Care home resident who assisted at lung operation of King George VI celebrates turning 100

Sarah Minter, who assisted at the lung operation of King George VI at Buckingham Palace, has celebrated her 100th birthday.

Ms Minter, who lives at Whitegates Retirement Home in Hastings, spent her working life as a nurse and in her most senior role as principal nursing officer regularly received invitations to functions, dinners and receptions from Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Prime Ministers - Winston Churchill, Harold Wilson, Clement Atlee and Edward Heath.

After becoming a theatre sister during the war at Westminster Hospital, she became theatre superintendent for the Westminster Group of Hospitals, including the Westminster, the Westminster Children’s, the Gordon, All Saints, Queen Mary’s Roehampton, St. John’s Battersea Geriatric Hospital and the Putney Hospital.

So when King George VI needed a lung operation, it was Ms Minter, who was asked to coordinate the nursing team and the equipment.

“I was about to go on holiday when Clement Price Thomas (later Sir), a renowned chest surgeon, came into my office. After carefully closing the door, he informed me that he had to perform a major chest operation on King George VI and, at the Palace’s insistence, the operation would take place at Buckingham Palace.”

“From sterilising to lighting apparatus, I selected what equipment I could from the Westminster’s surgical theatres, including the latest operating table, in order to create a replica theatre inside the Palace. I also had to ensure that enough equipment remained in the hospital for normal operations to take place,” she said.

The King’s operation began around 10am on 23 September 1951 and Ms Minter said she remembered the “thrill of looking out at the crowds from a window in the Palace, as a press notice about the operation was posted to the gates”.

“After the operation the King returned to his own bedroom where he slowly recovered from the procedure.”

King George VI, who was a heavy smoker, was told at the time that he had a blocked bronchial tube and never realised he had cancer.

Ms Minter has many special and personal memories of the Royal family from that time and still keeps the letters from one of her nurses who temporarily lived at the Palace in order to nurse the King after his operation. Although King George recovered from the surgery to remove one lung, he died five months later in February 1952.

She also received a signed photograph of the King and Queen, thanking her for her part in the procedure, which according to Julie Levett, social activities coordinator at the home, “has pride of place in her room at Whitegates Retirement Home”.

Sarah Minter’s name is also listed with the other surgical team members on a stained glass window commemorating King George VI, in the chapel of Westminster Hospital.

In 1956 she was given a scholarship and travelled to America where she did a Masters Degree course at Boston University. She also visited other hospitals in Washington, New York, and Toronto where she observed new systems and procedures that she took back to Westminster. During her career Miss Minter even found time to write a short book ‘Theatre Techniques for Nurses’. She eventually retired in 1977, aged 60.

Ms Minter was recently interviewed by the curator of medicine from the Science Museum about her memories of King George VI’s operation, as the museum were setting up a display in their Health Matters Gallery using the very operating table that she had procured for the Kings’ surgery at the Palace.

Katie Maggs, the curator of medicine, said: “Speaking with Sarah, I gained a real sense of the professionalism shown by nurses like her and an insight into the conditions in which she was working and the operation which took place. Whilst proud of her part in such notable surgery, it was medical advances Sarah recalled – such as the first dialysis machine used at Westminster Hospital or the shift from being a voluntary to an NHS Hospital – that made more of an impact on her and the patients she cared for.”

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