The Voice of Nursing: Celebrating 100 years of the RCN, the Royal College of Nursing, London
A proud showcase of an institution that has supported nursing for a century, says Emma Shepley
Venture behind John Lewis’s flagship store on London’s Oxford Street and you’ll find Cavendish Square – an 18th-century development created for aristocratic West End living and home today to the 100-year-old Royal College of Nursing (RCN).
The RCN is in the heart of medical London, just a stone’s throw from Harley Street’s long line of clinics and specialists, where Lionel Logue famously treated King George VI’s stammer. Other notable institutions in the area include the Royal Society of Medicine, the British Dental Association, the Association of Anaesthetists and the King’s Fund.
Many UK museums represent nursing, but only the RCN’s Library and Heritage Centre and the Florence Nightingale Museum have nursing history as their central and sole purpose. Founded in March 1916, just before that year’s tragic summer in the Somme, the RCN was the first organisation to secure professional status for nurses.
Its current exhibition, The Voice of Nursing: Celebrating 100 Years of the RCN, showcases this slice of medical history throughout 2016 as part of a dynamic year of public and professional engagement and events. Nursing history holds a mirror to the modern era, taking in war, suffrage, trade unions, workers’ rights, women’s rights, the foundation of the National Health Service and debates around the delivery of health services today. Nursing staff are the single largest professional body employed by the NHS (more than 377,000 in 2014) and early 20th-century perceptions of the job as “an extension of domestic duties” by “selfless angels” (as the exhibition interpretation describes) collide with the professional realities of nursing today.
Florence Nightingale’s reputation as the “lady with the lamp” still eclipses her work as a leading public health campaigner and pioneering statistician, and the RCN’s centenary displays make it abundantly clear that academic training and specialisation have made today’s nursing unrecognisable compared with earlier incarnations of the profession.
Rich history
The RCN’s headquarters is an intriguingly rich architectural jigsaw: a 1720s seven-storey townhouse was joined to the purpose-built 1926 College of Nursing next door in the 1930s, and 21st-century glass walkways now cut through the RCN’s striking interiors.
Prime minister Herbert Asquith owned the townhouse before the RCN bought it in 1921, so its interiors are a stunningly theatrical survival from this grander past. Most prominent is the vast Italianate baroque stairwell mural created by the scenery painters of Drury Lane in 1730, but sadly it is only visible to the public on tours or open days.
Visitors enter the RCN’s Library and Heritage Centre from Henrietta Place. The centre, opened in 2013, creates a welcoming and lively impression, something that royal colleges don’t often achieve, thanks to their deliberately imposing architecture and long histories as member-only institutions.
The Voice of Nursing display is adjacent to the public entrance. It aims to “showcase the rich history of the UK’s largest nursing union, transporting visitors through a century of one of Britain’s most- loved professions”. Curated by library and heritage staff at the RCN, the objects are drawn from the institution’s own collection – “the largest nursing resource of its kind in the Europe”. What the display emphatically is not is a comprehensive history of 100 years of nursing – it stays focused on the institution’s history and successes from start to end.
Century of change
A genuinely challenging and exploratory institutional anniversary exhibition is tricky to pull off, particularly with the stated aim of celebrating a centenary. Prominent quotes from the current RCN president and chief executive dotted throughout the exhibition come close to corporate blandness, but the disputes generated by a century of embattled change are explored sufficiently for the display to spring to life.
The theme of voice is carried from the title into every aspect of the exhibition – with audio points, an engaging animated film and through the use of direct quotes from contemporary midwives, theatre, mental health, neonatal and district nurses, teachers and academics reflecting on what nursing means to them.
The route around the exhibition
is circular, beginning and ending in an Edwardian-style drawing room corner, complete with chaise longue, patterned wallpaper, pendulum clock and folding screen. Nicely judged playful touches abound: #1916selfie opportunities with white linen nursing caps, a display on 1960s student nursing with Quink ink pots and crumpled vintage chocolate wrappers scattered around. Visitor feedback forms are lined up on multiple clipboards and you are playfully invited to “check the exhibition’s vitals” before you leave.
The first world war precipitated demand for effective nursing regulation, standards and training as thousands of women volunteered to serve. The display panels efficiently tell the story of the British Red Cross matron-in-chief, Sarah Swift, who proposed the creation of the college in a “shrewd move” to “capitalise on a nation’s wartime gratitude”. As the first member of the RCN, Swift’s application form is appropriately the first object on display.
Belt buckles, epaulettes, scissors, chatelaines and training manuals tell the story of the RCN’s early years. Although not the most engaging collection of objects en masse, the curators have worked hard to pull out personal stories to relieve the visual limitations of nursing’s material culture. The best is a map of Great Britain entirely formed of enamel hospital badges that were presented to nurses on completion of their training and worn throughout their career.
Evolving profession
The Nurses Registration Act of 1919 established the first state register, but the battle to view nursing as a profession was far from over, and this exhibition highlights the varying perceptions of the nurse’s role.
At this point the show takes in the tension-filled rivalry between medical institutions and suffragists furious at the appointment of men to the college council when women-only institutional directions was preferred by many campaigners. Male nurses could not join the college until 1960 and a quote from the 1950s highlights the discrimination one man experienced from the early RCN.
A book of lecture notes made by trainee nurse Christine Clark in 1963 is also curiously compelling. Clark notes the bed-making routine in scrupulous detail and the list of apparatus, which included “2 long sheets, 2 blankets, draw sheet & mackintosh, 2 chairs, 1 counterpane”. Her first action, hurriedly abbreviated, was to “see patient comfortable” before stripping, folding and flipping the sheets.
The cliches of nursing are nicely incorporated too: Barbara Windsor as the “naughty nurse” in Carry on Doctor gets a mention, alongside reproductions of cartoons by Giles and Donald McGill, clearly selected to border on the risque without actually crossing the line. (A similar display of mid-20th century nursing images on show at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London is more eye-catchingly offensive.)
A final sprint through the rest of the 20th century takes in nurse shortages, targeted overseas recruitment drives (begun in the 1930s and continued after the second world war), the first nursing degree programmes and the RCN becoming (by unanimous vote) a trade union in 1976. In choosing to cover a century of frenetic social change, the exhibition can only touch on a terrific set of stories and events.
The RCN’s institutional collections are rich repositories of the history of the working lives of nurses. And its centenary display, although by necessity small in scale, hints tantalisingly at the wealth of material held.
Nursing is a proud profession and this exhibition takes pride in showcasing the institution that has protected and supported it for a century.
Emma Shepley is the senior curator of library, archive and museum services at the Royal College of Physicians, London
Main funders Royal College of Nursing
Exhibition design Greenhat Design
Conservation Jillian Gregory
Object Mounts Stephen Umpleby
Exhibition ends December 2017
Admission Free
The RCN is in the heart of medical London, just a stone’s throw from Harley Street’s long line of clinics and specialists, where Lionel Logue famously treated King George VI’s stammer. Other notable institutions in the area include the Royal Society of Medicine, the British Dental Association, the Association of Anaesthetists and the King’s Fund.
Many UK museums represent nursing, but only the RCN’s Library and Heritage Centre and the Florence Nightingale Museum have nursing history as their central and sole purpose. Founded in March 1916, just before that year’s tragic summer in the Somme, the RCN was the first organisation to secure professional status for nurses.
Its current exhibition, The Voice of Nursing: Celebrating 100 Years of the RCN, showcases this slice of medical history throughout 2016 as part of a dynamic year of public and professional engagement and events. Nursing history holds a mirror to the modern era, taking in war, suffrage, trade unions, workers’ rights, women’s rights, the foundation of the National Health Service and debates around the delivery of health services today. Nursing staff are the single largest professional body employed by the NHS (more than 377,000 in 2014) and early 20th-century perceptions of the job as “an extension of domestic duties” by “selfless angels” (as the exhibition interpretation describes) collide with the professional realities of nursing today.
Florence Nightingale’s reputation as the “lady with the lamp” still eclipses her work as a leading public health campaigner and pioneering statistician, and the RCN’s centenary displays make it abundantly clear that academic training and specialisation have made today’s nursing unrecognisable compared with earlier incarnations of the profession.
Rich history
The RCN’s headquarters is an intriguingly rich architectural jigsaw: a 1720s seven-storey townhouse was joined to the purpose-built 1926 College of Nursing next door in the 1930s, and 21st-century glass walkways now cut through the RCN’s striking interiors.
Prime minister Herbert Asquith owned the townhouse before the RCN bought it in 1921, so its interiors are a stunningly theatrical survival from this grander past. Most prominent is the vast Italianate baroque stairwell mural created by the scenery painters of Drury Lane in 1730, but sadly it is only visible to the public on tours or open days.
Visitors enter the RCN’s Library and Heritage Centre from Henrietta Place. The centre, opened in 2013, creates a welcoming and lively impression, something that royal colleges don’t often achieve, thanks to their deliberately imposing architecture and long histories as member-only institutions.
The Voice of Nursing display is adjacent to the public entrance. It aims to “showcase the rich history of the UK’s largest nursing union, transporting visitors through a century of one of Britain’s most- loved professions”. Curated by library and heritage staff at the RCN, the objects are drawn from the institution’s own collection – “the largest nursing resource of its kind in the Europe”. What the display emphatically is not is a comprehensive history of 100 years of nursing – it stays focused on the institution’s history and successes from start to end.
Century of change
A genuinely challenging and exploratory institutional anniversary exhibition is tricky to pull off, particularly with the stated aim of celebrating a centenary. Prominent quotes from the current RCN president and chief executive dotted throughout the exhibition come close to corporate blandness, but the disputes generated by a century of embattled change are explored sufficiently for the display to spring to life.
The theme of voice is carried from the title into every aspect of the exhibition – with audio points, an engaging animated film and through the use of direct quotes from contemporary midwives, theatre, mental health, neonatal and district nurses, teachers and academics reflecting on what nursing means to them.
The route around the exhibition
is circular, beginning and ending in an Edwardian-style drawing room corner, complete with chaise longue, patterned wallpaper, pendulum clock and folding screen. Nicely judged playful touches abound: #1916selfie opportunities with white linen nursing caps, a display on 1960s student nursing with Quink ink pots and crumpled vintage chocolate wrappers scattered around. Visitor feedback forms are lined up on multiple clipboards and you are playfully invited to “check the exhibition’s vitals” before you leave.
The first world war precipitated demand for effective nursing regulation, standards and training as thousands of women volunteered to serve. The display panels efficiently tell the story of the British Red Cross matron-in-chief, Sarah Swift, who proposed the creation of the college in a “shrewd move” to “capitalise on a nation’s wartime gratitude”. As the first member of the RCN, Swift’s application form is appropriately the first object on display.
Belt buckles, epaulettes, scissors, chatelaines and training manuals tell the story of the RCN’s early years. Although not the most engaging collection of objects en masse, the curators have worked hard to pull out personal stories to relieve the visual limitations of nursing’s material culture. The best is a map of Great Britain entirely formed of enamel hospital badges that were presented to nurses on completion of their training and worn throughout their career.
Evolving profession
The Nurses Registration Act of 1919 established the first state register, but the battle to view nursing as a profession was far from over, and this exhibition highlights the varying perceptions of the nurse’s role.
At this point the show takes in the tension-filled rivalry between medical institutions and suffragists furious at the appointment of men to the college council when women-only institutional directions was preferred by many campaigners. Male nurses could not join the college until 1960 and a quote from the 1950s highlights the discrimination one man experienced from the early RCN.
A book of lecture notes made by trainee nurse Christine Clark in 1963 is also curiously compelling. Clark notes the bed-making routine in scrupulous detail and the list of apparatus, which included “2 long sheets, 2 blankets, draw sheet & mackintosh, 2 chairs, 1 counterpane”. Her first action, hurriedly abbreviated, was to “see patient comfortable” before stripping, folding and flipping the sheets.
The cliches of nursing are nicely incorporated too: Barbara Windsor as the “naughty nurse” in Carry on Doctor gets a mention, alongside reproductions of cartoons by Giles and Donald McGill, clearly selected to border on the risque without actually crossing the line. (A similar display of mid-20th century nursing images on show at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London is more eye-catchingly offensive.)
A final sprint through the rest of the 20th century takes in nurse shortages, targeted overseas recruitment drives (begun in the 1930s and continued after the second world war), the first nursing degree programmes and the RCN becoming (by unanimous vote) a trade union in 1976. In choosing to cover a century of frenetic social change, the exhibition can only touch on a terrific set of stories and events.
The RCN’s institutional collections are rich repositories of the history of the working lives of nurses. And its centenary display, although by necessity small in scale, hints tantalisingly at the wealth of material held.
Nursing is a proud profession and this exhibition takes pride in showcasing the institution that has protected and supported it for a century.
Emma Shepley is the senior curator of library, archive and museum services at the Royal College of Physicians, London
Project data
Cost £50,000Main funders Royal College of Nursing
Exhibition design Greenhat Design
Conservation Jillian Gregory
Object Mounts Stephen Umpleby
Exhibition ends December 2017
Admission Free