Peggy Nuttall: 'Nursing Times' editor unafraid to take on the medical establishment

Peggy Nuttall started her career as a physiotherapist and later trained as nurse, before going on to become an influential editor of Nursing Times. Under her stewardship (from 1959 to 1973), the journal gained a new vitality and its circulation rose from 17,000 to 37,000. She took on the establishment when necessary, effecting change through pertinent questioning rather than through criticism.

She was an advocate of progressive nurse education, and always listened to the "hands-on" nurses, many of whom she persuaded to write about nursing practice. She was also an able administrator: in 1979 she was called in to sort out budgetary and political problems in the management of two London teaching hospitals.

Nuttall was born in Ilford, in north-east London, in 1917. Her father had been a craftsman and is described on her birth certificate as a master bootmaker, although he was also a tent maker, and an inventor. When she was 17, Peggy left her convent school with a higher certificate and took a job in a library. However, she suffered from myopia and, worried about losing her sight, she decided physiotherapy might be a more suitable occupation.

She enrolled as a student at the London (now Royal London) Hospital, and worked at both St George in the East and University College hospitals before studying for a teaching certificate at Guy's Hospital and being evacuated to the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. She went on to become a lecturer in anatomy to physiotherapy students at the London, but was disturbed at the increasing syllabus requirements of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, and became ever more dissatisfied with the episodic nature of physiotherapy.

"While the Chartered Society were insisting that physiotherapy should be given to patients only by Chartered Physiotherapists, they were content to let nursing staff do it after 5pm and on Saturdays and Sundays," Nuttall recalled. "To emphasise my point (and on reflection, in a spirit of bravado) I decided to do nursing training."

This she did at St Thomas' Hospital. "It was an odd experience to be the deputy principal of a school of physiotherapy one week and a probationer nurse the next. I had constantly to remind myself that no one asked me to join." She was critical of some procedures but decided to keep quiet until she became a State Registered Nurse. At the end of her training she was awarded a "best student" gold medal.

She became a sister and then night superintendent at St Thomas' but, in the days when it was unthinkable for a senior nurse not to live in, Nuttall needed to live at home to care for her mother and another family member. The problem was solved when a colleague came across an advertisement in the Nursing Times for a clinical editor. "She and her colleagues wrote an application on my behalf. I got the job."

Nuttall had not been in the job long before the editor, Marjorie Wenger, had to retire on health grounds, and Nuttall took her place. Then things began to move. The Nursing Times was the official organ of the Royal College of Nursing; Nuttall wanted freedom, and secured an amicable separation. She then instituted a number of changes, getting nurses instead of doctors to write for the magazine, introducing controversy with her regular "Gadfly" columns, and encouraging research by providing a medium for the publication of papers. During the 14 years she was editor, circulation more than doubled: "She caused the journal to become an essential tool of the professional nurse," said the citation when she was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing in1980.

Nuttall, however, did not regard nursing as a profession. She preferred to regard it as a craft. Always neatly dressed, favouring a white blouse and skirt, she could be an intimidating presence. With an incisive mind and a nose for politics, she was a brilliant speaker who contributed decisively to the yearly RCN congress debates. She had a sharp wit. The only change she noted with the introduction of the NHS at St Thomas', she said, was that the patients were called "Mr Smith" and "Mr Jones" instead of "Smith" and "Jones". At a Westminster Abbey service for senior nurses she remarked: "The men have taken over nursing and women have taken over the Church."

She served for a period as member of Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham Area Health Authority. In 1979 Patrick Jenkin, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Services took the decision to suspend the authority after it had resolved to defy the Government's financial limits on their spending. He selected Peggy Nuttall and four others as commissioners to run the group, which included St Thomas' and Guy's hospitals.

On retirement from the Nursing Times, Nuttall took a temporary post with the International Council of Nurses' International Nursing Review in Geneva – "a really hair-raising experience", as she described it. Nuttall once remarked: "Nursing can be all-absorbing and NHS politics entrancing: however, one needs other entertainment." She found this in taking London University diplomas in social studies, religious knowledge, archaeology (she dug in the Negev in southern Israel for four seasons), and the history of art, in which she graduated with honours from the Open University. In the end what Nuttall always feared happened, and she lost her sight; not being able to read brought frustration to her last years.

Laurence Dopson

Peggy Dina Nuttall, physiotherapist, nurse and journalist: born London 8 December 1917; Editor, Nursing Times 1959-73; OBE 1976; died Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire 5 October 2008.