Recently I meet a lady who had trained here as a nurse in the late 1950’s.  She worked for 2 years on Albert Ward at a Junior Staff Nurse and she told me some of her memories of the time:

At the time Sister Melhuish was in charge and Mary Johnson, known to everyone as ‘Johnny’, was the Senior Staff Nurse.  On one occasion an undergraduate patient left a note in his empty urinal asking when the ‘bottle round’ was done?  When the nurse returned with the crate on wheels and collected it, the note read ‘six pints Friday please’!!

On another occasion a patient was admitted with ‘abdominal pain’.  I think it was the next day that he decided it was the best time to move on.  It was lunch time when he asked when Sister was back, I told him and disappeared behind curtains to attend another patient.  There were only two of us on duty and the other nurse was also briefly out of view.  He got up, dressed in a boiler suite and walked out of the hospital.  It transpired that he was prisoner on the run!!