A TEENAGER’S dream of becoming a draughtsman faded after he destroyed a milling machine and complex lathe as a second-year apprentice.

Moved unceremoniously to the tool room, Blackburn youngster John Harvey Greenhalgh resigned from the English Electric Company, in Clayton-le-Moors, and took his career in a different direction.

Harvey, one of five children of Eric and Edith Greenhalgh, who lived in Queens Road, had started work there after leaving Audley Secondary School at the age of 15. He was a member of Woodlands Scout Troop, run then by Harold Burrows, and the St John Ambulance Brigade first-aid competition team which won many cups. So he knew all about fractures and bruises when he had two stints in hospital after injuring his arm playing football and began taking careful note of the ward’s routine.

So, in 1954, at the age of 17, he became a cadet nurse at Queen’s Park Hospital, which had once been Blackburn’s workhouse and was then a teaching institution as well as a medical facility.

Now in his 70s, Harvey has written a book about his four years at Queen’s Park. Needle In The Heart — The House Of Mad Eccentrics tells of his days of learning the skill of sharpening needles, scrubbing bedpans, bottles and kidney dishes, of basic ward hygiene and housekeeping tasks.

He also tells of the sisters who ran their wards as though they were sergeant majors, the authoritarian matron in her dark green and the pretty nurses in their starched aprons and caps, as well as the patients he cared for with patience and increasing skill.

It provides a compendium of eccentric doctors, such as the GP who was so obsessed with cleanliness he was known as Dr Dettol and who cared for patients during the 1950s in the hospital referred to as The Fortress.

In those days it was the same as any other infirmary. There was no attitude of use it once, then throw it away. Everything had to be washed, scrubbed, irrigated, sharpened and sterilised.

But in the midst of hard work Harvey got up to pranks, too, such as the day he and a fellow student nurse hid all the pots and pans from the kitchen in the gardener’s greenhouse.

After four years at Queen’s Park and gaining his SRN, Harvey was called up for national service, before emigrating to California. Over the years he obtained his RN, BA, MA and PhD, going from staff nurse, to head nurse, administrative nursing supervisor and assistant director of nurses. He said: “What a great adventure it was. I would not hesitate to do it all over again.”

n Needle In The Heart — The House Of Mad Eccentrics, published by Xulon Press (ISBN 978-1498419130), is distributed by Ingram/SpringHarbor.