Drever Watson

DREVER WATSON, who has died aged 89, …

            At the outbreak of war, Drever’s mother, Stewartina McDonald, was in charge of the Red Cross in Dartmouth and aged 16 Drever was recruited as a Red Cross volunteer.   On her first day she was put on what were called “special duties” – sitting for hours with a mortally wounded young sailor until he died.

            Only in 1944 when Drever was 20 was she allowed to become a fulltime Voluntary Air Detachment or VAD and to be sent overseas.    She became a theatre nurse at the Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, and it was after the war that she saw worst casualties.    These included  some wounded from Burma and Prisoners of war of the Japanese who were too weak to complete the voyage home, and were landed in Malta to be treated for trauma.   One was a female RAF wireless operator who had been captured by the Japanese and despite being rescued only two days later was catatonic and had to be kept on round-the-clock suicide watch.   Drever also helped to treat the survivors of the Corfu Channel Incident, when, in 1946, two British destroyers were damaged by Albanian mines.  Other patients were some of the wounded returning from the Palestine Patrol, the Navy’s dangerous and thankless task boarding ships carrying refugees to Haifa, many of whom had severe facial injuries inflicted by Zionists armed with homemade maces and other medieval handmade weapons.

            Drever Belle McDonald was born on February 25 1924 in St Vincent, Cape Verde Islands, where her father was an oil bunker engineer, and when the family settled in Dartmouth, she was educated at the progressive coeducational Darlington Hall boarding school with its minimum of formal classroom  teaching, and, as an antidote , at Cheltenham Ladies College.

            She was born into a naval family whose roots lie in the Scottish Islands (Drever is an Orcadian name).   Her older brother was a naval doctor who as Surgeon-Lieutenant (later Captain) Ron McDonald was at the liberation of Jersey on May 9, 1945.   Her younger brother, Alan McDonald, joined the naval college in 1945 and later commanded submarines;   she met her first husband, John Rogers, when he was an engineer in coastal forces base on Malta in 1946 and he came to the hospital for treatment after a motor cycle crash;  and met her second husband, Denis Watson, who was a midshipman on the destroyer Electra who picked up the three survivors of the sinking of   HMS Hood in the Denmark Strait and, in the South China Sea, the survivors of HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales. 

            After her demobilisation in 1947, Drever McDonald read for a BSc and worked as a research assistant with Professors Bob Case and Sir Richard Doll at the Chester Beatty Cancer Research Institute in South Kensington, where great advances were being made in the field of medical science.

            In 1954 she married Rogers, who worked in the oil industry,  and lived in Syria along the Euphrates river, near the Iraq border. She became fluent in Arabic and, when the 1956 Suez crisis caused anti-imperial eruptions across the Middle East, led a convoy of “oil wives” and children (including her own eight-month-old twin daughters) across the desert to the Lebanese border — creeping past the Syrian army base at Palmyra.   At the border she found that many of the other women had not brought the correct paperwork, but she refused to leave anyone behind and would not let anyone cross until all were given clearance to enter Lebanon.   

            Evacuated to London via Cyprus a week later, her sole surviving possession – her husband’s prized reflex camera – was confiscated by Customs because she was unable to produce a receipt.  Her husband and other oil engineers were eventually released by the Syrian authorities and, six months later, several tea chests, carefully filled with the remaining shards of all their worldly goods from their looted home, were delivered by the Swiss Red Cross. She always laughed at the memory of finding a single ornamental glass intact.

            Returning to the Middle East, she lived for six years in Qatar,  seeking occasional respite from the heat of the Persian Gulf in Lebanon where she loved to ski off-piste. Her passion for skiing continued until she snapped a knee ligament on a Swiss ski-slope at the age of 79.

            Moving back to Britain in the 1960s, Drever Rogers, then aged 40, remarried and, as Drever Watson, trained as a teacher, taking posts at state secondary schools in Great Yarmouth, London and, finally, at the Inverurie Academy in Aberdeenshire. She was a formidable, but much-loved, figure in the classroom. Her toughest teenage “bad boys” as she affectionately called them, would greet her in the street with friendliness and respect. Even in her eighties, and retired to South Kensington, she could silence a group of unruly teenagers on a bus with a firm “do you mind!”

            Until her death Drever Watson continued to live an independent and busy life in London. As her wartime generation of family and friends gradually fell into declining health and infirmity, she became a valued carer, taking friends to hospital appointments across London and nursing them in their homes. Although she never got around to collecting her war service medals, she would march past the Cenotaph with her fellow VADs on Remembrance Sunday, joking that marching in step was definitely not their forte.

            With John Malcolm Rogers (Lieutenant RNVR), whom she married in 1954, she had twin daughters and a son. The marriage was dissolved and in 1966 she married Commander Dennis Coghlan Watson RN, who died in 1978.

Drever Watson, born February 25 1924, died October 9 2013