IN the 1950s, a district nurse was something of an institution — an invaluable help to doctors and a familiar friend.

Nurse Kathleen Teece, of Grindleton, and her two colleagues, Nurse Ida Bounds and Nurse Edith Eastwood, were known and respected in the villages clustered round Clitheroe at the time.

Since the formation of the NHS, they had been employed by the West Riding County Council — in those days the boundaries put the Ribble Valley villages in Yorkshire.

Previously, they had come under the jurisdiction of the Ribblesdale District Nursing Association. In 1953, Nurses Teece and Bounds had been colleagues at Grindleton for more than 20 years and were used to being called out six nights a week.

The area they covered stretched into the Trough of Bowland, taking in Dunsop Bridge, Slaidburn, Whitewell and, in the other direction, the villages up to Gisburn. Nurse Teece had vivid recollections of the great snowstorm of 1940 when some of the roads in the area were blocked for a week.

One night a call came for assistance from an isolated farm and it proved a nightmare journey by road for her and a colleague.

Eventually, they had to abandon their vehicle and continue across fields and over fences and hedges for four miles to reach their patient. On another occasion, two of her colleagues were stranded in the snow at Whitewell and had to travel 12 miles back home on a farmer’s manure cart.

Nurse Teece also recollected the occasion when she arrived at a farmhouse on a routine visit and her attention was called to a lamb with a broken leg. “I set the leg in a splint and from inquiries afterwards, found that the animal had made a good recovery,” she remembered.

Despite the big improvements in amenities she had witnessed during her career, Nurse Teece, who was president of the Grindleton Women’s Institute, still visited homes deep in the countryside where there was still no electricity, gas or water supply.