Edinburgh Life Stories, part two: How the NHS created a huge rush for false teeth throughout the Capital

VOICES of the past recall their lives in many of the Living Memory Association’s new Life Story podcast.

NHS brought free dental treatment to Edinburgh

Recorded over the last 32 years, many of the collected memories find subjects reflecting on their working lives. Today we focus on two editions which shine a spotlight on the early days of the NHS in the Capital.

Audrey Soutar was born in 1933 and lived for many years in her family home on Leith Walk. In the podcast Memories of the Early Days of the NHS, she recalls having to pay for a doctor’s appointment, home remedies and her time working as a dental nurse and at a herbalist. Speaking to the Association’s Miles Tubb in 2008, she began by recalling memories of her childhood.

“I remember going to the school dentist at 5 Links Place... didn’t like that very much. At school you had a medical examination every year; you got your hair examined for nits, you were weighed, had you height taken and generally looked over to see if you were ill-nourished.”

NHS brought free dental treatment to Edinburgh

At the time, many people relied on health supplements to ensure their children grew healthily. Others less so. Audrey remembered, “We had cod liver oil, concentrated orange juice and rose hip syrup.

“Didn’t like the cod liver oil, but I enjoyed the orange juice, the rose hip syrup was alright. When I was younger I remember having emulsion, pink stuff, and malt. I liked that. Then there was other stuff called ‘Chemical Food’, which you had to take through a straw because it rotted your teeth. God knows why they gave you that but it was supposed to be good for you.”

In the podcast Audrey also recalled other remedies that have long since been confined to the history books. “If you had a cold you were supposed to leave half an onion in your room and that would absorb the germs and if you had a sore throat, you put a sweaty sock around your neck.”

As an adult, Audrey worked as dental nurse and reveals that with the arrival of the NHS, many people wanted all their teeth out, known as a “total clearance”, in order to have shiny new dentures.

“I worked as a dental nurse in the early 50s, obviously when you had to pay for the dentist nobody wanted to go, in fact, nobody wanted to go to the dentist anyway. But once the National Health Service came in and it was free, people came, but what they really wanted was to get their teeth out and false teeth put in. 15-year-olds would come in and say, ‘I want them all out. My mam’s got them out, my dad’s got them out, I want them all out’, but of course no reputable dentist would take out healthy teeth. There was a great backlog because of the poor dental health at the time.

“I worked at a practice at the foot of the Walk and there were three dentists, six technicians and myself, and the place was stacked to the gunnels with false teeth. It was going like a fair... and then they put on a charge for dentures and a full upper and lower set cost £4/10/-”.

A fascinating insight into dentistry of the past, another vivid collection of memories from the 1940s and 1950s features in another edition of the podcast, Nursing in the 1950s. Ena Munro came to Edinburgh in 1949 at 18 to train at Leith Hospital as a nurse. Having spent a year as a midwife at Elsie Inglis and time nursing in the community, she returned to Leith Hospital in the early 1950s to work as a staff nurse on a surgical ward, where she remained until her retirement in the mid-80s. Talking to Tubb to mark the 60th anniversary of the NHS, she shared stories of an army- trained matron, home births at Greenside and cooking boiled eggs for the patients’ tea.

“In Leith we had medical wards, surgical wards, gynaecological wards, eye operations, we also did orthopaedics and had an ear, nose and throat department and we never had any infection,” she declared proudly.

After training, Ena spent a year in midwifery at the Elsie Inglis Hospital. "We had to live in. We had an assistant matron who was one of the nastiest people I ever met. She was in charge and I don’t think she liked anybody and I don’t think anyone liked her. Her room faced the nursery and during the night, if there were babies crying, you had to take them to the changing room and put them along the work top so as not to disturb her sleep... strange person.”

Ena quickly returned to Leith Hospital, getting a job as a staff nurse through a recruiting office on Rose Street, only to discover the matron, Miss Mitchell, wasn’t too pleased with her for not applying to her direct. “But I must have liked it, I stayed there until I retired.”

Listen to The Life Story Podcast free online - Audrey Soutar: Memories of the Early Days of the NHS https://lifestory.libsyn.com/audrey-soutar-memories-of-the-early-days-of-the-nhs and Ena Munro - Nursing in the 1950s can be found at https://lifestory.libsyn.com/ena-munro-nursing-in-the-1950s

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