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Janet Adams
Heroic Red Cross nurse who served for a quarter of a century amid wars and disasters all over the world
On the frequent occasions where she found herself ministering to the wounded either of civil conflict, or of conflict between allies of one sort or another and those who might be styled “the enemy”, she adhered to a cast-iron rule to regard the patient as a patient and not as either a friend or foe. For her work she was appointed MBE and awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest award of the International Committee of the Red Cross. She also held the British Red Cross’s Award of Honour.
She was born Janet Patience Cameron Grant at Saffron Walden, Essex, in 1920 and educated privately in Hertfordshire. But she was always proud of her Scottish nationality. In 1940 she volunteered for the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and served on nursing duties with the mobile Doune and Inverness VADs, and at the Bridge of Earn Hospital. As a VAD nurse she was subsequently attached to the Army, serving at Edinburgh Castle, Orkney and, after the liberation of the Continent, in Belgium and Germany.
After attending a special course for VADs in London she qualified as a state registered nurse in 1948, obtaining her diploma in tropical medicine the following year.
Then began her life as a roving Red Cross troubleshooter. In 1949 she went out to Malaya, where the insurrection by Chinese communists against British administration had not long begun. Here with a colleague, Teresa Spens, she did pioneer work in establishing medical services in the “new villages” which had been set up to house Chinese squatters from the countryside and to isolate their occupants from Communist guerrilla influence. This was perilous work, involving as it did driving between these settlements, unescorted, along isolated jungle routes where guerrillas at first reigned supreme. She and Spens were the forerunners of hundreds of British Red Cross workers ultimately to serve in Malaya, in 30 teams covering the entire country.
She moved in 1953 as a field officer to Northern Nigeria. By then she had qualified as a midwife, and she set up maternity and child welfare clinics as well as establishing health education facilities. The following year she went to the Gold Coast, soon to become independent as Ghana. There she was co-author of a report for the government on training, and on welfare and health education.
On September 24, 1955, a hurricane (coincidentally codenamed “Janet”) struck the Windward Islands with devastating force, causing great destruction in Grenada, and on Carraciou, a small island 30 miles to the north. There, only two buildings were left standing.
On leave in Scotland by the banks of the River Spey, Janet Adams was summoned by a telephone call to Red Cross HQ, which dispatched her to Grenada with a single tent. There, and later on Carraciou, she and Red Cross colleagues organised shelter for thousands whose homes had been destroyed by Hurricane Janet.
Her next assignment took her back to Africa. In Sierra Leone she helped to set up a blood donor service and milk feeding scheme, and, as she did in other African countries nearing independence, helped their British Red Cross organisations to transform themselves into national ones.
Next, in Uganda in 1961 she was involved in relief for 20,000 refugees fleeing into the country over its southern border from the genocide in Ruanda-Urundi (soon to become independent as two states). In the north of the country the task was to try to cope with the thousands of fugitives of a civil war raging there, while throughout Uganda there were further thousands of orphans from Aids to be coped with.
In 1962-63 she served in Aden and Yemen, where the British authorities were heavily involved battling insurgent groups. Her job was officially “to survey the needs of Yemeni war casualties”. She interpreted this as a brief to cross the border into North Yemen on a camel convoy with medical supplies for the wounded, a hazardous operation with Arab nationalists supported by President Nasser of Egypt (and Russia) in the ascendancy in the region. She survived in a wild terrain in which, as she said “every adult male carried a ten-rupee jezail” (she learnt to duck if one of these long-barrelled muskets was aimed in her direction), until her supplies ran out.
The RAF intelligence officer who had originally conducted her to the border was subsequently to describe her as “one of the bravest and most determined people I have ever met”. When time permitted, Adams also organised a maternal and child welfare clinic in the Aden Crater area.
In 1964 she was posted to Zanzibar, where a revolution was in progress, with the usual collateral casualties among the non-combatants. With all the facilities at the main hospital wantonly wrecked by revolutionaries, she fearlessly drove across town to confront the revolutionary leader and compel him to disgorge invaluable medical supplies.
By this time she had been in the field almost non-stop for 15 years under immense physical and nervous strain. A posting in 1966 to the Arabic school in Lebanon for a year to improve her spoken language was a well-earned “rest”. By this time she had been awarded the ICRC’s Florence Nightingale Medal (1963) and appointed MBE in 1964.
In 1967 she was back in the field with a vengeance — this time to Vietnam. In the Mekong Delta civilian suffering was intense, with babies and children starving. Church orphanages did their best but generally lacked the vital essential of milk.
Determined to preserve the impartiality essential to the Red Cross’s ability to do its job tending the sick and wounded on both sides of any conflict, Adams refused to be affiliated to US forces. This meant forgoing lavish American rations and supplying herself and her team with food bought on the black market. But she got hold of a clapped-out landing craft and used it as a Red Cross boat to ferry food and drugs up the Mekong, running the gauntlet of Vietcong fighters and pirates on both sides of the river. She always rated Vietnam as the toughest of her assignments and the human deprivation there the worst she encountered.
After a further period of intensive Arabic study, this time at London University, she went in 1970 to Jordan, where, as the Government battled with Palestinian guerrillas, thousands of innocents required food and medical help.
In 1972 she was sent to Bangladesh, where a large population was suffering from the new country’s violent birthpangs, as well as from the effects of chronic natural calamities — floods, cyclones and disease. For the next two years she helped to administer the British Red Cross medical and nutritional team attached to the International Red Cross in Bangladesh.
In a “retirement” that never really materialised, she kept busy in a number of spheres. These ranged from work as a holiday relief matron in Inverness to her presidency for East, West and Central Africa of Associated Country Women of the World, the largest international organisation for rural women. Her particular interest was women’s rights, and she travelled in many African countries monitoring the — as she conceded — very slow progress in the region.
She also worked for the Economist Intelligence Unit as a consultant to the Saudi Arabian Government on welfare schemes in the country. In London she was chairman of the medical and agricultural selection boards for Voluntary Service Overseas.
Janet Adams was briefly married in the 1950s. Latterly she had lived with her sister in Saffron Walden.
Janet Adams, MBE, Red Cross nurse and disaster relief administrator, was born on September 24, 1920. She died on October 16, 2006, aged 86.