Our New Orderlies

Autumn 1915

The introduction of women orderlies is an experiment which has been long talked of, and which - like all innovations - met with a certain amount of criticism and even covert hostility in certain quarters. At the moment of writing, the women orderlies have only been installed in their respective wards for a day or two, but already they are proving themselves to be a most valuable feature of our hospital. We are confident that they will have 'made good' ere these lines are in print, and any opposition which may have based itself on the theory that this special field of service was a permanently masculine preserve and could never be feminised will have been overcome by the force of facts.

There is every reason why the 3rd London General Hospital should be proud to make a success of this novel scheme, and why its staff should extend a particularly hearty welcome - as we all have indeed done - to our new orderlies. The management of this T.F. hospital was the first body to foresee the inevitable shortage not alone of R.A.M.C. men, but - what was less obvious - of experienced women nurses, and, consequently (in the face of Official doubts), persistently encouraged admission to our ranks of 'V.A.D.s' at a period when they were being rather coldly looked upon at other institutions. This enlightened policy has now borne fruit - an order that none but fully trained nurses should be employed in military hospitals has been rescinded; every war hospital in the country has taken advantage of this relaxation of the old rule; and the V.A.D. is at last recognised in every quarter at her true worth. Her training in peace-time - undergone without much apparent prospect of its subsequent use - has turned out to be of priceless value in the nation's hour of need. Admittedly, a slight training, it has, nevertheless, sufficed to set free the more advanced nurses and sisters, whose skill is urgently in demand for application elsewhere; and now before us we have the spectacle not only of women experts being thus released by the self-sacrificing V.A.D., but men orderlies also. In our own hospital it has been practicable to permit some of the 'youngsters' to join the staff of hospital ships; the men, that is to say, who, when first enlisted, were below nineteen, but who have since then passed the necessary birthday, and qualified both in age and experience for the more trying - but coveted - posts afloat.

That the advent of 'the orderlettes' (as someone tried to nickname them) has had its humorous side we do not deny. Even a war hospital may be permitted to enjoy its small jokes and allow itself the relaxation of a little genial banter - sometimes at its own expense. But behind the jests and the chaff there is something solid and very admirable. We can enjoy our chuckle over this or that minor misunderstanding or the trifling mistakes inevitable in such a readjustment of the hospital's machinery; but the main thing, after all, is that a vast amount of necessary work is getting done, and done well - done, we may add, by ladies who have, in many cases, abandoned a life of ease for fatigues previously undreamt of, and whose sole reward, in weariness, is the knowledge that the menial tasks which they accept would otherwise have occupied the time and strength of workers required in other spheres of activity.