Nurses tend to an injured woman after the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake before being transferred to one of the emergency field hospitals. Photo / Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank, Wilson T2267
Many people understandably still lament the loss of Napier’s public hospital in 1998.
Hastings, 70 years earlier in 1928, had opened its first hospital – but for maternity services only – and its anger was it was not a full-service hospital, blaming Napier for this.
On February 3, 1931, when at 10.47am, the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck, those that could, tended to the hundreds of injured in Hastings and Napier.
Napier’s hospital had collapsed, so field hospitals at McLean Park and the racecourse at Greenmeadows were established.
In Hastings, the closest to a public hospital was the private one, Royston – then in Avenue Rd West, opposite where Spotlight is today.
Most of the town’s injured were brought and laid out on the front lawn. There were around 100 patients there within half an hour of the earthquake.
The staff at Royston – medical men on site and Sister Williams knew they were Hastings’ only hope of medical care. Looking after the 100 or so injured lying on their front lawn was all on them.
Each patient on the lawn was assessed – administering morphia where needed.
A plan, however, was needed – and Mr H V Hoadley, the Hastings member of the Hawke’s Bay Hospital Board, and a Royston doctor, set off directly down Market St, then up Prospect Rd. They were heading to the Hastings racecourse.
The inspection by the two men revealed that the undamaged tea kiosk (Cheval Room) would be suitable as a place to deal with all the casualties.
Word was spread out – no further injured to be taken to Royston – but the racecourse.
Outside Royston hospital were still dozens of men waiting in their lorries – and together with bedding the injured were loading back on lorries to make the trip to Royston – fortunately, Market St was not blocked with fallen masonry.
A lady I interviewed about 20 years ago, remembers watching this scene – almost in disbelief – that an hour previously – on this rather muggy hot day, hundreds were going about their business shopping, and now many of them were now dead – or eerily being transported on the back of lorries down Market St to the racecourse.
Within two hours of the earthquake every person was taken to the makeshift racecourse hospital.
Between 1.30pm and 10pm 60 operations were performed, and each of them had full anaesthesia.
Apart from the medical and surgical activities at the racecourse, other volunteers sprung into action, and as one doctor said, “I desire to stress the value to us of voluntary cooks, who without facilities gave us an ample supply of boiling water and immediately provided us with cups of tea and soups during the day, and capped their efforts with a wonderful hot dinner at night.”
The patients at both the Hastings and Napier racecourses, and McLean Park all needed proper post-operative care, and plans were made to get them to hospitals on the lower North Island. The railway had been damaged, so 30 patients of the 64 patients at the Hastings racecourse were sent on February 4 by ambulance to Wellington.
Others were transported on February 5 to Ormondville to be put on trains there.
When the railway was opened to Napier on February 7, four hospital trains took the remainder of patients away.
Beds “of all descriptions” were lifted onto the train truck carriages and secured to the floors by wooden battens to prevent them from moving about. Ambulance workers were wearing white rags round their arms with a cross inscribed by red ink.
When each patient was put on the train, their names and addresses were written on price tickets taken from a drapery store.
At the Hastings Fallen Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital on the day of the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake were 13 expectant mothers. Five babies had been born a week later, and a report stated, “there are now five happy, contented patients were in the hospital grounds.”
Although the hospital was built in ferro-concrete – and undamaged by the earthquake - Bell army tents were erected in the hospital grounds.
Due to the continued aftershocks no one wanted to go inside a building, let alone give birth in one.
The people of Hastings rightly called Royston hospital and its staff “the Salvation of Hastings” for its earthquake efforts. A public fund was launched within days of this earthquake to build a bigger and better Royston, and the result of this was the beginnings of the facility that exists today in Prospect Rd.
Assisted by a £35,000 (then a small fortune) bequest from Henrietta Kelly for a Hastings hospital (she perished in Napier’s Masonic Hotel during the 1931 earthquake), where able to open additions to the maternity hospital in June 1935, enabling the beginnings of a full service hospital.
Politics between Hastings and Napier threatened to overshadow the opening during speeches when the bitterness of the decades struggle to achieve a hospital was still bubbling below the surface, but Hawke’s Bay Hospital Board chairman and Napier mayor, Charles Morse – (blamed for holding Hastings back) stated that today, “I don’t intend to enter into any argument.”
Relations between Hastings and Napier had soured since the earthquake, reaching an all-time low, taking some time to restore some semblance of any regional co-operation.
Michael Fowler is a contracted Hawke’s Bay author and historian mfhistory@gmail.com