Angela Craig

Nightingale Nurse

Angela on her wedding day with Dr Harry Craig

Angela Craig trained and qualified at the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing, St Thomas’s Hospital, in the 1950s. She and her cohort are among the last living ‘old Nightingales’ from that decade, a special and close-knit group of women, whose nursing ethos descends in a direct line from Florence Nightingale herself.

The School, elite and prestigious to this day, was founded to give nurses a formal medical education and a professional career. It continues as the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care at King’s College London.

Angela was admitted to the School as a probationer in 1951 and worked at St Thomas’s until 1955. She was then invited back to take up a Charge Nurse role in the mens’ casualty ward when the Suez Crisis suddenly demanded a high number of nurses abroad. St Thomas’s Hospital was known as the ‘policemen’s hospital’, and the injuries Angela was nursing could be severe. The work on the wards involved considerable hard physical labour. Even in her early twenties, Angela was regularly working night shifts with perhaps one other colleague, in charge of several wards, and under strict instructions not to call on exhausted doctors unless absolutely necessary.

During this era, the range of pharmaceutical drugs and therapies was extremely limited, and antibiotics were only just coming in. Angela recalls the miraculous power of penicillin when introduced. The skill-set of nurses then was different from what it is now, with the ability to give patients psychological support in their healing journey of great importance. Cleanliness and infection control were also critical.

The School’s admissions policies and practices had echoes of Florence Nightingale’s own priorities, with an emphasis on an individual’s moral ‘character’. The resilience needed to withstand the harder sights in a hospital was taught through a form of discipline which we may regard, from today’s perspective, as somewhat harsh and emotionally repressive. There was a fiercely maintained hierarchy in nursing teams, with juniors required to remove their cloaks as a mark of respect to Ward Sisters, even in the freezing cold of St Thomas’s entrance corridors!

For nurses it was also an era of deference to doctors, almost all of whom were male. Angela recalls with amusement a particular consultant who insisted on being accompanied, when doing his ward rounds, by a nurse carrying a cushion heated with a hot water bottle, on which to warm his hands before examining the patients! Senior nursing staff had quickly to resume wearing their starched cuffs at the appearance of a doctor.

However, it wasn’t all hard graft. Angela recalls the satisfaction of taking care of her patients, often working people from the Lambeth area, and seeing them recover. She remembers the high esteem in which nurses were held, and that – in compensation for their woefully low salaries – they were routinely transported free of charge in taxis and given free theatre tickets.

Such a demanding training created very strong bonds among the young trainee Nightingales. During her time at St Thomas’s Hospital, Angela became firm friends with, in particular, Carol Wright (nee Josselyn) and Jo Warsop (nee Cotterell). These two became her bridesmaids when she married Dr Harry Craig – who also qualified at St Thomas’s – in 1958. Carol and Jo and many other Nightingales were Angela’s friends for life when she had her family and took on her role as General Practitioner’s wife in Winchester for the next four or more decades.

Angela returned to nursing later in life, working in both the NHS (St Paul’s Hospital, Winchester) and in private sector provision in the area. A friend and former colleague, Jilly Woodhead, says: I first worked with Angela in the surgical wing at the Bereweeke Nursing Home, then at St Paul’s Hospital, and what a pleasure that was. A true Nightingale – so very caring, going about her duties quietly, efficiently, and always with a smile. A true joy to work alongside and a much valued team member, loved by all. She is definitely a credit to St Thomas’s training school. I, for one, feel blessed for both having worked with her, and – with my husband Chas – having her as a much loved friend.

Angela loves these quotations about nursing, not least from Florence Nightingale herself:https://nurse.org/articles/quotes-for-nurses-and-nursing-students/