Lucy Macdonald
Naval nurse in the Korean War hospital ship Maine who evacuated wounded in grim conditions
LUCY MACDONALD, who has died aged 102, was a sister in Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service who served in the hospital ship Maine during the Korean War. In 1949 the Admiralty, anticipating crisis in the Far East, had refitted the RFA Empire Clyde as a hospital ship and renamed her Maine, in acknowledgement of an earlier Maine which had been paid for by the American Ladies’ Hospital Ship Society, based in London and headed by Lady “Jennie” Randolph Spencerchurchill, during the Second Boer War.
The Korean War broke out in June 1950, and Maine arrived in Pusan, Korea, on July 14, when South Korean and US forces were being forced into a small perimeter around the port. Lucy Hesmondhalgh, as she then was, recalled that there was “just dust and desolation”, but as news of Maine’s arrival spread casualties began to arrive by the train – and busload.
In her ward in the ship there were 50 bunks for dangerous and serious cases, but soon her patients overflowed into wards for the walking wounded. “If I saw a stretcher approaching with a lifeless body and tubes sticking out in all directions, I knew they were for my ward,” she recalled. “Some were in a terrible state, some mercifully unconscious, with gunshot wounds, broken bones, head wounds, guts hanging out, and I can never forget the sight and smell of napalm burns. Some patients just cried, ‘Let me die’.” Many of the wounds were maggot-infested.
In the first month Maine carried 1,875 wounded to safety; nearly all Lucy Hesmondhalgh’s patients were US troops, whom Macdonald recalled for their courage and sense of humour. As reported by the wounded Randolph Churchill, then a special correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, conditions in Maine were very poor, especially compared to the new American hospital ships, but patients lavished praise on the nurses and the crew.
Over the next several months Maine made several voyages between Korea and Japan. Each day started with a hurried breakfast and a penicillin round at 8am, and ended at 2 or 3am. Each night when Lucy Hesmondhalgh went off duty she took a measure of Dettol, some of which she used to gargle and the rest went into her bath, “for the stench of flesh clung to every particle of my body and clothing”.
On her 13th and last voyage from Pusan to Hong Kong, Maine carried survivors of the “Glorious Glosters”, who had been bombed and burned by mistake by the USAAF. Lucy Hesmondhalgh’s last act in the ship was to commit her pyjamas to the deep. Her mother had bought them for her in 1942; it was now 1951 and she was leaving the QARNNS to be married.
Lucy Margaret Hesmondhalgh was born on November 5 1914, the fifth child in the large family of the vicar of Scalby in Yorkshire, where the family enjoyed a bucolic lifestyle in the interwar years. She and her sisters were educated at Casterton school in Westmorland, known to readers of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as Lowood House.
Lucy was 23 before she decided to train as a nurse, overcoming her father’s prejudice that nursing was little better than domestic service and persuading him to part with £50 to pay for the privilege of her training in London at Barts. There was no pay while she was at the preliminary training school, and then she received just £12 per annum when she became a probationary nurse; she was, however, threatened with dismissal after being caught roller-skating with Freddie the skeleton.
By 1939 she was a third-year trainee when she helped in the evacuation of Barts to Hill End, Hertfordshire, to prepare for mass casualties in London. She returned as an SRN to Barts during the Blitz and was in the shelter under the nurses’ home when a large bomb set it alight and buried the off-duty nurses in rubble, mercifully only wounding one girl.
The routine of the hospital continued unbroken and she was on night duty when London was firebombed. “The red glow shining through the blinds gave the impression that we must go up in flames soon,” she recalled. When she looked out in the morning she saw that the nearby post office had taken a direct hit and there were limbs scattered on the roof.
There was no respite when she went home on holiday: after the Scarborough blitz of March 1941, she volunteered at the local hospital. Subsequently her father paid out another £50 for her to qualify as a midwife at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
In October 1942 Lucy Hesmondhalgh joined the QARRNS, and after brief service at a WRNS new entry establishment at Blundellsands hotel, near Liverpool, and at Dartmouth, she travelled in the P& O liner Stratheden and the hospital ship Vita to join Lord Mountbatten’s staff in the Far East. There, as the war ended, she and another QARRNS, Ann Ramsden, were drawn into the Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI).
The first priority was to locate 125,000 Allied Pows scattered throughout the region. Later the two women went to Java where they found 9,000, mainly Dutch, women and children in Tjideng camp, “a pool of misery founded by the Japanese”.
In 1952 she married Herbert Macdonald, a planter who had survived three-and-a-half years as a slave-labourer on the Burma railway, and whom she had met in Singapore. She lived on a rubber plantation during the Malayan Emergency, but the marriage did not last, and they were divorced in 1974.
In 1958 she returned to nursing, first at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, then in 1961 at Southmead Hospital, Bristol. In 1965 she was chosen to help re-open “the Min”, the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases in Bath (formerly the Mineral Water Hospital), where she introduced many reforms, and remained until her retirement.
In 1981 Lucy Macdonald returned to Korea as a guest of the South Korean Navy.
Motivated by her strong Christian faith, Lucy Macdonald retained a lively mind until her last years; the bridge table was always set and the day had not started until she had completed the Daily Telegraph crossword.
Lucy Macdonald, born November 5 1914, died July 6 2017