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For
a night’s rest
Clare Lerner started as a First Aider
in the East End. Bombs fell, walls crumbled,
and Clare barely slept. The experience
inspired her to co-found the Country
Hospitality Scheme. Such a scheme allowed
First Aiders like Clare to relax in
the countryside for a weekend, and to
return to London refreshed. |
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How did you become
involved?
"
Two weeks before the war broke out I was in
the south of France. When I got home there were
letters from Middlesex Hospital first aid post,
asking me to report for duty.
I was sent to the East End
of London, because they had the first bombing.
Anywhere along the river were the first targets.
I was sent to Stepney to a first aid post
there and they had nothing. What they had
was bicarbonate of soda, so I want you to
know that I treated everything with bicarbonate
of soda. What we got were the flying glass
people, the cuts and bruises, the broken legs,
that sort of thing
 
We spent 24 hours
on and 24 off. We had cots to sleep on, and
meals, but you didn't leave the hospital."
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What
did you do?
"
At the first aid post
there were a number of people of all kinds.
A lot of them were officers in both St. John's
and the Red Cross, and they could get away for
weekends. Mrs. Joan Woollcombe had a cottage
in Hampshire; she used to go there every weekend.
She would come back and say, `I feel terrible,
you girls are all here and there I am, sleeping
every weekend. We really ought to do something
about this.'
We
put our headstogether, and decided that it
would be wonderful to get civil defence workers
out of London into the country for a night's
rest. Lord Horder, who was the King'sphysician,
said he would write a letter to The Times.
He wrote a letter saying that the civil defence
workers of London were preventing London from
falling. Well, by the next post we got letters
from all over the country, because by that
time civil defence workers were the heroes
and the heroines, and the people in the country
felt they owed them a debt."
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Any special memories?
"
So there we were, with
all these letters, and two women. We then had
to get people to go. Here were all these hostesses
just clamouring for the brave civil defence
workers and not one on hand to send.
We decided very firmly that
if this was going to succeed you absolutely
had to interview everybody. I became the head
interviewer.
You found out what their interests were. You
weren't going to send a little cockney who
wanted to be near a big town somewhere deep
in the country; he wanted a sort of local
pub and things like that. And you had to get
in touch with the hostesses.

We did have a few bed-wetters, which hostesses
didn't care too much about, as you can imagine,
but this is all par for the course. But apart
from that it all went very well. Daphne Du
Maurier was one of our hostesses, when she
was at Fowey.
The whole idea of the vacations,
and getting people out of London, was to prevent
breakdown. If the civil defence of London
had broken down, England would have fallen.
So that was the Country Hospitality Scheme
and the three of us worked like dogs. [It]
become a permanent part of the Joint War Organisation.
"

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FACTS
People who lived in the East End of London were hit badly by air raids during the Blitz, because their houses were around the docks, which were a particular target. 10,000 high explosive bombs fell on London in September 1940, mostly in Stepney, Poplar, Bermondsey, Southwark, Lambeth, Deptford, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Holborn and the City. Find out more about the Bombing of UK Cities.
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FACTS
During the Blitz, people had to get up very early to get to work because transport was badly affected. As well as this, many people undertook duties after work, or simply couldn’t leave work because of an air raid. Grace Lister worked at a first aid post underneath Guy’s Hospital in London: “Sometimes we couldn’t change shifts for the raids were so bad that the on-coming shift couldn’t get in and we couldn’t get out. Sometimes you were there for twenty-four hours. We never went to bed all those years. We had to lie on stretchers or deckchairs but we managed.”
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FACTS
First aid posts were intended to treat people slightly wounded as a result of air raids. They were usually set up in adapted buildings or in Casualty Receiving Hospitals. Each first aid post had three sections: one for receiving and sorting casualties, a second for giving treatment and a third where patients could rest before being sent home or to hospital. Find out more about First Aid Posts. |
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