I recall the isolation wards of the 1950s

THE ‘night of celebration’ letter recently from Mrs Joyce StevensSmith, about her childhood memories, sharpened very different memories for me which had been aroused by the Covid-19 lockdown.

In the early 1950s I was a young student nurse at St Helier Hospital, Carshalton, near where Mrs StevensSmith was living at that time.

The isolation problems that have recently been widely discussed in the press, and on the radio for several weeks, had already made me think about isolation wards in those days, when infantile paralysis was the epidemic.

At that time the isolation ward at St Helier was quite small, since isolation hospitals were common for treating infantile scarlet fever. St Helier’s unit was well away from the main six-storey blocks of wards, and quite scary for young nurses on night duty.

I have vivid memories of one night when I was sent across to sit with a patient who was in an iron lung respirator. It was a single room and I was there to check that the respirator didn’t stop due to an electricity failure, which was not unknown in those postwar years.

As I remember it, my job then was to press the alarm bell and to manually operate the pump system to ensure that the patient continued to receive oxygen.

Never having seen a respirator before, let alone having touched one, I just had to hope that I would rise to the occasion! So it was a night that I didn’t forget quickly.

As far as PPE was concerned, we had gowns and thin cotton masks which were available in all isolation situations, hanging on the wall in the ward and used by everyone.

I can’t remember that it ever crossed my mind that I was in any danger of catching whichever disease it was that the patient was suffering from.

Hand washing was strictly emphasised and every single ward had hand basins with lever taps, so that elbows could be used to turn them on and off.

The hospital was built just before the war and obviously had all mod cons. I wonder now how that epidemic stayed so confined.

Maybe one of your readers can enlighten me on that.

Mrs F E Ball Tiverton, Devon never have invented 2020 vacuum cleaners when he produced his first ground-breaking machine.

Microsoft has been using its customers to develop its products since the first MS-DOS, which was very like the disc operating system Bill Gates left university to develop for IBM.

There are other virus-tracing apps in the world. I think the UK should buy one of those, perhaps with modifications, because our record with public computing must be among the worst in the world.

Like me, most of those in charge are still thinking in analog, not digital. Or the NHS could launch the Isle of Wight app, as a Beta product, and update it as often as necessary.

This government has more on its plate than any UK government, ever, with climate change, Brexit and now Covid-19. And all that ignorant public service broadcasters can do is to make life as hard as possible for our very brave Prime Minister and his team of ministers, who have little specialist knowledge or experience of their own.

In future, we should elect more engineers, mathematicians, medics and biologists to Parliament, instead of graduates in politics, philosophy and economics, three subjects with the fewest correct answers. That isn’t even analog, it is mumbo-jumbo.

When we have time, the British people should reinvent democracy for the digital age. We do not want to become absorbed into one of a small number of competing empires under elected dictatorships and centralising power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

I believe there is still a majority for returning the Commonwealth, under our Queen, to how it was in 1972, before we were misled by Edward Heath who, the 30-yearrule has now proved, lied about the future of UK sovereignty under the EU’s policy of “ever closer union” and gave away a thousand years of British sovereignty, which evolved from Norman tyranny to constitutional monarchy, with a few fits and starts along the way.

Tony Maskell Newton Ferrers, Devon