Stages of Emergency: The Casualties Union

Stages of Emergency: The Casualties Union TRACY C. DAVIS On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting; Twas only that wizen he was offhe was acting. - Oliver Goldsmith on David Garrick; quoted by Dr. John S. Binning, Medical Adviser to Casualties Union study circle for Liverpool St. Station, Claxton (Struggle 142) In the spring of 1941, during the latter days of the London Blitz, St. Andrew's Convent School in Leatherhead, seventeen miles southwest of Charing Cross, was badly damaged by a parachute mine. The nuns evacuated, turning the ruined building over to the county. The mine exploded in the bend of the elbow-shaped building, leaving "a mixture of totally destroyed, unstable but shorable and secure ruins" (Claxton, Practical 101). In these ruins, Surrey established a Rescue School, where civil defence workers went to practise techniques for safely extricating victims from bombed-out structures. Squads came down from London and surrounding regions to become proficient in handling ropes and tackle, shoring up dodgy debris to allow workers access and victims egress, and extricating stretcher cases from precarious positions. The school's superintendent, an engineer who in peacetime inspected the county's bridges, routinely laid down in the rubble and observed students' proficiency as they extricated him from beneath collapsed walls and out of cellar basements. Eric Claxton later admitted, "I pretended a nonchalance I did not always possess that their knots were properly formed when they hoisted me out from a third storey window opening! It made them more careful and gave them confidence to feel that I had faith in them" (More 3I). A year later, during a lull in bombing, Claxton prepared a special course for the heads of the Rescue Service, all trained engineers. He wanted to increase the rescuers' stakes in handling stand-in victims. The Assistant County Medical Officer of Health led him to the Byfleet Ambulance Station, six miles away, where the staff "dabbled in the make up of wounds" and, led by Brenda Modem Drama, 46:2 (Summer 2003) J51 152 TRACY C. DAVIS Civil defence training course at Falfie1d School, Eastwood Park (Gloucestershire), showing Richard Lancaster, a member of staff, being rescued. British Infonnation Services photograph. (Record Group 397-MA, National Archives at College Park, College Park MD, accessed from British Infonnation Services/BIZZ 1I523!LA/Civil Defence) Whiteley. one of the ambulance drivers, "introduced some acting" into their fIrst-aid practices (33). Claxton wrote: "At the end of the course everything was brought together in one or two incidents, with people wounded and suffering amidst debris, and one or two apparently missing. I taught them to search and to crawl in underneath the debris. Horror upon horror - a fire broke out. They rescued one man only to fmd half all hour later when someone was still missing that several of them had been standing right on top of the place where he lay buried!" (36-37). In subsequent courses, the rescue scenarios "staged" by the school and discovered by the students became more elaborate. In one, Brenda Whiteley, a stalwart among the early casualty actors, was placed under the joist of a collapsed floor, her leg apparently crushed. She was scared by her predicament - the dirt, the dust, plaster, soot, the pain in her leg, the terror of being held in a vice by the beam. Her dog had run off or was, per- Stages of Emergency: The Casualties Union 153 Rescue training at the Federal Civil Defense Administration's school at Olney MD. showing a volunteer"victim"made up with grease paint and moulages. (Record Group 397-MA, National Archives at College Park, College Park MOl haps, another victim. Her husband did not come, when she called. She had renewed pain when the beam was lifted off her leg. was profoundly gratefuJ to her rescuers, frantic about dog and husband, and distressed that lunch would nOl be ready when the children came home from school. The rescue men had entered a new world. Here was a person with problems as well as injuries, and there was a need to care for the person as well as for the broken leg. This person was part of a community with responsibilities...