| Description | Interview with Dr Stella Henriques recorded on 6 September 1986 by Elizabeth Olson.
Transcript of Interview :
O Dr Henriques, why did you chose to come to Aberdeen in the first place?
H Well, my father, he studied here and my mother was an Aberdonian and her brother went through medicine here and her uncle went through medicine here so I never thought of anywhere else but Aberdeen.
O You say your father was an Aberdeen graduate, when did he graduate?
H In 1898. I don't know when he actually came to Scotland, I think it would be somewhere in the 1880s. We came over from Jamaica, I don't know why, except that it must have been a custom of some sort that they came over to Scotland, I really don't know. He told me himself that his father and mother, when he was sixteen, called him, he was one of a very large family, and said that they thought it would be a good idea if he went in for medicine. No medical history in the family or that sort of thing and he went off straight away to Kingston Public Hospital in Jamaica and enrolled as a medical student and he was the only person there for two years and that is why when he did come over he found it so difficult to do his medicine because he had being doing such a tremendous amount of general medicine and practical stuff that he found it extraordinarily difficult to do the systematic stuff. He failed his botany. I did crow over him over that because I did pass mine first go but not otherwise. But he had an enormous experience of personal stuff and it stood him is very great stead because his parents were planters in Jamaica. There would be old Portuguese, Spanish Jews who fled from the Inquisition partly. I think they landed in Brazil and worked up as Columbus discovered America. He had several languages you might say but his English wasn't of the best. He failed English dictation he told me to get into the university. He found it terribly difficult to do the systematic work, the theoretical work, because he knew all the practical. His father who had been very wealthy lost all his money in a hurricane of some sort so there was practically no money to keep him going and it was in the days of the unqualified practitioner. He could go in the holidays as he did round about Aberdeen and work as a locum for doctors, utterly unqualified as it were as far as papers were concerned and was accepted. It was a thing you could do in those days. He'd earn enough money to carry on in Aberdeen when the term started again. He did that all round Aberdeen. I suppose he worked in various places, villages and towns. I don't know where he went but he never had to trouble about money because he could always earn it because they were allowed to do that then.
O You said that he had to take Anatomy throughout his career, the course was different?
H Yes, right to their finals they still had an Anatomy paper to do and that was the thing that used to floor him. When I went up, I failed my Latin entrance exam and I stayed on six months in Aberdeen to swot it up and at the same time the war was on, that was 1917 into 1918 and the cousin I had in Aberdeen she was helping with the war work in Migvie House in North Silver Street I think it was, that was the headquarters and the head lady there was Mrs Carter who was a daughter of Sir Alexander Ogston who'd been the surgeon and daddy's professor in surgery. She told Mrs Carter about me, Mrs Carter spoke to her father who was alive and Mrs Carter had asked if he remembered Dad and he smiled and said oh yes I remember Henriques and she said why did he smile, she didn't ask him. I said I don't know but Dad told me that when you went up for your finals if you failed a subject you had to take the whole lot again.
O You couldn't resit?
H No. So Alexander determined that when he passed Dad in surgery he was not going to re-examine him and so whenever Dad appeared at the doorway for the oral exam he said 'good afternoon Mr Henriques', 'good afternoon,' and that was the finish. He refused point blank to re-examine him, he said I've passed him once I'm not going to do it again. One thing I didn't tell you that I thought might interest you, Dad was there when the first women went in for medicine, Myra MacKenzie. Dad said they were absolute beasts to her, he was ashamed when he thought of it, the dreadful life they led that women. At the lectures she would sit in front and the men would be behind. She would wear a hat, of course, - she was properly clad and he said the professors were beastly, they told their dirtiest stories and he said we all applauded and clapped and cheered. He said, "You could see that poor women, the blush come up the back of her neck to the root of her hairs and we thought this was so funny" but he said "By the end of the time there wasn't one of us who wouldn't have died for her." They respected her enormously. After I qualified in twenty three, it was in that year only two or three months afterwards, I saw a notice somewhere that the Aberdeen University dinner, the London branch were having a dinner at Gatty's in London and I said to Dad "Let's go." This was the whole university, actually it was an anniversary of George MacDonald. His son was there and he was to take the toast, but in the middle of the dinner Dad said to me "Oh we shan't fo, I shan't know anybody" and I said "Well let's go" and I was newly qualified so we went out and in the interval man after man came up and looked at Dad and said "Good God Henriques I thought you were dead long ago" and then daddy would introduced me rather proudly and they look at me and say "Do you remember Myra MacKenzie?" Everyone of those men spoke of her. I thought it was rather touching. Dad said they respected and admired her so enormously for the pluck she had.
O Would she have been a young woman of seventeen or eighteen?
H I've no idea how old she was. I think she went into general practice in some place or other but I've just no idea. You might be able to find out, you could find out. But that's when it was, it was somewhere around the 1890s, somewhere round there it was.
O That's interesting.
H It is interesting because they were beastly to her Dad said they were each ashamed to think of the way they'd played up and made her blush so and embarrassed her. They really had no feeling for her at all.
O And then you decided to come to Aberdeen University and you had to sit an entrance exam to get in?
H Yes. The English and French I was exempt because I'd passed them in the senior Cambridge but I had to take Latin and Maths. To my surprise I got through the Maths, I'm no good with figures, and failed the Latin, not that I expected to, my Latin was very bad. Dad wrote and said do not come home, stay up, this is autumn 1917, stay up and swot up your Latin. He sent me off to Stuart Thomson's Commercial School in North Silver Street I think it was. He was the most amazing man, I'm sure you much must have come across something about him. He was one of those wonderful all rounders, he could teach anything. He ran the school, I suppose they did shorthand, typewriting, accountancy and so on but he could do everything else, he taught me my Latin. There was another man there, a man who was being coached for something in the Arts line, but I don't remember what it was he was doing, and Stuart Thomson he was wonderful, he gave me things to do in Latin, exercises and what have you and a very crushing way with him as I think I told you that when I'd done something that I thought was really good he would close his eyes and say 'manifestly' and I felt so squashed. I was not allowed to have big ideas.
O So you passed the exam?
H I passed, I took that in the March.
O So when did you start?
H You could start in the Spring or the Summer. Somebody today that I was talking to thought I would start in the Summer. I said no I started in March and you certainly could do it twice a year and leave twice a year.
O What were your first term subjects?
H That was Botany. We had a number of subjects that we took at eight o'clock in the morning. Botany was one, then the following year some people did the practical Materia Medica but I didn't do that. Then there was another morning one, Public Health. It was the Medical Jurisprudence really. I liked that. These were going through the years but they were at eight o'clock in the morning then you spent your mornings in the dissecting room and lectures and anatomy. Then in the afternoon you had two. As this was a summer term I had Physics with Professor Niven. All our professors were very old because they had to stay on during the war, there was nobody else to take on in the First World War. Professor Trail would have been my father's professor in Botany and he actually died two years later and they said it was the second lot, not our lot, that killed him. They were a dreadful crowd of students that lot were, because the war was over and they were an enormous crowd doing everything. All of you did Science, Art, Medicine, everything were all in that first year subjects.
O Anyone studying Botany would go into the Botany class?
H Yes and the same thing with Physics and Zoology and Chemistry. They all did the same thing that first lot, but the second lot was such an enormous entry. Men left from the army. They were made into two classes. The professors and everybody had to do two lectures, one in the morning and one in the afternoon on the same subject. They had to be cut in half the class was so colossal. That was the second year 1919, but in 1918 we were all one class. There was a very large intake of women because, so I understood, I was never told, that it was up in Aberdeen that the Senatus got worried about the future of medical careers of profession and they went round the girls' schools and asked the headmistresses to encourage the girls to go in for medicine.
O Really?
H Yes I was told that, because I used to wonder why some of the girls went in for medicine. I knew nothing but medicine. From the age of five I had been hauled into the surgery for people to spit into basins when Dad had pulled out teeth, because you all pulled out teeth in those days. So that I knew nothing else and medicine was the one thing I wanted to do and always had. So that was easy for me but there were people who certainly had no medical background who went in for medicine and I believe that was part of the thing. Not many men had come straight from school, very few, and the rest of the men, there were quite a number, but they were all disabled, sent home from France or wherever they'd been. Dr Forbes Catto he only had one eye; and Johnny Taylor he had a jaw shot away, lower jaw and various people limped, Sandy Lyle, bless his heart. I expect you knew Sandy, he's not long died?
O Went into Clinical Chemistry?
H Yes. He was in my year and he had a bad limp so I expect he was another one. There was an awful lot like that.
O Were they embittered by their experiences or were they just glad to be back?
H No, but I'll tell you what they did feel. They felt they were old compared with us. We were young, we'd just put our hair up and our skirts were lengthened, we were all about eighteen.
O You said that was a formal thing for women?
H Absolutely. There was no short hair. I remember the first short-haired lassie, I've forgotten her name. She did have short hair, I don't know if she was in my year or the year after me, she certainly took that Chemistry class in what was my second year and she had short hair, MacRobert or something like that her name was.
O But that was unusual?
H Yes, there was nobody else with cropped heads. We all had buns and hair pins and we all wore hats. We maybe took them off but it depended on whether your hair would stay up or not. I don't suppose we wore hats in the dissecting room, in fact I'm quite sure we didn't. We all had overalls and things that we wore there. There were a lot of girls but we did have a fair number of men as well and we were all fairly well behaved. Those men I remember, that was the lot, only it was in the second year that they started the rag weeks and I remember reproaching two men who were in Agriculture and Commerce who had not done anything to help us. They were the lot that had been demobbed later and they said we are old men we can't stop to play. That's how they felt. They'd got to catch up, they'd lost those years and they'd no time to muck about with rag weeks and things like that. But it was our lot that really got the rag weeks going.
O Why? What was your aim? Did you do it for fun?
H To get some money for the hospital.
O Was the hospital in need of money?
H Yes. When I was a dresser, that would have been my third year, up in Professor Marnoch's ward you dressed patients wounds, but if they were clean wounds that he'd operated on, when you were dressing them you took off the gauze that was against the wound and put on clear sterilised gauze but you re-sterilised the next lot of cotton wool and what you'd taken off and put it back on again. We were short of stuff and we had to raise cash somehow. We didn't do it for fun I assure you we did to raise cash. We were very proud. I think we raised £1200 but I'm not quite sure and that was as much as we could raise.
O A substantial amount of money in those days.
H I traipsed up and down those tenements begging for it.
O Did you put on any activities that raised money?
H We did have a torch light thing and I was the original Stella the Bajanella. We didn't have it in the theatre, we had it on the platform in the men's union. That was the very first Stella the Bajanella and I was the Stella. That's how they took the name because I had to wear a red hood which of course I wasn't entitled to at all. They borrowed songs from all kinds of musical comedies and things, I don't know if we paid any money towards it at all. That was left in the hands of Harvey and Mac. That was Rowntree Harvery and MacAllan, they were the two that played together and they organised the thing, it was just a kind of little review. On the university it was, and we performed it in there, and it went down very well. But I hadn't a strong enough voice to sing, they realised that. I had to talk the songs and then the following year when they got His Majesty's to do it then they got somebody with a better voice, so I was out of it. We were all hard up together, that was the interesting bit. Linklater turned up, he was in the second year, but he couldn't get through his anatomy, that's why he chucked medicine. When he died, over the radio, BBC announced his death, and they said his first book was White Man's Saga. I phoned up and not that they took the slightest notice and said it was not White Man's Saga, it was White Maa's Saga. I suppose they'd done it on the tape and they weren't going to change it so they repeated White Man's Saga but it wasn't it was White Maa's Saga. It's all about Aberdeen and it even gave the anatomy paper that he couldn't pass in it. It was all about being a student in that first year or two completely and people said they recognised some of the characters. I remember Jimmy Hunter, I'm sure was in it, he was Forestry. He was one of our few married men, most men were unmarried, we only had two or three married men, that's how we remembered that they were married. I don't know if we met their wives or anything. What you had was Botany and Anatomy and Physics and I think we must have done Zoology.
O With?
H That was Professor Thomson, he was a darling, the gentlest of souls. He had his little jokes and one of them was that the worm in its very earliest days didn't live underground at all it lived on top and then when various predators came along it went below, but it liked to come up top of a night and have a peek round and said he, it was not really the early bird that catches the worm it was the belated worm that said I won't go home until morning that was caught by the bird. That was one of his little jokes and we adored him for it. He was the gentlest, kindest of souls, he was perfectly sweet. For Chemistry we had Professor Soddie. We were out of his class. He was a scientist and he had no use for us really and I had no idea what he was talking about. They had that system of having two class exams and if you get a certain percentage then you're allowed to take the professional. Well I did alright for the Botany but when it came to the Physics I had no more idea than fly, I didn't even get my sign up. Dad said it was awfully good because in his day you just went into the professional exam and if you signed and were ploughed well you'd lost your money. Whereas you see you didn't lose you money if you weren't allowed to take the exam until they were surer of you. So I had to take the whole of that wretched Physics exam out, take the whole class up again the following year.
O And how did you get through the second time?
H That's when I learned Candy's Physics for Medical Students by heart. I'd no idea what it was about but I managed to get through. Then the Zoology and the Chemistry the following year. Professor Soddy had gone to Oxford and we had a new man Professor Findlay and as far as I was concerned he was perfect, I really did understand what he was talking about and I got through without the slightest difficulty so that was something. But it held me up taking the Physics again. Most of the people who would have been doing something and did something else I didn't do because I was so anxious to get through this wretched Physics the second time. People were taking their Materia Medica practical in the mornings, the eight o'clock class, I didn't touch it, I said no until I've got through this thing I'd better not take on something I can't do. We had Materia Medica class and that is where you came across for the very first time I imagine in the history of modern medicine the business of the psychoanalysis. This is where the shell-shocked soldiers came in. They'd never had anything before like that. At the very beginning they called it psychoanalysis they didn't call psychiatric treatment or anything like that.
O Who taught that?
H The Materia Medica professor, Professor Marshall, he taught it to us. We were taught how to examine people. There was word association, that was the kind of thing they taught us. It was the very first of its kind, well for that war anyhow. There was nothing else, the unfortunate shell-shocked was perhaps shot as a coward but it wasn't that at all and they'd just begun to realise this and bring out this shell-shocked idea but it had taken a long time to get going. The beginning of that came in the Materia Medica class and you learned and you learned in the practical how to make up medicines. You learned how to put the cork in the bottle, how to put the label across the bottle properly, how to write up the label and put it at the right angle. You then finally having made up your medicine and poured it in you then folded it up in white paper and sealing waxed it and there was a proper bend in the thing that had to be perfect and the professor came down and looked at it to see if it was right. We were brought up that way.
O Did it stand you in good stead or did you never do it again?
H Oh no. When I was in general practice I did them up in white paper but I made up all my medicines. In Scotland they didn't. In Scotland the general practitioner wrote a prescription, in England you always made them up. You made up all your medicines yourself and that's what I did. I didn't roll pills, I could get them made up at the druggist's but ointments I learned how to make up, Lasser's and jolly good useful that was because I once tried to make a steak and kidney pudding and put in too much water and there was no more flour to add to it and I took a spatula and I dealt with that thing as though I was dealing with Lasser's paste. It turned out alright. I couldn't roll it because it was sticking to the roller. I never forgot it. Then you had two exams in Anatomy, your first and your second, then when you got your second then you left the drain and went up to the Infirmary. Up till then you'd done nothing in the medical line at all it was all learning basic stuff and because of that you didn't get to know everybody. You were there in the Anatomy class for two years so when you went in you were the new person and there was already a year ahead of you in there doing their second year and then when you became second year the first year came up and because of that you did know people on either side of your year but after that you knew nobody because you went off to the Infirmary and you started as a dresser. I was in Professor Marnoch's ward. One of the things that was so agonising was that everybody had known Dad.
H Now what were we talking about?
O You were telling me about being a dresser
H That's right, yes well Professor Marnoch he had been a contemporary with my father too, and this is the thing that worried me, when one time I came up to Aberdeen after I qualified, old Booth, who used to be the attendant on the surgical classroom and so on, he had retired. Now old Boothy, once when he discovered who I was, he remembered my father, "the skiting in and out" said he and one day he produced for me a programme of a concert that the students had given with Professor Marnoch ,then Mr. John Marnoch, doing a violin solo and my father singing a comic song. Yes, and he took me round at the back of the classrooms the surgery classroom, and there is a long corridor running right at the back very narrow and on it was pinned up innumerable programmes and heaven knows what not and when I came up I said "Booth is retired, who on earth has got hold of that stuff?" it is incredible the amount of stuff he had got over the years, and nobody could tell me and you see it was, it is a great loss.
O Yes it would have been.
H A tremendous loss because it gave a history of the students as he had seen them and seen them grow up and all the rest of it, I thought it would have been so well worth, and nobody seemed to know anything about it, I suppose I, perhaps I was one of the few who had been taken round behind the scenes and see something or other that he had got pinned up and so on, he had all these programmes. He knew everybody, everybody from their earliest days at the University like that, he would have been invaluable for this sort of thing.
O Yes indeed, my goodness.
H Marvellous old bird he was. Well anyhow, that was what would happen. Professor Marnoch, he was the man who was so keen on assepts; we had that drummed into us, to scrub and scrub and scrub, and the sister in charge of the ward, was Sister Aida Savage. She was tall and very impressive, not beautiful, but, by Jove, she kept us in order. We needed it, mind you.
It was in 1919, yes, I joined the Dramatic Society, I was the only one of our gang (I was always the odd one) and I enjoyed it, and at that time, they had, before, when I first came up, it was only a women's Dramatic Society - it had been a mixed and then it had folded up and then they started again. They did the Midsummer's Night Dream and Professor Harrower saw this, and he was Professor of Greek then, and he thought: "there's talent here, I will see about getting a Greek play done", so he re-translated the Antigone of Sophocles and then he looked round for action. And he invited all the Dramatic Society people, and he got a professional producer and he put out a notice wanting men who were interested to join up - mainly medicals as a matter did join up, don't know where the arts people sat at all, they were rather slow coming forward - and they had a great reception or do at which the cast was cast you see. Unfortunately I couldn't go because it was just holiday, it was just end of term and I was going to go home to Kent you see, and I couldn't go. I thought, "well that has put paid to me, I'll go and sell programmes perhaps", then of course there was three months holiday. Beginning of October 1919, there was a train strike, I managed to get up to London from home, the sailors were driving that train. But then to get to Aberdeen, you couldn't do it by train so I came up by sea, 'Aberdeen Steam Navigation Company' and you had two nights and a day on board and it was lovely, beautiful weather. And when I got into my digs, (I had got new digs) there, on the mantelpiece, was a letter saying would I undertake the part of Ismene in the Antigone? I had no idea, I didn't know what the Antigone was about, but I did roughly know that she got into trouble because she wouldn't let the vultures eat her brother's dead body, but that was all I knew, because there was a picture of it. I seem to remember the picture above her sitting beside this body and the vultures in the distance but I knew nothing about it, I had no idea what she had been up to, or who she was, or anything about her.
O And you were forced to?
H Well I said, "Alright" you see, "of course, what's happened?", and they said "Oh well they cast Dorothy Mitchell for the job and she got cold feet and drawn back." They hadn't had any rehearsals by then, it was holidays, they were just doing the casting, and then of course they'd scraped the bottom of the barrel, and I'd come up, so that was that. Well we rehearsed, Parry Gunn took us through the stuff and he was a professional producer and then away he went to produce other people. He got us into the thing of what to do and to learn our lines and what have you, and we rehearsed on Saturday afternoons and we did it behind closed doors at Marischal, and in fact it became quite a social event, we brought little jam tarts or something. The war was still on you see. N,o well the war was over by 1919 that's right, but this is when we were doing it and in the end we did produce it. Parry Gunn appeared just a week or two before the performance, he was horrified at us. Of course we'd lost all the things we ought to have been told to do, and he tore us all to shreds, I know he had me nearly in tears. However, we did it, and we performed it in the Music Hall, we had an enormous facade on the outside of the Palace and there it was, and it was an arts girl who did Antigone, I can't think what her name was, but you'll find it in the programme. [Frances Mordaunt]
O In the programme that you gave me
H Yes probably it will be there, she was terribly short-sighted I don't know how she managed without her glasses, but she did, she had to. Parry Gunn had never produced a Greek play before and he was thrilled at the opportunity. He spent hours in the Picture Gallery looking at the statues and see how the hair was done and everything you know, and he also wanted to produce it as far as possible as a Greek tragedy would have been done. Of course we weren't wearing masks, but he thought that if we had as few gestures as possible and those were to be significant gestures and not to trot about and the whole thing really was to be done on your voice, and that was the thing. Because you'd have been behind masks if we were doing it in Greece, or as Greeks, and so on. And it went off frightfully well. We were terrified, of course, very expensive seats, I think 5 shillings or perhaps half a crown was the cheapest, which was a lot of money then, but the Aberdonians turned up and the students turned up to mock at this thing, of course, we were terrified. The Saturday afternoon matinee we were just about trickling with terror, because we were just were feared to death. Mercifully in the, if you could ever lay hands on the Alma Mater, the magazine, for that thing, they said in that they came to mock and remained to pray, they were so taken aback at the thing, it was so utterly unusual to them or anybody, and it went off awfully well and Parry Gunn, he was so pleased with us. He said he had produced many plays amateur and professional but he had never met such team work, because we weren't doing it for ourselves, we were trying to make a good job of it for the University. Now the following year it was a hash because they followed it up with Agamemnon and the Choephoroe, both plays together on the same night. Helena Davidson and I were leaders of the chorus in the Choephoroe but you needed a Cly … or Clytemnestra - I don't know how you pronounce that - for the Agamemnon you see, for him being murdered when he got back from Troy with what was her name, Cassandra, yes. And the thing was that Parry Gunn felt we were really too young to understand such a very heavy part, which of course he was quite right, so they sought round to find somebody to do it and they picked out a lady who was quite famous in the local amateur dramatics. And she saw this was the opportunity of a lifetime, they made her come to one or two lectures, to make out she belonged to the university, but she got her own ideas how this was going to be done and of course it was for her own glorification and was going to be tremendously dramatic and of course Parry Gunn didn't want this. He had the most terrible time, I don't think he ever really got his way with her, - did manage to stop her screaming. But otherwise, she stood out like a sore thumb, it was such a pity. He said "you know I'd done better to leave her out and get one of you folk, you could have done it." He was really disappointed about it, which was rather sad because it was very good and it was only after that that Glasgow decided to do a Greek play I may tell you, we were the first to do it for what 400 years.
O My goodness
H Yes, it was something like that so that it was really quite a thing to do.But in the meanwhile, we had the Armistice, I haven't told you. That was 1918 of course, Monday 11 November. And we, I never had the money for a newspaper, none knew that the war was coming to an end. If you hear of things now or read of things they tell you that people were realising the war was coming to an end, but we didn't understand that. It had been going on so long that we just didn't know. And so on that Monday morning when the bell tolled at 11, it just meant to us that was the end of an hour and that the next class would be starting. But as we were at chemistry lab thing we went on for 2 hours so we never moved and then somebody burst in and said "The war's over!" Good gracious. Well, of course, we fled down the stairs and chaos, all work abandoned that day and the men were absolutely dotty, of course, at the thought that it was over. And so - how on earth we managed to acquire the garments - we had a fancy dress march with the torches that night and then, of course, the next day - we were never content - we decided we'd have the day off and the Senatus said "no, you'll go back to work." We said, "no we weren't going", and we didn't go but they had their own way back on us. I know Professor Trail looked at us very soberly and he said "The war is not over yet, this is only an Armistice" but of course we couldn't understand this, we were dotty at the thought of it. Anyhow they had their own back on us, because when they did the exams, they asked the questions out of all the stuff we ought to have been getting the day that we didn't go.
O Oh dear, that was unkind.
H There were some good people who had gone, you see, so they were able to answer the questions. They got their own back on us, but at the end of the week half of us were down with Spanish flu, we were all down and that was I think the cold weather and everything and, oh the place was, everywhere was the flu, it was really a marvel to me that no one died up here, because we didn't realise it and I remember Helena Davidson, (I was telling someone who knew Helena Davidson this afternoon), I said "She collapsed, they put her to bed". Of course she lived in the town, her father was one of the masters at the Grammar school, I think, and I believe they put her to bed in her clothes, long before they could get them off her, she was so bad. Chris Kerr, her parents, her father was Rector at the Academy at Elgin, and they sent for her mother to come to her digs and so on. I got it, landed in bed, felt like death warmed up, I didn't - I said "Oh this is flu you know" and that was that and I had just changed my digs, gone into St. Mary's Street, and my folk, my friends, didn't know where I had got to, and they had to hunt for me. Then Jean Ritchie appeared at the end of the week and she said, "Get up! There are three exams next week." So I crawled out, not knowing, and went to these exams. I did not acquit myself very - I got through - but only just. And then wrote to my fathe,r and he was horrified, because he was really nearly killed with it at home. They told me at home that for nearly a fortnight he never ate, except breakfast in the house. He ate in whatever house was food on the table. He just went from house to house, he said he had no time to argue with anybody, the important thing was to put them on their fluids. He got medicine for them - and they were not to go back to work till he said, and if they started to argue, he said "Go to hell" and walked out. And then they sent letters of apology and implored him to come back again, but that is what it was like and of course the war didn't finish, I mean it killed more people with that Spanish flu than it did during the war, really. And in Persia, (oddly enough I heard this on the radio only 2 or 3 days ago) some man said, "I don't think it is realised that the war didn't finish till 1919 because the British Army was still fighting the Bolsheviks and in Persia they had the South Persian Rifles." Because I met men, when I was in Persia, who had been in the South Persian Rifles, and our almoner, Huschmandrod, he was one and he told me how he had ridden miles with the body of his dead - there were British Army officers who officered them - and he rode miles with this body across his horse, so that the tribesmen shouldn't mutilate this body you see. And there are war graves there in Hamadan, I know ,and Shiraz. We've got British soldiers buried there from the flu.
O Who died after the army, from the flu?
H From the flu, it killed ever so many of those men, really.
O World-wide
H And that was happening, and Dunstaforce you see was happening in the north. Dunsterville was the general, - he was the origin of Kipling's Stalky, I've heard him talk about this - and they, he went, they went into Russia to fight the Bolsheviks
O And that didn't finish till later.
H No it didn't finish till 1919.
O You'd said that you'd lived in various digs, mostly in the Crown Street area?
H Yes, I was first of all in Crown Street itself, that was were there had been the old vicarage I think
O You said that wasn't very clean?
H She was very grubby and then I went …
O Tell about the soup!
H Oh the soup well, she was a good cook but her eyesight wasn't too good and when she made a vegetable soup you also got a well cooked maggot or two, but it is extraordinary what you do … and I knitted. knitted a mitten a night for the Red Cross as it were, to get things out to the front but we did all that sort of thing
O Did you take holiday jobs?
H No you couldn't. There were no jobs to take. I worked all this thing in between Migvie House. I did bales of 500 pairs of socks and did them up in hessian and sewed them up and sent them to the front you know and that kind of thing, but there were no holidays. I took a week off at Christmas to go home and see Dad and I had had this flu and I looked like death warmed up. It doesn't suit me to be thin, at least in Dad's eyes. He was horrified, I was under 8 stone and looked and felt awful. I really felt dreadful, I got a kind of claustrophobia, I'd get into the classroom and then couldn't bear it and go out before the lecture started.
O Horrid.
H And I used to start to cough, well that was a change of atmosphere, you were cold outside, you came in and immediately, I really felt, I didn't clear up for, I should think, nearer six months. I came back to St. Mary's place, that was where I was for 4½ years, with a letter from Dad imploring Mrs Grade to take care of his motherless daughter and to see that I got tripe.
O Which would be good for you?
H Dad was very keen on tripe, I was brought up on tripe, and I remember Mrs. Grade coming through with this open letter in her hands and she said "Do you like tripe Miss Stella?" and I said "I love it Mrs. Grade" "Oh well" she said "You shall have it" And then she said a thing that has been my acid test for years: "I have often noticed that the people that say I don't like tripe, are not quite sure of themselves." And so I often think to myself, when I hear a person say "Oh I couldn't stand the ...." I think, "Mrs. Grade would have a word for you!"
O Yes that's lovely. What did your digs cost do you remember?
H Yes, I paid a pound a week in the grubby digs, Dad used to send me five quid, I had 5 shillings a week pocket money, you see, and then in this other place, the price went up. But the grubby one, I must say ,they did do my washing and gave me firing but in this, no I had to find a washer woman and coal for the fire and a sack cost you one and ten pence, a sack - that would be a hundredweight I suppose, I don't know if it was.
O Probably
H It lasted me a fortnight, and you could get, and I can't think whether it was twenty for a shilling peat, and that was a great help because once you got your fire going, you could put it on it smouldered all night, you see you didn't have any Common Room, you lived and slept in that room and ate in that room, and you didn't light your fire until you came home at tea time. I used to bolt up those steps and down again between Bridge Street and Crown Terrace, you know, and come home for lunch every day.
O Really?
H Oh yes, every day and up and down, I did it, and I'd all the short cuts.
O And no Union to have luncheon?
H No no no, I couldn't have afforded it.
O Was there a Woman's union?
H No, there was just one room, you had one room in which you hung your clothes and there was a lavatory and washbasins off and another room in which you sat. Well, the furniture where it came from, it was somebody's old throw out sofas, the springs all coming through, I never sat in it. You hung your clothes off and went off to your work but the only people who ever sat in it were people who played bridge. There was a table and the bridge players, but I am no bridge player, so I never sat. I never used, and there was a hole in the wall that you could lower as a speaking tube or little telephone, you could order from the men's side a cup of tea, which was poked through and you paid for it. I never did it, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. We had no other means of eating at all. The men had a union, what they had in it I've no idea. They had a lovely large room that we used to have shilling hops in, and dance in, and a piano, and then there was another room, well, the other room really led onto the stage at the end, there was a platform - stage thing and they did boxing. I remember going, one of the men in the digs (this was two or three years later) was a boxer - a lightweight. I remember he borrowed my gloves, he said it tightened his hands inside his gloves, or something, and he said, he wished we'd come and watch, so I went. Oh and there was a balcony in the men's union, that's right, because I remember sitting up in the balcony watching this boxing, and so, and we had these concerts, and I suppose there were debates too.
O Did you go to that?
H I can't think I did very often.
O You said there was a women's Medical Society?
H Yes, there was a women's Medical Society, everybody belonged to that, the medicals. And we read papers to each other or we got folk to come and speak and, I think I told you, Dr Innes - Mrs Innes - she gave us a marvellous lecture on nerves in general practice and she was wonderful because it was just what I needed when I did start in general practice. She said, and so truly, she said "You know with men they've no patience with a women's nerves, they'll say "Oh well you've got nerves, you see" and hand you out a prescription and she said you can have a draw full of prescriptions but it doesn't make you feel any better, you have got to find out why you are feeling like that." And when I was in General Practice I got an awful lot of this because, for one thing, you got an awful lot of sailor's wives because I was down in Gillingham near Chatham and the headquarters the […] you know and sailor's you see would bring their wives and put them into digs with them but then they didn't see a great deal of their wives or they might have gone off on commission somewhere. And these women were very lonely and then they'd get all worked up and nerve racked, and so on, so they came and talk to me, and I just listened.
O And you found that?
H I found that that helped them, and I had a very nasty, but very good, nerve tonic that Dr Gadsby gave me when I was doing the district, when we had to do that in the Upperkirkgate and around there, you know those slums there. Well they had, you see, an outside dispensary and it was then that Dr. Gadsby gave me that prescription and, my word, it made my practice, nobody could become addicted to it, but it got them better, that was the important thing. Yes. And the unfortunate thing is I cannot get it made up now. They say they haven't the ingredients, not that they are unusual, it's just they can't be bothered now, it's all tablets, but you cannot get addicted, it was not nice enough, it wasn't a tablet, they swallowed it and I swallowed it myself when I got worked up, I used to think it was about time I had a bottle of this, and I took a bottle and I was alright again. It was very very good. I introduced it to Persia when I went out to Persia, I put the Persians on that, oh dear me yes. Yes, it was good and that was Dr Gadsby.
O Did you enjoy the district dispensary?
H Oh yes, but I was ignorant, but the thing was, I worked so hard at home. I never had a holiday, now I come to think of it, because the moment I got home, I had to sit in my father's house. Consulting room morning and go round with him on his rounds to see the patients, and afternoons surgery, evening surgery. If I wanted to go to a dance it was with great distress that he let me off, and if I got home and found he had gone up to a confinement, cause you did all that in the house, I'd go up after him, in my dance frock and put a pinafore over me and sit with the lady while he talked with the husband down below, until it was time and then he came upstairs. So I worked, I used to say I worked harder in the holidays than ever I did in Aberdeen. I came back to relax!
O My goodness.
H But I worked very hard and I learnt such an awful lot you see. As Dad said "This is of the great point, everybody is different, you can see half a dozen people all with the same ailments, the same night but they are all differen.t" Now I had all that drummed into me, this is where I learnt so much.
O So you would have seen yourself as being a Doctor, training to be a Doctor, when you went up to university. Did you see yourself as anyway pioneering being a woman doctor, or was it too late for that?
H Well I was a pioneer.
O You were indeed.
H Way down in Gillingham there, the men doctors wouldn't speak to me
O Really?
H No, no, no. You see the first thing that happens when you qualify - oh there is one other thing I ought to tell you, Daddy and I made history. When I was going up for my finals, Dad said he was blowed if he was going to have the same degree as mine. He was an MB CM, it was what they called Old Regulations, you will sometimes see 'Old regs.' under a thing, and that was the Old Regulations, they use a Bachelor of Medicine but a Master of Surgery. He was going to get his MD. Well, you didn't have to do a clinical examination under the Old Regs. so he wrote a thesis on diphtheria and he learnt Greek and he went to London and he took an examination in Greek in London. They sent the papers down to London, and it was sent up and he was passed, so he and I were capped together.
O Really
H Yes, we were. And I remember Sir George Adam Smith when he shook hands, he said "I have never done a father and daughter in the same time", cause he was done first as an MD and then I followed on when the MB's were being done. But they had never had anybody do that before, so that was that, we made history that time. What happened was, Daddy was also, he also was beyond the pale because he was Medical Officer for a club. What happened was Lloyd George had started The Panel for the Working Man, but there was nothing for his wife and children, and so a lot of these what they called, Friendly Societies, were got up so that they paid a certain amount each week and so that the wives and children were looked after. But this was considered very derogatory by the ordinary professional man. You were quite beyond the pale, you were a club doctor, make no notice. Daddy used to laugh, oh I wish he were alive today because he used to say: "State medicine will come my child and then we'll all be club doctors" and it is perfectly true but it wasn't then unfortunately. They actually signed a round robin putting Dad beyond the pale, and because I was his daughter, (I was living in the house which was provided by the club, for Dad you see). And so - Dad and I always hoped we would work together - (I would have worked for nothing cheerfully to be with him) however Dad, cheerfully, without thinking one day, told one of the committee members of the club that he hoped the day would come when I qualified that we should be working together. This man reported this to the Chairman, Dad was ticked off good and proper. "How dare he presumed to think that he could do such a thing as have his daughter with him." They weren't having a woman in the club either. So there we were. So Dad didn't tell me this, he was very upset, but he said "Right, they don't want her, they shan't have her." And when he came up to be capped with me, he said "When we go down, I have taken two rooms for you in Canterbury Street and you'll start there." And that is what I did, and I made a practice. I'd been with him about …, living in the house, and I - the BMA write to you and say "Now that you are a doctor you must join the BMA." But you had to put in your application through the local committee. And the local committee were not having a woman doctor, so they picked on me. First of all they wrote and said "Was I working with my father?" I said "No, I was living in the house as my father's daughter, I had my place somewhere else". Then something else cropped up, down they plunged on me. It didn't matter what I did they were on me and in the end I withdrew my application, and I did not join the BMA till 1948 or 49, when I was in Yorkshire. It was no good and we never … none of those men ever spoke to you. Well, after I had been in practice for (perhaps this is boring you?) in any case, after I had been in practice for about a year, less than that, the club decided that I was a rival practitioner. I was to get of their house, and so out I had to clear. Now I never had a home after that. I took a funny little place for about a year, it was jammed in between a fried fish shop and a garage but I had a little flat upstairs, and slept there and so on, and then got a rented house down in the town.
O So that it was very hard for you?
H Oh I managed. I had a housekeeper, and thank heaven I was at least able to consult Dad when I got things I didn't know what to do with. The sort of thing you got was this. When you never washed, if you washed your hair, remember your hair was long, everybody had long hair, when you washed their hair, you did not go out until it was properly dry otherwise you got neuralgia. And I had a woman who went out and got her head, got neuralgia, and it wasn't neuralgia, it was a kind of cephalalgia, it was the skin of a head. She was in agony, she did not know what to do with herself, there was no sleep, there was no anything for her, and this appalling pain. I tried everything I could think of and I had got some very good prescriptions for paints, painting on, no good, nothing. So I phoned Dad and I said "What am I to do for this poor soul?" He said "Take your ethyl chloride and go and spray her head and freeze her scalp." And I did, and she stopped immediately. He always knew what to do, that was the wonderful bit about him.
O Just experience.
H He was never at a stump for anything. He was invaluable, so that that's what happened, in the surgery. You did have two surgery classes, you had it in your third year and then again in your final year and then of course there was Professor Ashley Macintosh
O Do you remember him?
H Oh yes, his nails were bitten down to the quick.
O Were they?
H Excitable little man but a very fine little man, but of course he was the nerve specialist for the whole of the area and we saw cases that you never saw again in your life of nervous diseases, because they were sent to him. I remember getting, incurring great wrath on my head because I said to the girl I shared my digs for three years with Bess Dunbar, and I said "I do wish we didn't get all these nervous diseases, I know they are very interesting but we'll never see them in General Practice. I do wish we could have bronchitis" And she was furious cause she said it was all so interesting but then she was of a medical background. She was, one of her sisters - she was one of seven sisters I think, and two more came after who did do medicine - but the first five or so had done, were in Arts. One of them married Ian Innes, do you know Ian Innes, he had a son who also became something too. Ian Innes, oh he was quite a big one in the BMA, really. They were in England. I always remember it because they had a baby, a son, and Bess became an aunt and I said "Oh write and ask them how many teeth the child has got?" you see. And she said "babies aren't born with teeth", I said "Oh indeed, they are born with teeth" And he was born with two teeth!
O Really?
H But you see my father told me, I told you he went to Africa with the UMCA, into what was German East Africa, in those days, as a missionary - it was in the middle of his medicine that he went. He went because he could get through, anyhow he became a Christian because he was born a Jew. He became a Christian in Aberdeen and he went out with them and he came back with this dysenteric abcess of the liver. Well, then he married mother so that was all right - and qualified, but I remember him telling me that in Africa if a baby were born with teeth, that's how I know, it was sent to the crocodiles. And so were twins, that is the sort of thing you remember. And so when I heard of Bess's nephew arriving, I said "ask how many teeth he's got." He had two, and I said to his mother, years and years, later when he was a grown man, yes I saw him at one of the receptions we went to, I can't remember when, and I saw his mother then and I said, I asked how many teeth that baby had, she said "My word, he bit me when I was breast feeding him", she remembered.
But that was the time, and they wouldn't have me and then.
O But in the medical school it had been alright?
H Oh there was no trouble.
O No trouble there?
H No trouble whatsoever, never and I belonged to the University Club in London, you see, we used to come up for the dinners then.
O Which University Club?
H The Aberdeen one.
O The medical one?
H No, it was Aberdeen University.
O The Alumnus Association?
H Yes something like that, because that George McDonald thing you see was really all the arts people were there. I shall never forget it because the poor man was as deaf as a post and people got up and made speeches about his father and then poor wretch, having not heard a word of it went and said it all over again. And I remember I looked at Dad and Dad looked at me, and I remember the man across the table, I don't know who he was, but we said "We'll have to go, we'll miss our last train." He said, "Mine went long ago!"
O Thank you very much ... and thank you for giving me a second crack at the whip.
H No that was the best I could do.
O Did you play sport or did that not ...?
H No, Just as we went round today on the bus and we came near, out I don't know where it was, it was where they used to have the sports field, I suddenly recognised it. "Oh I said this was the one time I ever came over to Kings. I used to help at the tea tables when they had the sports".
That was the extent of your participation?
H No I didn't play games or swim or do anything at all
End of Interview
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