Lewisham Keep Our NHS Public Protest in the Blue

Lewisham Keep Our NHS Public has called a lobby in Bermondsey at the office of Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes to call on him to oppose his Government's Health and Social Care Bill.

It will take place on Saturday 25th February at 12 noon by 4 Market Place, off Blue Anchor Lane, SE16 3UQ  (facebook details here). They promise a sound system and a choir.

Sharley McLean: from refugee nurse at Lewisham Hospital to LGBT activist

Born Lotte Reyersbach in Germany, Sharley McLean (1923-2013) fled the Nazis and ended up in London. Her parents both died in the Holocaust (her father was a socialist, her mother was Jewish). After hearing a libertarian speaker in Hyde Park she got involved in the London anarchist scene, selling the papers Freedom and War Commentary at Speakers Corner, though she was ambivalent about their pacifism during the Second World War: 'I really saw the Nazi machinery as an evil and so I did not want to participate in anything that would detract from that'.

During the war she worked as a nurse at Lewisham hospital, as she later recalled: 'My first involvement in unions was when I was nursing at Lewisham hospital. I learned from a friend that nurses at Friern Barnet got five nights off a fortnight and we were getting only four. I heard that there was a trade union in the hospital, basically for porters and cleaners and another nurse and I got in touch. We were probably among the first nurses to join a union. You had porters who wheeled trolleys for the corpses; you had porters who looked after the rubbish. Everybody insisted on the differential and I thought that was crazy. However, we did get five nights off a fortnight.

I hated the war; we were in the frontline, all the casualties we saw. When Sandringham School was bombed, there was a tremendous anti-German feeling when those kids were brought into the hospital. It was heartbreaking: a war against children. You just worked; there was a dedication and even people with little nursing experience were called upon, to set up drips. It was all done by hand and we had a big fish kettle to sterilize things. Things were primitive compared to now and the sepsis rate was higher, and there were no wonder drugs. I was also on duty when the hospital was hit. A bomb fell on the dispensary which caused tremendous fire. As nurses we were told where there were so-called safe points and one of my friends on E Block had taken shelter at one of those points and that collapsed and she was killed outright. We were badly burned in the D Block I was in but we managed to evacuate all the patients, and people who hadn’t walked for months and months suddenly found they were able to walk down these ghastly fire escapes. At the end of the war Ruth [another refugee] and I went down Lewisham High Street and we sang every German folk song we could remember'.

Sharley (pictured above in 1941) carried on working in the NHS until she retired, and later became involved with HIV/AIDS support at the Terrence Higgins Trust as well as being a lesbian activist working for the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. Indeed her first encounters with other lesbians were while working at Lewisham in the Second World War.

'When Lewisham Hospital was bombed, we all shared rooms and even beds because the rooms were so small. We were together; we cuddled each other without giving it a second thought. I think we were naive sexually. One staff nurse would say there were two ward sisters who were 'homosexual ladies'. They used to tell people they weren't married because their boyfriends were killed in the First World War. I remember we used to look at them with curiosity. Ridiculous when you think how naive one was.

I can remember one woman in particular I had a tremendous crush on. She was a cancer patient. I was very fond of her and I was told off for being too emotionally involved when she died. Also one of the orderlies used to say to me, 'Oh, you are one of us' and I thought she meant that I was as English as she was and I felt flattered that I had been accepted'.

Source: Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories (Routledge, 1989). The air raid on Lewisham Hospital took place in July 1944, killing at least three people. The bombed school she refers to was actually called Sandhurst Road School in Catford - 38 children were killed there in January 1943.

Update March 2022:

Sharley MacLean was given recognition in the 'Out and About' exhibition of material from the Bishopsgate Institute LGBTQ+ Archive at the Barbican Centre in Feb/March 2022. Included was a banner from 'Hyde Park Gays and Sapphics' with a sign saying that this was a group founded by Sharley in 1982 and which for more than 20 years gave speeches on gay rights at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park.

Siberia SE1

One of the hazards about working in South London is that it's very near to Westminster. This means that politicians looking for a quick photo opportunity can jump into their chauffeur-driven cars and head down to some place they couldn't find on a map to show how down with the people they are.

An old Etonian prime minster who wants to show he cares about education? Why not come to a perfectly good South London school you wouldn't dream of sending your kids to and pretend you have spoken to more than a couple of black people in your entire life? Hosting a visit by the President of the United States? Why not come down to another school you wouldn't dream of sending your kids to and play table tennis?

Want to show that you care about the NHS while you plot to hand over chunks of it over to your donors in the private sector? Why not come down to Guys Hospital, after all it's just over the river? God help any conscientious 'public servant' who should object to any aspect of such spectacles. So spare a thought for David Nunn, a surgeon at Guys who dared to interrupt a media blitz on a ward there with messrs. Cameron & Clegg standing around the bed of someone who was presumably too sick to run away. The surgeon has now apparently voluntarily requested indefinite leave, in the same way no doubt that many voluntarily confessed to trotsykist-fascist-deviationism in the days of Stalin (OK I exaggerate for effect - I know that Guys isn't the Gulag).

It put me in mind of the Thatcher period when her habit of turning up at the bedside of disaster victims led to the distribution of spoof 'Thatchcard' donor cards saying: 'In the event of an accident, the holder of this card wishes it to be known that he/she does not wish to be visited by Mrs Thatcher in any circumstances whatsoever'.

(image of Thatchcard from Max Atkinson's blog)

Lewisham Keep Our NHS Public - meeting this Thursday

A new group has been formed locally to campaign against changes to the National Health Service:

'We recently formed Lewisham Keep Our NHS Public as a local branch of the national campaign (see ). KONP is a broad based, non party aligned campaigning organisation that seeks to defend the NHS as a publicly owned and publicly provided service that stays true to the founding principles of the NHS as a service that is equitable, comprehensive and free. The NHS is under threat, as never before , from Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill which aims to transform the NHS into a competitive market where "any willing provider" can bid against NHS organisations to provide health services, allowing the for-profit private sector to take over large swathes of our health service'.

They are having a public meeting this Thursday, March 10 (7:30pm - 9:30pm) at the Saville Centre, 436 Lewisham High St, SE13 with speakers including John Lister of London Health Emergency; Dr Jackie Davis, co-chair NHS Consultants@ federation and Doris Smith, chair of Lewisham Pensioner's Forum. The aim of the meeting is both to inform people about the threat to the NHS and to plan actions as part of the growing campaign against the bill.

Immigration raids in South London

Oops posted this twice in error - post is here