Blitz survivor hails front-line care at hospital

A 94-year-old Blitz survivor returned to the hospital which saved her life to hand over a special thank-you present yesterday.

Doris Leci suffered terrible injuries when her father's east London army clothing factory was bombed by the Germans in 1940, leaving 20 people dead.

She was taken to the Royal London Hospital where she received "fantastic" care and yesterday she presented the hospital's museum with a photograph taken during her stay which was given to her when she was well enough to leave.

The picture shows Mrs Leci's doctor presenting a stethoscope to an Army officer so it could be used to listen to dropped bombs to test if they were live. The staff nurse and a second nurse look on as the presentation takes place.

Although Mrs Leci cannot remember the names of any of those in the photograph it provides a fascinating snapshot of hospital life during the war and will be kept in the museum's archive.

Mrs Leci remembers the doctor well, although his name has slipped her memory, because she was in hospital for several weeks and each morning gave him a rose for his buttonhole from a bunch given to her by her husband Solomon Leci.

"Because the house was also bombed, my husband was staying at the Strand Palace Hotel and he came past Covent Garden on his way to see me," she said.

Mr Leci often bought his wife pink roses and she was yesterday presented with a bouquet containing the same flower after she handed her precious photograph to the hospital's chief nurse Kay Riley.

Mrs Leci, then 25, was working in the office of her father Solomon Corman's factory in nearby Hannibal Road when it suffered a direct hit.

"It was wages day, a Friday, the sirens went at 9 a.m. There was a very good shelter but we all went down and nothing happened," she remembered.

"Being wages day I said, 'I have got to go up'. That was when the bomb came down.

"That's as much as I can remember. I was unconscious for two or three days."

Mrs Leci had been trapped under a girder and suffered terrible injuries to her ribs, kidneys and bladder but said she was very lucky to be alive.

"It was quite traumatic. I had little sand bags round me so I couldn't move," she said of her early time in hospital.

"When they wanted to wash my back I had five nurses to do it. Can you imagine that today? Four lifted me and one washed me.

"The nursing was absolutely wonderful."

Many of the patients were injured as a result of the bombings and the hospital itself suffered heavy damage.

Mrs Leci said: "There was elderly lady brought in after a bomb dropped on her house.

"Her husband came in and said 'I'm sorry, the piano was hit but the eggs are all right'," Ms Leci said, adding that he had even brought the eggs to prove they were okay.

She said it was strange to return to the hospital after 70 years and see it so much bigger.

"I remember the main entrance, not that I came in the main entrance initially, but I remember passing it from time to time," she said.

Mrs Leci said she was released from hospital on October 9 1940, the day that St Paul's Cathedral was bombed.

Her father moved to Nottingham to continue manufacturing Army clothes and she joined him when she was well enough as her husband had signed up for the Army Medical Corps.