DO YOU like rice pudding and what do you think of the British Empire? Not exactly searching interview questions, but had you applied for nurse training back in the 1940s these were among the subjects that you might have been grilled on.
Nursing Standard (Nov 22) says that a conference on nursing’s history heard that the mothers of potential recruits were often interviewed alongside their daughters. One nurse recalled that her mum was quizzed by Matron for longer than she was.
The aim, it seems, was to weed out those from the “wrong” background. Several working class applicants were told that nurses normally came only from “professional families”.