Joan Wilson obituary

Other lives: nursing sister in intensive and coronary care who was also a union shop steward

My mother, Joan Wilson, who has died aged 88, had a long and pioneering career in nursing, was a dedicated union shop steward and brought up four children.

Born in Rossington, South Yorkshire, the sixth of seven children of Jim McCready, a miner, and his wife, Kitty (nee Sloan), Joan won a place at Doncaster technical high school for girls and passed her school certificate there. She then went on to a secretarial course but changed path and enrolled as a student nurse at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, becoming a registered nurse in 1953.

In January 1954 she married my father, Charles Wilson, a bus fitter, and in the next seven years they had four children. During this time Joan worked nights part-time at Tickhill Road hospital, then an isolation hospital dealing with, among other things, the few cases of polio still presenting despite the introduction of routine vaccination in the mid-1950s.

In the 60s she returned to Doncaster Royal Infirmary as a staff nurse on an orthopaedic ward. At the time, Doncaster’s surrounding mines and other heavy industries supplied the infirmary with an unenviable rate of traumatic injuries and it was decided to establish an intensive care unit there. Joan volunteered to be part of the nursing staff and was Sister Wilson ICU for the next 18 years.

In the early 1970s a coronary care unit was opened next to the ICU and Joan undertook additional training at St George’s hospital, Tooting, to equip her for the responsibility. She enjoyed her time in the capital and acquired a passion for its galleries and museums.

She was small but determined. My uncle recalls visiting her one evening on the unit, when an alarm went off. She ran across the ward and jumped up on a bed and on to the chest of a patient in cardiac arrest. It made quite an impression on him.

Joan’s dedication to the professionalisation of nursing led her, at the instigation of Rodney Bickerstaffe, then Yorkshire head of the National Union of Public Employees, to become nursing shop steward at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, a position she held through to the mid-80s. In 1982 she was presented with a miner’s lamp from the then Yorkshire NUM head, Arthur Scargill, following a successful pay campaign by the nurses, supported by the miners’ union.

Her retirement in 1992 saw no let-up in her energies. She pursued her talent for portrait painting and her work was exhibited in amateur exhibitions at Doncaster Museum. She and Charlie travelled widely, visiting far-flung family.

Charlie died in 2013. Joan is survived by her four children, Richard, Elizabeth, Jonathan and me, and by 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Peter Wilson

The GuardianTramp

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