An oral history interview with Gillian Lewis and Colin Humphries conducted by Anila Ladwa for the In/Visible Labour project, part of the In Living Memory programme.
In/Visible Labour responds to the radical and resilient experiences of collective family making through a programme of artworks and oral histories works by a diverse range of Lewisham communities and their support networks across the borough.
Gillian Lewis and Colin Humphries met when she ran her own touring theatre company. Colin is a professional theatre prop maker. Gillian is an active member of the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign and coordinated many different faith groups in Lewisham to get involved and support the campaign. Gillian came up with ideas for visual props and approached Colin to make these to lead the campaign protest marches including ‘Jeremy the Vulture’ who can be spotted on some of the archived images from the march.
Transcription
Gillian: Well, I am a Lewishamite born and although ironically, I might as well throw this in, I was actually born in Charing Cross Hospital when it was in Charing Cross because my mum was booked into the unmarried mother’s ward, which just sounds absolutely bonkers today. But back in 1956, although in fact she got married before she gave birth, it was too late, she was already booked in. I was born within the sound of Bow Bells in that case. But I was then brought up in Lewisham. I’ve done lots of things in my life and I’ve lived in lots of places but I’m back in Lewisham.
I’ve been in Lewisham in the flat that I’m in at the moment though, I can’t believe it, 39 years in my wonderful flat which was actually special lettings, and had an enormous number of Goldsmith’s students in it in the 1980s. So, that’s how I got it. Everything has changed with housing, so everybody lives there, families live there, and a lot of much, much older Goldsmith’s students live there. So, anyway, I’m just going to continue because it’s sort of links into Colin if I say that at a certain point I set up my own theatre company with another woman.
And we toured all over the country with shows, and we always commissioned writers and we had the music professionally recorded and composed, and all the rest of it. And Colin and Becky became our designers, props makers, costume makers, and our whole blinking design department for our theatre company.
Colin: Becky is mainly the designer, and I was – we both made stuff together.
Gillian: And inputted ideas.
Interviewer (Anila): What was the theatre company called?
Gillian: It was actually Open Wide Theatre, and our first show was called A Wheelie Bin Ate My Sister. Sorry, thinking back, so in 1996, maybe 97, we did the town mouse and the country mouse. So, I can’t believe I’ve known you all these years Colin, 25 years. But that’s how I met Colin, it was all about theatre and art, and we were all very young and probably beautiful too. And now –
Interviewer: You still are.
Gillian: So, when this sort of like bomb dropped and we could not believe that Lewisham Hospital was going to be the victim actually of the very first action under a brand new law when David Cameron got in, in 2010, actually sorry, I just want to say this very quickly, but ironically when he got in, in 2010, a completely independent foundation in America had – it was called the Commonwealth Foundation had done an 11 country, a sort of survey and study of different types of health systems and as always, as with every study that’s virtually ever been done the NHS came up right at the top. And that result was posted in July 2010.
David Cameron had not long been in. Anyway, the point is that they published a white paper saying that they were going to change the way that the NHS functioned and totally reorganise it, and the most crucial thing about it really, or one of them anyway, was that they were going to revoke the legal duty of the Minister of Health to provide healthcare for the population. So, you can see where they’re going.
So, although we’d had this fabulous relationship artistically actually we folded our theatre company in 2009 and after many, many years of successful touring when I was still in touch with Colin, and so this artistic endeavour to support the massive effort to stop this hospital being sacrificed and closed so that a nearby hospital that had a deficit – what that actually means is that the government wouldn’t underwrite – in other words it was underfunded, that’s what it actually means.
Of course, I turned immediately to Colin because I knew that they did all sorts of things for parades and sort of festival type events where people carry very big eye catching marvellous creative works of art, so we continued to have a collaboration –
Colin: We do a thing called Hope Festival and we do a workshop for the kids, and have a procession, and they make costumes, banners and things. That’s in May I think.
Interviewer: Whereabouts is that festival?
Colin: It’s in Biggin Hill on a campsite there. I’ve lived in Lewisham all my life, although I too was born actually in the sound of Bow Bells. Dick Whittington Hospital in High Gate because my parents were city people. They lived and worked there. I was one year when I came to Lewisham, so I’ve lived in Lewisham since the age of one. My mum still lives here, and she’s 92 I think. And so, I’ve lived in this house in Brockley since 1984. Nine flats in it, big garden. Obviously it was one big family house originally in Wickham Road when it was a really gentile road.
And back in those days – we know this because someone actually knocked on our door once, and they actually lived here, and born here I think. And they remember in those days Wickham Road was a private road and it had a barrier, a police barrier at each end, and anyone coming into the road had to have either a letter of introduction to say they were working in the house.
Interviewer: A private road, wow!
Colin: They were known to the police because they lived in the road. It was a very posh road. Community really. I mean the [unintelligible 00:06:38] is separate, self-contained, but we have a WhatsApp group so we all sort of communicate with each other and have regular gatherings in the garden and stuff. We have got some dialogue about various issues as well in the house. And it’s always been an artistic and creative environment. We’ve got a lot of musicians that have lived here, actors, and artists. In fact, currently there’s some girls, art students living here. And there have always been artists. We kind of attracts artists this house, it’s a Bohemian sort of house.
Interviewer: Perhaps we could move on to your time working together, coming together for the campaign. Colin, I don’t know how much you were involved in participating or attending those meetings.
Colin: I’m not really sort of part of the actual organisation, that’s Gillian’s thing. She calls me in now and again to help with projects and stuff.
Gillian: And I always wonder whether you dread it when I send you a text. It’s like oh God, what does she want now.
Colin: Whenever you receive the message you’re thinking what’s she wanting now.
Gillian: What outlandish and incredible thing. Well, shall I just try and sum it up briefly. Sort of dim memory is that it somehow came up online, maybe via 38 Degrees, which is another campaign or change.org, or something, but I remember the very, very first meeting which was when they very first published the white paper. So, then there was a period of time where we’ve tried to find out whether this white paper was going to become law or not, and while that was – there was a lull.
And I know that that first meeting I went to was at the old or rather the 1960s Lady Wells Baths which has subsequently been pulled down and is now prefabricated flats, which is – but they are quite good, because they are council flats thank goodness. But I just remember that at that very first meeting there were well over 150 people and that was in something like March 2011. I know it was 2011, I’m sure it was March.
And to really just sort of try and pinpoint certain important aspects of this, first of all I had absolutely no idea until all of this started to erupt, I had absolutely no idea that there was any difference between what private companies provide health wise, and what an NHS actually means, and actually is. Especially after a lifetime of only ever having heard negative reports in newspapers about, you know, money being wasted in the NHS or people waiting on waiting list, especially in the Margaret Thatcher era.
So, my attitude was one of why does it matter, what does it matter if this company provides this service or not. So, I very, very quickly learnt and understood that they are not the same thing at all. They don’t resemble each other in any way, shape or possible outcomes, anything. Because in a service the determinant for what kind of treatment you get mainly is what your need is, you know, as a patient.
Whereas the determinant for a private company is largely dictated by what they will actually get paid for. And whether it’s profitable, and so, I very quickly learnt, for example, that they past this law that was going to be called The Health and Social Care Act, and I always remember the very first sentence by a GP who tried to explain it to everybody who was at this first meeting. The very first sentence was there’s very little about health or social care in this proposed bill. It’s actually just a financial reworking that will allow private companies to bid for a lot of money.
Whilst at the same time giving private companies the right to refuse treatment, regardless of whether they’ve got the budget for the treatment or not. There’s a very, very good example actually in the hospital at the moment, the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign worked very, very hard last year to not have an outsourced contract for pathology. In other words, the testing of bloods and whatever else, and they were successful in preventing that from happening in the hospital, which is very, very important.
Because when the pathology department does the test the consultant can meet with the pathologist and that’s how they come up with an appropriate diagnosis. And for the patient this crucial, absolutely crucial to their treatment that they have this discussion. So, the hospital, and in fact they were going to do the same thing with the GPs, the hospital was going to carry on testing for the GPs, but the GPs were part of this huge £6bn outsourcing contract.
And so, now what we’ve had inside information from somebody working in a GP’s surgery, that what happens is the tests are all done within the GP practice, they then get whizzed off by a courier, but they never get the same courier twice, so there’s no relationship there. When it gets to the private company it sometimes takes time for it to be done, so a lot of tests come back saying that they’re out of date and that they’ve got to be done again. They don’t get to have the conversation they need to have with the consultant.
And in fact, all the tests get delivered on a Thursday evening which leaves the GPs wading through these tests because they’re so important to start the treatment for the patients over their weekend. So, if you ever wonder why it’s hard to get an appointment with a GP, these are the sorts of things that are adding to their workload. So, I’m just giving you one example of how the minute that you end up with private interests within a so called then National Health Service, you get completely warped and skewed outcomes that do not serve the doctors, the clinicians or the patients, and that’s just one teeny weeny little example.
Colin: I tried phoning the doctor, you’re waiting at least an hour before you get through every time. And we know that because I recently – Becky has been trying to get appointments, every time she phones, there’s been a few times now, it’s at least an hour, there’s a queue, you’re in a queue.
Gillian: That’s right. And my question would be as somebody recently said on the stage of an NHS conference that was held hosted by Keep our NHS Public, the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign is the Lewisham group for Keep our NHS Public which is a national organisation. And they hosted and set up a conference which was also their annual general meeting a couple of Saturday’s ago on the 12th of November. And somebody stood up on the stage and said if we’ve been 10 years now of privatisation how is it for you when you try and see a GP.
If it’s so great why are they doing even more draconian measures now. But anyway, the most important thing is I came to see and understand very, very quickly that private provision is entirely different to a service. A business is not a service. They could not be more different. And I’m not sure if many people understand that. I feel that even now after 10 years most people have no idea whatsoever that our Secretary of State for Health no longer has a legal duty to provide healthcare for the nation. It’s just a guidance. The guidance is it’s a good idea to do it, but there’s no legal duty.
Colin: It’s still called the National Health Service.
Gillian: It’s still called the National Health Service and that logo, and those words are preserved with great fervour by the current government because hiding behind that logo in many cases, many, many cases are private companies. You could even go to your GP and think that your GP is National Health Service, they might not be. More and more GP surgeries are being taken over by American corporations, and I doubt people know that.
Colin: We don’t have to pay for your GP when you go to your –
Gillian: You don’t have to pay for a GP when you go to one that is owned by, for example, Centene, which is a US health giant, they’re an insurance giant. No, you don’t have to pay. But what you might find is that they’ve got all sorts of cost cutting measures where it’s even harder to get to see your GP, even when it’s an emergency.
Colin: That’s definitely true.
Gillian: Because what they’re doing is not spending the money on patients in order to keep as much of it in their coffers as possible. Anyway, going back to the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, this is what’s really important, one of the most amazing things about the campaign is that the people who were able to inform the great majority of people, because the meetings were massive. There would be 200 to 300 people at any given meeting. When the government representative, who’s name, I can’t remember what his job title was for the minute.
I think it was TSA, or something, but when he came to hold the first public meeting in Lewisham for this proposal to downgrade the hospital there was enormous anger because they had hired – sorry, the lecture theatre they’d hired at the hospital was full, so they also then had to additionally use a local community centre. That was full. The backup room in the community centre was full. And there was a crowd of about 400 people in the street outside who couldn’t get in. And he was supposed to be answering questions from the concerned members of the public of Lewisham, and we couldn’t even get into the blinking meeting.
So, right from the word go the sort of mobilisation of people was absolutely massive, and that very, very special important thing I was going to say about the campaign was that the understanding of the proposals for downgrading the hospital, in particular the maternity ward, which was a brand new ward by the way, brand new. The hospital had spent £12m upgrading the A&E and having a dedicated children’s and family A&E, and creating this brand new maternity ward which all the people that I ever knew that ever went in there were agog at how amazing it was.
So, they did all of that and the proposal was to close Lewisham because Lewisham had no debt. I mean the debt was miniscule. Of course, no hospitals have debt, it’s actually a gap in funding is what it is. But this new law meant that hospitals became – they had a new sort of legal financial structure in which they all became individual competing businesses. So, they were seen to be having debt, and because the nearby trust, which was the South London Health Trust, they had a bigger debt because they had a government sponsored debt called a public finance initiative.
Which was costing them something like £1m a week, £50m a year, which actually believe me in comparison to the amounts of money this government has been squandering is not even noticeable. However, they were going to keep that open which protected the payments to the banks for the interest on the building of the hospital, that’s what a private financial initiative is. And close the hospital, which was more easy to close because believe me, this was the thing that – I keep not mentioning what the really important magic thing was.
So, the important, in a way the power of this campaign is that the people that were leading it in no other sense than that they had the experience and understood what was going on, and what the significance of all the proposals was, were the ex-head of the children’s department, for example, of the hospital. And it was the best children’s department of the district general hospitals of London. So good that it worked hand in hand with the Everlina Children’s Hospital at St Thomas’.
So, the calibre of the people, the GPs, members of the British Medical Association, nurses that were working in the Lewisham Trust, the calibre of the people that were doing that was such that they were really able to highlight and pinpoint why the proposals were absolutely bonkers, totally bonkers. Honestly. There’s no other description. The medical staff, particularly the GPs of Lewisham, were completely supporting the campaign as was the staff of the hospital.
So, that’s how you get a very formidable opposition to proposals that aren’t based on anything real. That actually matter to the patients, the population etc. And you got us to introduce ourselves and our links to Lewisham. Lewisham Hospital is an example of a district general hospital where the majority of people walk into A&E. I always remember that coming up at the time. It’s embedded in the town centre. It actually does wonders for the economy of Lewisham because it employs loads of people.
But most importantly there are plenty of hospitals which are outside towns, where you’ve got a car, the proposal was to move everything over to – or the A&E and the maternity ward, to the already struggling hospital on Woolwich Common, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. It used to be an army hospital when it was built and guess what, my dad worked there as a telephonist. That hospital would have had to have coped with an extra 275,000 population of Lewisham.
And it’s A&E was already full to bursting. These were proposals that could not work. And the other thing that was explained to us was when the close an A&E and a maternity unit, and you replace them with a clinic for cuts and grazes, there’s a name for that, I can’t remember what it’s called now, but it’s just an ordinary sort of clinic where you can go for injuries and so forth. What you’ve done is you’ve removed the blood transfusion facilities from the hospital.
And very, very quickly what it means is that all the other – like the important wards where they do difficult surgery, not elective surgery like a cataract or a hip replacement, but all those multiple difficult surgeries, if you haven’t got blood transfusion the hospital starts to die. We put a video on the website, the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign website because the government said that it took an extra two minutes. So, in other words, if you were living in the borough of Lewisham and you had to get to Lewisham Hospital you only had to add an extra few minutes to your journey and you could be right in the middle of Woolwich Common when there are no train stations.
Colin: Two minutes.
Gillian: So, we got people from our campaign to do that journey. We got them to do that journey in the evening, not even in the rush hour, and it took them well over an hour, and they had to get three buses. Everything about it was a lie.
Colin: It’s unbelievable, it’s mindboggling how they could possibly –
Gillian: One of the things is, as well, if somebody had a problem in the middle of giving birth transferring to another unit in a hospital three town centres away, you know, every second can count when a person gives birth. Speaking of which I’ve just got to give you one little fact that I’m wondering if the maternity midwives may or may not remember, but one of the things that the government had to do by law was a consultation. And they printed thousands and thousands of these consultations but most of them didn’t get posted actually.
We gave out loads of them and ultimately made a very, very large bonfire outside the hospital with them on the last day because they were useless. But what our extremely well informed experienced, and in the know leaders of the campaign were able to do was explain to everybody how they needed to understand each question in the consultation. And here’s one about maternity that will make your hair stand on end. Because one of the questions was do you want to see improvements to the – sorry, do you want to see improvements to the infant mortality rate.
Now, anybody in their right mind is going to say yes, who’s going to say no to that. Until you know that there – there was no infant mortality at Lewisham Hospital so how can you improve on zero for the last seven years that is. But if you put yes, that would then count as a vote for their plans to close the maternity unit. That’s the kind of thing that you need experienced knowledgeable people to explain to you because you are an innocent when you’re up against these kinds of methods.
And that fact always stuck in my mind because it’s so disingenuous and it really showed up that their motives were just at all costs to close the maternity unit and the A&E.
Colin: It all still there isn’t it, the A&E and the maternity.
Gillian: It certainly is.
Colin: It’s fantastic how it is still there thanks to mainly your campaign.
Gillian: Although being hugely impacted by the deliberate defunding of all of the NHS but –
Colin: Across the board they’re defunding it and have done for years.
Interviewer: I’m going to ask what your exact roles were in the campaign itself. Colin, if you want to kind of just give us a little bit of insight into your creations that you’ve shown me photographs of.
Colin: And I made various things that – visual sort of, striking things on Gillian’s lead. I mean Gillian had the ideas to do – we made a vulture which was called Jeremy, after Jeremy Hunt, who was the Health Secretary at the time. He’s now Home Secretary isn’t he?
Interviewer: He’s the Chancellor I think.
Colin: Yes, sorry. And it was basically kind of like a big sort of thing you carry, and it was actually – it was a vulture on top of the National Health Service sign, and the vulture is pecking the sign to represent the health service being basically being slashed and pecked away at by vultures. Another thing we did was we did some banners detailing the various deaths that occurred during patient’s being kept waiting in the corridors on trolleys. And detailing all the figures and everything that had just been published.
And the other one, well we made a big birthday cake for the 70th birthday of the National Health and a big march for that. A great bit birthday cake.
Gillian: That must have been 2018 mustn’t it then, because it was formed in 1948.
Colin: I suppose so, yes. We also did a border control post because there was a big sort of issue about people not being allowed – they had to prove their status as – to get treatment, and they had to give all their details for the data, and there was a risk that they would be deported if they weren’t legalised, citizens, refugees, you name it.
Gillian: Or people who are just waiting for a decision. They may not have been told that they’re not entitled to health care, that’s what that border control booth was for, wasn’t it.
Interviewer: So, I’m sitting with the mastermind and the making of –
Colin: Gillian is the mastermind, for sure.
Gillian: I’m not honestly. I might have a few ideas but believe me –
Colin: We just made your ideas basically.
Gillian: I mean there’s always a lot of you in it, isn’t there, the design of it, I mean the vulture – it reminds me of, because by the time you’re holding it on a pole it’s got to be at least 3 to 4m in height.
Colin: Yes, it stands up above the head and shoulders of the crowd, so it’s seen.
Gillian: And it has featured on ITN News at 10 a few times, and all sorts of other programmes. I mean it’s got the wow factor Colin.
Colin: It’s been on several demos.
Gillian: It’s worthy of the National Theatre where you worked at the time.
Colin: Yes.
Gillian: When the Romans used to carry, what was it called, not a banner, it was something else, a –
Colin: SPQR.
Gillian: Yes, and maybe an eagle or something for their regiment, and we used to carry that with –
Colin: Legion.
Gillian: And it certainly is eye catching and it gets an awful lot of attention which is what these – the fact is what you’re making is – you’re bringing to life ideas that are going to enable people to understand at a glance what’s really going on. And also, to get their attention in the first place.
Colin: Our little marching band plays a lot of demonstrations, it’s called Les Wang, Zoings. The Zoings. We do quite a lot of demos.
Interviewer: How many in the band?
Colin: Mainly about five but there are other additions as well. Can be up to 10 sometimes depending on who’s available. Quite often we do the TUC march and the anti-war march as well, that was the Iraq War. Mainly brass. There’s a couple of saxophones, baritone saxophone, tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, trombone, sometimes trumpet. And percussion. It’s like a little marching band.
Gillian: Does Becky play the accordion still?
Colin: She does play accordion but in Les Wang she plays drum, she plays snare. We have other percussion as well. It’s quite a rousing joyful noise.
Gillian: And also, just to interject and say that the TUC march, which is where we suddenly came upon you, were you standing on the cenotaph?
Colin: That’s a good place that we go, we stand in the middle of the road in Whitehall. The procession just rushes past you, you’re in the middle and you’re playing basically.
Gillian: And also, just to add that TUC march had an absolutely massive health contingent, so all the campaigns like the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, we were there, we were carrying out banners. I was marching next to – honestly, I’m not making this up, the Royal College of Midwives. I’ve still got one of the Royal College – I just had to pick it up, Royal College of Nursing placards which says, “Understaffing costs lives”. And also, this was really relevant, I was desperate to get hold of one of these people because the Association of Physiotherapists was next to us as well. So, there we were embedded in this fantastic huge representation of – so it’s all linked back to the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign as well.
Colin: I mean I think Lewisham Campaign was one of the first demos we did. I think that was the first time we got together actually.
Gillian: Wow, I didn’t know that.
Interviewer: That’s like 10 years ago then.
Gillian: I don’t know where the time has gone but one thing to note is that however negative any of the things I’ve said are, in particular, the NHS wasn’t supposed to still be here. It was supposed to be gone by now, and it’s an absolute tribute to giving – nobody knew we were going to go through COVID and all of that, but it’s an absolute triumph that yes it is still there. And the most recent question that is coming up can we really afford an NHS. And it’s the exact opposite question, can we afford not to have an NHS. Because when the NHS was formed the biggest worry of GPs in 1948, and in fact they objected to there being a universal healthcare system, because they were terrified that it would be too expensive.
That it couldn’t possibly ever treat the population and it ended up being just over 4% of GDP. This is another one of the great myths that universal healthcare is more expensive. It absolutely isn’t. If you have somebody, I can’t begin to tell you how many people I know who have been in Lewisham Hospital, I mean it’s nothing to do with me honestly, I’m not guilty, it’s just because it’s local, it’s in our community, and if you need to have a blood test or whatever don’t forget pathology and the consultants, they’re still in the hospital, in the trust.
Being able to give those diagnoses on the spot on the ground, but one of the statistics quite possibly from the World Health Organization is, and this was one of the really big objections to the A&E and maternity unit being dumped in Greenwich in the middle of Woolwich Common where there is no public transport virtually, is that when people are rushed into hospital it doesn’t matter what you’ve got, there’s a statistic which says that people who are visited by their families are more likely to recover more quickly.
But how difficult is it going to be if you’ve got to get two or three buses depending on what part of the borough you come from to actually even be able to visit a member of your family. And what if you’re working. I mean I’m still working even at my age. I could have retired this year, but I love my job, and that’s – I’m a guide, but that’s so easy in Lewisham Hospital. There’s about 15 buses aren’t there Colin that stop outside the hospital. It doesn’t matter where you come from in the borough.
Interviewer: You’ve just reminded me Gillian that your role was kind of – were you involved in getting all the faith groups together?
Gillian: Yes. So, what happened was we were in one of our massive meetings with about 300 people one night, attending, and it just happened to come up that the lady who had formed a group, she’d been reaching out to churches, I think she probably was a church goer, and she had a very, very good response from all these different churches. But this lady, how ironic when I tell you, had to actually go into Lewisham Hospital with some condition or whatever. So, she hadn’t been able to carry on this work that she’d been doing.
So, I put my hand up and I volunteered, and I took over. And we had an amazing group of different faiths in our interfaith group. At the time there was an interfaith minister in the hospital. He was part of it. He’s moved on subsequently. We had the Catholic churches. We had the Church of England of course, but I’m talking about the whole South Eastern Dioceses of many, many churches, they donned their cassocks to march to be visible. We had the most marvellous Hindu Temple, and two thirds of the people on the board of that temple were either retired consultants or still were medical people.
And fully understood the significance. We had Captain Nigel who was the Salvation Army person that was running the very big Lewisham, you couldn’t call it an office, it’s like a hub, Salvation Army Hub, he was an ex nurse. How about that. And he understood very, very clearly what detriment that would be to the people that he looked after, because one of the jobs of the Salvage Army is in supporting people who have fallen on very hard times, and that can be people who are abusing substances.
And he gave one very good example that on many occasions when people were very, very badly ill because they’d been homeless or whatever their situation was, he would have the bus fare. He put them on a bus with strict instructions to get off at the A&E of Lewisham Hospital, and he wondering how on earth he was ever going to manage to do that with a hospital that was three bus journeys away on Woolwich Common. And he said so many lives that he personally knew about, people who managed to get into A&E, people who managed – we only ever hear the bad stories don’t we.
Because whatever happens to you, if you’ve got to get there quickly, this is what the World Health Organization says, it can’t be three town centres and four miles away. Not if you want to live. We had the Seikh Temple in Woolwich which covered Lewisham and Greenwich. We had the Baptist Church, now the lady who ran that wasn’t very well. She used to pray for us though. I’m probably leaving out – oh, how could I leave out the mosque, because the mosque is practically opposite the hospital.
And what you’ve got to remember is that quite a few of these churches, especially with their work around the world, churches, faith communities, really understood what the detrimental effects of private medicine are which most English or British Citizens simply don’t get because they’ve never – it’s been there all their lives and they think somehow it’s going to survive. It really isn’t. There was the interfaith group, and they came out, particularly on the day of the judgement, and very cleverly we had produced many – something like 150 placards that said the fight goes on.
If we’d lost that court case. And another 150 placards that said victory for Lewisham, so whatever way that judgement went we had it covered. And outside the Royal Courts of Justice shoulder to shoulder there were representatives of the Synagogue who I didn’t mention a minute ago, the mosque, Captain Nigel in his full Salvation Army uniform. The Seikh Temple, which was run by a woman, Church of England. It was an absolute shoulder to shoulder event.
Our hospital, Lewisham, and most people think of it as our hospital, cannot be closed in a kind of honest open way by the government they can’t do it full frontally, let’s say, because it has that judgement. And when the government appealed in full knowledge that they were going to lose it was the fastest judgement in history that appeal, two minutes, nobody even managed to get their coats off. We couldn’t get out of the court in time. The judges came straight back in and upheld the original judgement. And they wasted nearly £100,000 doing that.
But there are many, many other ways to close a hospital or bring it to its knees. Don’t give it the money. I’ve been to Lewisham Hospital board meetings where they’ve been discussing the fact that that month’s money simply hasn’t arrived. And they’re down to only a few bandages or something like that, people don’t realise how close to the bone it is. And you’re absolutely right, so we have never stopped campaigning. And just to talk about babies, mothers and babies.
One of the things that Colin made was the border control kiosk because doctors and nurses, and hospitals, the trust as a whole are being asked, as Colin pointed out, to be border guards because – and what’s happened, what we discovered in Lewisham anecdotally was that there were parents who were afraid to bring their children in and that children had died as a result. There were mothers who were afraid to come, and one mother came in way too late, she didn’t go to any antenatal classes etc. and lost her baby.
And we set up a working group with the maternity unit because the hospital wasn’t exactly clear about – some of these people had every right to be treated. Every right to be treated, legally every right, but if you’re not a border guard how do you know. But if doctors and nurses, and the trust, but particularly doctors, if they are discovered to have treated somebody that then subsequently didn’t have the right to be treated their entire career, forget losing their job, that is the end of their career.
So, this is what’s hanging over people’s heads and this is the work that the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign is still doing with midwives, the trust, and the hospital, to save the lives of innocent children. So, if you’re paying huge rents how are you going to pay the bill that you’ve got to pay because your child needed to see a doctor. It’s really evil when you start to look at the hundreds and thousands of millions that have been given away to private companies, that money was there for the NHS, but it doesn’t go to the NHS. That’s why we’re still here and we still will be here.
And you probably know this Aneela, but we’re changing our name. We’ll be having new banners made and all the rest of it because we’ve just had our AGM, so believe me, we are going into 2023 with our sleeves rolled up determined never to give up, ever, ever to give up.
Colin: Yes, because the NHS is the whole country, it’s not just Lewisham. Obviously, the Lewisham Hospital Campaign is the local big focus but –
Gillian: It’s part of the bigger story. Definitely. Because you specifically referred to the war, since World War II, well I just wanted to say one last thing which is I was listening to a programme a while ago, and it was about the lost sort of practice speeches that Winston Churchill did, and they were in a cupboard. It’s called His Cabinet, and he used to practice them out loud and record them, and listen to them, because he knew how important communication really was. And we’re still very, very familiar with his speeches about the war. And fighting the war and never giving up.
He made speeches about universal healthcare because he believed that people should have it. He believed that was something that in a civilised country you should have universal healthcare.
Colin: And he was a Tory.
Gillian: I know. But the reason why I want to just mention him is because when he was asked about the war he said, they said to him did you know that Britain was going to sort of survive and not be defeated, and he said, “No, but I knew it was better to fight.” Better to fight than to just lie down and give in, and that’s the attitude that all around the country, not just the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, but certainly that is the attitude of the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign. Win or lose, and we’ve done a lot of winning, but win or lose we’re never going to stop. We’re never going to give up. Never. Ever.
Colin: Just like Winston.
[End of recorded material at 00:49:44]
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