The Spirit of '45 Page #4

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were always going about.

Well, before the health service,

money was the prime mover,

or lack of it.

I think a farm worker

got six shillings a week.

He would probably

pay a shilling rent on that.

That left him very, very little,

and most had large families.

The money was not there,

so they turned to folk remedies.

"Oh, my grandma knows

what to do with that," type thing.

For instance, tonsillitis,

they'd get someone

that had got sweaty socks,

and something out of the sweat,

they'd put round their neck

and that was supposed to cure them,

but quite often

it resulted in ear infection.

For the working man

or the working woman,

there was

National Health insurance cover.

The panel.

You got onto the doctor's list.

Your family did not.

Your family might be covered

by some son of little insurance scheme:

The Hospital Saturday Fund

or sixpence or a shilling a week

that you paid for each in the hope that,

if anything did happen,

you'd be able to get

some son of cover for care.

You had to pay. And...

My mother was quite sick at the time.

My father was having to go to work

in agony, needing surgery,

but because they didn't pay sick pay...

This was before the railways

were nationalised.

They didn't pay sick pay,

so he was going to work in agony

to pay five shillings for the doctor

to put his foot on that doormat.

That was before you got any help,

you know,

advice on what was wrong with you

or anything.

But the so-and-so knew

my mother was dying,

so kept coming back

for his five shillings.

The doctors were private people.

They used to come and visit you.

They'd charge you

maybe half a crown a visit.

Then they'd probably charge you

half a crown for a bottle of medicine

or something of that kind.

And very often you'd got,

say, three or four in a family

that wanted treatment at the same time,

well, the doctor would do it on credit

and then he would often double up

as a credit collector.

We used to have collectors

who used to come on a Friday

at half past three,

ready to get out on the streets

by four o'clock.

The secret was to get the collector

into the patient's home

before the insurance agent arrived,

because if they paid

the insurance agent first,

there was never any money left

for the doctors' collector.

So you would occasionally go to a house,

walk up to the door.

You could hear life going on

behind the door.

And as soon as you knocked at the door,

dead silence.

Dead silence and you thought,

"I'm sure I heard somebody."

Knock again, still dead silence.

On one occasion, a little girl

eventually came to the door and said,

"My mum says she's not in."

My mother was on her tenth child

and she sent me up to get the nurse.

I run up and get the nurse because

every child had to be born at home.

She came down and I could just hear

mumbling and going on up there.

I heard the baby crying.

Then the next thing, I see my mother

being carried downstairs on a stretcher.

And my brothers was crying.

Optimistic, I said,

"Our mam is going to be alright."

"Don't worry about Mam. Mam is good."

And as she went past,

she just squeezed my hand.

Somehow I knew things weren't right

and she...

I came home from school that day

and my cousin had come round to me.

He put his arm round me

and he said, "Ray, Mam is dead."

And of course I cried my eyes out.

And what really

set the fire going inside me

was when my father was also crying.

The doctor put his hand out

and he said, "George," he said,

"Winnie died," he said,

for the want of a pint of blood

And he said,

'Winnie died for a hospital bed."

He said, "Winnie died

for the want of an abortion."

I ran up to the mountain

with my mother's bonnet,

and I said to that God up there;

Because we all went to chapel;

We were strong chapel;

"If you're a decent God up there,"

I said,

"my mam was

the most wonderful woman in the world."

My brothers and sisters have just been

dragged off to the orphanage."

"Give us our mam back.

Give me my family back."

I genuinely believed

when I went to bed that night

that my mam would come back

the next morning.

From that point on, I was an atheist,

because I realised

that the only thing,

the only persons that could improve

the situation was ourselves.

This leaflet is coming

through your letterbox one day soon,

or maybe you've already had your copy.

Read it carefully.

It tells you what

the new National Health Service is

and how you can use what it offers.

Hospitals and specialist services,

medicines, drugs and appliances,

care of the teeth, care of the eyes,

maternity services,

home health services.

The grand ambition really

was to provide healthcare as necessary

to the public at large.

It was very exciting, you know.

One knew that there wasn't

very much stuff around to do it with.

We had old stock,

the hospitals,

we had very maldistributed

medical services across the country.

There were some areas

which were very poorly supplied

with hospital services.

Bevan was an extraordinary man.

He nationalised the whole damn lot.

Everything that claimed to be

a hospital was nationalised,

which was not at all what the

Labour Party had expected or voted for.

They had all expected

for the hospitals to be owned and run

by local authorities,

by local government.

He made a lot of enemies that way.

But you, the public,

are interested in health no less

than doctors and in health services too.

We all want better health services

and better health,

but in organising them,

let's make sure that your doctor

doesn't become the state's doctor.

Nye Bevan was demonised,

as I'm sure you're well aware.

The British media have a way

of picking on somebody

and turning them into a demon.

They were aided and abetted in that

by the BNIA

who regarded him as evil incarnate.

It's obviously quite a job

sending out the BMA plebiscite

to 56,000 doctors

asking them, roughly speaking, whether

they approve of Mr Bevan's scheme.

Lord Moran, as president

of the Royal College of Physicians,

did the deal with Nye Bevan

which brought the NHS into existence.

He managed to persuade Bevan

to drop the notion of a salaried service

for general practitioners.

That sort of killed a lot of the fear

amongst general practitioners.

But he also got the agreement

to allow private practice

to continue for the consultants

and also for merit awards

and various other things,

which, as you may recall,

enabled Nye Bevan to say shortly

afterwards when asked how he'd done it,

"I stuffed their mouths with gold."

Well, this is the

birth of the National Health Service.

This is Nye Bevan

and the matron, Anne Dolan,

walking from the main building

down towards a gate.

They said this was

handing over the key of the hospital.

There wasn't a key handed over.

It was just... That was just the way

they said the health service was born.

The thing that stands out,

it sounds so petty, this,

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