AIR RAID VICTIM

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23767, 21 September 1940, Page 16

AIR RAID VICTIM

YOUNG SYDNEY NURSE COLLAPSE AFTER RESCUE A DISTINGUISHED CAREER Heroic efforts to roscne a Sydney nurse from the ruins of the nurses' wing of a London hospital after an airraid failed when she died of shock as the nir raid sirens sounded again. The nurse was Miss Barbara Mortimer Thomas, aged 32, who had many friends in Auckland and was a member of the Clapcott family, once well known in this city. Miss Thomas had shown remarkable fortitude for more than 12 hours while the rescuers strove to remove the debris which was crushing her. She had been freed and it is estimated that she would have been removed within a minute if the next raid had not started. Five other nurses buried in the ruins had been given up as lost. Scaffolding Erected

A bomb demolished the wing during the previous night-long raid and Nurse Thomas' cries attracted the attention of rescue squads. A steel scaffolding, which rose 40l't, was built around the injured nurse while others in the rescue squad made a hole beneath the bed on which she lay and cut away its legs. Several times she stretched out her free arm for injections of morphia and a hole was made in a near by wall so that tea could be handed to her. She was eventually moved up to the hole in the wall and had been lifted halfway through when the raid began. As the air-raid siren sounded a German aeroplane flew over the wreckage. Nurse Thomas died while doctors waited below to treat her. Work at*St. Thomas'

Nurse Thomas left Sydney in ]930 as a member of the first Australian women's hockey team to tour abroad. She had graduated in arts at Sydney University and was in her second-year medical course when the tour intervened. At its conclusion she decided to remain in London and enter St. Thomas' Hospital as a massage student. She graduated from that course in 193 M and Tier work was so distinguished that she was asked to join the stafl of the hospital in the physio-therapeutic department. in December, 1937, Nurse Thomas went to Sydney for a six months' holiday and aiso visited New Zealand, staying with various friends in Auckland.