Oral History Gallery

Incidents and case studies ashore 3 - Sunburnt submariner 1970s

Evelyn Williams

Service: 1961 - 1990

Rate: Principal Nursing Officer

Evelyn Williams trained as a nurse and midwife before joining the QARNNS (Queen Alexandra Royal Naval Nursing Service) in April 1961. During her QARNNS career she worked at Royal Naval Hospitals Haslar, Plymouth, Malta and Gibraltar and also at HMS Raleigh, HMS Goldcrest, HMS Terror in Singapore, HMS Neptune and RM Deal. After becoming a Nurse Tutor she became involved in the training of both nurses and Medical Assistants and her final appointment was to the staff of Surgeon Commodore Naval Medical Training before her retirement in 1990.

Evelyn recalls a bad case of sunburn.

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Extract Text (Duration 0.47)

We had some quite interesting cases in while I was there.Â Hmmm, we had one chap in particular who had been on trot duty, trot sentry duty on a boat; that is he had been duty on the upper deck, on the casing of the submarine, hmmm, and he had got very badly sunburnt on his legs.Â And he came in, and in fact needed some quite lengthy treatment for these burns, and it was something we learnt, in fact he was quite fair haired, so it was something we learnt again to teach the submariners that they must take care of fair haired people and people standing out on the casing in hot weather.