24 April 2021 - A Year in the History and Life of the QA Jurassic Coast Branch Zoom Meetings and Blogs - By Kay Foster and Merrill Bate

The Covid 19 Global Pandemic, with little warning, changed the face of the globe for a year and maybe well beyond, Millions of people died around the world and our way of life was turned upside down. This is a story of how one small group of QARANC Nurses pulled together to help each other through the impact of fear, loneliness (for some illness), and created resilience amongst ourselves.

30th March 7.30pm. I was having dinner when I felt an overwhelming fatigue. I left most of my food and went to bed and stayed there for ten days. I had caught Covid-19. Three-weeks earlier I had attended a weekend Transcendental Meditation course in Kent. There were over 50 people there from around the country, many from London. As I knew no one in Devon who had had Covid, I could only pinpoint it with some certainly to Kent. I was pretty ill with several quite severe side effects, but then there was not the knowledge around that there is today. Long Covid was not even known about by the scientists at that time.

I mention this because less than three weeks later on 25th April 2020, I hosted the first Jurassic Coast Drinks get together via Zoom. The QA Association had funded each QA branch to connect to its members. Marjorie Bandy, the Chair of the Jurassic Coast Branch, had put out an SOS for anyone with knowledge of using the Zoom Video Conferencing Software App. Now I can’t remember when I first used Zoom. I know it was with my golfing friends but was it before or after I had Covid? Whatever, I had some experience. That meeting started at 6.30pm and for future meetings we changed it to 6pm by popular request. We began with an informal chat.

Pat McKay, Branch Secretary, sent out newsletters to Branch members and invited them to the Zoom meetings, and before long, we had an average of 20 people attending every Saturday. We were a mixed bag from Serving and Retired, Regular and Reservist QAs, mostly Officers; the meetings were open to All Ranks and sometimes to family and friends of members. After the first couple of chat evenings, we decided to have members of the group give a presentation to add interest. On 6th June, Karen Melling was our first speaker and talked about her experience Sailing Inside the Northwest Passage. That was the first time I started “screen sharing' and had to rehearse, thank goodness for YouTube tutorials!

Merrill Bate who is a QA Association Trustee saw the benefits of this for communicating to our members. We joined forces and decided to share the responsibilities of running the Saturday evening “Zooms”. As I sit here writing this reflection with our year anniversary just one week away, we are proud to say that every Saturday since the 25th April 2020, we have sat with our computers hosting the Zoom meetings. Some presentations we recorded, as they were given by Serving Officers with what we thought were historical records for the Corps archives. These are now stored on The Cloud at RHQ QARANC. 

Over the year we have had a range of activities all designed to provide something that would distract people from the tedium of living life in the midst of a pandemic, to entertain, support and provide friendship. These activities have included talks, commemorations of VJ Day and Remembrance Day, quizzes, a Regimental Murder Mystery Guest Night and a Burns Supper when we joined up with the Scottish Branch. Talks given by Serving and Retired QAs have been entertaining and informative. A number of talks on the QARANC in the 21st Century have certainly proved that nothing ever stands still and that the Corps goes from strength to strength.

Merrill and I were passionate to try and engage with our group and beyond to get 'QA Corps History" documented. With the help of Wendy H Jones, a retired QA who now has a successful international career as an author, we started a blog to capture our history. Our aim is to capture and share the stories of the 3 R's (Regulars, Reservists and Retired) which we believe are important and contribute to the more recent history of our Corps. We currently have 33 blogs published and over 11,000 hits. Our blog can be found on https://qareminiscences.blogspot.com

There has been a sterling effort by Wendy and Jan Westbury to get the blogs proof-read and loaded onto Blogger by Saturday of each week; the blog team have been joined by Eileen Nolan to help with management of the blogs produced to date and encourage the wealth of fascinating historic stories still to be written.

We didn't stop there, as Sue Shrimpton set up our branch Facebook page, well and truly taking the branch into another forum for communication.

The 3rd Covid lockdown was lifted on the 12th April 2021 due to the stunning efforts made by the population from social distancing, wearing face masks and changes in social and personal hygiene practices. This was achieved by government planning, the changing of laws to insist when appropriate that we all must stay at home and work from home when possible. For quite long periods the only shops allowed to open where those for essential elements of daily living. This was complimented by the sterling efforts of our scientists to develop vaccines in the fastest time ever known and to date are hugely successful. As the QA Jurassic Coast Committee and Zoom team move into the spring-summer of 2021, we have decided to reduce the meeting to twice a month with the view of returning to weekly in the autumn/winter when maybe, just maybe, we might return to some form of restricted living as the Covid-19 virus continues to wreak its damage.

Below are a collection of comments that our group felt about how the Jurassic Coast Zoom meetings have helped them through the lockdown and for some, the severe isolation experienced during the 2020-2021 Covid pandemic.