| Description | Supplementary recording by Dr. Stella Henriques. No date given. Available in two parts MS 3620/3/16/1 and MS 3620/3/16/2
Transcript of recording:
And now I want to tell you about the other things I remembered about Aberdeen. There is one thing I haven't told you, that I am the original Stella the Bajanella, I never appeared at the theatre, I was in the very first performance in the Men's Union on their platform there and I, Rowntree Harvey and Gordon MaCallen they played the piano and we did a kind of review. That was the original Stella the Bajanella, and then after that of course it became much more enlarged and appeared in the theatre and so on. I wasn't in those performances but I was the very first and original one. Now I was thinking about the people that I had known, the Professors, in that last year, our final years. For one thing, the Senatus decided, or the Faculty of Medicine, I don't know which, that in their wisdom we should know something about great men who had been in medicine and so they invited various great people to come along and talk to us, the final year people, fourth and five years. First man who came was Sir Arthur Keatts, who was after all an Aberdeen man, and although he talked to us I can't remember what he talked about, in the lecture room in the anatomy department aai I remember, he stood a tall thin man, and he looked right up to the assembled rows of people and turned to Gobiereed and said, Goby we had some fine times here didn't we just. That's all I remember of him. We also had Sir Bruce Porter I think his name was, and he was the man who discovered mortar fever he'd been an army surgeon, he told us and when he was quite a young man and newly qualified and in the army, he was working in an army hospital and the matron there was evidently a pretty fierce person. aced he got into her bad books because there were things that she thought he ought to be doing and he didn't do. He didn't think it was necessary to do, to give some of the treatment that she thought he ought be giving and so on and so on. And in the end she took him to task, to his superior officer. He said the superior officer was an old Aberdeen graduate, and he said he listened to the matron's complaints. He said he didn't say anything. he sat there with his head down and he doodled on the blotting paper and when the lady had run out of steam after detailing his all his misdeeds and the things he should have done, and had left undone and the rest of it, he then said without lifting his head, .I was always in favour myself of letting my patients die of their own diseases, and that was the finish of that for him. Then we had, who did we have after him, oh yes, a darling man, Sir James McKenzie. He was a wonderful old boy, there all so fine you know, so humble because they are so great and he told us of all his earlier life when I think he had been a watchmaker or something in his earliest days and that's how he was able to design these very delicate instruments, since he had designed the electrocardiogram or something like that, and he had just recently returned from a trip to America he told us and he had been horrified at the amount of equipment, and this was in 1922 or 23, the amount of equipment that an ordinary GP in America required with his own X ray and his own this that and the other. And he implored us to remember that we had first of all, before we turned to instruments, we had five senses and we were to learn to use them first before we went into anything more mechanical: and that was a great help to me, I can tell you. I developed a sense of touch that was invaluable especially when I think that I worked in four hospitals in Iran and only one had an X ray plant and that not very good. I just developed a sense of touch that could fish out all sorts of foreign bodies in people except for perhaps a child who swallowed a necklace or something like that. He was simply lovely. Then we also had Norman Walker, Sir Norman Walker I imagine he is, the skin man. Dear Dr. Christie, he was our skin man and he invited him to come and talk to us and he entranced us. He talked about itching and the itch. He himself was impeccably dressed, we all fell for him tremendously, he was beautifully dressed. I am not so sure if he didn't have a flower in his button hole, but he was absolutely marvellous and he talked to us as I say about itching. He said you know anybody can have lice in their heads, be him bishop or bargee, duke or dustman. He said of course you don't say to them, Have you lice in your head. What you do is say "Have you noticed any lumps behind your ears" and if you say no then you say "May I have a look, just let me see" and he said while you are feeling with your fingers, you are looking with your eyes, and that is that. He then gave us a marvellous description of scabies, of course that was where the Duke of Argyll was to he put up, the scotching post for people to say. God Bless the Duke of Argyll, while they scratched on them. He said as a matter of fact that the British ran from the Scots at the invasion of Prince Charles not because they were afraid of them, but afraid of the scabies they brought with them. However that was his opinion. He also had an opinion that a lot of things diagnosed as leprosy in the bible well some of them, were due to scabies or other things. And in his opinion Nairmun the Leper had suffered with scabies. He was doing this perfectly seriously, he wasn't sort of debunking the bible in any way,, but he said consider the case, Naimun wasn't segregated from his people and what he thought was that the local specialists had taken a look at Naimun and said, Well it really looks like scabies but not Naimun, it must be leprosy, and that's how they diagnosed it. Meanwhile he wasn't segregated as I say, from the rest of the community, he still worked at the army headquarters and with his king and all that, he must have been rather nice and so was his wife because it was the little slave girl that had been kidnapped who talked to her mistress seeing how distressed she was. And said you knew if you were to come and see our Doctor in Samaria, he would be cured and of course she passed this on to him, and he passed it onto the king. It reads gloriously in the Old Testament you know. The king wrote to the king in where was it Judah, or Israel and said I am sending Uaoman along for you to cure and the king tore his garments and said "What am I to do, this man is seeking to got to war with me, how on earth can I cure anybody?" But of course Elijah heard about this and Elijah said send him along to me. An along came Nairmun with all his retinue, and he stood there and Elijah did a spot diagnosis. He never even went and had a look at him. He simply said go and wash in the Jordan seven times and of course Nairmun was furious. He really let rip and said At least you could have done was come and looked at me or done something, but his servants you see they weren't as scared of him and they said My father if he asked you to do something difficult you would have done it, why not go, give it a trial and he went. And he bathed seven times, where did he bath? He bathed where the sulphur springs go into the Jordan, seven times as Sir Norman Morcar said, is rather a lot, I don; think I would have said seven times myself, because you do get an itch with a lot of sulphur, but still it worked, and he was better and away he went. First he offered a fee to Elijah which was far and above anything that any Harley Street man would have sneezed at but he refused it and what happened. Gaza his servant thought if the old man's dotty I am not and he flew after Nairmun and pitched that yarn about needing clothes and things for visitors unexpected come. And Nairmun handed him over some things which were his old clothes and he put them on and away he came back and Elijah said to him "And where have you s been?" end he pitched some yarn and Elijah said "You're telling me that you have been to see Nairmun and now you have got what Nairmun had". And he had got scabies you see. I remember Professor Marnock, principally for his beautiful hands and his impression of a sepsis on us, and there I .. back with his finger nails cut down to the quick, impressing that on us that even though a person may appear purely hysterical and do not datum them down as hysteria until you have made perfectly sure that there is nothing else wrong with them, and how right he was. I have in later years come across two cases which have been diagnosed as pure hysteria, and both of whom had tumours of the brain. He knew and my word he drummed that into us. Dear old Howdy, Professor McKeron, was of the greatest of help. He was so practical, there were an awful lot of things he did not approve of, but he taught them to us because as he said they do all these things in Edinburgh, Edinburgh my dear was always the start of everything and they went into all sorts of things and Howdy didn't necessarily approve of them, but as he said I must teach you these things, tell you these things, so that should you be asked the questions at examination then you will know how to answer theme tend I have been told that on occasion when a co examiner, they always came from Edinburgh the co examiners, said sort of rubbish 'to something that some unfortunate student had said in the examination, Howdy would pipe up with "but that's what I teach them" and that was that. I shall never forget being confronted by my first impacted breech when I was working in Persia, in Iran, in my old caravan ....The hospital was not built to the hospital at all, it was an old caravan site that was adapted and wasn't I happy there. No running water, no anything but never mind, we were very very happy. and I always remember looking at that impacted breech or rather feeling it and saying to the English sister I had, have a look in the instrument cupboard and see if you can find a blunt hook and she said I've never seen one used. No I said, but this one is going to be and it worked and I remembered Howdy saying if you have not got a blunt hook, well curved umbrella handle will do just as well.. There were all sorts of things he did not approve of, he didn't approve of a new thing that had come out then, of letting women go downstairs when they were, three days after they had been delivered of their babies. The custom was to keep the mother upstairs as it were for ten days tend as he explained, and he was perfectly right, he said `you see it is alright if you have got a wealthy patient who can afford to have maids and people doing things for them, but the ordinary working class women that ten days that she gets, after she has had her baby is the only holiday she will ever get and ever does get, and she deserves it, and frankly you know, I don't think I used to hear so much about postnatal depression in those days, because those women did have a rest. He said himself how, if she comes down those stairs, three days after she has had her baby, she will be scrubbing, she will be washing, she will be cooking. She can't keep out of it, that ten days upstairs is all the rest for her and after all as he said, "If you are going in for general practise you might just as well treat all you patients the same and stick to one way of doing things". Another thing he was very scornful of was twilight sleep, does anybody ever remember twilight sleep now? Painless childbirth it was, and you gave them hyacene hydabomide but what he objected to was that, or rather, was this giving the hyacene hydabonmide by the nursing staff or something. He held that it was an extremely dangerous thing for the mother and the child and that it should be given by the Doctor and nobody else and that the Doctor should be in attendance throughout the whole of the labour. Well as he said you cant do it if you are in general practise, he was quite right,, and I remember being offered that job and I was in general practise and turning it down. It was a private nursing home that did it and I remember the matron offered it to me, she said Oh I give all the injections. I said that is not what I was taught, I either take the thing on or I don't, and I shall not take it on, and I didn't take it on, so that was Howdy. There is one other thing now I must tell you and that was about the capping of the Queen. Queen Mary, it must have been, I think, you will have to check this about September of 1922, because I was up then and I know I went up, I only had a month's holiday. I had a, I stayed on through July, I went home in August, and came back in September to put in more work in the clinics and things because it was my final term and I, there weren't very many of us students up of course, just a few, a handful who were trying to put in some extra work like ourselves and we were told that the Queen was coming in from Balmoral to be capped. Jimmy Hunter was our president of the Students Representative Council, se called us together the day before it happened, and he said now no larks, this is a lady. Mary Esslemont was our 'vice president of the Students Representative Council, and there had been a fine old tadoo about her election because as you know the Sunday after the election of the Students Representative Council, the President and Vice President reads the lesson in the Chapel and the Divines did not wish Mary to do it because they said a woman must not lift her voice up in the Chapel. However Jim, we were all very annoyed, and Jimmy Hunter faced them and he said "If you don't let her do this you are insulting the whole of the University because we all voted for her and nobody will come to church so there". So Mary read the lesson. Anyhow the Queen was to come. There was terrific tadoos, nothing to do in the town, the Union place was cleaned up and there was a red carpet on the stairs up to the Mitchell Gallery and so on, the Hall, notice on it, Do not Step on the carpet. They turned the museums at the top there into dressing rooms for the Town council, and all the Civic fathers and of course, the Principal was there and the Duke of Richmond and Gordon who was the Chancellor, there they were all preening themselves in front of the looking glass in that small room at the side, retiring room for the Queen, and all this was happening and we were in the Quad and the Queen arrived and there wasn't a soul to receive her. Harvey the under Sacrist, you know he was a stout red burly ex policeman wasn't he? He stepped forward and he opened the door of the car and out stepped the Queen and there was nobody there except us and nobody moved and Harvey looked at her and he said in the voice that I heard "Your old soon" and the Queen said "I think I must be a little early" "Ha" he said "A quarter of an hour". Well that broke the spell, we fled and somebody whipped the notice; Do not step on the carpet off, and others fled up to tell the City fathers and the Duke and the Principal and everybody and they all came fluttering down the stairs to greet the Queen. Well after that it was alright. We were given the back row in the Mitchell Hall, yes, for students. That was all that was left, the rest of the hall was filled with the Lords and nobility and all the folk who were up with the shooting, and so when I got into the Hall the very last seat in the back row had been taken so I walked up the side of the hall and stood in the front at the side and saw the whole performance. The Queen was ushered in and put onto the platform and she looked down over the assembled crowd, mot at me of course, but I mean the folk there, and you felt there was a little rising every now and again. I think as people half rose and she recognised them and gave a quick little nod to them, and then the proceedings started and Jimmy Hunter presented her with, I don't know what it was, a Roll of Honour or something, and Mary Esselmont gave her some flowers, and then the proceedings finished quite happily. And I know I took a snap with my little box camera out in the quad when she came down again but I never showed the picture. It was quite good, I don't know what became of it because I was rather afraid I might be clapped into the Tower for lesser majesty. Anyway she went off with the Principal and I suppose had lunch at his place and in the afternoon she was taken over Old Machar Cathedral. Well as you know it has a terrific amount of heraldry and stuff in the windows, the ceilings, the roofs and everything, really marvellous, and so it was really well worth going over it. I don't think she had ever been there before, and they brought her out and who should be waiting for her but Mrs. Narrower, Blanche as we all Irreverently called her. She was the wife of Professor Narrower, the Professor of Greek., I rather think her father had been Professor of Greek before him. Anyway I knew her quite well from the Greek plays and I asked her how she got on later on. She said "Well, the Queen came forward and came out of the cathedral and she advanced towards the Queen and the Queen said I think you have something for me and she said Yes, I made my bob and then I said Yes, if her Majesty would please accept this book, which her father had written on the heraldry in Old Machar Cathedral. The Queen to her great delight, took the book but instead of handing it to her lady in waiting, she stood there and went through the book. Looked at all the illustrations and everything and then she closed the book and handed it over to her lady in waiting and she said, "I'm going to enjoy this". Made Blanche's day of course like anything. I saw Mary Esslemont later and said "Weren't you nervous, she said no, she said I was at the start, and then I realised that the Queen was as nervous as I was so I felt quite comforted and she, Mary said afterwards to that she had met the Principal and Matthew Hair, bless his heart, the two who were the most concerned in the whole affair. Professor Matthew Hair, I think he was the senior Professor, he was another nn who had been a professor in my father's time and they were like a couple of schoolboys, so happy that it had all gone off well and that the Queen had said to them when she was going "That she had often had days like this to do, but she didn't know when she'd enjoyed herself so much, so there. Recently I heard something on the radio which reminded me very much of my, something my father had said, and I'd like to tell you about it. You must forgive me if I tell you things about my father that I've already spoken but I have forgotten so I'll start at the beginning. When he was about 16, his father and mother told him that they would like him to go in for medicine. There was no medical history in the family as far as I know or he knew but anyhow he went off to Kingston Public Hospital, remember they were in Jamaica, and enrolled himself as a medical student and there he remained for two years or more. He learnt to do everything, the was the only student there and so from midwifery to post-mortems, he did the lot and when he eventually came to England I imagine he must have been about 19 or so, he had an enormous practical experience. His father was well off in those days, he was a planter and so when my father arrived in England, in London with an introduction to his father's tailors in Saville Row, and he told me that he bought himself a new suit every month, for I don't know how long, perhaps three or four months, but at least when evil days came upon him, he was always well dressed and also he had enough to pawn at times, which was very useful. As a matter of fact when he went up to Aberdeen, he must have looked quite a dandy. He introduced the trilby hat to Aberdeen I may tell you, it hadn't been seen before it appeared on his head. He worked as you know at the University, he wasn't awfully good at getting through the systematic examinations and he took a long time. He also became a Christian, remember he was a Jew and he was baptised and confirmed on the same day in St. Andrew's Episcopal Cathedral, it is St. Andrews I think isn't it? And then he became a missionary, he joined the church, no the universal mission to central Africa, and he went out to Africa. His father I may tell you when he heard of his conversion, he rent his clothes and said prayers for the dead, and as far as he was concerned, my father was dead. It must have been a long journey by boat of course, and they arrived in Zanzibar, after I don't know how many weeks, but by that time my father could speak Swahili fluently. He learnt that on board ship, he had a great taste for tongues, and he was very good at them. He told me that when all new comers to the mission, when they arrived in Zanzibar, were taken to the house of an old African, and it was a great honour to meet him. He had been one of Livingstone's servants, and brought the body down to the coast with the rest of them, so that Dad always felt that was a great thing that he had met this man. Then they walked, they walked solidly, there was no means of transport until they reached where they were going. If you can get hold of an old atlas, published before the First World War, you will see where he went. He went to German East Africa, which was administered by Germany as a colony and there he worked in the mission, in the hospital. Now remember he wasn't qualified but in those days, an unqualified practitioner was allowed. When hard times came to him in Aberdeen, he worked as a locum or an assistant to Doctors, round about Aberdeen, and in Aberdeen for all I know, earning sufficient money to carry on with his work, studies. It was allowed in those days and with his enormous experience, he found no difficulty in doing the work. Well he was there in Central Africa,. in German East Africa and he told me about that life there. Administered as it was from Germany, they had Governors or Administrators or something there and there was one man who was there, when Dad was there, and when you read books about Germany and their colonists, and especially Africa there is one man's name who always crops up, and it always has the adjective 'infamous' attached to it and that was Karl Peters. He was a most wicked man and Dad told me of one incident where, he overreached himself. He had several African wives, and one of these eloped with one of the mission boys, an African, of out, I don't know where. Karl Peters went off after them and brought them back and crucified them. Not long after, he wrote to the Bishop of the mission, telling him that he proposed to visit them at the mission. Whether it was a tour of duty or just going to the mission I don't know, but Bishop had heard of course, knew all about what had happened and he wrote to Karl Peters and he said, that before he came he wanted to know if it were true what he heard about him, about this boy and woman. Karl Peters didn't answer that bit, but he wrote again saying that on a certain day he would be there. He came, but the mission gates were closed against him, he was not admitted and the Bishop wrote home to Germany and reported the matter, and Karl Peters was brought back to Germany. Following him came an excellent man Von Paul, Dad remembered him with great affection and said what a splendid man he was. Then unfortunately Dad went down sick, with dysentery and he was invalided home with a dysentery abscess of the liver, and he was a very sick man. He was taken into the Infirmary eventually and his abscess opened and drained and he recovered, but he didn't recover sufficiently for the mission to send him back to Africa. They said they didn't think he was fit enough and so he remained at home, but they continued paying for his keep, his, all his studies and so on and Dad said afterwards he paid them back everything he had to owe them. But meanwhile, I know he was very hard up before that, before he went to Africa, I think. He lived he told me on ten shillings a week. He shared a box bed with another student and on hot nights they would toss up to see who could sleep at the outside of the bed and not right up against the wall. I don't know whether the student, he never told me who it was he shared with, but I think he must have come from the country, because they lived principally on oatmeal, and sheep's head. Dad always had a great affection for sheep's head, at least he told me so. He said you could do anything with it and it lasted ages and so he carried on, but he did one thing and that was, he brought back from Africa something. I don't know if it was a plant, a drug, I mean a root or a leaf or what, but it was called papana and he, and Professor McWilliam investigated this plant or whatever it was. They, in the laboratory at Marischal, they went at it to discover its properties and its uses and that's where he, this recent thing comes in. It was an amazing thing. He could digest anything. Dad had it made up into a pill by Duncan Flockis the druggist, and it was his own pill and he gave me a good supply of them when I started up on my own, and when it was finished, his supply he had, I wrote to Duncan Flockis and asked for more of these pills. But they wrote back very sternly and said 'This was a private prescription and if I were to get any of those pills, I must have permission from the person who originated the pills:! And so Dad had to write and say that it was alright for me to have them. The thing that Dad said principally about that pill was that it could digest gristle, it was a perfectly marvellous pill to take with you if you were going to a banquet or a feast or something. Evidently that's how Dad came across it in Africa, getting .... with his stomach perhaps didn't suit all the food that he ate, but this thing did the trick and it really was remarkable. I took it with me, a good supply, when I went out to Iran. I never gave it to the Persians because after all the Persian stomach must be used to its own food, but it was an absolute godsend to the Europeans. The Bank Managers and people like that whom I met, in Iran, and who enjoyed Persian food, it is delicious but some of it is very rich. Its not like Indian food, it is not hot, there are no curries but there are some remarkable dishes which are frightfully good but very very rich, and you had to be very careful how you eat those because of your inside. I presented these pills to the various English people who went out to Persian dinners and long to be able to survive them the next day. Not because there were bad food or anything but some of the things were very rich and very tempting, and I remember very well when Reg Iliff, who was our clergyman in Khairman, he was head of the boys school in Khairmam, and he was promoted to go to Isfahan, to be head of the Stewart Memorial College there. And Reg came to me and he said, "I'm going to have to go through an enormous number of farewell dinners, with my pupils in their homes, and I shall die if I have to eat them all. I must have your pills", and he did and survived. As Dad always said was "It will digest gristle". Now here is the funny bit. They worked it out, Professor McWilliam and Dad and it must have got into the Farmacia, I suppose Professor McWilliam did that. Anyhow, in the last fortnight, here in Stamford, I listen in to the Radio 4, and they have a programme one night a week called Medicine Now, or something like that. Well I think it was about a fortnight ago or three weeks possibly, when they were talking about the difficulty of helping people who have had an accident, some sort of strain, something, which would injure the vertebrae and the cervical nerves might come up, poke their way through the holes in the vertebrae. And it was very difficult to get them back and of course the patients suffered terribly about these things. Because, and what made matters infinitely worse, was that they said that the nerve that had poked through got surrounded, coated with gristle and they couldn't and nobody could poke this back again. But said they joyfully, on the radio, I have no television of course can't see anyhow, they said they had got this papana and discovered that it softened and got rid of gristle, and so they were coating these nerves with the papana, and a miracle was happening, the nerves were being able to poke back again. But I laughed, because it sounded as though it had never been heard of before, and I'd heard of it for at least 60 years and it must be nearly a 100 years old, because Dad when he was in Africa, he must have been either the late 1880's or the beginning of the 1890s, so it was quite a good thing. And I can remember so well Dad saying to me, it will digest gristle believe me and it did. You had to take it not at the beginning of a meal, not at the end of the meal, but in the middle of the meal and you were absolutely safe for whatever you ate, there was no indigestion. So that's something worth knowing. I have just been thinking about what happened to the women who went through medicine when I did and just before, and after, while we still had the big classes of women. They couldn't get jobs in hospitals anyhow, nobody wanted them once the men were back, 5o what they did was, they either went into general practice or they went back to Marischal and took the Dph. A lot of women did that. In our own little gang of six, five of us did general practice and only one Teeny Lane it was, she did, she went back and took her Dph, but Jean Ritchie carried on as an assistant and then had her own practice in Yorkshire. Chris Care did exactly the same thing in Nottingham, and so did Gerty Angus, who married Jumbo Craig. They did the same in Aberdeen Beston Barr I know did general practise until she married and I was the other one as well. So that is what happened to us all. I remember I didn't see much of the fifth year students when, or rather the first year students, when I was in my final year but I found out that there were very few women in deed taking medicine then. I don't know if , as many as ten doing it at that time, there was no call for the woman, and the women had stopped coming to do medicine. We ourselves, there was one thing we did enjoy in Aberdeen apart from the university and the things that went on there, and that was being able to get to the theatre, at His Majesty's, where we saw some splendid actors. All the best people in London used to come up for this, I saw Henry Ainleigh, and Mattheson Lang, and Forbes Robertson, Matthew Harvey, Martin Harvey and who else was there. There was somebody else who was awfully good too, they were all terribly good and they came up. We had the Gilbert and Sullivan people up, we had the Amara Opera Company, we had the Karl Rosa Opera Company and we used to go off on a Saturday afternoon and pay our one and tuppence, I thick it was i to go in at early doors, the gallery where we sat in the front row, that's what you did do if you got your early doors, so that you could lean your elbows on the ledge in front of you, because there were no backs to the seats. One night, and one night only, oh it must have been the daytime, I was passing rather a day not a night, passing the theatre just as the last person went in for the matinee, it was ninepence I think it was then. And they were doing the Val Kari, and I joined them. Now the ceiling of the gods slopes and I can tell you that I never saw anybody's face from the time I got in to the time I went out. People in crossgartered hose, padded to and fro across the stage. They shouted, they yelled, they cried, they sang. Once or twice they sat down and then I saw somebody up to the waist, but I never saw anybody's face uptil,X the end of the show, not at all, all the times I am afraid that is why I can never take the Val Rari seriously. In 1928 my father married again, and I felt that I could leave England or at least leave my practise. I had worked up a practise in that five and a half years I had a panel of about 100 people, and that was a lot when you thin;: I'd started from scratch. I did my schools, my infant welfare, my anti natal clinics as well, and I had actually got a practise that was worth selling, and I sold it. I sold it to two, no three Irish women, medical s, and they carried on for a bit I know, the practise has changed hands twice since that time but, it is still a woman's practise, it is still run by women. I myself offered to, for missionary work and I joined the Church missionary society, and eventually in 1929, they sent me out to Persia, as it was, Iran now. I had before in that six months, that I had with them in the training college, I took post graduate course in eye work, I learnt to do cataracts on pig's eyes I did a post graduate sort of course on midwifery, although I had done a lot of it of course, but I went on to try and see if there was anything further I could learn at Clap ton Mother's hospital. I attended the out patients and the operating block at Mild May mission hospital I got the hang of major surgery, not that I did any there, but I jolly well had to do it when I got out to Persia. I got out in March was it, March or April of 1929 and went to Bombay, went round by Long Sea, to Bombay, transshipped and went up the Persian Gulf to Busshire. We landed in Busshire one day, we started off to go up to the, to inland to the plateau's. We did not work in the Gulf at all, that was the oil company part, but we did nothing like that to! were missionaries and we went on up through the plateau, through the mountain passes to the plateau's, that's where the towns were and I was going onto Shiraz. Midway on that second day, we ran into a ambush, it was about half past five in the evening, we were told not to travel after sunset, and it certainly wasn't sunset then; but the man shot up through the door of the car. He was lying at the side of the road, shot through the arm of the British engineer who had come down to collect us, across the chest of a passenger. I was sitting at the other end, it was a van, a small van, with my arms stretched out to the windscreen, hanging on to make a little more room, and got a very nasty dum dum bullet through my shoulder. However, we went on that night, through the dark into, costaroom, under the big villages, and then the following day to Shiraz. I was there for five months, having arrived there, we were besieged by tribesmen. I didn't ,get outside the town until just before I left, which was when, August, beginning of September, Oh yes that's right, when the siege lifted, but in that time I had learnt to do a great deal, even though my arm was in a sling. To discover what it was like to deal with gun shots and people like that, tribesfolk. I was working in the hands of one of the most experienced pioneers, Dr. Emily Stuart, who I think was an Edinburgh graduate, she must have been one of the first there, I am sure. She had been out in the country over 30 years, and of course, what I learnt from her, was simply invaluable, and then on I went onto Ishtfahan and then from Ishtfahan, only just stayed two or three weeks to go to Yahtz where I was for several years with my little old caravan. It was really a caravan, the men's hospital had been rebuilt as a men's hospital but the women had to take what was left to them and it was just an old caravan site, but I was intensely happy there. We had no electricity, no running `water, no anything, but we were, I didn't mind, that was the glorious bit about it, I didn't mind. You see I had been brought up the rough way in general practise, I used to feel terribly sorry for the people who came straight out from hospitals in England, and expected an awful lot, whereas I didn't expect anything, and that made all the difference. I worked there until, yes I came home on leave in 33, yes ,home through Russia and then, we always sent our letters via Russia in those days, and I came home through Russia, and Poland and Germany to Holland, and across that way. That was the quickest way home, and then my father died in 34, 1 shall never forget poor dear .
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