In a south London house plastered with posters tracking 40 years of fighting for the NHS, June Hautot brings out a little booklet her father kept in his pocket. What is inside? A list of the family’s expenditure on doctor’s fees that tells a concise, brutal story of what life before the NHS looked like. Every visit to the GP, of which there were many, because Hautot’s mother had cancer, cost five shillings. “And our rent was eight shillings,” Hautot says. “People lived in fear of being sick.”
So begins Alex Brooker’s tremendously moving crowdsourced story (BBC Four), told through a polyphony of voices and objects from up and down the country as our critically endangered health service wheezes its way towards 70. Watching the first of three episodes, which focuses on the inaugural quarter-century, filled this NHS patient and daughter of a retired NHS house officer turned cytology screener with a strange affliction. It took a while to diagnose, so unfamiliar was the sensation. Symptoms included a sore swelling of the heart. Ah, that is it. Pride.
Brooker, a warm, cheerful presenter whose personal investment in the NHS is considerable (“Before I was 18, I had more operations than I can remember,” he says, stroking his first prosthetic leg) travels to the outskirts of Manchester to meet June Rosen. She remembers a hallowed morning in 1948 when a very important man came to stay. “I was told not to go too close taking him breakfast in bed because I had a cold and he had an important speech to make,” Rosen says. It was Nye Bevan, in his stripy pyjamas, about to get up and open his national health service. “My mother said she felt we were going to build the new Jerusalem,” says Rosen. “It was going to be a better world.”
There are so many powerful stories. Retired doctor John Marks, who graduated from the University of Edinburgh on 5 July 1948, the day the NHS started, remembers treating a man with an enlarged prostate on his first day at St Leonard’s in London. “Where do I find the anaesthetist?” he asked someone, in a panic. They replied: “It’s you.” When the patient stopped breathing, Marks, who had given only six anaesthetics under supervision as a student, had no choice but to go for it. “He survived, he got better, he went home,” he grins.
Other stories are less heartwarming. The NHS, after all, holds up a mirror to the nation. In it, we see Britain at its most beautiful, but also at its ugliest. Joan Hooley, who starred in the ITV soap Emergency – Ward 10 (A black woman! Playing a doctor! In the 60s!), recalls the racism she experienced working as a nurse. “Some of the patients would say: ‘Get your black hands off me,’” she recalls. She graciously acknowledges that, at a time when tens of thousands of nurses were coming from the Caribbean to staff the NHS and doctors were being recruited from the Indian subcontinent, “it must have been difficult for them”.
Some of the most painful moments recall the inhumane treatment meted out to mentally ill patients. Take Winnie Dickins, who was prescribed LSD treatment for postnatal depression and became suicidal. The NHS’s treatment of women by patrician male doctors viewed as gods is sobering. Judi Piper tells the story of her grandmother, a glamorous socialite who was found dead aged 50 by an overdose of painkillers. They were administered by Dr John Adams, who is thought to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 160 people, which would make him the deadliest serial killer in British history. Adams, who coaxed his alleged victims into leaving him their fortunes, was tried in 1957 and found not guilty. In 1961, he was reinstated as a GP.
Then there is Ann Rossiter, who became pregnant by a Nigerian law student in the early 60s, when abortion was punishable by life imprisonment. She went to a backstreet abortionist, who syringed soapy water into her uterus. “It was exceedingly painful,” she says. When she was taken to hospital, the doctor called the police before treating her blood loss. She was told to “keep it down” by the nurses when she screamed for pain relief.
The first 25 years make for a rollicking, heart-rending tale. The picture that emerges is of a radical health service that has made us better in every possible way. This is why, when its founding principles are under threat, saving the NHS really means saving ourselves. “The NHS and I coincide,” as Marks puts it. “I love it.”
