The ‘Irish Angels’ who swapped Ireland for the UK
HAVE you ever heard of the ‘Irish Angels’? They were the thousands of women who left Ireland in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to train as nurses and work in hospitals in the UK. One was Mary Hazard, now 80. Her book, Sixty Years A Nurse, describes life as one of the NHS’s longest-serving nurses. She devoted 62 years to the health service, only retiring last year at the age of 79.
Her book starts in September, 1952. Mary was a week away from turning 18 and on her way to Putney to begin nursing training.
“Mother wanted me to train in the Mater,” she says. “She called England ‘an evil, black Protestant, godforsaken country’. But I wanted to get away from the nuns. All the hospitals in Ireland were run by nuns and I’d been with nuns since I’d started school, at four. I’d had enough.” It was common for Irish nurses to train in England. Many had done so before Mary and would after her.
By the early 1970s, there were more Irish-born nurses in Britain than there were in Ireland; the Irish made up 12% of the British nursing staff.
“You had to pay for your nurse’s education in Ireland and lots couldn’t afford it,”says Mary. “They’d train you for free in the UK, as long as you worked for them for at least one year afterwards.”
The first section of Mary’s book recalls her childhood in Clonmel. Her memories involve collecting apples for Bulmer’s for tuppence a bucket, wartime food shortages and animosity towards the English. “Father fought for Ireland in his youth and shot a policeman,” says Mary. “When he died, he was buried with full military honours and an IRA flag on his coffin. My son only realised that when he read the book — he was shocked.”
The main focus of the book is Mary’s training. “It was like the nuns all over again,” she says. “Uniforms to our ankles, hair back, no jewellery and in bed by 10 o’clock every night — it was even stricter than the convent.” The nurses earned £10 a month during their three years of training. “We’d buy Woodbines from Bert, the porter, at four old pennies for a pack of eight,” says Mary. “Bert would also get us bottles of Merrydown cider, which we would drink illicitly after lights out. We could easily spend a third of our wages without leaving the building.” What she encountered in those early days shocked her, including women who had failed abortions. “Some would be in a terrible state, with metal, back-street abortion implements still stuck in them,” she says.
Venereal disease was common. “This was widespread after the war,” says Mary. “I remember a man with syphilis, whose toes came off one day while I was changing his dressings.”
She also worked with TB patients. She had a dread of it, because it had killed so many people in Ireland. Three of her sisters had been sent to a sanatorium to recover from it. Her sister, Úna, suffered terribly. “She spent six years in the sanatorium and her entire right lung was removed, as well as all her ribs down one side,” says Mary. If this makes the book sound downhearted, rest assured, it isn’t.
Mary’s fun-loving personality shines through, especially in the stories she tells of how the nurses entertained themselves on their days off. The girls would go to the Hammersmith Palais to dance. But there were rules they had to follow. “It wasn’t done to approach the bar by yourself,” says Mary. “You had to wait for a man to offer to buy you a drink and, if he did, I’d always have a Dubonnet and lemon or a gin and orange.”
In 1950s Britain, men tended to belong to one of several gangs. There were beatniks, who wore sloppy joe jumpers, beards, longish hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Teddy boys had sharp suits, velvet collars and Brylcreme-slicked quiffs. And then there were ex-soldiers, American GIs and local police and firemen. Mary and her fellow trainees never told men they were nurses.
“Nurses were thought to be free and easy,” she says. “We didn’t want them to think that.” Other sections of the book deal with Mary’s later life. She tells of meeting and marrying her first husband. She kept this marriage secret, for a time, because nurses were supposed to remain single, then there’s juggling her career with three children. She emphasises how much she misses her work, now she’s retired. “I’ve had the happiest of lives working as a proud Irish nurse for 62 years in the NHS,” she says. “I worked from when I was 18 until last year and miss it every day.” And despite her mother’s dim view of England, Mary now views it as home. “I’ve had a good life here and if I had it to live over, I’d do it all again,” she says.
- Sixty Years a Nurse, by Mary Hazard, with Corinne Sweet, is published by Harper Element in paperback and eBook
