Marjorie Thompson died on August 5th 1945 aged just 35 from a heart attack caused by her asthma. Although, still young she had had a successful nursing career and shortly before her death was appointed deputy head of district nurses and midwives across the county of Norfolk.To die young is always cruel but to do so having just come through the second world war seems particularly so. Marjorie's death came three months after the end of the war in Europe and just 10 days before the end of the war in Japan.
Marjorie's obituary, which I found amongst her sisters' belongings, appears to be from a local newspaper in Woodbridge, Suffolk where she had been a district nurse.
The obituary highlights Marjorie's role managing the arrival of evacuees in the small town of Woodbridge. I also found another newspaper snippet from early on in the war that went out of its way to praise Marjorie's contribution to the successful reception of the evacuees from London.
The obituary also notes Marjorie's work in London during the blitz in 1940, when London was bombed daily for almost two months, and the subsequent V1 and V2 raids, which from mid 1944 targeted London and the south east of England with thousands of short range ballistic missiles. Together these raids killed almost 100,000 Londoners.
No training can have prepared nurses like Marjorie for the horrors they witnessed at that time.
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Thanks for the link here. So sad, but it's wonderful that she made such a difference in her short life.
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