Hackney Hospital

Interviewed by Claudia Jessop

Vera Gold was born in Stepney in 1918, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. After leaving school at 14 she worked as a dressmaker’s assistant and a shop assistant. When the Second World War broke out, she reported for duty as a nursing assistant for the St John Ambulance. She worked at a First Aid post based at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, where she also helped in the outpatients’ department and on the wards. It was here that she met her future husband, who also worked for the St John Ambulance service. In 1940 her home was bombed, but luckily she managed to reach an Anderson shelter shortly before the bombing raid started. In the same year she got married and shortly afterwards started work at a First Aid post based at the Stepney Jewish Hospital, and then at the Eastern Fever Hospital in Homerton Row (the present-day site of Homerton University Hospital). At the Eastern she worked in the ambulances and on the children’s ward, and this job helped to secure her and her husband accommodation at Banbury House in South Hackney, where she was living when her two children were born in 1943 and 1946. After the Second World War the family moved to Loughton in Essex, where they lived for 28 years until, having been widowed, Vera decided to return to London where she set up a new home in Highbury, living there for 32 years.  We were very saddened to learn of Vera's death shortly before the completion of this website.