Nurses reunited ... 45 years after their first shift
EIGHT nurses who started their careers together on the very same day in 1974 have reunited – 45 years to the exact day they started training in Huddersfield. Over the past four decades they have seen it all, and, incredibly, three of them are still working for the NHS.
The women are Anastasia Brackenridge, Julie Dickenson, Judith Abernethy, Linda Sykes, Gillian Smith, Valerie Firth, Anne Dove and Margaret Hamlett.
To celebrate, they shared afternoon tea and recreated their first day together in the same line-up as the days of black and white.
Of the group, only one, Valerie, remains at the infirmary and is still doing shifts in the Outpatients Department.
Her contemporaries Gillian and Judith work at Wakefield and Calderdale hospitals respectively.
Their reunion saw half a century of memories of their early days as trainees in a “big house in Birkby” compared to their lives now.
At their reunion, they said: “What an amazing group of women we are. At 16 and 17 we were chucked together in an old house in Huddersfield, we shared a room with complete strangers.
“We laid patients out before we were legally allowed to buy a drink in a pub. We did injections, worked nights and went on secondment to the middle of nowhere.
“We didn’t complain (much), we just got on with whatever was thrown at us and then we carried on to complete general training.
“No-one can say it has been easy. Some of us have battled with serious medical issues, divorce, bereavements, moving home and children moving to the other side
of the world. But through all that, we carried on nursing.
“Ladies, we are women of bravery, strength and courage.
“We are really bad at saying well done to people who have given their careers to making other people’s lives better - sometimes at the expense of their own free time, and sometimes at the cost of their own physical or emotional health.
“So we just wanted to say that and to acknowledge the 300 years we have nursed.”