大象传媒

Reg's family went from relative wealth to extreme poverty after his father, an artillery man who had lost a lung in WW1 died from an infection in the other one. Reg was 9. He left home at 14 and after working as a radiographer in Leeds General infirmary, a friend suggested he joined the hospital branch of the T.A. The medical staff stayed together as an RAMC unit for much of the war.

The unit went to Etaples in the bitter winter conditions of 1939 as the 18th General Hospital. Boots froze to the floor in the Nissan huts and had to be removed with a mallett! The ground proved too frozen for him to erect the 80 bed marquees required. Nor had anyone any training in erecting one but I have full details now!

He was then given six men, a shovel and a pick and told to build a road from the main gate but the pick didn't really dent the ice!
The pioneer corps fortunately did very much better and he was duly equipped with a 4 kilowatt portable field X-Ray machine and generator which was rather inadequate for its prime purpose. The patients had to be strapped down to prevent movement during the long exposure times required for head or torso x-rays.

He also had a new piece of equipment called the Whetstone stereoscope which was an excellent idea in theory as it could detect foreign bodies.
In the First world war most soldiers had died from gangrene because shrapnel and bullets were not extracted early enough. He therefore spent a lot of time trying to get this to work efficiently given the generator constraints. Then one day Colonel Whalley appeared together with another very senior officer. He asked Reg how he was getting on with it. He replied that it did work but it was slow and would not be practical if there were a lot of casualties arriving. This wasn't quite what was hoped for and the officers went away. Another sargeant asked if Reg had been aware that the other officer was Brigadier Whetstone himself!

The unit escaped from Dunkirk and eventually went to Edgecomb Manor in Crowthorn where it was to treat any casualties from the Blitz that couldn't be dealt with by the London hospitals. The main hospitals coped well and he wasn't very busy.

In July 1941 he travelled to Malta in what I think was Operation Substance but his ship ran aground and he spent 3 days at Gibralta. To his shock he met a monocled officer in a British uniform but wearing the Iron Cross! No, Gib hadn't been captured. The Colonel had been awarded the medal during the Spanish Civil War for accepting wounded from a damaged German submarine which had put into Gibraltar. Unbelievable!

His years on Malta July 1941-March 1944 covered the largest and most decisive air battles of the war and the patients included pilots of all nationalities. After the fall of Crete, with invasion apparently imminent, he was issued with a rifle, something he believes would have led to summary execution if captured.

Food was desperately short and Malta, lacking any natural soil, could not grow crops. Transport became even more difficult as all the horses had been eaten. There was one unexpected bonus from the air war when a griffin vulture, struck by a spitfire fell into the sea.
Curried vulture is a magnificent dish and much recommended but those around the table were well aware that the roles of diner and dinner could soon be reversed!

He saw and photographed the Italian fleet as it approached Malta to surrender but last year he made a statement which stunned me.
The Italian Naval commanders had an excellent but I believe unpublicised personal reasons for surrender. Reg was an eyewitness at that point.
Immediately on landing the hospital was filled with numerous officers of the very top rank. Reg had never seen so much brass all at once. This was undoubtedly prearranged and his friend, the chief pharmacist, told him he had been instructed to withdraw large quantities of penicillin.
This was still in desperate short supply and something the Axis simply did not have. Syphilis was a huge problem in the armed forces of all countries and Italy was no exception but surrender meant treatment at least for those at the top.
With hindsight most people would accept the authorities were right to take the pragmatic approach!

Once the Malta blitz was over, there was far less work to do until they received a visit from Marshal Tito and Lord Gort. The hospital was to treat Yugoslav partisans. About one third of the fighters were women. Due to absence of proper medical facilties, serious wounds had been left untreated. The first one Reg saw had gunshot wounds. He had been splinted roughly with a couple of bars across his leg and he had survived for 6 months with the most appalling compound fracture of the femur. He was brought up by the Maltese orderlies to the x-ray dept and Reg was absolutely horrified to find swarms of maggots crawling all over his wounds -and his x-ray table. However the consultant surgeon was quite pleased! He had seen similar wounds in WW1 and knew that the maggots had saved the patients life by preventing gangrene.
It's strange how history repeats itself. In 2002, a long time after Reg told me this, Maggot therapy re-established itself to deal with MRSA wound infections!

Reg eventually left Malta and moved to Italy. At one point he found himself near a pocket of German resistance around Argenta and was instructed to move a large well marked hospital wagon to a newly captured position.
Noting a shortage of British Troops, he stopped at a farm building and went inside only to find it full of astonished Germans!

Unfortunately the timing had been wrong and it hadn't quite yet been captured! The German medical corps were looking after their wounded and one or two British as well. Luckily the German Sergeant spoke English and as no one had any guns, it was less threatening than might be expected. The sargeant merely handed over responsibility for all the wounded plus a portable Siemens X-ray machine, far superior to anything that Reg had seen. Reg told them to carry on working which they did.
Eventually that farmhouse became the 57th field dressing station.

When the war ended he had been away without home leave for four and a half years. He was given some short leave, then immediately posted to Belfast where there was a TB problem. He was finally demobbed in January 1946, making his war one of the longest.

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