My father came from Scotland in the late 19th century to practice in England, having done locum work in Cumberland where he met his wife Caroline. He went originally to Rippingale in 1892 where his very first case was a mother who was about to have a baby. There were no maternity or district nurses in those days and when he arrived to see her, he found half a dozen of the village crones sitting around the room all eying him closely and he realised that the new doctor was being assessed and so he looked at them in turn and then chose the one that looked the most clean and decent and who he thought could be most helpful and told the rest to go. He could be rather abrupt at times and so his instructions were obeyed immediately. Fortunately, everything went smoothly at the birth and the mother had a healthy baby but the outcome was that my father had no trouble with the women in the village after that.

He then moved to Bourne and took over the midwifery practice of a doctor who had decided to move to the south of England and he also became the Medical Officer of Health and so when he first arrived in the town, he asked for directions to the poorhouse, a Scots term, but no one understood what he meant, but after explaining, they directed him to the workhouse as St Peter's Hospital was then known locally. Tramps would regularly arrive here to seek lodgings in one of the outbuildings that was reserved for this purpose, because the only other place for them to sleep was the open air. It was a common sight in those days to see a tramp getting up out of the hedgerow where he had spent the night and so it was a welcome change to have somewhere to go. 

You might have 20 or 30 staying overnight and in the morning, local farmers would arrive asking for ten men to work this field and 15 to work another and so they could earn some money in that way. During the winter months they usually stayed for more than one night and they often earned their keep by sawing logs and their chief food was a thin soup called skilly, a sort of watery porridge or gruel made from oatmeal that was the main dish in prisons and workhouses in those days. The actual inhabitants of the workhouse were those who could no longer be looked after at home or were unable to fend for themselves and there they sat around all day with nothing to do, the old men with a spittoon at their feet and the old women in poke bonnets and quite often smoking a clay pipe. 

I started to take over from my father about 1924 and this meant going to the workhouse several times a week but at this time there was a re-organisation of the system and the intake at St Peter's was limited to women and children while the men went elsewhere. At one stage we had 23 infants in, mainly cot cases, as well as the old people upstairs, and the matron only had two nurses to look after them all. But despite the hardships she was enduring, she always came down to the front porch to meet you wearing a nice blue uniform with white cuffs and would say: "Oh, doctor, I'm so busy" although it was the nurses who were doing the most of the work. 

My father was once involved in a panic about a smallpox outbreak that occurred in 1893 at the time that work was being carried out on the new branch railway line between Bourne and Little Bytham. A large number of Irish labourers were employed on the work and two of them contracted the disease, although the doctor attending them was not certain and thought that it might have been chicken pox but in the event it was smallpox which in those days had the same connotations as the Black Death. The railway company therefore hired a nurse and took over two small cottages in Manor Lane and turned them into an isolation hospital which eventually handled a large number of cases, several of which resulted in death. 

There was a strong public resistance to vaccination in those days and in 1926 I remember seeing a man with a curious rash and diagnosed smallpox and as soon as the word got out, the balloon went up and everyone in the town hurried to be vaccinated, including those who had originally been against it. We had to take stringent precautions and I was required to give the tramps at the workhouse daily medical checks. It was like inspecting a squad in the army with 30 or 40 men lined up every morning stripped down to the waist and as none of them caught it, I would walk down the line each time saying "Pass, pass, pass" and it broke the heart of the local council who had to pay me so much extra but after six months the scare subsided. 

When visiting in the years prior to the First World War with my father, we used to go by cycle or by pony trap and we did not get our first car until 1907. It was a Humber Twelve and it had no windscreen. My father never understood motor cars and so he never learned to drive and was always driven by a chauffeur but he still kept to his bicycle for local journeys. We took one patient all the way to Woodhall Spa for specialist treatment for his arthritis but the car could do no more than 25 m p h flat out and even then the whole thing was quivering and shaking. 

We had two types of patients, the ordinary people and then the private patients for whom you had to wrap up their bottles of medicines in brown paper and sealing wax and some of them would even insist on coming to the front door to collect them instead of going round the corner to the surgery to distinguish them from the hoi polloi. Then there were the panel patients, a system introduced in 1909 under which families who did not earn more than £5 a week paid a shilling a month, that is twelve shillings a year for two adults and children under five six shillings a year and the toddlers and babies were admitted for nothing. All of this meant a lot of work late into the night making out bills twice a year from the entries in the daybook and then everything had to be entered into the ledger and of course, it was a great irritation if some people did not or would not pay, something that applied to about five per cent of my patients who gave themselves enormous airs yet I could never get any money out of them. We therefore welcomed the National Health Service when it was introduced and all of the doctors I knew were determined to make it work because it would make life so much easier and took away all that labour of book-keeping. 

The trouble was in those days that there were no proper nurses; you just had your village gamps and using them was hit or miss. If you were called out to the fen at two o'clock in the morning to tend an expectant mother and you arrived to hear a baby yelling then you knew that all was well and you just said "How do you do", had a cup of tea and made sure that everything was fine before going home again. It was also very usual in those days for patients to have minor operations at home, things like tonsils and adenoids and sometimes even appendicitis. When you arrived with the surgeon, there was everything scrupulously clean, boiled and ready and a table waiting for the patient. I would administer the anaesthetic and that was that. We were also called out to a lot of accidents, the worst I remember on the Thurlby road near Elsea Wood where two lads on a motor bike had crashed into the back of a lorry. I had never seen anything like it because their faces were absolutely flattened by the impact, as if a steam roller had gone over them, and I can still see it now. There were also a lot of suicides, the worst I remember being a chap on one of the local farms who had made a second attempt to kill himself but this time he had been successful and had blown his brains out with a shotgun. I was just having lunch when I was called out and a nurse went with me but when we arrived, the chickens were already strutting around and picking at his bones and I nearly lost my lunch. 

I knew the surrounding fens well, especially Tongue End, first as a boy and then as a doctor, but I remember best those trips with my father by pony and trap. We would leave the road from Bourne some half a mile before the River Glen and then make for one of the black houses across a field. Houses in the fens were tarred on the outside in those days to keep out the damp and so they looked black. From there, the horse climbed up the bank of the Bourne Eau and crossed the River Glen by a horse bridge to the Boat Inn, one of two public houses in the village at that time. 

There were four cottages in a row between the Boat Inn and the tongue of land where the Bourne Eau flowed into the Glen while along the Bourne Eau were houses connected by droves to the road into Spalding. At one time, barges came up the Eau as far as the Anchor public house in Eastgate. On the south side of the Glen was another pub, the Chequers Arms, and a chapel. Across the adjoining field you came to the Counter Drain, again with its pub, the New Inn, and a square that contained three or four houses, the most appalling housing you have ever seen, terrible places with outside loos, one room downstairs and perhaps two bedrooms above, with one of these households to lose three out of four children in the family to tuberculosis. 

Then the River Glen was properly bridged and the road from Bourne extended to cross it and the Counter Drain with a road over it to Spalding and Baston via Windmill Farm. The Glen burst its banks in 1910 and flooded Bourne South Fen. In 1917-18, German prisoners of war had laid a light railway on the top of the bank and strengthened it. The bank burst again in the awful winter of 1947 and again German prisoners were used to mend it. The present pumping station was then built. 

There were many night trips to expectant mothers in the locality, particularly to the cottages behind the Boat Inn where there were 14 confinements in one year. One either cycled or, in later years, took the car as far as the bridge and then walked along the bank where a cow or a horse might suddenly rear out at you in the black of the night, fair putting the wind up you. A worse night venture was to a farm on the other side of the Weir Dyke. There was no road across the fields to Twenty so one walked along the bank, crossed over the sluice gates that controlled the Bourne Eau, then gingerly across the Weir Dyke and, approaching the crew yard, you hugged the wall until you saw the welcome light of an oil lamp in the window. 

There were some compensations. As a child in very hot summers, I have seen the will-o'-the-wisp, the luminous, flickering blue light given off by the spontaneously burning peat. I have seen men stilt walking. I have been sent for when the snow lay on the ground and seen the red orb of the sun rising out of the east, flooding the whole area with beauty. Once, as I crossed the Bourne Eau near the Boat Inn, I saw four swans flying wing tip to wing tip, from bank side to bank side, out of the mist into the mist, a most beautiful sight. But always there was the kindness of one's patients, despite their hard living conditions, with no water laid on, no indoor toilets. You always got a cup of tea after attending a confinement and despite the conditions in which they lived, it was always served on a clean tablecloth with a slice of cake or a piece of pie. 

Before the influenza epidemic of 1918, my father used to doctor the Tongue End district that extended to beyond the village school to the Counter Drain with the droves going to the outlying farms. One farmer had laid a light railway for a mile from the road to his farmstead houses. Now all sorts of extraneous works and collecting yards disfigure the fens. The water levels have dropped and no longer can one see twenty swans on patrol. The old mysteries have disappeared but the memories remain. 

See also Dr John Galletly

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