Olive Griffith

Discreet advocate for mental nursing

Olive Frances Griffith, mental nurse: born 27 February 1908; died Poole, Dorset 14 February 2002.

"We are looking to you to do something about mental nursing," the Royal College of Nursing's general secretary, Frances Goodall, told Olive Griffith in 1941.

Griffith did not disappoint. She taught in the leading mental hospitals, she was a consultant for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. She sat on the influential committees which mapped out the future of nursing in the post-war period. She was an inspector of training schools for the General Nursing Council and for 15 years was nursing officer for mental and mental subnormality (learning difficulties) nursing at the Ministry of Health, where she empowered matrons and chief male nurses who were then subordinated in mental hospitals to the medical superintendent.

Unusually for a nurse of her generation, Griffith wrote in the doctors' journal The Lancet. And she must be the only senior British nurse leader ever who spoke fluent Chinese. She had been born in China in 1908, where her parents were missionaries with the Chinese Inland Mission, went to Chefoo School in north China, and remained adept at eating with chopsticks to the end of her life.

Her academic ability showed early. She trained as an orthopaedic nurse at the Lord Mayor Treloar's Hospital, Alton, in Hampshire, won first class honours for her general training at King's College Hospital, London, and distinction in her mental nursing examination at the Maudsley Hospital. Fast-tracking, she was seconded from Claybury Hospital, where she was administrative sister, to take a hospital administration course offered by the Florence Nightingale International Foundation and obtained the Diploma in Nursing (mental) of London University.

During the Second World War she became first assistant matron at the progressive military psychiatric hospital set up at Mill Hill School. (She made an exquisite petit-point picture of the school and gave it to the hospital's medical superintendent. What happened to it? The RAMC Museum has no pictures of Mill Hill military hospital.) At the end of the war she took part in the unpublicised rehabilitation of returned prisoners of war. There was concern about these men, particularly those imprisoned by the Japanese, and a transition camp to resocialise them was set up at the Southern Hospital, Dartford, in 1945-46.

Griffith spent 1946 in Greece as Unrra's psychiatric nursing consultant. In 1947 she was asked to become inspector of training schools for the GNC, and in 1949 she went as a lecturer at the University of Toronto School of Nursing. Four years later, she joined the Ministry of Health as a nursing officer. Here she moved thinking about and attitudes to mental nursing both at the ministry itself and in the hospitals. Although she was discreet about her part in the deliberation of the Athlone and Horder committees, she would have given the interests of psychiatric and mental subnormality nursing her usual uncompromising advocacy.

She was active in the Royal College of Nursing. When the college was not able to admit mental nurses she was a founder member of the Society of Mental Nurses and was one of its leaders for 25 years. Once the college's constitution was amended, she organised sections for mental nurses.

For her hobbies Griffith was an expert in Hardanger embroidery, Honiton pillow lacemaking, and the difficult art of growing cyclamen from seed. She never married but loved children. An article in the Nursing Times, when she retired from the ministry in 1968, stated:

There is a rumour that she also has several "secret adoptees", mostly people with some form of handicap. Nothing she can do for them is too much trouble, but details are hard to come by because she never talks of her good deeds.

Laurence Dopson