Doctor, nurse – and baby – who were there 70 years ago
On its 70th anniversary, a doctor and a nurse recall that historical day, while a woman who shares its birthday credits it for saving her life
In some ways, July 5 1948 was a regular Monday in the United Kingdom. That morning’s Daily Telegraph led with news of a plane crash in Middlesex, alongside reports of a missing yacht in Cardigan Bay, a “mainly fair” weather forecast with a chance of “rather cool scattered showers”, and fears of a Communist split in Eastern Europe.
In reality, it was a day on which this country changed forever. After years of contentious discussion, the nation’s hospitals and doctors’ surgeries would be united in one great, state-run conglomerate: Aneurin Bevan’s proposed a national health service, free at the point of use, finally came into existence. The NHS was born.
So what was it really like for the very first staff and patients under the radical new system? On the service’s 70th birthday, here, a doctor, a nurse and one of the first babies born under it, look back on a quietly monumental date.
THE BABY Jane Cohen (née Hales)
I entered the world at 1am on July 5 1948, and was thus one of the very first babies to be born on the NHS. It was a home birth, straightforward and quite quick, with one midwife present, and my father, as was typical back then, absent from the room. I was the third child, with two much older siblings born in pre-nhs days, and I began life in a railway cottage in the South Yorkshire village of Brinsworth.
The nearest doctor’s surgery was a good bus ride away, but every Thursday the doctor visited locally, setting up a makeshift surgery in a neighbour’s sitting room. If we needed to see him for minor complaints, this was where we went for at least the first decade of my life. Anything more serious merited a home visit, such as that I received as a two-year-old with the measles. The doctors did their rounds with a well-stocked black case, without needing to keep an eye on the clock; he was not merely respected, he was a knight in shining armour.
Many years later, I would come to see my doctors in much the same light. Three years ago, then 67 and living in south-west London, I fell seriously ill with sepsis.
Not knowing what my symptoms of tiredness, painful joints and sickness indicated, after a week, I could no longer walk. Howard, my husband, called a locum doctor, who took one look at me and declared I needed to go to hospital immediately.
An ambulance arrived quickly and, before I knew it, I had been “bluelighted” to the critical care ward at St George’s Hospital, Tooting. How fortunate I was to be taken there. Every test imaginable was carried out over the following days, and I cannot begin to express how caring and efficient the medical staff were, allaying my fears with their evident competence.
I remained in hospital for about three weeks, after which my treatment continued with daily visits at my home for a few months and frequent appointments at hospital, where I was still being closely monitored. Two years later, I had finally recovered, and I thank the NHS for saving my life. I owe the doctors and all the supportive medical staff at St George’s my life and my immeasurable gratitude.
‘IVF? Unimaginable. A hip transplant? Ridiculous. A heart transplant? Science fiction’
THE NURSE June Hewett
I was a 17-year-old cadet nurse when I started work on the children’s ward at St Martin’s Hospital, Bath, less than a year before the National Health Service launched.
We were all 16- to 18-year-olds with no formal training, just picking things up as we went along, and as well as caring for the children, we were tasked with cleaning the floors and stoking the fires, because we had no central heating. Then, at the other extreme, we had to go to theatre with the children needing surgery. It was a very broad workload.
I found out that the NHS was being rolled out on the radio, and saw it in newspapers: we were told nothing about it in the hospital itself, but were convinced that it was going to be a wonderful thing.
At that time, the health service needed a lot of change. Parents were not allowed to visit their children unless they were in a critical condition, and this caused quite a lot of distress. The only way they could see them was to look through high windows into the wards, and if their children were well enough to clamber up the back of their beds, they could catch a glimpse.
On the day of the official launch, we carried on our work, just the same as we had the day before – and in the same uniform, too.
Since that first day, there’s been a great improvement in things like surgery and paediatrics, and I rather doubt they would have had the same success under the old scheme.
While it’s remarkable that it’s available to everyone, I do think the NHS is in a critical situation. It needs far more funding for the work it does, and more money should be given to student nurses and doctors for training.
I couldn’t wait to retire myself, which I did on my 55th birthday in 1986, because there were so many changes to nurses’ education taking place, and I was getting fed up with it.
Nowadays, when I visit people in hospital, I often see a group of nurses sitting at a nurses’ station, talking and drinking coffee, which we were never allowed to do. I think we were more professional back then. In my 39 years as a nurse, working on the baby unit was the thing I’ll remember most fondly. Now, with the advances the service has made, I hope that others have that same enjoyment I had – even in the face of challenging times.
THE DOCTOR Dr John Marks
I qualified as a doctor on July 5 1948, so you could say my life and that of the NHS have coincided. There were mixed feelings in the medical community about what was to come, before that first day. When I was a student at Edinburgh University in the Forties, many of the older medics were bitterly opposed to Aneurin Bevan’s proposal for a state-funded health service. “We’re going to become civil servants…” they’d moan, concerned for their career prospects. I, on the other hand, was always a supporter; the principle was wonderful, and it still is.
It was a strange mix of chaos and business as usual, in those first days. In one sense, the NHS was simply not in place on one day, and in place the next. As such, anyone who thinks there was a major change to our day-to-day work on July 5 is living in cloud cuckoo land – the change was simply in who paid. But it certainly
was haphazard. Within two weeks of qualifying, and just two days after being registered, I went back to St Leonard’s Hospital in London, where I’d worked as a student. They asked me if I wanted to become a locum. I said of course I did, but when do I start? “Now,” they said.
That evening, an old man with an enlarged prostate was brought in. I found the surgeon, asked him who the anaesthetist was to be, and he looked at me with surprise. “You are!” And so off I went.
The patients kept coming and, of course, they now could. With the NHS in place, people who had problems such as hernias, which they might not have been able to see a doctor about before, suddenly came to hospitals in their droves.
We forget just how crude medicine was in 1948. We had around 30 effective drugs, children were dying of scarlet fever, we had very few instruments, and
penicillin was still brand new. The idea of IVF? Unimaginable. A hip transplant? Ridiculous. A heart transplant? Pure science fiction.
Now I’m 93 years old and retired, but I have seen all those procedures becoming relatively straightforward. The pace of change has been incredible. I continued as a GP, and later became chairman of the British Medical Association, leading the organisation against Kenneth Clarke’s attempted healthcare reforms in the Eighties.i know better than most that the NHS has always had its problems. It was underfunded from the first day onwards, yet while I lost faith in the system over the years, I never lost faith in that principle. It remains one of the greatest social experiments in history – I believed in it in 1948, and I believe in it in 2018.