Today’s brisk walk was different and it was a battle. It was a battle chiefly because of the wind. When I turned from the Embankment just along from Saint Thomas’s into Westminster Bridge Road the wind was so strong I thought it was going to blow me off the pavement into the road. I had to take shelter behind a sort of kiosk and just pause there while I gathered myself together and then I managed to walk on a bit and i held onto a building at the side. The wind was blowing straight at me so that I could hardly move forward. Then I turned gradually into Westminster Bridge Road and suddenly the wind was behind me with such force that I was practically running along the pavement under the railway bridge.
That was the battle. The walk was different firstly because I wasn’t sure whether I would make it home – not from exhaustion but in time to get to the loo. The ageing process. Of course I’d been, and washed my hands for twenty seconds, before I left. I did make it back home, just. And the walk was different because people seemed more irritable. It may have been me but I don’t think so. Not only two joggers in the middle of the pavement but also three brisk walkers each in the middle of the pavement. Tut tut.
But chiefly today’s walk was different because today is the eve of the birth of Florence Nightingale 200 years ago. She was born on May 12th 1820 and so my walk became a pilgrimage to St Thomas’s Hospital where Florence Nightingale opened The Nightingale Home and Training School for Nurses in 1860.
(I can’t go tomorrow as, by previous arrangement, tomorrow is a painting day. A friend and I who don’t always feel motivated to paint try to motivate each other and tomorrow’s the day.)
So back to the pilgrimage. After delivering a birthday card to a friend in De Laune Street I cut through to Kennington Road then along Black Prince Road to the Embankment. Right past Lambeth Palace with a pause there at St Mary’s Gardens and then on to St Thomas’s. There’s a very high brick wall behind which are some of the nineteenth century hospital buildings.. They were designed to suit nursing principles laid down by Florence Nightingale.
My grandmother, baptised Evelyn Mary, born Ovans, Granna, we all called her, was a Nightingale Nurse.
I stayed with Granna and Grandfather often when I was a child and loved listening to herstories of the past, her childhood, her family and especially of London. When I was still at boarding school I badgered Granna to write down her stories and she did.
She was one of eight children, three boys and five girls. She herself was born on October 12th1871 at Oak Lawn, East Sheen, Surrey.
‘My elder sister Janet, I am told,’ this is what she wrote, ’was a very pretty baby; I was not.’
Granna adored her father. Her mother told her when she was older that she had overheard Janet, as a little girl, saying to her, ‘Which do you like best, father or mother? And that Evelyn had replied without hesitation, ‘Father. When they are going out, he says ‘Let’s take the children,’ and mother says, ‘certainly not.’”
Evelyn had always been determined to be a nurse. Why, she didn’t know. There were no relatives in the medical or nursing profession. Nursing was considered ‘indecent’ for nicely brought up girls however it was eventually agreed she might go to a children’s hospital known to a friend – it was in Tite Street in Chelsea. To nurse children was considered possible.
From there she went to train at St Thomas’s, the teaching hospital founded by Florence Nightingale. Her previous training did not count. She had one interview with the Matron of
St Thomas’s during which the Matron said she was too tall with too long a back ‘short nurses stand up and work better’ then she took her name and Evelyn Ovans started as a lady probationer at St Thomas’s in September 1896. She signed on for three years.
To be trained as a lady probationer you paid £48 and received £20 the second year. ‘During my training,’ Evelyn wrote, ‘we constantly heard ‘Miss Nightingale does not approve of’ this or that and we all had a sort of typed letter from Miss Nightingale on our plates on Christmas morning.’
Once, when she was working on a men’s orthopaedic ward, a patient, who was delirious, got out of bed, took off his night shirt and walked naked down the ward. She went to him, calmed him, took him by the arm, and led him back to his bed. ‘Of course,’ she told me, ‘all the other patients closed their eyes and pretended to be asleep so I should not be embarrassed’.
‘When we were appointed sisters we had to go to be interviewed by Miss Nightingale who was bedridden. She never saw more than one person at a time. When I saw her she was getting a little senile, but talked to me and asked questions. My impression of her was of rather a fat little old lady with a very smooth complexion not a bit like the pictures of ‘The Lady with the Lamp’. I felt she was rather lonely.’
As a Sister at St Thomas’s my Grandmother was never know by her own name but by the name of the ward – Adelaide Ward – so she was Sister Adelaide. She wrote,
‘In those days we had grey and red blankets on beds in winter, and white and red in summer. All the patients wore red flannel bed jackets. Later I got permission for my women to have pink.’
and
‘In my time we had to prepare all the ligatures, catgut, silk and horsehair; we used a good deal of Carbolic – sterilisation was only starting. We used marine sponges, flat and round, in the theatre.’
She described her time as sister of that ward as some of the happiest of her life.
From the Nightingale Training School Record Book
Entered the school on September 29th 1896. Age 24
Character comment: Miss E.M.Ovans is a refined, well educated gentlewoman with a high sense of duty. In addition to the innate refinement and dignity, her calm self possession, tact and gentle manner eminently fit her for the position of sister in a Gynaecological ward where great influence and sympathy are much needed.
The ward is kept in excellent order and the comfort and welfare of the patients the first consideration.
… And then
Career details: She stayed at the hospital until December 1902 when she left to be married to Hugh Acland.
My Grandfather, Hugh Acland, had studied medicine at Otago University, New Zealand and then came to England for further training at St Thomas’s. When he met Evelyn Ovans he was Junior Resident Gynaecologist Surgeon. They never met outside the ward. He would do his rounds and then they would talk sitting at the table in the middle of the ward in full view of the patients. Hugh Acland told her that his home was in New Zealand. He asked if she knew anything about New Zealand. She said, ‘Only that it’s the last map in the atlas.’ He told her later that this rather upset him.
One day he left his stethoscope in the ward. She put it in her office for safety and he came for it in the evening. He followed her into the room and proposed to her. She accepted. He then asked her, her name.
‘We really knew very little of each other,’ she wrote, ‘not even our ages, before we were engaged. Had I known at the time that he was younger than I, I would never have accepted him but he was a surgeon and much respected and I never dreamt he was younger. I thought it very silly of him to propose before he had seen me out of uniform – some girls look quite dreadful out of uniform.’
They were married on April 15th 1903.
There’s a contemporary newspaper account of the wedding
‘A very pretty wedding in which widespread interest was manifested by Sleafordiansgenerally, attracted an unusually large but reverent congregation to the Parish Church of St Denys, on Wednesday the 15th instant. The bride, who was given away by her brother Mr Hugh Ovans, 5th Fusiliers, was attired in a lovely dress of Duchesse satin, trimmed with Limerick lace, chiffon and orange blossom, and an old lace veil over a wreath of orange blossoms.’
A week later they sailed from Tilbury bound for Wellington on the ship Ruapehu. They called at Capetown. She was rather horrified at the houses with corrugated iron roofs and remarked on this to my grandfather. ‘He was silent for a time,’ she wrote,’ and then told me he feared I would find the same in New Zealand.’
Granna was always homesick for England and I’m not sure that she ever really became a New Zealander. Of course she had married a New Zealander. That’s why she went to New Zealand.
I’ve taken much of this from my talk ‘The New Zealander’ which I gave at the Arts Club in Dover Street, London W! in 2005