Staff Recruitment

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Record Number: 4.103

Record Type: Summary/Transcript

Caption:

This is a photograph of Tony Dennison, who worked at the Royal Albert as a nurse from the 1970s to the 1990s. Taken in 2006, this photograph is of Tony in one of the classrooms at St. Martins College, Lancaster where he is Course Leader on the Learning Disability Branch in the School of Nursing and Midwifery.
Summarised below is Tony's explanation of how he came to apply for a job as a nurse at the Royal Albert. In Record 4.104 he goes on to talk, in an audio extract, about the actual interview process itself.

Summary:

This is a summary of part of a recorded interview carried out between Tony Dennison and Nigel Ingham on September 20th 2005.

In his interview Tony Dennison describes the influences that led him to apply, in 1973, to be a Cadet Nurse at the Royal Albert. Aged 17 he had been advised by the headteacher to leave the lower sixth of Ripley High School in Lancaster. At the start of secondary school life he,

‘did quite well. Then something happened. It’s probably all due to puberty basically! I got interested in women, drink and towards the end I fouled up basically. I failed, I was expected to take my ‘O’ levels, go on and do ‘A’ levels and er I just lost interest. Started not going to school, failed my ‘O’ Levels, stayed on into the lower sixth to start studying ‘A’ Levels and resit the ‘O’ Levels but failed them all again. And basically advised to leave! So, so I did!’

Tony suggests that he was fairly relaxed at this point about what to do next:

‘I had no idea what I wanted to do. It didn’t concern me. I was quite enjoying life! Didn’t know what was coming next. It sounds awful looking back on it. I would be appalled if my children were like that!’

However influences led him to see Royal Albert nursing as a possible career: enjoyment of biology at school; his mum had been a nurse (including a short time at Royal Albert); and his granddad, who worked on the railways, used to meet regularly Tony’s cousin and her fiancee/husband, both Royal Albert student nurses, at the hospital staff’s social club. As Tony suggests, this latter was an important influence because:

‘I used to spend week-ends at my grandparents. And my grandfather used to tell me tales of things he’d heard in the Social Club, basically about what a good life it was being a nurse at the Royal Albert… So it didn’t seem that bad a thing really. It didn’t seem like it’d be a terrible job. And it seemed at that time it would be a very secure job. I went into it thinking. “Well that’ll be me for life then.”’

The story of the application and interview process is told by Tony in a audio extract, from the same interview, in Record 4.104 (Staff Recruitment).

Notes:

Also see Record 4.104 for an audio extract from the same interview, in which Tony recounts the application and interviewing process he undertook to become a Cadet Nurse at the Royal Albert in the 1970s.

Keywords:

Male Nurse 1970s Family Before Hospital

School Staff

Biography:

Name: Tony Dennison
Gender: Male
Date of Birth:1956
Role: Nurse
From: 1973 To 1990s