Former nurse on the dark days on front line in Royal Victoria

Former nurse on the dark days on front line in Royal Victoria

4 November 2015

AMIDST the chaos of blood-soaked hospital wards it was the less experienced nurses who sometimes faced the hardest tasks during The Troubles.

While more senior members of staff battled to save lives, junior members of staff were often left to hold the hands of the dying. Treated without fear or favour, no-one was left to die alone and it is an experience few of the young medical staff forgot.

One such nurse was Horace Reid, from Ballynahinch. He is among a group of nurses who have spoken about their work during some of our worst atrocities for a BBC documentary which screened this week — Nurses on the Frontline.

Horace is still haunted by the pretty face of the young woman who lay on the hospital trolley in front of him 42 years ago. The victim of a sectarian shooting, she was mercifully unconscious during the half hour he spent with her.

“A doctor told me there was nothing that could be done for her and that I should just stay with her,” said Horace, who was just 24 at the time.

“It wasn’t a nurse-patient relationship. It was a human being to human being relationship. There were just the two of us and we were on a journey which was going to be a short journey for one of us.

“I had a girlfriend of the same age and standing there thinking that someone had decided to blow this young girl away was appalling. It was a terrible waste.

“She was lying there as if she was sleeping. That was hard to watch. She looked perfectly normal. It was very sad.”

As well as contributing his own personal story, however, Horace had another key role in the documentary.

Not long after taking up his post at the Royal Victoria Hospital, he began compiling a media archive about the impact of the Troubles on the Royal.

Newspaper cuttings, photographs and recordings were all put in a shoebox and this permanent physical archive would go on to spark the interest of BBC producer Moore Sinnerton, behind this week’s documentary, for which Horace is credited as an archivist.

The pair had previously worked together on a project and were meeting up for coffee in Rossi’s in Ballynahinch when Horace happened to mention his treasure trove of cuttings. The documentary was also inspired by the Royal College of Nursing’s 2013 book ‘Nurses’ Voices from the Northern Ireland Troubles’, for which Horace did much of the photo research. But of all the thousands of nurses who served during the Troubles, there was a shortage of those willing to go on the record. Only about 100 made contributions to the book in 2013, and only 24 went on camera for this week’s TV documentary.

The patients mentioned by the nurses on camera were not named, and after a lapse of 30 or 40 years few can be identified by the general public. But it was likely that close relatives of the Troubles dead would recognise circumstances of the loss of their loved ones, as recounted in the documentary. To minimise the possibility of re-traumatising these families, the BBC took the exceptional measure of contacting each home individually in advance of the broadcast.

Sandra Peake at the WAVE Trauma Centre was given this role. Originally a nurse and from Spa, Sandra had an early viewing of the film and identified patients and families going back four decades.

One of the victims contacted to appear on the documentary was a previous patient of Horace’s who had lost both of his legs, and the pair were reunited on screen.

“I gave him a book called Survivors,” Horace recalled of his time treating the man. “It was in the Newsletter, by Alf McCreary in the 1970s.” 

Thirty years later and Horace recalled reading an article by the same patient who was discussing the issue of post-traumatic stress.

“This guy was talking about his experiences and along the way he said the only psychological support he got was from a male nurse in the Royal who gave him a book,” he said. “I thought that can only be one guy.”

Horace is now retired and a local historian. His memories of the really bad times at the Royal are from his early days and he has little patience for people discussing post-traumatic stress when it comes to him or other nurses. It is the patients he is worried about.

“I saw some gruesome things and there was nothing to prepare us for them,” he said. “It was a quick learning curve but after the initial shocks, I think we got a pretty thick skin.

“The patients were the ones who were traumatised. Yes it was difficult at times but you learned and you learned quickly.”

Horace said he developed the necessary ability to “switch off completely” when it came to work and home life. Many years later he is pleased with the end result of the documentary but said watching it for the first time was a relentlessly emotional experience.

“It was worse watching the documentary than going through it, it was so sad; all the tragedies,” he said. “By half an hour in I was wanting it to finish.”

At the time, he said, staff were able to help each other by simply talking about it afterwards.

“The nurses coped by having a cup of coffee,” he said. “It wasn’t all doom and gloom. They socialised very energetically despite the dangers.

“Counselling did not exist then. If you said you were traumatised you would be told very smartly that the people really traumatised were on the bed.

“The effect was on patients. There was very little psychological support. A patient’s psychological wellbeing was well down the list of priorities.”

Nurses on the Frontline can currently be viewed on the BBC iPlayer.