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Percy Lane Oliver OBE (1878-1944)
Percy Lane Oliver was born on April 11th 1878 at the home of his grandparents, Paul and Marjorie Curnow, in Fish Street, St. Ives. In 1921 when he was working in London as Secretary of the Camberwell Division of the British Red Cross, he and a few Red Cross colleagues responded to an urgent request from the nearby King's College Hospital for a blood donor. One of the group became the hospital's first donor to give blood as a volunteer without financial reward. Oliver's experience on that occasion led him to the concept of voluntary blood donor panels and the system he then devised.
He worked tirelessly on the system for the rest of his life and was admired and copied in countries around the world. His system is now incorporated into our National Health Service through the National Blood Authority. Oliver was awarded the OBE for his work in hospitals and among refugees in the First World War but during his lifetime he received no public recognition of all the pioneering work he did in the field of blood transfusion.
Oliver died in 1944 and it was not until 1972 that any public reminder of his contribution to modern medicine was forthcoming. It came in the form of a plaque placed in the Haematology Department of King's College Hospital. In 1979 the Greater London Council attached one of their 'Blue Plaques' to the house in South London where Oliver and his family carried on the administration of the voluntary service, and in 1992, with the co-operation of St. Ives Town Council an appropriate plaque was provided in the newly opened Stennack Surgery in St. Ives.
King's College Hospital is now part of the King's Healthcare NHS Trust and to mark the 75th Anniversary of that first voluntary blood donation and the start of Oliver's work, the Trust felt that something more tangible than a plaque was needed. It was decided that one of the hospital's new wards should be named after him. This was done on Thursday December 12th when a plaque referring to Oliver's work, was unveiled in the Oliver Ward.
It is hoped that patients who receive treatment in the Oliver Ward may be encouraged to become volunteer blood donors that, in itself, would be a tribute to his work.
Excerpt taken from St. Ives Times & Echo, 6th December 1991 - Copyright Tom Richards
Commando Mountain Warfare Centre
During a period when the Germans controlled the coastline from Norway to Spain, Winston Churchill ordered the transfer of the Commando Mountain Training Centre, based in the Cairngorms, Scotland, to St. Ives, Cornwall.
This may have come as a pleasant exchange to the troops who had been living in 8-man tents flown in helicopters from Lossiemouth to their base 4,000ft high in the Cairngorms where they survived freezing conditions from December to March building snow holes and ice caves.
Churchill's aim was to attack the Channel Islands and France, therefore the training was to be advanced from mountain warfare to cliff climbing, handling canoes and mud sledges, casualty evacuation in preparation for 'D' Day, and fast movement across country with full fighting kit.
Jim Smith, who still resides in St. Ives, remembers the day he disembarked the train at St. Erth station and took that wonderful scenic journey on the train around the coast to St. Ives. No one was going to complain about this transfer. Their unit was based in small Nissen huts at the end of Porthminster Beach, permanent staff and instructors were billeted with St. Ives landladies, many of whom had attractive daughters, this being the grounds of many of the soldiers ultimately making their homes in Cornwall.
Commando Mountain Training Centre produced some fine mountaineers, well known in the climbing world and some first class commando soldiers; it was a known fact that senior officers considered them the best of commando soldiers. Troops stationed in Falmouth but trained near St. Ives carried out the most daring raid of the war, The St. Nazaire Raid, the important port of St. Nazaire was destroyed but there were many casualties on both sides. The chief instructor, Captain Joe Barry, became a legend in his life, well loved by his own troops. Although Captain Barry did not reside in Cornwall, when he passed away in 2000 his ashes were brought back to the West Country and cast along the cliffs of Sennen Cove.
At the end of the Second World War the last landing was to be on Singapore and Malaya, led by the 3rd Commando Brigade and the 2nd Para's. The unit was closed down towards the end of 1949 before being amalgamated into the Commando School of the Royal Marines at Bickleigh.
Forty or so years later, in the Falkland Islands, the 2nd Para's and the 3rd Commando Brigade were to be the first to land on the islands. In the Gulf and recently in Afghanistan the fighting was lead by the same task forces, most of them trained in Mountain Warfare.