Cynthia Cooke, born June 11 1919, died April 20 2016

 

Cynthia Cooke.

Born June 11 1919, died April 20 2016

 

Cynthia Cooke, who has died aged 96, nursed newly released PoWs and later became Matron-in-Chief of the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service.   

 In January 1945 Cynthia Cooke was a nurse at the Royal Navy hospital at Herne Bay, Sydney, New South Wales, when she volunteered to staff the makeshift hospital facilities onboard the aircraft carrier Formidable. Over the next few months Formidable steamed more than 100,000 miles and carried nearly 14,000 former PoWs to Sydney as well as returning troops from the Far East. 

On her first mission, after battling through a typhoon, Formidable collected some 1,000 emaciated Australians from Manila. Loading the men in their weakened state from landing craft to Formidable took three days, and in order to load one former prisoner, suffering from tuberculosis of the spinal column, Cynthia Cooke helped to manufacture a body-length plaster of Paris case which incorporated stretcher poles. On October 24 Formidable sailed for Papua New Guinea to collect 1,254 Punjabi soldiers who were in an even worse condition than the Australians, most suffering from malaria and severe eczema. 

Though antibiotics and antiseptic treatments were available, the best treatment for most men was curry, which they cooked themselves on the flightdeck. There was only methylated spirits to clean ulcers and Cynthia Cooke would warn through a translator that it would hurt. It was, however, translated to the patients as: “If doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t do any good.” Cynthia Cooke returned to Britain in the escort carrier Queen. 

In order to go on watch in the sickbay she used to cross the flightdeck to avoid the mutual embarrassment of seeing the ship’s company half-naked in the messdecks. But when, on one occasion, a gust of wind nearly blew her overboard, she was subsequently always carefully chaperoned through the messdecks A guardsman’s daughter, Cynthia Felicity Joan Cooke was born on June 11 1919 at Bealings, Suffolk, and educated at Stockwell County Secondary School, south London, where the first headmistress, Rosa Basset, had introduced the Dalton Plan, which gave pupils the freedom and opportunity to develop initiative and self-reliance.  

In 1938 Cynthia Cooke began training at Tite Street Children’s Hospital, Chelsea. She worked as a theatre sister during the Blitz, and in 1943 joined the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service (QARNNS), beginning her career at the Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar.   There, before D-Day, she cycled to the hospital past columns of Canadian tanks, where the men greeted her with cries of “Hello, Sugar! Are you rationed?” 

In late 1944 she travelled to Australia in a troopship carrying some 4,000 Royal Marines. Post-war Cynthia Cooke served in the sickbays at RNAS Dale in Pembrokeshire, where a young national serviceman, David Attenborough, gave her a hand-drawn chart to help identify seabirds. She served in naval hospitals in Chatham, Hong Kong, Malta and Plymouth, and was principal tutor at the Navy’s training school from 1970 to 1973. 

As Matron-in-Chief of the QARNNS, from 1973 to 1976, she lived in an official residence at Haslar where she interviewed all budding new sisters – she accepted one girl who arrived for her interview in a party frock, because “she had made an effort” – and resisted all attempts to disband the nursing service. Cynthia Cooke was conferred with the Royal Red Cross in 1964, became Commander of the Order of St John in 1974, and was appointed CBE in 1975. 

In retirement she returned to Suffolk, where she cared for her mother who lived until she was 102, and supported good works, including the Royal British Legion for Women, blood donors, and her parish church.

The Badge of the Royal Naval Medical Service

The new Badge of the Royal Naval Medical Service (RNMS) became official on 30 October 2013. The snake of Asclepius twined around a naval anchor is the perfect combination of historic symbols of both our Medical and Naval heritage. However, this badge is not new and in fact dates from the 18th century.

In 201 1, during force generation for Operation Herrick 14, the RN led medical group tried to order a number of crests for official gifts, but found that the commonly-used snake and staff with a Naval Crown had never been approved by the Ships' Names and Badges Committee, and was in fact an adaptation of the badge of the Army Medical Services. Further investigation revealed that there
was already a badge dating from 1715 that was adopted for the uniform insignia of Naval Medical Officers of the Sick and Hurt Board. The original badge did not, of course, include the Naval Crown, since it predates the Crown's adoption as the badge of the Navy by well over a century. The serpent and anchor would have been familiar to anyone in the Navy at that time, including Admiral Nelson
and James Lind, just as the crossed anchors of the Victualling Board continued in use for Pursers, the triple anchors of the Navy Board for Navigators, and the foul anchor of the Admiralty Board for Executive Officers.

The Sick and Hurt Board was responsible for medical services in the Royal Navy from 1715 to 1806. It was a separate (but subsidiary) body to the Navy Board, supplying Surgeons to Naval Ships, and running shore and ship hospitals. It was also responsible for prisoners of war.

Proposed RN Medical Service Memorial

Watch this space for information on a proposed
Royal Naval Medical Service Memorial
at the National Memorial Arboretum, Staffordshire.

Sister (Res) G.G. Ainsworth

Royal Naval Hospital Peebles, now that's one I have never heard of, enjoy the read.



Name: AINSWORTH
Initials: G G
Nationality: United Kingdom
Rank: Nursing Sister (Res.)
Regiment/Service: Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service
Unit Text: Royal Naval Hospital, Peebles 
Date of Death: 29/10/1918
Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead
Grave/Memorial Reference: 1209.
Cemetery: PEEBLES CEMETERY

Sister Glen Ainsworth
Voluntary Aid Detachment
Died 29 October 1918

ONE of the marvels of the Great War was the way in which the women of the Empire nobly responded to the call of their Mother. None more so than the compassionate sisterhood of nursing. From every rank of life, from every hamlet, town, and palace, their numbers were recruited for the sorrowful yet magnificent campaign against disease, suffering, and death. Many a soldier, from the ultimate outposts of the Empire, voluntarily exiled from home and loved ones, learned to bless those selfless followers of the Mother of Mercy. Of such was Sister AlNSWORTH, who, after years of devoted ministry in the noblest of all causes, succumbed at the post of duty.
Sister Ainsworth was born at Stockton-on-Tees in 1889. Her father was an engineer, who was drowned when Glen was six years old. From a child, her desire was to become a nurse ; it was her vocation. At the age of 18, she entered the Sick Children's Hospital at Bradford, and continued there for three years. Thereafter she went to the Royal Infirmary, Liverpool, and continued until the outbreak of war. She was one of the first of the nurses to volunteer for foreign service. Her first post was at the Royal Naval Hospital, Malta, for two years, thence back to Plymouth. When Peebles Hydropathic was taken over by the Admiralty as an Auxiliary Naval Hospital, Sister Ainsworth was transferred thither; and there remained at the post of duty — hard-working, unselfish, beloved by all, until seized with pneumonia. 'She passed away on the 29th of October 1918, greatly regretted, for she was greatly loved. Her body, enwrapt in the Union Jack, was borne to its resting-place in the beautiful cemetery attached to the ancient Church of St Andrew of Peebles, covered with flowers, and escorted with naval honours, by the staff and patients of the Hospital, who mourned a true and loyal friend; and the bugle notes of "The Last Post" lulled her body to rest.

We waited at the heavenly gate,
As those who watch for morning wait
The faithful dawn to see.
A thin cloud veiled it from our view,
But it was close at hand, we knew,
With Him who has the key.

He was beside us, strong and true,
His patient, perfect work to do,
His words of grace to say;
And on the bed. He came to bless,
The shadow of his loveliness
In tranquil outline lay.

Through mortal pain from change to change,
A hallowed way that was not strange
With Him our loved one went;
While from His breast; with resting eyes,
She watched the light of love arise
On all the griefs He sent.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

We saw the gate unclose at last,
And through the opening, as she passed,
A gleam of glory came;
It set its seal upon her face -
It filled her sad, forsaken place
With one triumphant Name.

Source: The Book of Remembrance for Tweeddale – Peebles Book 2

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.

MA Kate Nesbitt MC

MA Kate Nesbitt

Awarded Military Cross for her bravery in Afghanistan.

Kate Nesbitt was awarded the Military Cross for bravery in the field. The Royal Navy Medical Assistant had braved Taliban fire to assist a comrade who was wounded in the neck during a firefight in Afghanistan last March. Kate remained with the wounded soldier, dressed the wound and prevented further haemorrhaging whilst the fight continued around her.

Medical Assistant Kate Louise Nesbitt from Plymouth deployed to Afghanistan with 3 Commando Brigade and worked in close support with “Charlie” Company of 1st Battalion The Rifles when she found herself under fire from the Taliban.

Her citation reads:

“Nesbitt’s actions throughout a series of offensive operations were exemplary; under fire and under pressure her commitment and courage were inspirational and made the difference between life and death. She performed in the highest traditions of her service”

MA Nesbitt joined the Royal Navy in 2005 and, after medical training, served at the Commando Training Centre in Lympstone followed by a deployment on the type 42 destroyer HMS Nottingham.

Awarded to all ranks of the RN, RM, Army, and RAF in recognition of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy on land

Medal

An ornamental cross in silver, with straight arms terminating in broad finals ornamented with Imperial Crowns. At the centre on the cross is the Royal Cypher (King George VI shown here). The reverse of the cross is plain in design, though at certain times the year of the award has been engraved.

Clasp

A silver bar ornamented by the Crown may be issued to MC holders performing a further act of such gallantry which would have merited award of the MC.

Ribbon

A central stripe of deep purple flanked by equally sized stripes of white.

Awarded to

All ranks of the RN, RM, Army, and RAF in recognition of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy on land.

History

Instituted in 1914, the Military Cross (MC) was issued for gallantry in presence of the enemy to warrant and junior officers of the Army who were ineligible (on account of their rank) for the Distinguished Service Order. During the First World War, it was also available to equivalent ranks in the Royal Naval Division and Royal Marines and it later became available to equivalent ranks in the RAF for acts of gallantry on land.

The equivalent award for the other ranks for gallantry on land in presence of the enemy was the Military Medal (MM) which had been instituted in 1916 and, similarly to the MC, later became available to RAF other ranks serving on the ground.

Following the 1993 review, the MM was discontinued and the MC became available to all ranks of all services for exemplary gallantry on land in presence of the enemy. It is at a level below the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross and is at the equivalent level to the Distinguished Service Cross (for exemplary gallantry at sea) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (for exemplary gallantry in the air).