Drever Watson Naval Nurse

February 25 1924 - October 9 2013

Drever Watson, , who has died aged 89, was a naval nurse in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and cared for former prisoners of the Japanese who were too traumatised to return to normal life in Britain.

At the outbreak of war, Drever’s mother, Stewartina McDonald, was in charge of the Red Cross in Dartmouth, and at 16 Drever was recruited as a Red Cross volunteer. On her first day she was put on what were called “special duties” — sitting for hours with a mortally wounded young sailor until he died.

Only in 1944, when she was 20, was Drever allowed to join a Voluntary Aid Detachment (or VAD) and be sent overseas. She became a theatre nurse at the Royal Naval Hospital Bighi in Malta, but it was after the war that she saw the severest casualties. These included some wounded from Burma and PoWs of the Japanese who were landed in Malta to be treated for trauma.

One of these was a female RAF wireless operator who had been captured by the Japanese, and despite being rescued only two days later was catatonic and had to be kept on round-the-clock suicide watch. Drever also helped to treat the survivors of the Corfu Channel Incident of 1946, in which two British destroyers were damaged by Albanian mines.

Drever Belle McDonald was born on February 25 1924 in St Vincent, Cape Verde Islands, where her father was an oil bunker engineer. When the family settled at Dartmouth, she was educated at the progressive co-educational boarding school Dartington Hall, and, as an antidote, at Cheltenham Ladies College.

After her demobilisation in 1947, Drever McDonald read for a BSc and worked as a research assistant with Professors Bob Case and Richard (later Sir Richard) Doll at the Chester Beatty Cancer Research Institute in South Kensington .

In 1954 she married John Rogers, whom she had first met when he was an engineer in Malta in 1946 and needed hospital treatment after a motorcycle crash. After the war he worked in the oil industry, and the couple lived in Syria , near the border with Iraq.

She became fluent in Arabic and, when the 1956 Suez crisis erupted , led a convoy of “oil wives” and children (including her own eight-month-old twin daughters) across the desert to the Lebanese border — creeping past the Syrian army base at Palmyra. At the border she found that many of the other women had not brought the correct paperwork; but she refused to leave anyone behind, and kept the convoy together until all were given clearance to enter Lebanon. Evacuated to London via Cyprus a week later, her sole surviving possession — her husband’s prized reflex camera — was confiscated by Customs because she was unable to produce a receipt.

Returning to the Middle East, she lived for six years in Qatar, seeking occasional respite from the heat of the Persian Gulf in Lebanon, where she loved to ski off-piste. Her passion for skiing continued until she snapped a knee ligament on a Swiss ski slope at the age of 79.

In the 1960s she moved back to Britain. Her first marriage was dissolved, and in 1966 she married Cdr Denis Watson, who had been a midshipman on Electra when the destroyer picked up the only three survivors of the sinking of the battle cruiser Hood in the Denmark Strait .

Drever Watson trained as a teacher, taking posts at secondary schools in Great Yarmouth, London and, finally, at the Inverurie Academy in Aberdeenshire. She was a formidable but much-loved figure in the classroom, and her toughest teenage “bad boys”, as she affectionately called them, would greet her in the street with friendliness and respect. Even in her eighties, when she had retired to South Kensington, she could silence a group of unruly teenagers on a bus with a firm “Do you mind!”

With John Rogers she had twin daughters and a son. Her second husband died in 1978.