Dorothy: The Memoirs of a Nurse, 1889-1989

Sidgwick & Jackson 1989. 1989. Hardcover. 8vo hardcover 180pp, b/w illus. very good / very good d/w. Dorothy Bishop was born in 1889, just two years after Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee. A hundred years later, she tells her story, of how 'a bit of Victoriana' shocked the expectations and escaped the constraints of her large and unusual family to become a nurse in the London of the First World War and the Cairo of the early twenties. A happy childhood in London and Kent during the Edwardian Golden Age is brought to life in visits to the circus, holidays at the seaside and the eccentric behaviour of the Bishop household. Dorothy's was not a conventional family and the close relationship which existed between her charming but remote mother and Richard Austin Freeman - doctor, artist and celebrated detective novelist - created a strange manage a trois which coloured her childhood. And then came the War. 'Hell' for her three brothers who volunteered for the front, but it set Dorothy free from waiting at home for suitable marriage offers. This is the first book to tell how a training nurse survived in the days before antibiotics and unions: when surgeons baptised babies before operating; when cockroaches in the ward were an everyday hazard; and when nurses worked fourteen-hour days for #8 a year. After qualifying, a brief spell of private nursing left Dorothy disillusioned, until her sense of adventure took her to Cairo - exotic, eye-opening and full of romance. Today, Dorothy Moriarty lives in Camberley in Surrey. She has contributed to the Help the Aged handbook, "Take Care of Yourself" (1988), and has recently broadcast on 'Woman's Hour' and American TV. An annuitant of the Royal United Kingdom Beneficent Association, she herself is an example of their motto - 'Independent When Elderly'. .