Add Information to Record of a Person who served during the Second World War on The Wartime Memories Project Website
Add Information to Record of a Person who served during the Second World War on The Wartime Memories Project Website
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264708
Nursing Sister. Mary Kathleen Spiers
Queen Alexandras Royal Naval Nursing Service HMS Glendower
from:Cricklewood
Mary Spiers was a SRN at Middlesex Hospital and began her training in late Summer 1940. Her training included time with the war blinded at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. In May 1944 she was sent with other nurses to establish a Casualty Clearing Station in Portsmouth. The Clearing Station became operational on D-Day.
She recalled that British casualties had hand-written histories; the American had typed notes - written by clerks initially in shell holes on Omaha beach! Later she was seconded to the Navy, and eventually became permanent rather than wartime with QARNNS. She was briefly at HMS Glendower training establishment, where the VE day gun salute was achieved by tossing thunderflashes into metal dustbins at the correct intervals. She believes the gunnery officer that day was Lt RN Prince Philip.
She was in the Naval Hospital in Malta in 1946 or 47 and was discharged from QARNNS upon her marriage to Surgeon Lt (Dentist) John Miller in May 1948.