Grace Benson grew up on a dairy farm on isolated Great Barrier Island, where her mother was known for her nursing skills and often recounted stories of her nurse training at Thames Hospital. Grace always wanted to be a nurse, a desire heightened by a typical teenage response to an article in the Weekly News which showed nurses in uniform who ‘looked amazing. I wanted to be like that’.
Enrolling at the Auckland School of Nursing in 1956, she was assigned to Middlemore Hospital, which she remembered fondly as a ‘family’. Middlemore specialised in orthopaedics and she describes a typical day on the ward and the demands of lifting patients. Beds and mattresses were very basic but orthopaedic nurses learned to use pillows as a piece of equipment: 'It was satisfying to make a person comfortable’. She describes her nurse training as a period of hard work, determination to do well and adhering to the hierarchical ward structures. Grace and her contemporaries nurse trainees took pride in developing practical skills. They would never go off duty until they had completed their assigned tasks. She describes learning to cope with death. She remembers ‘sick parade’ and how she and her fellow nurses rarely got sick themselves.
She says the nurses described their own rooms in the Nurses’ Home as ‘our haven’. They appreciated the hot baths (‘our feet were sore, our bodies were aching most of the time') and the good food. Grace won the Dr and Mrs Lange Prize when she graduated in 1959 for the highest marks in the State Examination for Middlemore Nurses, which made her parents proud.
Following graduation she took her maternity nurse training. In 1962, she married Alan, who became a teacher. Grace accompanied her husband when he got a job in a rural school, and she worked as Night Supervisor at Te Kuiti Hospital in 1966 and then at Dannevirke Hospital.
Grace went into teaching while at Dannevirke Hospital and did a BA at Massey before going to Wellington Teachers’ College to undertake a course for tutors in hospital schools of nursing. In 1982 she became a tutor and later a lecturer at Manukau Institute of Technology. She relished the chance to complete a Masters degree in the 1990s commenting that they were the best years of her life. Grace never regretted her choice of career. She reflects that she has always valued the complexity and significance of being a nurse, and believes its basic premise remains ‘caring for and responding to the patient’, regardless of the available technology, something which she has always sought to impart to her nursing students.
