WHEN Betty Bray, former matron of Stretton Sugwas Hospital, began her training as an ophthalmic nurse at the Royal Westminster Hospital in 1940, leeches were routinely applied to the eyes of patients suffering with glaucoma.

But the relegation of leeches to the medicine chest of history was not the only change Betty saw in more than four decades of nursing.

Family and friends came from far and wide last month when Betty Maynard celebrated her 90th birthday with the launch of a book chronicling her working life - Nurse Bray: Laboring for Love in Worthing, London and Hereford.

As a child, Betty Bray had wanted to become a vet, an ambition born during a carefree childhood on South Africa's veldt. However, her father's dreams of life in South Africa were destroyed by bush fires and locusts and the family returned to England in 1924, acquiring Lower Hopton Farm near Bromyard. Unfort-unately, the Depression prevented Betty following her dream, too, and she decided to train as a nurse.

As she settled into her new life at Worthing Hospital, "she realised that nursing was just another way to pour out the compassion she felt for four-legged animals".

She soon found that there were three prime objectives to her training - "to learn how to do things 'properly' (the hospital way), to obey rules and to work hard".

Working hard was to prove second nature to Betty Bray as she pursued her nursing career.

She became fascinated by the precision and delicacy of ophthalmic surgery, and in 1940 she embarked on a year's training as an ophthalmic nurse at the Royal Westminster Hospital.

She was to spend four years at the hospital in the heart of war-torn London before returning to Hereford in 1944, pregnant with her first child. She had married Arthur Maynard, a construction worker and volunteer firewatcher, in February 1942, having met and fallen in love with him in the course of his firewatching duties at the hospital.

As she returned to Hereford and the companionship of her family "Betty wondered if she would ever again pursue the career she loved".

However, after a decade spent raising her family, and in spite of raised eyebrows and a reluctance on the part of family to surrender their own private nurse, Betty returned to work in 1954. She had learned from the family's GP that Hereford's Victoria Eye Hospital was in desperate need of trained ophthalmic nurses. Matron Bevan, for her part, 'couldn't wait for Betty to start'.

Within a matter of weeks, Nurse Bray has been promoted to sister and 11 rewarding years followed. By 1965, Betty had decided the next step was to be a Matron herself.

When the news of Matron Restall's retirement from Stretton Sugwas Hospital reached Sister Maynard, she applied for the job and within a month had taken up her new position.

The Eye Hospital's loss - "We all cringe at the knees to lose you," said Matron Kerr-Ramsey - was Stretton Sugwas's gain: "Within a short time Matron became the heartbeat of the hospital."

A sense of the atmosphere generated during her reign at the hospital can be gleaned from a 1971 headline on a feature in the Hereford Times - "This hospital is more of a family home".

In 1976 Betty Maynard's made the decision to retire, following the incorporation of Stretton Sugwas Hospital into Hereford Hospitals. But her association with it didn't end with her retirement and she was chairman of the League of Friends in 1982, the year closure was announced.

What typified a career that stretched from the dark days of the Depression, through the horrors of war and life as one of a rare breed for her time - a working mother - was the compassion and humanity that characterised her dealings with patients and colleagues alike.

l Nurse Bray: Laboring for Love is a collaboration between mother and daughter, a book that evolved from conversations between Betty and her daughter, Christine, a nursing historian, and is available from Amazon.com.