had been called up for national service and had to be at the war, so she had to administer a lot more medical assistance than normally would've been the case.
The Air Raid Precautions (ARP) wardens would bring in the wounded and if they'd given them morphine to reduce the pain, they would write an 'M' on the person's forehead, which indicated that they had being given morphine. One of her jobs was to pull out glass out of the injured people before they were being prepared for an operation she also took part in some of the operations alongside the doctors.
After this, she then moved down to Carshalton in Surrey to complete her midwife training. This was in the middle of 1944. This was the period known as the Doodlebug Summer when the Doodlebugs or V1 flying bombs, were launched against London at this point. She was based at St. Helier's Hospital in Surrey this suffered a number of attacks and the hospital was painted grey to try and prevent it being spotted from the air.
During the war she was engaged in other duties as well as apart from being in training "had to deliver babies in the Underground with my gas mask and tin hat on".
After the war, she worked in fever hospitals, became a midwife, then a health visitor and in 1988 she retired. Just before she retired in 1977, because of her contribution to nursing some of her colleagues recommended her to receive the Queen Silver Jubilee Medal. She died in 2019 at the age of 98.
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