'Hers was a life of service to the public' - Husband pays tribute to former nurse Vera Swift

She had lived in Crawley for some 67 years.

From the age of five, Vera knew exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up, and that was to be a nurse.

Her dolls houses were always hospitals and her dolls’ arms fell off regularly due to frequent injections.

She was a junior member of the Red Cross. In 1945, she narrowly escaped death by just reaching their Morrison air raid shelter in time to shelter from an exploding V1 Flying Bomb, which seriously damaged their house and from which she and her mother had to be dug out.

Vera won a scholarship to Wimbledon High School and was so keen on becoming a nurse that she enrolled when 16 to start training at 18, in 1948, at Kings College Hospital, in the year of the foundation of the NHS. This was followed by midwife training at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Between these two training events she met her husband Jim, whom she married, and they moved to Crawley in 1954.

Initially working in Dr. Ivan Clout’s surgery in Langley Green, she paused for some years when the children arrived, then took up school health checks and finally went to work in the new Family Planning Clinics, working for many years in Sussex, Surrey, and London, clinics.

Vera also conducted lecture courses for midwives and district nurses and gave talks promoting famly planning clinics to the public. Vera was passionate in the belief that all women should know about and have access to family planning facilities. She finally retired in 1990.

Husband Jim said: “If there was anything exciting going on, she was always first in the queue, this included ballooning, gliding, going up in 100 feet hydraulic towers, jet skiing and helicopter flights.

"She started several WEA groups in her home lounge which were subsequently amalgamated into the U3A, of which she was a long standing member. Hers was a life of service to the public.”

She is survived by her husband and two of her three children, the oldest having died last year from cancer at the age of 64.