The final resting places of 16 nurses have been restored in tribute to their legacy, and as a mark of respect for the NHS workers toiling to protect the public during the coronavirus pandemic.
Three graves in Glasgow’s Necropolis have been overhauled and modernised by representatives of a city charity who act as voluntary guides of the city’s most famous cemetery.
The plots containing the remains of 16 nurses and domestic staff from the city’s Royal Infirmary have had their headstones refurbished by stonemasons to commemorate the history and endeavour of nurses who paid the ultimate price for their vocation.
Ruth Johnston, chairwoman of Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, said: “These nurses caught terrible diseases and died in days when they didn’t have such good facilities and protections.
“But even nurses working today have caught Covid and died. The nurses working today have been working under such incredible pressure, and have been for the last two years. So doing something with the gravestones of these older nurses seemed fitting and relevant. Especially because in one of the first graves, five of the six died of infectious diseases.”
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The refurbishments were funded after applications to the Merchants House of Glasgow and the James Wood Bequest Fund, but the work was delayed by the pandemic. Morag Fyfe, historical and genealogical researcher of the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, has uncovered details about the lives of some of the women buried in the graves.
She said: “They started burying them in 1872, young nurses who had caught things like enteric fever through the course of their work. They continued to use the graves up until the 1930s, with the last burial in 1937. In quite a lot of cases they were young ones who have come from places like Caithness, or Aberdeenshire or over from Ireland.
“In some cases they had no local family to claim their bodies but in other cases they maybe outlived their family and perhaps had no relatives left.”
There was a wide range of ages. Records revealed Jane Mowat died of tuberculosis aged 21 in 1872, while Isabella Sutherland died aged 82 in 1895 from “old age and debility”. Some of the deaths were registered by non-family members, meaning recorded information about their lives is now scant.
The charity, formed in 2005, is now looking to shed light on the patients from the hospital who were buried in common graves in the early 1900s.
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Members are also researching details of the graves of men in the medical profession who are also buried in the graveyard overlooking the hospital.