Reviewed by Alannah Tomkins
Memoirs of nursing are used extensively to chart the early years of nurse professionalisation. It is less common for primary texts to cover years in the second half of the twentieth century, making this slim, privately-published book a welcome addition to the field.
Jones begins his book in a bullish or even confrontational style in relation to verifiable history, making his stance clear on page one: ‘accuracy is not the main claim with a memoir such as this … if on occasion I get things wrong, well, tough … these are my memories and if they do not tally with your memories of the period then write your own memoir.’ If you can read beyond this overt challenge, however, the book evolves swiftly into an engaging and personable narrative.
The twenty short chapters cover Jones’s experiences from the point when he started to consider nurse training to his graduation, with occasional glances forward in time which allude to his subsequent nursing career. He charts his training by considering in turn the wards where he served at Broadgreen Hospital (chest unit, urology, surgical, and orthopaedic wards among others) and the staff and patients he encountered there. Jones is rarely critical of his fellow nurses but offers some excellent anecdotes about the ways that ward staff and patients interacted with each other. He also reflects on how much changed, between when he qualified and when he retired. Incidentally, I could not better his judgement of old-fashioned nursing history, as ‘excessive nostalgia combined with selective amnesia’ (on page 134).
Quite late on in the book, Jones admits that one of his main motives in publishing his recollections was his participation in some major working-class activism under Margaret Thatcher’s first government. A march from Liverpool to London in the spring of 1981 was organised by trade-union members to protest against the then-high levels of unemployment, and Jones was recruited as a first-aid volunteer. The account he offers of the march, from the perspective of its injuries, is a unique reminder of the social context that spurred riots in Liverpool later in the same year, and gave us the landmark television series Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982.
My own interest was particularly piqued by his de facto discussion of the tensions between stereotypical masculinity and a nursing vocation. This is first raised on page seventeen, in relation to his father’s largely-silent scepticism about his choice of work. The topic is discussed more fully in chapter nine, where Jones offers an account of his own reactions to people’s disbelief, when he was repeatedly asked ‘What, a male nurse?’. He is a strong advocate for young men entering nurse training in the present, and addresses the historic, blanket assumption beyond the profession that male nurses were always gay.
There are two drawbacks with the presentation of this narrative. It contains no references at all, and while this is in keeping with the very personal account it gives, there is a case for providing some core information, for example about the history of Broadgreen Hospital, by drawing on recognised historical sources. Similarly, the script needed to be proof-read to erase typographical errors. Most of the time these are minor – a spare capital letter or a missing full stop – but page two and the phrase ‘manual kill’ had me reassessing my attitude to student nurses, until I realised that the wording should have been ‘manual skill’.
On balance this will be an enjoyable read for anyone who remembers the years of Jones’s training, whether or not they were, or became, a nurse. Its greatest value will be for historians of the future, seeking an authentic voice of twentieth-century nursing.