WHEN the National Health Service was born on July 5, 1948, there weren’t enough doctors for everyone and so the Government allowed GPs from Ireland to come over and set themselves up in areas where there was a shortage.
Ireland itself was short of money after the war and so unable to offer positions to the doctors its universities were training. It quietly accepted that some might be tempted by the bright lights of the NHS shining from across the Irish Sea.
The Government advert in The Northern Echo of July 5, 1948, announcing the birth of the NHS
So Dr Patrick Skehan, newly qualified from University College Dublin, came over to see where he might be able to fit in. He found positions as a locum in north Wales and Huddersfield, where he met Rosaline, a newly qualified nurse from County Cork who was also trying to find herself a position in the NHS, whom he married.
Then they moved on to Coxhoe, just outside Durham City, and rented a home in Kelloe where he realised he could set up his own surgery.
Together with Rosaline, he bought a field behind the aged miners’ homes and began building a home-cum-surgery. Mining subsidence prevented the building from going where he intended on the plot, but it was complete by 1958 and called Ardmore, a village on the southern Irish coast midway between Waterford, where Patrick had grown up, and Skibbereen, where Rosaline came from. They were a partnership, with Rosaline acting as the practice nurse – while also bringing up their children.
A retirement celebration for Dr Patrick Skehan, right, and his wife, Rosaline, left, in 1982 with their long-standing receptionist Mary Montgomery, from Kelloe, in the centre
His was a career of classic County Durham doctoring. “He had to go underground many times to attend incidents, including fatalities, and all five of his children learned to drive going round the mining villages like Quarrington Hill and Cassop, taking him on calls,” says his daughter, Bernadette, who was born in Dryburn hospital and now lives in London.
The mining community had itself been made up of many migrants, including from Ireland (once the Labour Party learned that the Earl of Durham raced his horses in red, it adopted green as its colour in this part of the world to appeal to miners with Irish backgrounds), and so Dr Skehan fitted in well – the convenience of having your own doctor on the doorstep must also have made him especially welcome.
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Over time, his single-handed practice amalgamated with those of Drs John Brown, Terence Knaggs and Albert Peterson in Coxhoe, and together they built the medical centre in Lansdowne Road, which still serves the community.
In 1982, after 35 years in the NHS, Patrick and Rosaline retired back to Ireland. Rosaline died in 1993 and Patrick, aged 80, in 1997.
“Every time there is an anniversary, like the 70th or 75th, I think of how proud he was of the NHS and how very grateful he was to it for giving him a job which allowed him to bring up his family.”
And the people of Kelloe must have been extremely grateful to him for establishing the first surgery in their area and looking after them for more than three decades.
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