INTRODUCTION

by Dr GEOFFREY SMITH

My arrival in Bourne during the spring of 1961 was largely due to Alistair Galletly's affection for the Middlesex Hospital where he had studied as a young man. He had written to his old friend, Professor Sir Brian Windeyer, who was by then the Dean, asking if he knew of anybody who would be interested in going into general practice and as I had been his house physician two years earlier, he suggested me. I duly turned up in Bourne for an interview and was greeted by Dr Galletly who ushered me into his sitting room where we had a general discussion over tea about nothing in particular and after a short spell, he spoke with Cecil Sweetnam, his other partner, and I was appointed.

It was one of the most fortunate days of my life because he turned out to be most kind and benevolent towards me and at the same time helpful, instructive and caring at all times. However, I soon learned that he did not tolerate sloppiness in any way, whether he found it in colleagues, patients or in his council work. The two roles, that of family doctor and councillor, combined easily and as both occupations were run professionally and efficiently for the good of the people, his work made a serious contribution to the community.

I soon learned that he had a quite amazing knowledge of the locality, demonstrated on one occasion when I asked him where a certain family lived in the North Fen. He drew a map of both North and South fens showing all tracks and houses and named the occupants, even those not patients of the practice, including of course the family about whom I was inquiring.

His accounting methods were a continuation of those days before the National Health Service, far from officially acceptable but always efficient and accurate. Charges were entered in a day book by a code based on the word Cumberland, C representing 1,U 2 and so on, a puzzling system to those not in the know but a perfect one to defeat prying eyes.

Dr Galletly commanded great affection from patients, his practice colleagues, hospital staff and his domestic employees. He had a splendid housekeeper called Margaret Trotter, always referred to as Miss Trotter. She was a very Scottish lady and would bake cakes for him and the practice staff as well as being at his beck and shout at all times because he would always call out for her in a very loud voice and never go and look for her. Grummitt, the gardener, kept the garden immaculate and Dr Galletly once told me that he never passed a weed without removing it with the result that employer and employee were both immensely proud of the garden and all visitors were treated to an obligatory tour as a result.

Professionally, he was always very keen to ensure that he was not behind in the latest medical technology and would regularly ask me if this or that was the best current treatment. I do not remember a single occasion when he was not up to date which I always considered to be quite remarkable.

He felt that the NHS was a good thing, not only because it dispensed with payment by patients but because it also gave the doctors a more regulated life. Soon after I arrived, I mentioned that we should drop the Saturday afternoon surgeries but my suggestion was greeted with silence and because he had such a tremendous work ethic it took some persuasion for him to agree but after a few undisturbed weekends he saw the benefit. Some time later, when I promoted a night and weekend rota with the other practice in Bourne, there was very little resistance.

When reading of the workload that he used to regularly undertake, I now know how fortunate we doctors who came after have been. Add to this the current circumstances in which there are no hospitals in Bourne and only a distant emergency service, then we realise exactly the sort of dedication he had to his profession. He was a man whose integrity, honesty and devotion to others has shaped many lives and his character has certainly been an example and role model to me.

He was a man whose life saw change from carriages to Concorde, yet he adapted without complaint. It was my privilege to have known him and Bourne has had few citizens more worthy than Alistair Galletly.


Hunstanton
Norfolk
England
March 2006.

Memories of a life in practice

FATHER AND SON SERVED THE COMMUNITY
FOR SEVENTY YEARS

by Dr John Galletly

Two generations of my family devoted their lives to medicine. My father, John Galletly, was born at 25 Archibald Place, Edinburgh, in 1861. His father, Alexander Galletly, was himself born in Perth and was related to the Robertson family. He was the first head of the Edinburgh Museum of Industry and of his five sons, three became doctors, as did each of their sons, all studying successfully at Edinburgh University.

He had graduated in 1886 after winning many prizes and later went to study in Vienna at the time of the Mayerling tragedy. [In January 1889, the bodies of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his young mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, aged 17, were found with gunshot wounds in the bedroom of a hunting lodge at Mayerling, the result, it is thought, of a suicide pact although the government tried to cover up the scandal]. Years afterwards, he used to recall how the ear, nose and throat surgeon, Petenkoffer, came into his class the morning after the shooting was known and said: “I cannot lecture today. Our beloved Crown Prince is dead.”

After returning to Edinburgh, he did a fortnight’s locum at a mining village in Lothian and encountered every possible midwifery complication. John then became an assistant to a doctor at Skelton, a village near Penrith in Cumbria. He liked the doctor and, to illustrate the midwifery techniques of those days, he related how, when attending a woman at her confinement in a lonely cottage, his chief rode up on horseback and asked him if he wanted any help, pulling out his midwifery forceps from his tailcoat pocket. My father assured him he was managing all right.

He met my mother, Caroline, whilst doing this locum. Her father, Frederick Wells, was a farmer and moved from time to time to various farms near Penrith. I believe that he had three brothers. In those days, all drank heavily so my maternal grandfather left the farm and retired to Penrith in his early forties to a nice house on Beaconside in Penrith and lived there with his wife and three daughters comfortably on £300 a year. My mother was their middle daughter and, as was the custom in those days, was taught to play the piano, to sing and to paint. She was sent to school in Koblenz, to Grove Mouse on the Moselle, just before that river joins the Rhine. Fraulein Solmolla ran the establishment and years later, when we as a family went down the Rhine in 1930, we called on her and found her in the same old fashioned black dress with buttons down the bodice. There were several English girls there and they used to sing in the Lothian Cathedral whenever the Empress Frederique visited.

My father took over a general practice at Rippingale, near Bourne, early in 1889 after his father had given him £700 to buy it. He issued his first death certificate the same year in respect of a cottager whose grandson was a patient of the practice I myself retired from in 1969. He went back to Penrith to marry my mother on 4th June 1890. John Franks, a farmer, whose son and family my father and I subsequently attended, sent his son Fred with a dog cart to meet the bride and groom at Rippingale railway station when they returned from their honeymoon.

The Rippingale practice had 600 or so people and extended into Billingborough, Corby Glen and even Bourne itself. There were no district nurses but we did have a village woman who obliged at births and deaths, a “gamp” [after Sarah Gamp, an unqualified nurse immortalised by Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, his novel of 1844] if you like, or the grandmother in the family would put on a clean apron and assume all knowledge.

Only a few houses had a piped water supply from a bore while the rest drew theirs from a well or a standpipe connected to the bore. The toilets were of the period, usually an old hut at the bottom of the garden, earth closets emptied twice a year with two seats on one platform and a smaller one for children on a lower platform. The streets were lit by oil lamps, the village shop was also the post office and sold almost everything.

Rippingale itself had several farmers, some big, some small, also known as cottagers or smallholders. There was the parson in the vicarage, a Methodist chapel, no squire, the chief landowner being the Earl of Ancaster living at Grimsthorpe Castle some four miles away, and a full complement of tradesmen to make the village self﷓sufficient. The historic church, the village inn, chestnut trees round the green, old houses, some thatched, some pink washed and newer houses of good red brick and blue slate built by the Ancaster family for estate workers.

CYCLING IN THE RAIN

When my father first arrived, a woman who had previously lost her baby during her confinement was expecting another and he called upon her. He went upstairs to the bedroom and found half a dozen village women sitting around, critically waiting to give the new doctor the once over. He told me later that he felt as if he was on trial. He looked round at the waiting women, chose one and told the rest to go and to his intense relief, he successively delivered the mother of a live child. His authority was established and he had no trouble afterwards with the village gamps.

In South Lincolnshire at that time, the area of a doctor’s practice was limited by the distance of his transport, whether it was a dogcart, a pony trap or even a bicycle. At first, he tried to ride on horseback but with little success and so he learned to ride a bicycle. The two equal wheels with a chain and pedals had but lately succeeded the penny-farthing models and this became his chosen form of transport at that time. Bicycles in those days had a special brake stop or bar attached to and protruding from the back wheel. It was operated by putting one’s foot on it, giving a hop or two and launching the body on to the saddle. It was fine for children to stand on the backstop for a ride while their parent pedalled. If my father went out in the rain he would stuff a duster over his knees inside the sort of Norfolk breeches he wore. At night, he found his way by acetylene lamp but these were gradually replaced by oil lamps, although they were not so reliable.

Of course, medicines had to be made up at the end of a round and the visits and the prescriptions, from which these medicines were made up, were entered in the daybook. The visits and medicines also had to be entered on the patients’ record card and the fees for visits to private patients entered into the ledger.

My father also employed a man as groom and gardener and owned a dogcart but using this resulted in a serious accident in his early days. At some corners in the road, large boulders were placed as markers and on this occasion the groom took a corner too fast and the nearside wheel struck the stone. The dogcart lurched sideways and threw my father out, causing permanent damage to his left ear. He was also slightly stunned and later developed erysipelas in the wound.

There were general hospitals, or infirmaries as they were then known, at Stamford, Grantham and Peterborough, but no maternity units. In the case of a difficult confinement, my father would summon help from a neighbouring practitioner or, in later years when he had moved to Bourne and had become medical officer to the Bourne Union (about 1907), he would admit them to the labour ward at the workhouse because he knew that at least the bedding would be clean and utensils available.

Admission to one of the neighbouring hospitals, or to a London hospital, was obtained by means of a patron’s letter, endorsement from someone important in the neighbourhood. For instance, the Earl of Ancaster was a Patron of the Middlesex Hospital and the Marquis of Exeter a Patron of Stamford Hospital. Admission could also be gained when the family doctor knew the consultant and this was the case with my father who knew Dr Tom Walker at Peterborough Hospital.

FEES FOR CONFINEMENTS

Patients were conveyed by a horse-drawn ambulance or, failing that, a farmer’s horse and trap and they paid for their medical advice either privately or through clubs such as those run by the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, the Bourne Baptist Church, the National Deposit Friendly Society or, more popularly, through the village clubs that were prevalent throughout the county, mainly as a result of the enthusiasm of patrons such as local landowners or clergymen.

The village schoolmaster or his wife was usually recruited as secretary, collecting regular weekly payments from each adult, the rate being twelve shillings a year in 1930 plus six shillings for the first three children while the fourth and subsequent children were treated free. The doctor provided medicines and dressings. Confinements in the late 19th century were charged at eleven shillings each and later, in Bourne, when the patient was considered to be well off, they were charged fifteen shillings.

Before the establishment of the present council system, local government was in the hands of a Board of Guardians that came under the direct control of the Local Government Board in London. The guardians were responsible for most local affairs and the running of the union or workhouse, situated in Union Street [now St Peter’s Road]. When my father first arrived seeking directions, he used the Scottish description for workhouse and asked the way to the poorhouse but no one understood him.

Tramps would regularly arrive here to seek lodgings in one of the outbuildings that were reserved for this purpose, because the only other place for them to sleep was the open air. It was a common sight in those days to see a tramp getting up out of the hedgerow where he had spent the night and so it was a welcome change to have somewhere to go and find shelter for the night. You might have 20 or 30 staying overnight and in the morning, local farmers would arrive asking for ten men to work this field and 15 to work another and so they could earn some money in that way.

During the winter months they usually stayed for more than one night and they often earned their keep by sawing logs and their chief food was a thin soup called skilly, a sort of watery porridge or gruel made from oatmeal that was the main dish in prisons and workhouses in those days. The actual inhabitants of the workhouse were those who could no longer be looked after at home or were unable to fend for themselves and there they sat around all day with nothing to do, the old men with a spittoon at their feet and the old women in poke bonnets and quite often smoking a clay pipe.

His consulting rooms at Rippingale included a waiting area, a small surgery and dispensary fitted with a wash basin, shelves and drawers for the linctuses, infusions, pills, bottles, corks, and the white paper and sealing wax to wrap up bottles for the private patients. The club patients, however, had to provide their own bottles that were not wrapped up. Minor operations were carried out in the surgery. Teeth were also pulled when there was no dentist available and these extractions were performed without an anaesthetic. Vaccination against smallpox was compulsory at that time unless the person had an acceptable conscientious objection and each area had its own vaccination officer. My father was Vaccination Officer for Rippingale and remained so even after he moved to Bourne.

My parents spent the next four years peacefully and, I imagine happily, in Rippingale. After nine years of marriage, I was born in 1899, a sister followed in 1900 but died at 18 months, then my brother, Noel, in 1901, and my sister Ruth in 1903.

During the Rippingale years, my father became very friendly with Dr Thomas Brown, a fellow Scot. He lived at the doctor’s house in North Street, Bourne, to which my father was shortly to move. By the side of the property was a short road or cul de sac known as Doctor’s Yard and in the end two houses lived the doctor’s groom and next door a man called Charles Osgathorpe, a chimney sweep. Behind these two houses was a piece of waste ground on which rubbish was dumped, including unsold fish and other rotting food and vegetation that stank in hot weather.

Dr Brown, although a good medical man, had three midwifery disasters in quick succession, an unfortunate occurrence but this was at a time when there were no trained nurses and no specialist hospitals in the area. As a consequence, he wrote to my father (there was no telephone connection at that time) informing him that he was leaving the town and joining a non-midwifery practice in Surrey and asking him if he would consider buying his practice. Terms were agreed and my father moved to Bourne, taking over Dr Brown’s house and employing an assistant, Dr Morgan, to run the practice at Rippingale although he was later replaced by Dr Alfred Holmes who had married a daughter of the Rev William Layng, the Rector of Rippingale.

A door in the Doctor’s Yard gave access to the surgery attached to the doctor’s house in Bourne, leading to a waiting room with a surgery and consulting room leading off. My father employed a lady dispenser because prescribing medicine was a time consuming task as every bottle, every box of ointment and every lotion, had to be made up. We also employed two maids and a nurse as well as the groom.

The dispenser, Miss Dally, had a port wine birthmark on one side of the face and was disliked by the maids. One day, when the snow was on the ground, the maids and groom made a snowman, poured some red ink over its face and placed a hat on its head. They propped it up against the surgery dour and pulled the bell. Miss DaIly answered, the snowman fell on her and she fled screaming.

The groom lived in a room up the yard near the stable occupied by a horse and a pony. My father never had much luck with his horses that were either on the verge of going lame or were very old. The best mount he ever had was one he used to hire from Mr Allen of the Black Horse public house at Grimsthorpe that could travel at 12 miles an hour. My mother used to drive the pony in a governess’ trap that was entered by a small door at the rear. The dogcart was fine for anyone sitting in the front but anyone in the back seat was in constant fear of being tipped out.

Calls to attend confinements were numerous. Whenever I awoke in the morning and realised that my father was not there and asked where he was, I always got the same reply from my mother: “He is out at a confinement” and at that tender age, I was none the wiser. Of the numerous nursing women available, there were two who seemed to be natural nurses and my father came to trust them not to send for him before he was needed.

Such emergencies usually began with a pull at the surgery bell and while my father was getting ready he would ask the messenger to call the groom or, if he was a farmer or a horseman, send him to put the horse in the shafts. If the address was in the town, he would cycle there with a black bag containing his instruments and chloroform slung on the crossbar.

Often, if the confinement occurred in one of the nearby villages such as Dyke or Morton, he would not bother about the trap but simply cycle there and if it looked like being a long confinement, he would take a book to read. His worry on a cold night would not be so much for the patient but whether the horse would get cold waiting outside. Sometimes, the father-to-be would fetch him in his trap and on one such occasion the cottage lay at the end of a cart track off the main road and the trap lurched in a rut and pitched my father out but luckily he escaped without serious injury.

He and the other general practitioner in the town, Dr John Gilpin, would if necessary help one another out in difficult cases using my father’s forceps won as a prize while studying at Edinburgh University. They were rather old fashioned by that time and had wooden handles but as they were a favourite instrument, he preferred them to a more modern, short handled pair which he also carried but rarely used. Always before surgery, he would plunge them to their handles in a pitcher of boiling water heavily dosed with Lysol disinfectant.

He was meticulous in ensuring that the patient was thoroughly washed down after the birth and given clean linen and a nightgown. If the case had been a difficult one he would move the mother into the labour ward at the workhouse because he could rely on the premises being clean. Only rarely did he and Dr Gilpin have to seek outside help, in which case it would be either Dr Tom Walker from Peterborough or his son Dr Alec Walker, who were sent for.

Cases were extremely varied and sometimes quite curious when compared with today. One night someone called to say that a relative had taken an overdose of laudanum. At that time, the drug was an accepted remedy in the fens for the ague and was freely available from the chemist without prescription. Presently, the chemist rang up to tell my father not to worry as the laudanum he had dispensed was only half strength.

A GRATEFUL FAMILY

On another occasion, at home and after dark, but in the dim light of the fish-tail gas burners provided (oil lamps were used in the living room), I had developed a sore throat and as diphtheria was prevalent in the neighbourhood, a dreaded and often fatal illness, my mother was in tears but my father came in, looked at my throat and chest and told my mother not to be a fool. “The boy has only got measles”, he explained.

At about the time I was ill, the first cinematograph films were being shown in Bourne and a large tent had been erected in the Market Place for the purpose. I went once but then as cases of diphtheria began to appear in the town I was forbidden to go again for fear of catching it.

In 1905, an epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in Lincoln caused by contaminated water and tankers were sent there from the boreholes in Bourne because this supply was known to be pure. At that time, Sir Ernest Pollock, who later became Lord Haworth, the Solicitor General, was living at Dyke whilst trying to win the Spalding seat as Member of Parliament and his daughter contracted the illness. My father was called in and he managed to bring her through a severe attack successfully with the result that the Pollock family gave him a magnificent silver rose bowl in gratitude.

There were two other doctors in Bourne during this period, Dr James Watson Burdwood, who was also the Medical Officer of Health to the workhouse, and Dr George Blasson, who visited the pub opposite his house far too frequently, and only stayed for two years. Dr Burdwood was a shortish bearded man with a wife whom we all liked very much. She dressed well and one day she was waiting for a train on the platform at Bourne railway station when a stranger approached and walked round and round her, looking at her inquisitively and making her feel quite uncomfortable. She complained to the station master that she was being pestered but he replied: “Madam, you should be honoured. That man is the great Worth himself.”

My father used to tell me that Dr Burdwood was an ignorant practitioner who had never learned how to give chloroform. He got into hot water over the smallpox outbreak in Bourne in 1893 that began among the Irish navvies who were building a new railway line through the area. He had been unable to distinguish chicken pox from smallpox and consequently there was a most damaging report by a health inspector who had been sent down from London. Again, in 1906, a report on the disgraceful sanitary conditions in the town was published in The Times when he was responsible as Medical Officer of Health and the isolation hospital was little more than a hut in a field at Castle Bytham, without piped water, basic sanitary facilities, nurse or mortuary.

The railway company therefore hired a nurse and took over two small cottages in Manor Lane and turned them into a makeshift isolation hospital which eventually handled a large number of cases, several of which resulted in death. Dr Burdwood subsequently resigned as MOH and in the same year he was later succeeded by my father after he had gained his Diploma in Public Health.

There was a strong public resistance to vaccination in those days and in 1926, I remember seeing a man with a curious rash and diagnosed smallpox and as soon as the word got out, the balloon went up and everyone in the town hurried to be vaccinated, including those who had originally been against it. We had to take stringent precautions and I was required to give the tramps at the workhouse daily medical checks. It was like inspecting a squad in the army with 30 or 40 men lined up every morning stripped down to the waist and as none of them caught it, I would walk down the line each time saying "Pass, pass, pass". It broke the heart of the local council which had to pay me so much extra for the additional duties but after six months the scare subsided.

INFECTIOUS DISEASES

The problem of dealing with cases of infectious diseases was exacerbated after Bourne Rural District Council was landed with a bill for £600 from the Stamford Infirmary for hospitalising patients during an outbreak of scarlet fever, a periodic epidemic and one that determined council members to build their own unit but owing to the usual bureaucratic delays, work did not start until 1914. A four-acre site on the Thurlby Road was chosen for the project and a borehole was sunk for the water and a sewage plant.

The complex consisted of a porter’s lodge, a large matron’s house with office, sitting room, dispensary, kitchen and five bedrooms together with an observation block with six single wards and its own kitchen, a scarlet fever block of two 12-bed wards, a disinfector, mortuary and garage, all finished in red brick from Little Bytham with red pantiled roofs at a cost of £5,000. It opened the following year when it became the only fever hospital in the whole of Kesteven.

A tuberculosis pavilion was built in 1925 with recreation room, single and double bed wards and a central kitchen and in 1930, a very modern block for infectious diseases was added. This consisted of two double and six single bed wards, each side of the nurse’s office. There was also a kitchen with tessellated entrance floors laid by Italian workmen.

Medicine in the latter part of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries, which is the period I am writing about, was in the hands of the local doctors as far as the small market towns and surrounding villages were concerned although consultant help could be obtained when required. Each doctor, far more than is the case today, was both physician and surgeon and expected to cope with all the ills and accidents of his patients, from a strangulated hernia to a feverish cold, although there were bonesetters (we call them osteopaths today) and patients would sometimes consult them surreptitiously. Other illnesses with which he had to cope ran from erysipelas to a tubercular abscess, from eczema to lupus. Illness frequently occurred at the workhouse although the records show that nearly every case was entered as erysipelas.

Infectious diseases were rife with a high mortality rate, in particular diphtheria although with the discovery of antitoxin, the outlook was immensely improved provided the case was seen and recognised in time. Cases of scarlet fever with consequent nephritis, rheumatic fever, chorea, erysipelas, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox and mumps were all far more frequent than today. Thanks are due to the various anti sera, anti-vaccines, better housing, less overcrowding, smaller families and, in 1915, the provision of the isolation hospital for the Bourne area. Arthritis, characterised by the old cartoon of an aged farm labourer bent double and hobbling on his stick, was frequent.

The town had its own piped water supply from bores sunk into the prolific water bearing strata of the Lincolnshire limestone belt. The surrounding villages usually had only wells except where a more prosperous farmer or squire had sunk his own bore, sometimes with a windmill to help pump it up, and this source often provided a supply for the surrounding houses. But there was no water carriage system. Earth closets at the bottom of the garden were the general rule. The town had a sewage system although many houses were not connected and a night soil cart was used.

The economy was based on agriculture and its associated trades. In harvest time, tramps would come to the local workhouse in increasing numbers. A farmer would drive up in the morning, looking for ten or twenty men to work on his land. Irishmen arrived in the locality to help with the harvest, living in temporary huts known as Paddy Houses on the farm where they were working and in some cases, the farmer’s wife would cook their meals. Most of the Paddies were big drinkers and my father told me of how one farmer would set up a barrel of beer for his men at one corner of a field. The gang would scythe their way round at a fast rate to reach the barrel and then stop, swig down a pint and start again.

Magnificent shires were used to draw the wagons or pull the ploughs, the binders and reapers. The horseman was the aristocrat of the farm and village working incredibly long hours, up at 4 am and not going to bed until the horses had been fed and stabled. They were the essential power on the farm and when engines arrived, their reaction was inevitable, rearing and kicking at the sight and sound of them.

Agricultural labourers were usually paid a bonus at harvest time and they used the extra money to pay off the various debts they owed to the village shopkeeper. Their clothes were basic and did little to promote good health, consisting of a thick woollen vest under a thick shirt, long pants, corduroy trousers with a piece of string as belt to hold them up. Cheap corduroy had a characteristic smell. A celluloid collar, rarely a tie, and a cloth cap, were also worn on special occasions although a dark suit was usually brought out for weddings and funerals. The thick working shirts and vests soon became drenched with sweat and as they did not take them off and wash to the waist at the end of a day, my father believed, and I feel quite rightly, that the rheumatism and backache they suffered from was due to this habit of keeping on their sweaty shirts and the heavy weights they had to carry. It was quite a usual occurrence to see a little man crossing a dyke on a plank with sixteen stones of corn slung across his shoulders or up an outside stone staircase, often without guard rails, to the granary, both typical of their daily tasks.

The housing of the less well to do was bad, if often picturesque, usually a row of cottages with a yard, a well, or in the town, a single standpipe. The cottages were sometimes roofed with Lincolnshire pantiles but sometimes thatched and few could afford oil lamps or candles for lighting. There would be a living room downstairs with some form of ladder or twisting staircase leading to a large bedroom above and running the length of the house with a partition in the middle. The walls of the house would be of stone, if available locally, or of mud, lathe and plaster in the lowland parts of the county where it was not, and brick if there was a brickyard operating in the vicinity with the right type of clay available.

There would be an outhouse and a little garden in front and sometimes there would be a parlour leading off the main room, with a few decorations on the walls, usually a hideous family portrait or other enlargements of photographs, and a black horsehair sofa. The living room had its all-purpose iron grate, superbly blacked, an oven on one side of a fire with a barred grate hood to carry the smoke away and a boiler with a polished brass tap and a small lid that could be lifted up to fill it with water. Everything gleamed, the black, the brass, the steel of the fender, all polished with loving care and in front of the fireplace would be the traditional pegged rug made of hessian from discarded sacks woven with pieces of old cloth and clothing cut up into strips.

KILLING THE PIG

Up the back garden path would be a pig sty and after months of raising the animal came the big occasion of putting away or killing the pig for food. Every part was utilised. Neighbours would help, even the women, their blouse sleeves rolled up and wearing a clean pinny [pinafore]. Saucepans, buckets, pitchers, basins of boiling water were made ready. Pork pies, pig fry, chitlings, trotters would emerge whilst the carcass itself would be salted down to be hung up afterwards, along with sides of bacon.

Butcher’s meat was generally only cooked on Sundays. Milk was not frequently drunk but condensed milk used instead. This was perhaps not altogether a bad thing as the cattle were often infected with tubercle. The teeth of both children and parents were often very bad from an early age.

The old English form of speech survived with words such as thysen [thyself] and mysen [myself] being commonly used. Village life was centred on the church and chapel, or maybe the squire as well if he lived in the village, but social conditions were beginning to change, particularly after the National Insurance Act of 1911 and the subsequent introduction of the old age pension, and official attempts to end bad housing that was prevalent.

In 1906, the owner of the Doctor’s House in Bourne where we lived went bankrupt. My father was given the choice of either buying the property at what he thought was an inflated price or of moving out. A wealthy farmer and patient, William Harding Sewards, sold him four acres of a field on North Road, Bourne, as the site for a new house and clinic, and although this was more land than he needed, Sewards refused to sell for less and he also drove a hard bargain, insisting on £4,000, even though my father had never then earned more than £1,000 a year at that time. Some years before, the same farmer had suffered from a rhinophyma [a large, bulbous, ruddy appearance of the nose] and my father called in Sir Lauder Brunton, of Bartholemew’s Hospital, London, who had been at school with him in Edinburgh and had been responsible for discovering the action of amyl nitrate in relieving angina.

My father therefore embarked on building his new house but was persuaded to go for a much larger property than he could afford. Apart from the very spacious living quarters, the section containing the medical practice consisted of a waiting room, lobby, surgery with teak shelving, hot and cold water, a deep basin and a beautiful large teak desk with deep drawers underneath. The house and garden only occupied two acres but fortunately he was able to sell off the two surplus acres some years later for more than he gave for the lot, thus enabling him to pay off a large part of his mortgage.

Motor cars were rare and the first doctor in the town to have one was Dr John Gilpin who ran the other practice from Brook Lodge. He bought a Georges Richard around 1904, a car with a body like a pony trap and a door in the rear. His close friend, Thomas Mays, head of the firm of fellmongers and skin dealers, was probably the first man in Bourne to own one and his De-Dion Bouton achieved a speed of 60 mph during a speed hill climb at Grimsthorpe Park, the highest speed ever recorded by a car in the district.

In 1907, my father bought his first car, a four-seater Humber 12 with a Coventry registration number. It was green with a high rack seat and a canvas hood but no windscreen. It was fitted with acetylene lamps, needed a handle to start the engine and the gears were outside the driver’s door and worked on a ratchet. It had a top speed of 39 mph and on the floor in front was a long lever with a double-bladed prong at the end. The idea was that if the car was going uphill and the brake failed, you could drop the prong that stuck into the ground and prevented the car going backwards.

My father never understood the internal combustion engine and depended on a chauffeur for most outings although occasionally he did drive it himself. We took one patient all the way to Woodhall Spa for specialist treatment for his arthritis but the car could do not more than 25 mph flat out and even then the whole vehicle was quivering and shaking.

In 1907, I was sent to Sleaford Grammar School along with many other pupils from Bourne while my brother and sister were educated at home by a series of French speaking girls who were studying for higher degrees. I think the first of them was Swiss, Clara Haef, who came from a medical family in Zurich and whose brother was a well-known authority on blood diseases. My parents later stayed with him in Zurich on several occasions.

Those days are remembered as peaceful and happy. A passenger railway line ran between Bourne and Sleaford and so there was no trouble travelling to and from school. My parents were always busy. My mother, despite having two maids, also had a woman to help with the washing as well as a chauffeur/gardener, yet she was always busy supervising, sowing, gardening, helping in the town, with the church, with Lady Ancaster and her nursing association or with her village musical activities and, on Sunday afternoons, a bible class at home for many young pupils.

In the evenings, she would help my father with his paper work, entering up the day’s work into the ledger and then, twice a year, sending out the bills, ridiculously small bills. For instance: “Consultation and medicine five shillings [25p in today’s money], visit five shillings.” Many patients were either in the village club or a friendly society while the more prosperous patients, such as lawyers, bank managers and the bigger farmers, would be charged ten shillings a visit with or without medicine. If they came to the house, private patients would be allowed to use the front door while everyone else went round the side to the surgery. The clergy were never charged.

In times of epidemic, my father was grossly overworked and my mother would assist by making up medicines. There were also many memorable cases. In July 1914, Walter Fenwick, squire of Witham Hall at Witham-on-the-Hill, near Bourne, became ill with abdominal pain. My father visited him and was not happy about his diagnosis and next day he called in a consultant who advised laporotomy [surgery on the abdomen]. This was performed by the consultant, either then or the next day, and the operation revealed appendicitis. Mr Fenwick died after a day or two and my father was blamed for his death. He believed that the consultant had, perhaps unwittingly, implied to the obsequious parson [the Vicar of Witham, Canon Leonard Cooley] that he should have been called in earlier. As a result, he lost the Fenwicks as patients. It was always a great trouble to him and as a family we never forgave the parson.

[The official history of Witham-on-the-Hill, published in 2000, says that Fenwick “died unexpectedly, the victim of a thoroughly unsanitary emergency appendectomy. According to received family recollections, Walter’s operation was conducted on the kitchen table in the Hall, with dogs running about even as the surgeon was doing his work. He was only 55.”]

THE PANEL PATIENTS

At that time, certain insurance companies used to issue health cover to people in return for a weekly contribution without any medical examination. One of the family would die and the insurance company, before paying out, would ask my father for a copy of the death certificate. He would always refuse. Obviously the insured person may have made a false declaration to the company knowing full well, or his family did, that he was cancerously ill.

Reputable insurance companies would always insist on a previous medical examination but those that did not insist on such precautions sent its agents into the districts to tout for customers and it was in his interests to collect as many weekly insurance premiums as he could, by fair means or foul, because that is how he earned his living.

The National Insurance Act introduced by Lloyd George’s government in 1911 caused an uproar in the medical world because it decreed that all people earning less than the income tax level of £3 a week were entitled to free doctoring and free medicine. This was at a time when the standard agricultural wage was between 13s. and 15s. a week. The legislation also heralded the introduction of the panel as it became known and those who joined became known as panel patients.

Eventually, the great majority of doctors accepted the new rules. Each patient was issued with a medical card to hand over to the doctor of his choice so that he could be put on his list. That card was then sent to the local insurance committee that was based at Grantham and a record card was issued to the doctor concerned on which all attendances and visits were entered. Periodically, the Ministry of Health sent an official to check the documentation and to help solve any difficulties that had arisen and those who visited my father were always pleasant and extremely helpful.

The new system was a boon to general practitioners like my father because it gave them an assured income. In addition, there were travel allowances when visiting patients who lived more than two miles away. Those who lived under two miles got their medicines by way of a prescription which they took to a chemist, the original prescription books having carbon copies slipped in between the pages, but doctors also received a dispensary allowance for providing medicines and dressings themselves. If a patient was off sick, he was given a certificate of incapacity for his state benefit but if he also belonged to a sick and dividing club, then he needed an extra certificate. This was in fact unnecessary as they could have simply demanded to see the patient’s state certificate but most clubs insisted on having their own and some doctors charged a small fee, sometimes one shilling, for the additional paperwork.

Owing to a bone disease in his youth, my father had one leg slightly shorter than the other. He used to get iritis [inflammation of the eye] and was partly deaf resulting from an accident while at Rippingale. Occasionally, he would get abdominal colic and would take an opium pill for relief. I remember well the time my mother had taken us to the woods and on our return found our father groaning with pain. But he must have been very tough to withstand the hours of work, the numerous confinements without proper nurses and the long distances he cycled in all weather.

Often, if he had to go to Tongue End, over four miles away down in the South Fen, he would time his journey so that he could take the train one way or the other to Counter Drain near Tongue End. He would decide which way to cycle by the direction in which the wind was blowing to give him the benefit of a prevailing breeze. In fact, it was often as quick to cycle as to take the horse and trap.

A memorable event occurred shortly after we went to live in the new house in September 1907. That spring, mother, the two maids and the three children all fell ill with mumps and one of the maid’s sisters came to help my father look after us all. He was already overworked and apt to be irascible, especially if the porridge did not have its quota of salt or if my mother got in a tangle trying to sort out and add up the contents of missionary bowls, one of her pet charities. She had no head for figures.

Every now and then my father took a holiday. Dr John Gilpin, the other doctor in Bourne, never had one but always took one day a week in the shooting season when my father stood in for him and in exchange he covered when my father went away. On one occasion, my father and my Uncle George, also a doctor, went on a cycling tour in Belgium for two or three weeks. Uncle George had a small private practice in Edinburgh and possessed one of the first X-ray machines to be used by a family practitioner in his consulting room.

His son, Alistair, became a prominent gynaecological surgeon and his elder daughter, my cousin Annie, qualified as a nurse at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, despite a spell of sick leave due to synovitis [inflammation of the membrane] of her knee joints through having to scrub the ward floors, a task expected of trainee nurses in those days. The younger daughter went out to a Presbyterian mission in India as the wife of a Canadian minister and died during the influenza epidemic of 1919.

When we moved into the new house my father gave up the branch surgery he had at Morton, a room he could use when visiting patients in the village and making up medicines for them. The surgery had been equipped with a large dispensing and storage cabinet with drawers below and a big cupboard with shelves above and he moved this to the new accommodation at Bourne. All sorts of supplies were kept there, cotton wool in 1 lb. packets, bandages, pill boxes, medicine bottles, corks and splints. I can visualise now the splints and especially the canvas bandages with an adhesive back that had to be heated to melt the sticky surface before applying it to a patient. Just think how convenient a sticking plaster is today.

In the pre-1914 days, I remember snowmen and Christmas parties in winter and sun drenched picnics in the summer. It was advisable for the doctor’s wife to call on suitable newcomers to the neighbourhood, partly out of a genuine desire to welcome them but also in the hope they might become patients.

LIFE AT THE BIG HOUSE

The second Earl of Ancaster married a good-looking American lady from New York, Eloise Breese. A portrait by de Lazlo of this slim dark-haired beauty hangs in Grimsthorpe Castle. The earl also owned Gwydyr Castle in Wales, Drummond Castle in Scotland and Rutland House in London. They had four children and although I am not certain where the first three were born, the Countess decided to have the fourth at Grimsthorpe and asked my father to be present at the birth.

He had a junior role allotted to him that he did not relish because he did not have a high opinion of the gynaecologist from St Mary’s Hospital who was to supervise the birth as obstetrician. It turned out that the child was a puny one and the Countess repeatedly changed the child’s artificial feeds. Her mother-in-law, the Dowager Countess, had breast-fed all of her ten children. Years afterwards, when her husband, from whom she had been separated for some time, lay dying she rang me up to ask how he was. I told her that he was gravely ill and volunteered to keep in touch by telephone with reports of his progress or otherwise.

The Ancasters often had important people to stay. One day a bicyclist going down the steep hill outside Grimsthorpe fell and dislocated his shoulder. An eminent London orthopaedic surgeon happened to be their guest at the time and after being called out to give medical help, diagnosed an uncomplicated dislocation of the shoulder, put his heel in the man’s armpit, pulled and reduced the dislocation. There was no call for an ambulance, an X-ray or an anaesthetist.

The wives of doctors had to observe a rigid social structure. They were obliged to give regular parties. The guests were selected couples from the approved circle at the garden parties in summer and their children when parties were held at Christmas. This meant that my mother had to give two parties each year, always observing the social niceties by taking care not to mix up the wives of gentlemen farmers with the wives of the tenant farmers and you could not ask a solicitor’s wife with the wife of a bank clerk to the same event while non-conformist ministers’ wives were rarely asked at the same time as Church of England clergymen’s wives.

The standard entertainment in summer was croquet with the maids in black dresses, white caps and pinafores serving the tea and sandwiches on the edge of the lawn. Winter parties were much more fun for the children provided that the shy ones were not asked to recite, which they always were.

Mother worked very hard in the house and in the parish. A visitors’ tray in the hall contained a large selection of people’s visiting cards. Then there was the Band of Hope, Gilbert and Sullivan amateur productions and bible classes for boys and girls in the consulting room on Sunday afternoons. She greeted all and sundry with a smile of goodness, the lower down the social scale the kinder the smile. When we lived in the old house and illness struck the people up the yard, she would send food up to them, sometimes even sherry.

In 1910, the Butterfield Hospital opened in a large house in North Road that had been bequeathed to the town. My father and Dr Gilpin were both appointed medical officers and the staff included a matron and one nurse who also had to visit sick people in the town. There were also male and female wards and an operating theatre. For those cases needing surgery that might be outside their scope, then Dr Alec Walker was called in from Peterborough to operate.

The list of cases from 14th March to 2nd September 1912 reads as follows: muscular rheumatism (cured), dislocation of shoulder (operation, cured), adenoids (operation, cured), extraction of tooth (operation, cured), pneumonia (cured), herpes zoster (cured), (strangulated ventral hernia (operation, cured), suppurating glands of the neck (operation, cured), adenoids (operation, cured), phimosis (operation, cured), accident to leg (operation, cured), tubercular abscess (operation, cured), tetanus, cured), sunstroke (cured), recurrent malignant growth in axilla (operation, cured), hectic fever from old hip disease (relieved), horse bite on arm (stitched up, cured), adenoids (operation, cured). These results were thought to be very optimistic at the time.

The housing situation of the workers was quite bad, caused mainly by overcrowding and poor design. Windows that would not open were a common occurrence and if they did, the occupants never opened them and as a result, tuberculosis was prevalent in the community, pulmonary and often rapidly fatal. With galloping consumption, the fresh air treatment was the vogue and the better off patients went to Switzerland for the cure.

People in general paid little heed to hereditary illness and farmers seemed to be more careful of the veterinary history of their stock when breeding than they were of their spouses or husband’s family history of illnesses when marrying. Milk was often infected although usually only tinned milk was drunk, teeth were generally bad and dental treatment a luxury and only carried out when it became a necessity after toothache had not responded to an application of oil of almonds.

My father was keenly interested in all the problems of public health and spent a great deal of his leisure time doing water analysis, distilling samples with potassium permanganate to estimate the amount of nitrates in each sample. One of my holiday tasks was to sit and watch and to ensure that the mixtures did not boil over, a tiresome task, especially when the sun was shining outside and everything outdoors was calling one away from the bench.

A DRUNKEN MATRON

Diphtheria was still prevalent and deadly although the causative bacillus had been discovered in 1884 and an antitoxin by Bohring in 1896. The Schick test was a tremendous help but did not come until 1915. Swabs were sent to a clinical research laboratory in London as there was no bacteriological laboratory available in Peterborough or Stamford. Cases of measles were often admitted to the isolation hospital, as well as whooping cough and typhoid.

The first matron was a Scot. My father, full of justifiable pride, invited a friend of his, Dr Henry Turner of Castle Bytham, to come and see the hospital and they arrived one afternoon to find the matron drunk. She was sacked and when the war came in 1914 we heard that she had joined the army nursing service but when in Salonika during the Gallipoli campaign, took to the bottle again and was dismissed from the service.

My cousin, Annie Galletly, a trained nurse from Edinburgh, became the next matron and in the terrible influenza epidemic of 1918, frequently went with my father to help lay out the dead in Morton where many had died within a week, throwing the entire village into a state of panic.

I have vivid memories of how hard my father worked during the following years and here are some extracts from the letters he sent me which illustrate his busy schedule:

25th September 1921: I had a long round yesterday on my bicycle, to Morton, Haconby, Stainfield, Elsthorpe, Grimsthorpe and Edenham, a good ten miles including a walk from the bridge at Lound along the railway embankment to Elderwood Farm. In the afternoon I went to the Butterfield Hospital, the workhouse and the isolation hospital, all of this in addition to the morning and evening surgeries with medicines to make up into the bargain. I was called up at 1 30 am (on September 2nd) and again at 2.30 am. I went to harvest festival this morning and this afternoon cycled the five miles down Dyke Fen and back and then onto Stainfield, Kirkby Underwood and Rippingale Rectory where I had tea so I have been fairly busy since you left. I hope the revision course is proving helpful and not too strenuous. P S: Ruth is head of school at Sherborne [in Dorset] but Miss Hoyle thinks that she should not go to Cambridge but to Bedford College.

9th February 1926: I had a very nice letter from Dr Voelcher [one of his son’s lecturers at medical school] about a patient I sent him, He went into the case very thoroughly and finished by saying: “May I take this opportunity of saying how pleased I am with your son’s work as my house physician. He is very keen and willing to learn and is kind and considerate to the patients. I find he was at the same college at which my younger son is working.”

You will be sorry to hear that I have ceased to attend Frank Atkinson of Dunsby. Gordon Taylor had operated on him for appendicitis at his home at Dunsby nine days previously. [At that time, it was a normal procedure for surgeons to operate on patients in their own homes, bringing their own nurse with them and relying on the patient’s own doctor to ensure that the room was prepared, boiling water ready in the kettle and boiler, and for the anaesthetic.] He had a good night on Friday with practically no pain. On Saturday morning, his temperature was 99 degrees and he was not so comfortable. I removed the rubber drain, as Gordon Taylor had instructed me to, and on Saturday night I went over to see him again and found his temperature to be 101 but there was still very little pain. I had telephoned Gordon Taylor and he suggested hot boracic fermentation to the abdomen in the belief that a little septic mischief was developing around the site of the appendix. On Sunday morning, his temperature was 100. There was still no pain to mention, only an uncomfortable feeling. At 5.30 p m on Sunday, Mrs Atkinson telephoned to say that his temperature was 100.6 but otherwise there was no change and she thought that I need not go over.

At 7.30 pm she telephoned to ask if I would meet and collaborate with Dr William Johnston over the case. He is a youngish man who recently took over my old Rippingale practice and has been causing a lot of stir as a bright young doctor, very up to date and all that, but he has never called on me as used to be the custom for an incoming doctor. I told her that I would not do so and that it would be an impossible position to put myself in. I asked her if her husband knew and approved of her request and on her saying “Yes”, I simply said that I was very sorry but must decline to put myself in that position. I told her that Gordon Taylor could easily come down the next day but she replied that it did not matter and that it was the home treatment that was important. Dr Johnston was a younger man than I and so it appeared quite obvious to me that she wanted him to take charge. I was therefore glad that I had refused to meet him.

Curiously Mrs Gilpin [wife of the Dr Gilpin of Bourne with whom Dr Galletly got on very well] told your mother a few days before Frank Atkinson turned ill that Mrs Atkinson thought Dr Johnston would soon be the consultant for the whole neighbourhood. “She must be infatuated with him”, she said.

Dr Johnston telephoned Gordon Taylor on the Monday, that was yesterday, asking him to come down. Gordon Taylor telephoned me to ask what it all meant. I told him briefly and asked him to look in on his way back. He did. He told me that he had informed the Atkinsons that the operation had been perfectly successful and that neither he nor I were to blame for the very unusual complication that he feared had occurred. Of course, I knew that Johnston will spin a very different story but you are not supposed to know what Gordon Taylor had said. Burn this letter when you have read it. Gilpin approved of my action and told me that he would not consent to meet with Johnston either.

I did not burn the letter as my father had requested. In fact I kept it and it has reminded me that the episode hurt my father’s feelings very much although it did not effect the loyalty of other patients at all.

31st August 1930: Just a few lines to tell you what has been happening here. In the first place, we have just heard this morning that that nice lad J R Stonebridge, who has had so many bouts of asthma, has died from bronchial-pneumonia whilst away from Bourne, I suppose on holiday. It seems only a week or so ago that I saw him and thought how well, for him, he was looking. His poor mother and father will miss him dreadfully.

J W Measures of Dunsby Hall is going to see Gordon Taylor tomorrow at 12.30 pm. I was sent for at 3 a m on Friday to see him and found him rolling about in a good deal of abdominal pain and gave him ¾ grain of morphia at 10 a m. I went over again and gave him an enema which brought away a great many round lumps of faeces like marbles. This gave him great relief. Owing to the history of past diarrhoea and this attack of what looks like obstruction, I thought it wise and strongly recommended him to see Gordon Taylor, and this he consented to do.

When I got back from Dunsby, there was a message awaiting me to go to Toft to see a Mrs Gill whose perineum had been torn with the Edenham nurse in attendance. The night was so foggy that it took Grummitt [the Galletly gardener and chauffeur] more than half an hour to get there. We thought we were at Toft Corner when in fact we had turned down the lane to Lound but we got there eventually.

The same day, at 9 p m, I was sent for by a temporary Bourne nurse to go to Mrs Haines of North Fen who was in labour. When I got there I found the head high up with a half dilated os. I waited for the nurse to tidy up and wash the baby and then gave her a lift home at 1 a m.

When I got home, there was a message to go immediately to Mrs Moody at 51 Woodview. Your mother had by this time asked Dr Keogh (Dr Gilpin’s successor) to attend. I went and found Keogh there, the room like a stoker’s hold, the woman naked and head not born. I gave chloroform and allowed Keogh to deliver as he appeared anxious to show his skill. The head was on the perineum and of course this resulted in a torn perineum, which I allowed him to stitch up. Just as he was beginning, there was a knock on the door and Mr Brooks was there to say that his wife required my attention. I went and found a still thin os. I gave her a draught and said I hoped she would be happy for six hours. She waited four hours and then sent to me again and a baby was born at 7.45 a m.

I had a tremendous round yesterday, Dunsby, Morton, Elsthorpe, Scottlethorpe, Toft, Bourne, Twenty and then Baker at the petrol pump, Tongue End. Then at 8.30 p m I had to go to Haconby Fen to attend ruptured varicose veins. At 3.00 a m today, I was called by the Bourne nurse to Mrs Michelson. I have been to the Butterfield, the workhouse and the isolation hospital every day for the last five days. Two deaths at the workhouse (Matthew Newton and Sanderson) and an attempted suicide admission. Would you believe it, the matron, Mrs Hancock, is away!

From 1 am until to 4 a m yesterday there was a terrific thunderstorm with flashes of lightning every few seconds such as I have never seen before. Matron McKenzie, the fearless matron at the isolation hospital, was quite awed at the experience.

In 1911, the question of our education had to be settled. Both my parents had been sent away to study, my mother at Koblenz and my father at Marburg and Vienna, but by 1911, opinion had swung away from Germany to France and so the idea of sending us abroad was not strange to them. Noel and I went to the lycée [grammar school] at Cherbourg in Normandy and my sister followed a year later to attend the College des Jeunes Filles.

ECONOMY IN SCHOOL FEES

My father found that he could educate the three of us for the price of one in England and so, in floods of tears, we left for France. Uncle Bob (Robertson) and his wife, Ethel, met us in London, fed us extremely well and put us on the Southampton boat train for Cherbourg. It was a small London South Western cargo come passenger vessel and we travelled second class for the first time but it was packed with tiers of bunks and bowls of vomit. I was always a bad sailor until in sight of land although Noel and Ruth were good sailors. The harbour at Cherbourg was protected by an enormous breakwater with forts guarding its entrances but within it the water was comparatively calm.

The first few weeks at the new school were daunting. It was a lay school although run by nuns and there was a chapel with a visiting Roman Catholic priest. There were 400 boys, but only about four of them were boarders. There was one older English day boy for a while. Noel and I were given a room to ourselves up in the block that contained the sick bay. We were there for a month to get ourselves acclimatised and then we moved into one of the vast dormitories where beds were high off the ground with red and white covers.

One nun took care of our clothing and another tended the sick bay. If you fell ill with a cold or whatever, you had to report to her. For a sore throat, the treatment was to paint the throat with strong tincture of iodine and a slab of cotton wool applied to the throat. For medicines one was given a tisane de tilleul or infusion of lime flowers. The treatment was cheap and affective and could well be applied over in England with great saving for the National Health Service.

A roll of drums woke us at 7 a m in the winter and at 6 a m in the summer. One hour’s preparation for the day’s work followed, then petit déjeuner [breakfast] which consisted of a bowl of cafe au lait and bread and butter and after that it was lessons until noon, half an hour’s play in the gravelled courtyard outside, then déjeuner [lunch] consisting of soup, ragout or fish with vegetables which always seemed to include runner beans. We had wine at Sunday lunch if it was a saint’s day, otherwise rough cider was served at all times.

Classes in the afternoon were held once on Saturdays then we had tea that usually consisted of dry bread and a stick of chocolate. There was no milk. Then there were one to two hours of preparation for the next day’s work supervised by a young student reading for his degree in teaching. Supper was a meal rather like lunch and afterwards we had an hour’s light reading, selecting books from the school library connected with the period of history or Latin we were studying. One book I remember was about the great hero Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls, and his struggles with Caesar [related in Gallic War].

There was a very well equipped gymnasium with an ex-army sergeant in charge. He wore black-buttoned boots and, strangely, he also taught dancing, long forgotten dances such as the mazurka. He also tried to teach swimming. The drill was to lie flat on a small stool and imitate a frog. Sometimes in summer we would be taken to the bains de mer near the casino but I never did learn to swim. As it was a naval port, the top class would be for boys wanting to join the navy as a career.

Pupils wore a dark blue style naval uniform with peaked hat and brass buttons down the front with a type of long black overall to reduce wear during the week. But at weekends, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, it was a smart turnout in best dress as we all went for our regular promenade or walk. During the week, we frequently played a game called La Tecque, a traditional Normandy game similar to rounders, and on Sundays Noel and I went to the Protestant church where there was always a long sermon.

When Ruth arrived a year later, that was the one day in the week we were able to meet although she was always with a crowd from her school and the headmistress, also a protestant, disliked us trying to whisper to one another. After the service, we would stop at a corner shop and enjoy one of the superb French gateaux that could be bought for half a sou without cream and one sou with cream or fruit.

We were well taught although we had the occasional illness. One term Noel had a continuous cold with a profuse nasal catarrh while some time later I developed conjunctivitis that did not clear up until my father installed some eye drops when I arrived home for the Easter holidays. School vacations were a week at Christmas, a fortnight at Easter and ten weeks in the summer following le quatorze Juillet [July 14th,, France’s national holiday] and always a memorable day with a prize giving in the gymnasium and the Prefect [Mayor] of Cherbourg on the platform with a wide array of dignitaries.

This was followed by a big ceremonial parade on the Grande Place facing the sea where there was a large commemorative tablet with the words “Thanks be to God for deliverance from the English 1459”. Various regiments took part, such as the 25th of the line with long blue overcoats and blue peaked caps with red epaulettes and red trouser and the 23rd Colonial Infantry wearing yellow epaulettes and yellow stripes down their trousers. Then there was a glorious band playing the national anthem, La Marseillaise, as I had never heard it played before or since.

During the Whitsun Holiday of 1911 we went to stay with the Rupert family at Ste Pierre Église who had become friends of ours and the father was a doctor. Shortly afterwards, Noel developed typhoid fever while I contracted scarlet fever and we were both isolated in separate rooms at the infirmary. Noel, I believe, was severely ill with typhoid and I felt pretty miserable too, especially as it was an extremely hot summer. There was no anti-serum in those days.

After six weeks, I was taken to the town baths for a disinfecting sulphur bath. I knew the place well because, as there were no proper bathrooms at the school, pupils were periodically taken there for a bath. There were no proper toilets at the school either, just groups of holes in cement floors over which one was expected to crouch.

One Easter holiday there was a strike affecting the cross channel ferries so we made the crossing on one of the liners, going out to board it in the outer harbour by tugboat. Ruth managed to distinguish herself by developing measles shortly before we sailed and here she was, rash and all, when we met father in London and what a shock it was to him.

AN UNFORTUNATE ENCOUNTER

At the end of our last term in 1913, mother came to fetch us home. I remember it because the weather was quite wonderful and we stayed at a small hotel on the Quai Alexandre overlooking the inner harbour where fishing smacks regularly congregated. We spent the day on the beach at Urville-Nacqueville, one of the very delightfully quiet and scenic resorts near Cherbourg, and when we got back, mother caught the sand from our shoes in a sheet of newspaper and threw it out of the hotel window but there were immediately yells from a diner down below who, as is the custom in France, was having his meal at a table on the pavement outside the restaurant. The proprietor rushed up to our room and mother penitently apologised. The day was the 14th July or just afterwards. The dining room window was wide open on account of the heat. Among the diners was a powerfully built junior officer of artillery dressed in a black tunic and red breeches with a wide black stripe down the sides. He had dined well and then started to sing the La Marseillaise in a powerful voice reminiscent of the barrack square and it was magnificent.

How can one describe the small seaside villages and ports that drop down to the coast in this part of Normandy? Ste Pierre Église and Urville-Nacqueville particularly, with hills behind, woods, heath and sudden valleys, the sands and sea, sometimes calm sometimes threshing about the cruel offshore rocks, all totally unspoiled but then most of England was also unspoiled in those far off days.

July 1915 was our last term at Cherbourg and so I returned to England and went on to Epsom College in Surrey as a boarder in Wilson House, named after the skin physician, Sir Erasmus Wilson, who was one of the college founders. The college was then, as now, a school for the sons of doctors just as St John’s at Leatherhead was a school for the sons of clergymen.

After qualifying MRCS [Member of the Royal College of Surgeons] and LRCP [Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians] at the Middlesex Hospital in 1925, I was lucky enough to obtain the post of house physician at the Evelina Hospital for Children in Southwark Bridge Road, London, for eight months at a salary of £100 a year with board and lodging. [The Evelina was opened in 1869 as a model hospital for children and financed by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in memory of his wife, Evelina, who had died in childbirth three years earlier]. There were three other residents with whom I got on mostly well.

The hospital was situated in that part of London immortalised by the novels of Charles Dickens, Lant Street and the Marshalsea Prison, and facing one wing of the building was the headquarters of the London Fire Brigade, the teams of white grey horses always at the ready. When the alarm came, fully dressed and helmeted men would slide down poles onto the backs of the waiting horses and within seconds a team would be racing away through the crowded thoroughfares, surely as fast as a modern fire engine can be driven today.

The senior physician had a fixed idea that babies could be weaned and reared on full cream milk. The out patients department was very busy. Children would be brought in still sewn up for the winter in flannel vests. Lice and crabs were plentiful. While working there I saw my first case of diphtheria. A railway porter had brought in his six year old son, extremely cyanosed and dyspnoeic and the dreadful sucking noise of air trying to get through a swollen larynx. The child died before the nursing sister on duty could get a tracheotomy ready. It transpired later that the child had been treated by the family’s own doctor for the past six days as a case of simple laryngitis.

Infantile diarrhoea struck whenever there was a warm summer with a very heavy mortality rate and at that time there were no antibiotics or sulpha group drugs available. The occasional mastoid would he admitted and a doctor would come round from the Middlesex Hospital at any hour of the night to operate. I also saw my first case of death from eczema. The patient was a baby with excoriated eczema around the face and on the forehead and although it seemed to be responding to treatment for a while, just died.

After completing my studies at the Evelina Hospital I applied for and got the post of house physicians with Dr Voelcher but was rather frowned upon by some staff members for going round the wards beforehand listening and learning about the patients. I had no idea that it was just not done. Nevertheless, I spent six months in the job and I enjoyed it. He was very much a doctor of the old school and dressed accordingly, top hat and frock coat and always carried a silver-headed cane. His rounds were long, going into great detail over each case and then periodically he would check up on what you had remembered, pointing out his old patients and demonstrating how well Mr X or Mrs Y was doing on only seven and a half minims of digitalis tincture a day, asking you to debate the difference, so to speak, between taking seven and a half or ten minims. Oddly, he had no time for X-rays.

On one occasion, I had an altercation with the hospital’s medical superintendent after refusing to give a Mr Debenham a report on a particular patient but Dr Voelcher took my side although afterwards, the superintendent told me nicely that Mr Debenham was a governor of the hospital and was therefore entitled to the information he had requested. In fact, Dr Voelcher was very good to me. He took me to Twickenham for the university rugby match with one of his sons who had been to Queen’s College, Cambridge, after me. At that time he was one of the few remaining consultants who actually owned their house and I was invited to dine with him at his home in Harley Street, the only time I have ever tasted snipe. Meanwhile, my sister Ruth had started studying medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in 1922 and we met regularly, often going to dances or having dinner at Uncle Bob’s house where there was a wonderful cook.

LIFE ON THE WARDS

Whilst I was house physician at the Middlesex I was in frequent demand to give anaesthetics to children in the out patients department, a procedure of which I had gained a lot of experience at the Evelina. If the child was old enough we would give nitrous oxide through a mouthpiece connected to a gas cylinder and sometimes to an oxygen cylinder as well. If the child were too young for gas, I would start off with a few drops of chloroform followed as soon as possible by ether. Sometimes, for short anaesthesia, I would give ethyl chloride. As students at the Middlesex, we were taught to give anaesthesia but limited to N20, chloroform being frowned on, with oxygen bubbling the mixture through a Boyle’s apparatus. Occasionally we would use ethyl chloride for a short session.

No muscle relaxants and no intravenous anaesthesia had come to light then. Giving a general anaesthesia to powerful adults was a different story from giving it to children. On two occasions, once for Gordon Taylor and once for another consultant, the patient, seemingly asleep, reacted violently to the knife. There is a true story of a young New Zealander who was giving an anaesthetic to a patient in the anaesthetic room and the surgeon, thinking he was taking a long time about it, went to investigate and found the patient on top of the doctor trying to beat him up.

My training necessitated 20 statutory cases of midwifery that could be completed in the hospital district or go for a fortnight to the Queen Charlotte’s Lying-In Hospital. [Queen Charlotte’s was founded in 1739 as the earliest lying-in hospital in the British Isles.] The Middlesex district had once been well populated but was then no longer so, Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street, Berners Street, Mortimer Street and Great Portland Street, all being full of shops, and so it was off to Queen Charlotte’s, then in the Marylebone Road, a very different story. In fact, it was a nightmare, 65 cases in a fortnight and one was allowed to put the hand on a perineum in four and allowed to more or less hold the forceps in a forceps case. The high, badly-lit corridors, labour wards, the two sisters, seemingly merciless, the smell of rubber gloves being boiled up and the endless deliveries, the yells and sometimes the screams, were all part of a frightening fortnight but even with the absolute minimum of experience one was given a Certificate of Proficiency in Midwifery.

After being a house physician, I obtained the obstetric housemanship under Berkeley and Bonney at the Middlesex Hospital. There two men were the greatest gynaecologists of their day, not only for their operative technique but also for their research into cancer of the womb and for their introduction into Britain of the Stockholm technique of using radium cassettes for treatment of cancer of the cervix. It should be remembered that at that time, the Middlesex was the foremost hospital for cancer research in the country and probably in the world and had received massive endowments for that purpose. There were 90 beds for cancer out of 450 and two wards for the inoperable cases. It was a golden, unwritten, rule for housemen not to hurry if summoned to see an inoperable patient who was bleeding. Remitte in pax [go in peace].

I owed my getting the post to Victor Bonney rather than Comyns Berkeley as my cousin, Alistair, had been his registrar at one point before going on to the staff of the Chelsea Hospital for Women and he often acted as locum for Bonney if Berkeley went away as well as assisting him at most of his private operations. Alistair had also been Registrar at Queen Charlotte’s.

So there I was, obstetric house surgeon in charge with a registrar and chief to appeal to, of the gynaecological ward with 25 beds, a maternity ward, a gonorrhoeal female out patients department and on call for the district. In spite of Bonney’s undoubted superior brilliance over Berkeley, because the latter was senior, he kept 20 out of 25 in-patients beds until he retired three years before Bonney.

The two had different styles, Berkeley rather like an orang-utan, sure that he arrived in a Rolls Royce and not from a branch of a tree, gruff and not overly friendly in his manner. Bonney was dapper, almost a dandy, always with a smile, but despite this casual manner he missed nothing. Bonney, too, used to invite his houseman to an afternoon at Ranelagh [Ranelagh School in Berkshire] to watch the polo and have strawberries and cream.

Both had upgraded gynaecology and midwifery practice at the Middlesex to such an extent that the hospital was a Mecca for doctors from the dominions, America and Europe. It must be noted that despite his emphatic teaching to avoid using forceps, if at all possible, it was rumoured that in his private cases forceps soon flashed out.

They had put into use Reverdin’s needle [a surgical needle having an eye which can be opened and closed by means of a slide], the surgeon and assistants having reels of ligatures on their wrists, gentian violet for skin and vulval disinfection and sterilisation, a powerful abdominal retractor and third finger scissors. Mr Edris, the anaesthetist with his gas and ether and Boyle’s apparatus, was excellent and quite at ease working with them. A few years had to pass before muscle relaxants and intravenous anaesthesia came in. The theatre sister was never rattled and always knew when a certain instrument would he needed.

Speed and absolute haemostasis were the basis of success for these two gynaecological surgeons and that speed depended on a comparative quickness on the part of the assistants. I think it took me a month, that would he eight operating sessions, to get into the swing, repeating that same speed and sureness, delicate handling and haemostasis, constant repetition of procedures, rehearsed and documented, developed over the years. A Caesarean section took 15 minutes, a sub-total hysterectomy some 20 minutes. A Wertheim’s operation for uterine cancer, and this included removing the pelvic glands, would take just over an hour, whilst at Bart’s, I was told that the same operation would take three hours. Operations for prolapse [an abnormal descent into the womb] took three quarters of an hour and this was very boring for an assistant leaning over a leg to hold this or that.

To my intense surprise, towards the end of my six months with the firm, Berkeley suddenly turned to me as the second Caesarean section of the afternoon was being lifted on to the table and said: “Your turn”. The gallery was full of visiting surgeons, including some American ones. I managed reasonably well, the baby duly yelled after sister had spanked it and one of the visitors from a hospital in New York congratulated me.

The registrar at that time was a man called Walker who had been up at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He had got his FRCS [Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons] and was doing an operation on the fallopian tubes. I forget exactly what happened but the woman died on the table. Why, I do not know as Walker was good at his job and later became a surgeon at one of the peripheral London hospitals.

In my first fortnight, I had a dreadful midwifery catastrophe. I had been called to a woman in labour at a house in Great Titchfield Street by the extern midwife. The poor woman, a Jewess, was having her eleventh child. I tried repeatedly to deliver her by forceps and the os [any opening or aperture in the body, in this case the cervix] was fully dilated but she suddenly died under the anaesthetic. Jews came from all over the building wailing and one man, the husband I presumed, threw himself under the bed. Of course, I should have had her admitted to the maternity ward to start with and send for help. I had to tell Berkeley the next day. “You probably ruptured her uterus”, he said. There was a post mortem and a coroner’s inquest when it was revealed that one kidney had been full of pus and there was no rupture of the uterus.

The whole area around Soho abounded with Jews and I felt better when, on a very hot Easter Sunday, I successfully delivered with forceps a Jewess in Poland Street. I had been sent for by the extern sister. The young mother lay on a vast double bed in a very hot room. The os was fully dilated but the head was not fully rotated, I got one of the housemen to give her chloroform, rotated the head so that it lay in the occipito-anterior position [for assisted delivery], applied the forceps and delivered a live baby with a tear.

The intern sister, Annie Zung, usually always very helpful when I had been called to assist with a delivery or to sew up a torn perineum, rather disapproved of the method I had worked out of using an elongated glass tube nozzle to insert into the rectum in case of rectal tears, so as to prevent the needle and thread penetrating both rectal layers. However, when I proved that the glass nozzle after boiling grew nothing on a culture plate she relented.

A very difficult case, with seemingly extreme disproportion of head to outlet, caused me to call in Bonney. Here, perhaps to illustrate the horrible use of crushing or perforating forceps - I forget the exact term - and realising that it was hopeless to expect to deliver a living child, I extracted the baby by perforating the skull, thus destroying the brain, and with the crushing forceps seized on the diminished skull and extracted the baby.

Occasionally, to my pleasure and profit, Bonney would ask me to assist him at one of his operations on a private patient in a nursing home. I used to get £3 for doing so and, considering that a houseman received no pay, save his board and lodging and the occasional £3 fee for an inquest on a “brought in dead” case, the extra money was a welcome help.

The General Strike of 1926 was on whilst I was obstetric houseman. One night as I was returning to the Middlesex there were no lights in the street and as I crossed Great Portland Street, I saw that a car had crashed into a central lamppost. The driver, a man, hailed me. He had given a woman a lift and she lay dead in the car, her head having burst through the windscreen severing the throat.

The out patients clinic was quite foul, especially as I had to attend that department dealing with female venereal disease. The cases seemed to be chiefly gonorrhoeal. The sister in charge was an old sweat who thought nothing of frying something for herself to eat in between douching out her regulars with permanganate of potash. There was then no other treatment and if you walked down Regent Street later that evening you would see the faces you had recently seen in that clinic at their stands, waiting for business.

A LATIN CONVERSATION

I was never taught how to deal with the illnesses I was likely to meet in general practice. There seemed to be but a limited admission of emergencies. For instance, I never saw a cerebral haemorrhage from the locality admitted and I imagine that they were sent to the London County Council hospitals. There was a minor revolution when one doctor suggested that extra beds be installed along the middle of the ward to deal with emergencies.

Bacteriology was well taught, first by Professor McIntosh and later by Lionel Whitby and Scarff. Local casualties were well dealt with by the houseman who was on duty at all hours of the day and night although the only anaesthetic available was via a cylinder of nitrous oxide worked by a foot pedal.

There was one unforgettable medical soiree when Professor Wilson, Professor of Anatomy from the London Hospital, arrived to lecture on personality. He quoted the Georgics of Virgil, that wonderful passage inscribed on stone in the garden of St John’s College, Oxford: Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis [And happy he, who has knowledge of the woodland gods] and told us how Bonney and Gordon Taylor, dissecting far into the night, would talk in Latin to one another.

In the summer of 1926, I passed my B Chir [Bachelor of Surgery] at Cambridge. Thanks to having passed my primary fellowships, I had no trouble with the practical part but had a sticky time with the oral. One of the questions was on lead poisoning and at the viva voce examination I was derided by one of the examiners for having gone through the alphabet with its symptoms. The medical case involved a one-hour examination of the patient and a further hour to write it up, followed by another hour’s viva voce when my examiner was Lord Horder [royal physician to five successive British monarchs]. I told him that I had found the patient to be suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. Lord Horder told me at the end that I would be relieved to know that tubercle had been found in the sputum. I was!

I missed the room I should have gone to for my viva in gynaecology and midwifery and arrived late. I apologised to the examiner but he was charming and told me not to worry and I passed.

After that, I was lucky to get the post of senior house surgeon at the Metropolitan Hospital in Kingsland Road, East London, with Shoreditch, Hoxton, and Hackney all around. [The Metropolitan Free Hospital was founded in 1836 and closed in 1977.] I was lucky in my doctors. Mr Ashton quickly taught me to do biometrics [the study and uses of anatomy] carefully and slowly, Mr Heath let me repair a perforated gastric ulcer, Mr Acton Davis, the orthopaedic surgeon, was keen on triple arthrodesis [the process of surgically fusing painful, damaged or unstable joints] of the foot. No attempt was made to stop all bleeding and the tortured foot was simply encased in plaster so that the next morning the plastered foot was red and not white but it did not seem to matter to the foot or patient. Mr Barrells, the senior surgeon, was also at Charing Cross Hospital. He would scandalise me by smoking whilst he was doing an endoscopy of the bladder saying that cigarette ash was sterile.

Capes was also the ENT [ear, nose and throat] surgeon at the Metropolitan as at Bart’s. He had done his war service in the Royal Navy and I always remember him being called out to Epsom at lunch one Sunday to be told that his father, who was a ship’s surgeon, had gone down with the Queen Mary at the Battle of Jutland. He liked chloroform to be given if a quinsy [acute inflammation of the tonsil with the formation of pus around] had to be lanced. He told me how he came to take up ENT work instead of surgery. He was house surgeon to the choleric Almroth Waring (the same Waring who was in charge of the first London Hospital in Camberwell where I was a patient after being wounded). Apparently, during the course of an operation at which Capes was assisting, Waring started slanging him so Capes flung down his instruments, told him to do his own bloody work and walked out of the theatre.

There was a surgeon called Ramsey who specialised in Rammstedt’s operation for pyloric stenosis [narrowing of part of the stomach causing a baby to vomit forcefully and often]. He would tell the junior house surgeon and myself to do a blood count on a patient admitted during the night with acute appendicitis. We pretended to do one and then telephoned him again to say that there was a suitable increase in the white cell count, then he would come and operate. I got a lot of operating experience during that period and some of the cases were most unusual. I had not been there for more than a few days when his housekeeper rang up from Harley Street saying that he had a patient there who had a lump in his belly. Would we please admit him and remove it? The junior house surgeon agreed with me that it was an appendix and we removed it.

I did a number of herniotomies [the operation for a strangulated hernia]. In one case of femoral hernia, I cut into the bladder by mistake and it took me a long time to sew it up. No wonder that the porter thought that I had been a long time. I made up for lost time in the next case and fortunately it was an easy one that took only 15 minutes. I had great difficulty one night in trying to tie off a bleeding point following dissection of tonsils. The anaesthetist could not prevent the patient gagging. In fact, I never really mastered the art of dissecting tonsils.

The visiting anaesthetist was a menace. We used to induce with ethyl chloride and then go on to ether. He had three deaths in succession. I let the side down once by not admitting a case of appendicitis during the night, as I should have done, although my junior had told me he would help me with it. I have always felt ashamed about it, but I was very tired.

One of the cases I was most pleased with was a perforated appendix in a girl of six or seven. She had peritonitis. I operated, rapidly sealed off the stump, inserted a drain and closed her up. She recovered rapidly. I was not so fortunate in another case, this time in a man in his late fifties. He certainly had an inflamed appendix or laparotomy and there was no difficulty in removing it, but he slowly went downhill and died but no one could tell me why.

The ENT department had brought tonsillectomies in school to a fine art as children were sent in by the London County Council or by whichever local authority was concerned. Tonsils and adenoids were done almost as a routine. The children passed through the receiving room, the operating room and into the recovery room at the rate of 14 an hour. The honorary anaesthetist used ethyl chloride and the operator the guillotine. I only remember a couple of frights but no fatalities. Osteomyelitis was a treated disease. In those pre-antibiotic days, all we could do was to lay the shaft of the diseased bone well open and allow free drainage, the wound being packed with gauze soaked in eusol.

RETURNING HOME

In this hospital there were two wards reserved for Jews although there did not seem to be so many in the area as there were in Soho. I did have a short sharp bout of influenza but otherwise I remained well. The accommodation for residents at the hospital was poor but some of the bedrooms overlooked a tram stop and trams seemed to run all night. I had a most instructive time at this hospital and then my father wanted me to try for my fellowship. As it turned out it was a mistake. He always thought too highly of my abilities, such as they were.

In 1927, I returned to Bourne to assist my father in general practice and stayed. Taking over his duties meant going to the workhouse several times a week but at this time there was a re-organisation of the system and the intake at St Peter's was limited to women and children while the men went elsewhere. At one stage we had 23 infants in, mainly cot cases, as well as the old people upstairs, and the matron only had two nurses to look after them all. But despite the hardships she was enduring, she always came down to the front porch to meet you wearing a nice blue uniform with white cuffs and would say: "Oh, doctor, I'm so busy" although it was the nurses who were doing most of the work.

We had two types of patients, the ordinary people and then the private patients for whom you had to wrap up their bottles of medicines in brown paper and sealing wax and some of them would even insist on coming to the front door to collect them instead of going round the corner to the surgery to distinguish them from the hoi polloi. Then there were the panel patients, a system introduced in 1909 under which families who did not earn more than £5 a week paid a shilling a month, that is twelve shillings a year, for two adults, children under five six shillings a year while the toddlers and babies were admitted for nothing.

All of this meant a lot of work late into the night making out bills twice a year from the entries in the daybook and then everything had to be entered into the ledger and of course, it was a great irritation if some people did not or would not pay, something that applied to about five per cent of my patients who gave themselves enormous airs yet I could never get any money out of them. We therefore welcomed the National Health Service when it was introduced and all of the doctors I knew were determined to make it work because it would make life so much easier and take away all that labour of book keeping.

The trouble was in those days that there were no proper nurses; you just had your village gamps and using them was hit or miss. If you were called out to the fen at two o'clock in the morning to tend an expectant mother and you arrived to hear a baby yelling then you knew that all was well and you just said "How do you do", had a cup of tea and made sure that everything was fine before going home again. It was also very usual in those days for patients to have minor operations at home, things like tonsils and adenoids and sometimes even appendicitis.

When you arrived with the surgeon, there was everything scrupulously clean, boiled and ready and a table waiting for the patient. I would administer the anaesthetic and that was that. We were also called out to a lot of accidents, the worst I remember on the Thurlby road near Elsea Wood where two lads on a motor bike had crashed into the back of a lorry. I had never seen anything like it because their faces were absolutely flattened by the impact, as if a steamroller had gone over them, and I can still see it now.

There were also a lot of suicides, the worst I remember being a chap on one of the local farms who had made a second attempt to kill himself but this time he had been successful and had blown his brains out with a shotgun. I was just having lunch when I was called out and a nurse went with me but when we arrived, the chickens were already strutting around and picking at his bones and I nearly lost my lunch.

I knew the surrounding fens well, especially Tongue End, first as a boy and then as a doctor, but I remember best those trips with my father by pony and trap. We would leave the road from Bourne some half a mile before the River Glen and then make for one of the black houses across a field.

Houses in the fens were tarred on the outside in those days to keep out the damp and so they looked black. From there, the horse climbed up the bank of the Bourne Eau and crossed the River Glen by a horse bridge to the Boat Inn, one of two public houses in the village at that time.

There were four cottages in a row between the Boat Inn and the tongue of land where the Bourne Eau flowed into the Glen while along the Bourne Eau were houses connected by droves to the road into Spalding. At one time, barges came up the Eau as far as the Anchor public house in Eastgate. On the south side of the Glen was another pub, the Chequers Arms, and a chapel. Across the adjoining field you came to the Counter Drain, again with its pub, the New Inn, and a square that contained three or four houses, the most appalling housing you have ever seen, terrible places with outside loos, one room downstairs and perhaps two bedrooms above, with one of these households to lose three out of four children in the family to tuberculosis.

Then the River Glen was properly bridged and the road from Bourne extended to cross it and the Counter Drain with a road over it to Spalding and Baston via Windmill Farm. The Glen burst its banks in 1910 and flooded Bourne South Fen. In 1917-18, German prisoners of war had laid a light railway on the top of the bank and strengthened it. The bank burst again in the awful winter of 1947 and again German prisoners were used to mend it. The present pumping station was then built.

There were many night trips to expectant mothers in the locality, particularly to the cottages behind the Boat Inn where there were 14 confinements in one year. One either cycled or, in later years, took the car as far as the bridge and then walked along the bank where a cow or a horse might suddenly rear out at you in the black of the night, fair putting the wind up you.

A worse night venture was to a farm on the other side of the Weir Dyke. There was no road across the fields to Twenty so one walked along the bank, crossed over the sluice gates that controlled the Bourne Eau, then gingerly across the Weir Dyke and, approaching the crew yard, you hugged the wall until you saw the welcome light of an oil lamp in the window.

There were some compensations. As a child in very hot summers, I have seen the will-o'-the-wisp, the luminous, flickering blue light given off by the spontaneously burning peat. I have seen men stilt walking. I have been sent for when the snow lay on the ground and seen the red orb of the sun rising out of the east, flooding the whole area with beauty.

Once, as I crossed the Bourne Eau near the Boat Inn, I saw four swans flying wing tip to wing tip, from bank side to bank side, out of the mist into the mist, a most beautiful sight. But always there was the kindness of one's patients, despite their hard living conditions, with no water laid on, no indoor toilets. You always got a cup of tea after attending a confinement and despite the conditions in which they lived, it was always served on a clean tablecloth with a slice of cake or a piece of pie.

Before the influenza epidemic of 1918, my father used to doctor the Tongue End district that extended to beyond the village school to the Counter Drain with the droves going to the outlying farms. One farmer had laid a light railway for a mile from the road to his farmstead houses. Now all sorts of extraneous works and collecting yards disfigure the fens. The water levels have dropped and no longer can one see twenty swans on patrol. The old mysteries have disappeared but the memories remain.

NOTE: This account has been compiled by Rex Needle from notes left by Dr Galletly
when he died in April 1993 and from a conversation recorded by Jim Jones of the
Bourne Civic Society in 1982 as part of the town's oral history project.

A kind and talented doctor

says JOY RICHARDSON

The high regard in which Dr Galletly was held in Bourne is amply illustrated by the experiences of Joy Richardson, daughter of Everitt Delanoix Cooke (1894-1964), a wealthy farmer and landowner, who lived at the Manor House in the Austerby. He was also active in local affairs, serving as chairman of Bourne Urban District Council from 1927-28.

Joy, now aged 81 and living in retirement in British Columbia, Canada, recalls that Dr Galletly was their family doctor who attended several emergencies during her childhood. As a girl during the school holidays, she often helped with the corn harvest and in 1937, when just 12 years old, she had an accident that almost cost her a thumb.

While farm workers were having their lunch break, Joy decided to give the horses a rest by freeing them from the weight of the wagons. “I decided that unhooking them myself would be simple enough and I fancied I could do all I had seen the farm hands do”, she said. “The cart shafts were held in place by a chain running over the horse’s back housed in a padlocked leather saddle. I had so often watched the men remove a horse from a cart by taking the weight of the shaft on one shoulder, unhooking the chain, lifting and holding it, whilst urging the animal forward. Simple enough. Wrong. I managed to lift the shaft and unhook the chain but I had not reckoned on the tremendous weight of the wooden shafts once they were not supported.

“My right thumb was hooked in a link of the chain when it flew across the horse’s back taking the top of my thumb from the first knuckle with it. Hearing me scream, my father ran quickly to my side. He shed his cream silk jacket, wrapped it around my bleeding hand and retrieving the bloody thumb top, we made haste to the Butterfield Hospital. Intricate surgery was performed by Dr Galletly, successfully re-attaching the top of my thumb and five days later, with my arm supported by a sling, I was allowed to go home.”

Three weeks later, Joy was back at the hospital under Dr Galletly’s care after a riding accident with her sprightly grey pony Daisy. Stooks of drying corn sheaves in the harvest fields were too much of a temptation and she jumped them one after another, gathering speed as she went but eventually collided with an empty farm cart returning for another load and after being thrown heavily to the ground, a huge cartwheel rolled over her.

“I vaguely recollect that everyone came running up with my father shrugging out of his jacket and wrapping me into it as I lay on the floor”, she said. “That was all I remember and I was taken to the Butterfield yet again. My insides were displaced but my right hand, still in a sling, had received no further damage but my left hand was a mess because the iron-rimmed wheel had gone right over it, pressing and splitting the flesh into the hard gravel.

“Back again to the operating table under Dr Galletly who performed intricate surgery to realign the tendons and the bones in my hand, to clean out the gravel and stick me back together. Courtesy of his skill, I retained use of both hands eventually, but in cold weather, the thumbs still contract like claws unless regularly massaged, and neither thumb pad has much strength or thickness. I wore both arms in slings for the rest of the holiday, receiving constant painful dressings on the left hand using gallons of hydrogen peroxide for cleansing.”

But it was only a matter of months before Joy was again rushed to the Butterfield, this time in November for an unexpected appendectomy. “During the operation Dr Galletly untwisted part of my intestines, the result of being run over by the heavy cart wheel and the surgery was 100 per cent successful”, she said. “I remember him as the very talented doctor who not only saved my thumbs but was also a very kind and caring man to our family, especially to my father who was diabetic. Everyone knew of his reputation at the Middlesex Hospital and we all felt very proud that he was working in Bourne.”

NOTE: Compiled with extracts from her autobiography Joy for Living
published 1996 © JOY RICHARDSON

See also Dr John Galletly