My wife, Anne Stillman, who has died aged 99, trained to become a nurse in Sheffield before the establishment of the NHS. Thus began her lifelong career and belief in caring for people, whether they be patients, schoolchildren, friends, family or neighbours.
Anne was nursing in Sheffield throughout the blitz that lasted from 12 to 15 December 1940 when, as she recalled, she was helping patients who were too ill to be moved from the upper floors of the hospital as bombs fell all around. Nearly 700 people died in the city during those few days.
From there her nursing led her to the army and on to India in the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), where she was a theatre sister with officer status. The journey out in 1943 was not without problems, as her ship was bombed in the Mediterranean and only just managed to limp into Alexandria, where the nurses then had to wait for a few weeks before being transported to India.
It was in India that I met Anne and where we were married, at Dehradun, in sight of the Himalayas, on 23 December 1944.
Back in London after the war we had two sons, Martin and Andy. But soon Anne went back to nursing at the National Temperance hospital, before working as a volunteer education welfare officer supporting children at Islington Green school, north London.
The oldest of four children, Anne was born to Ethel and Dan Stanton during the first world war in the small Yorkshire village of Wentworth. She did well at school, though much of her time there was during the general strike and the recession.
Times were hard and money short, but she grew up in a happy, strong and hard-working Catholic family, in a tight-knit community. Anne’s religious beliefs stayed with her throughout her life, though as a teenager she crossed over to the Church of England. She went to Barnsley high school with a scholarship, but without more money a university education was out of reach and so she trained as a nurse for a Sheffield steelworks.
In her younger days, Anne was an active hockey player and played for the Barnsley Ladies Hockey Club. She was a keen supporter of the Labour party and especially of equal rights for women. For a time she was an active member of the Six Point Group, the feminist campaign organisation. While Anne never saw herself as a painter, she had excelled at art at school, and when she later joined an artists’ group in Highbury she produced some beautiful paintings.
She is survived by me, our sons and three grandchildren, Katie, Jackie and David.
