Ethel Lote, nurse who cared for the wounded in the aftermath of Dunkirk – obituary

Ethel Lote, who has died aged 103, nursed evacuees from Dunkirk, founded the Dental Nurses Society, and taught yoga until she was 90.

On May 27 1940, Ethel was a teenage probationary nurse at an emergency hospital which had been set up in the grounds of Burntwood Asylum in Staffordshire, when she helped to unload a convoy of 242 wounded soldiers from the evacuation of Dunkirk. Many were traumatised, covered with mud, blood and sand, and their soaked uniforms had to be cut from their bodies to reveal shrapnel wounds, fractures and amputations. There were also some corpses she helped carry to the morgue.

In the mid-2010s she was traced by Eric Nolan, whose father was one of these seriously wounded evacuees from Dunkirk and who had been nursed by Ethel, and their emotional meeting was reported on television. Among her other patients were Polish airmen and Italian PoWs – and Gerald Lascelles, whom she recalled being visited by his father, the Earl of Harewood.

She recalled: “Life in the hospital was very exhausting. As each convoy arrived the injuries seemed to get worse. We were finding more and more who were suffering from mental and nervous disorders as well as bullet wounds and fractures. Night duty was the worst, when we would hear young men crying for their mothers or being in terrible pain from a limb which was no longer there.”

Ethel Nutting was born on November 28 1920 in Walsall Wood in Staffordshire, where her father was a coal miner and her mother a music teacher.

Ethel always wanted to be a nurse, inspired by her mother, who had been a nurse in the First World War, and while still at school she joined St John Ambulance Brigade and worked on Saturdays as a first aider at the local Crabtree electrical factory. As soon as she reached 17 years of age, she became a probationary nurse.

Before the war Ethel was an ARP volunteer, and she joined the Civil Nursing Reserve as a nursing auxiliary when it was formed in 1939. She stayed throughout the war at Burntwood, where the temporary hospital initially took convalescent patients from Birmingham hospitals and casualties from the bombing of surrounding towns and cities.

Reflecting on nursing then, she thought that today’s hospitals lack discipline. In her day there were dress inspections by a sister, when even caps had to be properly pleated. There was a 10pm curfew in the “virgin’s retreat”, as the nurses’ home was known. Wards had to be spotlessly clean for matron’s rounds and at night patients had to lie at attention for matron’s evening inspections. Today, said Ethel Lote, “nobody knows who are nurses and who are cleaners.”

In 1940, invited by a doctor to gain more medical knowledge by witnessing an autopsy, she fell in love with Albert Lote, a superintendent in St John Ambulance, when the lights failed during an air raid. As they each held a candle for the doctor to study the corpse, she recalled: “We looked across the body at each other and as we looked into each other’s eyes, we fell in love.”

Albert, however, was called up into the Navy and served abroad from 1940 to 1945 as a sick-berth attendant in the Fleet Air Arm. They kept their love alive by letter, married during a brief leave while Albert was awaiting demobilisation, and honeymooned in Llandudno in 1945.

Postwar, Ethel Lote became a health visitor, then dental nurse, and founded the Dental Nurses Society, of which she became president. Her hobby was yoga, and after gaining the All India Board of Yoga Certificate, she began teaching at the age of 40. At one annual dental conference, she had almost 200 people lying on the ballroom floor in their evening gowns. She gave up teaching yoga at 90 when she could no longer get her foot over the back of her neck and behind her head.

Ethel Lote is survived by two sons, Christopher, who became a professor of medicine at the University of Birmingham Medical School, and Derek, an IT specialist.

Ethel Lote, born November 28 1920, died June 11 2024