Shared Troubles Northern Ireland

My Story

Sister Kate

Kate O'Hanlon, Belfast
Added 06/03/2009

If the start of the Troubles in 1969 took us by surprise,
then the Malvern Street shootings in June 1966 came
like a bolt from the blue. Our patients on Saturday
nights were mostly inebriated, or suffering injuries
from domestic fights and road traffic accidents. There
were also the usual medical and surgical emergencies.
Shootings in Belfast just never happened.

I was in charge in casualty that Saturday night. It
had been quiet and in the early hours of Sunday
morning we were sitting, relaxed and chatting. The
telephone rang. It was ambulance control to say there
had been a shooting in Malvern Street, and two
ambulances had been sent out. I was astounded to
hear this news, and when I informed the surgical
registrar, Alan Gurd, he also was very taken aback. He
told me to keep him informed.

Ambulance control phoned again to say that one
young man was dead, but they were bringing in two
wounded youths. Neither was critically injured,
although both required immediate surgery. Dr Gurd
called in Mr Ernest Morrison, his consultant, and they
were busy in theatre for many hours. Both young men
survived, although one had been struck by six bullets.

Peter Ward, aged eighteen, had died from a wound
to the heart. His body was put in an ambulance and
brought to the hospital. A doctor went out to certify
him dead and he was anointed before he was moved
to the mortuary. The place was swarming with police
inside and out. His mother arrived at the hospital
accompanied by her younger son and Canon Patrick
Murphy from St Peter’s parish. In our observation
ward we told Mrs Ward that her son had been shot
dead. His distraught brother, only sixteen years old,
ran down the corridor, through the yard in front of
casualty and out the gate on to the Grosvenor Road.
He was going to Malvern Street, he said, to avenge his
brother’s death. We brought him back to his mother.

Peter Ward and his friends were barmen in a hotel
in the city. When they finished work, they had gone
for a drink in the Malvern Arms off the Protestant
Shankill Road. They were identified as Catholics by a
group of men in the Ulster Volunteer force, who
opened fire on them when they left the bar.

This was the first time I ever had any experience of
an event like this. How do you treat gunshot wounds?
We found over the years that initial resuscitation is the
same for gunshot victims as that given to any patient
with multiple injuries, for instance someone injured in
a road traffic accident. The patient must be completely
undressed, as something can be missed if they are
clothed. That is why large scissors were such an
important part of our equipment in the resuscitation
room. One of the first things we had to do was
administer intravenous fluids, and often blood too. We
also had to control bleeding from wounds. If there was
damage to a patient’s neck, we moved them very
carefully from the ambulance trolley to the hospital
trolley, with one person holding the head and neck and
approximately four others the body, lifting on
command. If a patient was unconscious or having
difficulty breathing, we would intubate them to
maintain a clear airway and administer oxygen.

One of the most important things to do was to
reassure the patient; we were all conscious that it was
very frightening for patients to lie in a resuscitation
room with so many people and so much activity
around them. In some cases, if enough staff were
available, one nurse would remain with the patient
until they left the department, especially if the patient
had been blinded or had injuries to the eye. We
administered pain relief as soon as it was safe.
Sometimes we could do this immediately, but if
seriously ill patients are given pain relief too soon,
they may not be able to tell the doctor what happened
or where they are injured. History is very important,
whether from the patient, the paramedic or a
bystander. Continuous monitoring of vital functions is
essential, using the Glasgow Coma Scale to ascertain
the level of consciousness. While the treatment in
casualty may be the same for gunshot victims as it is
for those injured in traffic accidents, the subsequent
treatment in theatre and intensive care will be
different for each patient, depending on the injuries
and, for victims of shootings, on the calibre of
the weapon.

The Malvern Street murder, as it came to be
known, was not the first shooting of the Troubles,
however. That had happened a month earlier, on
27 May, when John Scullion, a 28-year-old Catholic
storeman, was attacked by a UVF gang in west Belfast.
He was singing on his way back from a club. After he
was attacked, he managed to make his way home and
get into the house, but he collapsed at the top of the
stairs. The authorities claimed he had been stabbed,
although local people insisted he had been shot. After
suffering several heart attacks he died on 11 June and
was buried in Milltown cemetery. The controversy
surrounding the cause of his death was not settled
until his body was exhumed almost two weeks later,
when an autopsy revealed that he had indeed been
shot.

And prior to the Scullion attack, on 7 May the
home of Matilda Gould, an elderly Protestant widow,
was set on fire by members of the UVF during an
attempt to petrol bomb the Catholic-owned bar next
door. She was badly burned, dying from her injuries
seven weeks later, on 27 June, the day after Peter
Ward was killed. She may have been the third person
to die in the Troubles, but she was the first to be
injured. The UVF was responsible for all three deaths
that year.

In the days and nights that followed the Malvern
Street incident, we continued to treat medical and
surgical emergencies and all trauma patients as usual.
But the psychological effect of this killing on staff was
profound. You cannot compare the deliberate attempt
to kill a fellow human being to a death caused
by accident. I wondered about the men who had
committed this attack, so I went to court to listen to
the trial, where three men were given life sentences
for the killing. Gusty Spence, later to become a
prominent figure in the UVF, was among those
convicted. The thing that always struck me about the
many murderers I have seen through the years is that
you would pass them on the street and never notice
them; they are mostly insignificant-looking characters.

Undoubtedly, the worst part of emergency nursing
is having to tell relatives that their loved ones have
died. How much worse when you have to tell a
mother that her eighteen-year-old son has been
murdered? I did not know then that I would be called
upon to repeat this distressing task many times over
the next twenty-two years, telling husbands, wives,
mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and friends of the
tragic death of a loved one. We talked about the
Malvern Street murder for many days to come, little
thinking it would be the first of many such incidents.

Reproduced with kind permission from Kate O'Hanlon

Extract taken from SISTER KATE: NURSING THROUGH THE TROUBLES by Kate O’Hanlon.

© Kate O’Hanlon 2009

This extract may not be reproduced without the permission of Blackstaff Press.