Tens of thousands of everyday heroes s
Eugene Byrne
16:00, 12 May 2026
Men processing donor blood at Southmead, about 1940 (Image: Bristol Post)
On Saturday, February 12, 1944, people packed out the Colston Hall to see one of the biggest celebrities wartime Britain had to offer. The Western Daily Press gave it a big write-up:
“Wing-Commander Guy Gibson, VC, DSO, DFC, opened Bristol’s campaign for blood donors on Saturday with a pint of his own ‘dam-busting’ blood.
“He told a huge audience at the Colston Hall that the least the city could do to back the soldiers on the Second Front was to give liberally of its blood.
“‘I want to play my part, too, and I propose giving a pint of my own blood for the campaign directly after this meeting’.”
He was as good as his word. The hero of the famous 1943 “Dambusters” raid on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr rolled up his sleeve and was photographed signing autographs for the Red Cross nurses and having a cup of tea afterwards.
The visit was a great success. As everyone knew, the Allied invasion of Europe was going to happen at some point, and when it did the casualties would be considerable. If you were on the Home Front, Gibson pointed out, then giving blood was the least you could do.
Some 1,500 people signed up to give blood within 24 hours, and 1,000 more came forward daily over the next couple of weeks.
Gibson, who would be killed in action later that year, was not in Bristol on a morale-boosting or propaganda tour. He was in Bristol specifically because Bristol was at the centre of a very remarkable scheme – the world’s first organisation for collecting and distributing blood and plasma for transfusions.
Wing Commander Guy Gibson photographed on returning from a heavy bomber raid on Berlin in January 1943(Image: Mirrorpix)
The Bristol blood drive that saved soldiers’ lives
Medical science had known all about blood transfusions since the 17th century. Early experiments in pumping blood direct from the veins of donors (be they human or even animal) to patients had been the stuff of hazardous and often failed experiments.
Knowledge progressed, but to medical practitioners a transfusion was usually a last, desperate resort. Transfusion only became a more realistic prospect in the early 20th century with the discovery that there were different blood groups. Even then, it was generally done with a tube running directly from donor to recipient.
It took further trial and error to find a way of safely storing blood for future use, so transfusions as we understand them nowadays did not take place on anything like a systematic basis until the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s.
Where transfusions took place in Britain before WW2 – and before the days of the NHS – they were in hospitals run by a patchwork of local charities, private partnerships and local authorities. These relied on blood donors who were sometimes paid, but more usually were volunteers.
By the late 1930s there was a national association of volunteer donors, and Bristol’s was the largest membership of anywhere outside of London. Most of them had Group O blood, as medical understanding at the time saw O as the type which could be given to almost all patients.
By the late 1930s Britain was preparing for a war which everyone hoped would not come. A measure which attracted little attention at the time was announced in June 1939, meriting just a few lines in The Times:
“Bristol has been chosen by the Government as the national centre for a blood transfusion service which would come into operation immediately in the event of war. Dr Lionel Whitby, of the Middlesex Hospital, is organising the service, and in the event of war would go immediately to Bristol to control the service. Blood would be collected from volunteers, taken to a central clearing house at Southmead Hospital, and sent in bottles by air from Bristol to any place where it was needed. The first steps are being taken this week to enrol 5,000 blood donors. Arrangements will be made to increase this number to 100,000 in wartime.”
A recruitment drive to get blood donors enlisted was soon under way in Bristol; when war was declared three months later, the 5,000 volunteers initially required had come forward.
Nowadays Britain and most other countries operate elaborate and highly efficient systems for the collection and storage of donor blood and blood products and for matching donor blood to recipients.
But in the 1930s no such system existed anywhere. The facility set up at Southmead in 1939 was the first of its kind in the world, and it was being run by the Army Blood Transfusion Service (ABTS).
A military officer in uniform carrying a packing case by the open rear door of a military car, circa 1940. On the side of the case is written ‘ABTS Return to Army Blood Supply Depot, Bristol'(Image: Getty Images)
Experience in the Spanish Civil War suggested that in combat at least one wounded person in ten would need a transfusion, and so the ABTS was being established in the first instance to serve the needs of soldiers. But by the time war came in 1939 it was also understood that the ABTS would also be there for civilians, too.
On the outbreak of war, Dr Lionel Whitby arrived to take up his post. Whitby was a popular and successful medical man. He had been born into a middle-class family in Yeovil, Somerset, in 1895. He had been ready to take a place at Cambridge University in 1914 when war broke out, and he enlisted in the army as a private.
He was soon given an officer’s commission and served with distinction at Gallipoli, Macedonia and on the Western Front, winning the Military Cross at Passchendaele. He left the Army at the war’s end with the honorary rank of Major.
This was some months after he had been wounded when a chunk of a German shell cut through his femoral artery. He was bleeding to death when his life was saved by the skill of an American surgeon who amputated his leg, stopped the bleeding and organised a transfusion directly from the vein of Whitby’s batman.
Much of the organising work fell to Richard McCrudden, a scientist and expert on air pollution. He was a leading member of the Bristol Voluntary Blood Donors Association, and now became Secretary of the Army Blood Supply Depot (ABSD) at Southmead, shouldering much of the organisational workload.
In the past, only Group O donors had been wanted, but now donors of all groups were welcomed, because the ABSD supplied something which was, if anything, more important than blood – plasma.
Medical science now understood the importance of blood plasma, the clear yellow liquid that’s left over if you remove the red and white cells. It can be produced from all blood groups and can be safely given to almost anyone regardless of their own group. It can be used to revive patients who have suffered wounds or burns, prevents fluid loss and helps protect the body from infection.
Plasma could keep a patient going for a while until he or she received an actual blood transfusion. Unlike whole blood, which had to be stored in refrigerated conditions, plasma could be freeze-dried into powder, making transportation and storage easy. When it was needed, it only required distilled water. Now, patients could be kept alive even when emergency surgery was being performed on them.
Women giving blood at the Army Blood Transfusion Service(Image: Corbis via Getty Images)
The ABSD’s work did not just involve collecting blood and plasma and despatching them to where they were needed. Because relatively few doctors and surgeons had extensive experience of administering them, special Field Transfusion Units (FTUs) had to be trained. These personnel would then be attached to the Casualty Clearing Stations, where medical assistance could be given to wounded men before they were evacuated away from the fighting. These FTUs were trained at Southmead and based in houses in Henleaze Gardens.
The Army Blood Supply Depot’s first real test came in April 1940 when British and French troops were sent to Norway to help defend against the German invasion. The staff at Southmead immediately appealed to workers at the BAC factory up the road in Filton and were soon sending blood and plasma there.
The following month, the long-awaited German attack on France took place and again the system on the home side worked well. But the Germans’ success was so rapid and overwhelming that relatively few wounded soldiers received any transfusions because medical facilities were constantly being evacuated. With the fall of France, one of the advantages of Bristol as a location – being a long way from airfields in Germany – was now gone. The big air raids on Bristol of 1940-41 made clear that electricity supplies – essential for the work at Southmead – were threatened. On one occasion bombs fell on Southmead Hospital itself.
Arms and munitions factories already operated a system of “shadow factories”, where work could be duplicated if the main factory was bombed. So now a “shadow” ABSD was set up in the village of Chilton Polden, near Bridgwater in Somerset, 35 miles away.
This was based around West House, a large farm at the edge of the village. The buildings were not sufficient to accommodate the facility, which eventually included a plasma drying plant, storage, despatch and transport facilities. Much of the staffing seems to have comprised women from the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In due course more houses would be requisitioned and new buildings and Nissen huts erected.
The system really came into its own with the fighting in North Africa, where army medics used plasma despatched from Southmead/Chilton Polden. They sent little or nothing in the way of fresh blood, as transporting it was hazardous and pointless when you had a ready supply of donors in the form of soldiers. Modern blood donors will get a cup of tea and a biscuit; soldiers were often offered a bottle of “beer for blood”.
An ABTS depot in North Africa, 1942. The vampire bat seems to have become its unofficial logo, also appearing on “Bloody Mary” the
ABTS information van that was a common sight on the streets of Bristol.(Image: Bristol Post)
Things in North Africa were not always easy. Major Gladwyn Buttle (1899–1983), an expert on infections who had been persuaded by Lionel Whitby to transfer from his wartime role in the Royal Engineers to the Royal Army Medical Corps and thus join the ABTS, was sent to the Middle East to take charge.
Buttle proved to have a genius for improvisation, as budgets and bureaucracy didn’t provide him with as much support as he would have liked. Based in Cairo, he had to organise the manufacture of rubber tubing, needles and other equipment. But the biggest problem of all was bottles. Those for blood were made locally, but there were never enough for plasma. So he toured the clubs and officers’ messes and commandeered empty (and sometimes not always empty) whisky and gin bottles.
Waking up on an operating table, finding a tube running from your arm to an upended Johnnie Walker bottle which appeared full or half-full, must have been quite a surreal experience.
“Buttle’s bottles” acquired legendary status among army medics in the Middle East. One later wrote: “The greatest surgical advance of the war, more important even than penicillin, (was) the development of the transfusion service … and (it was) … Buttle who taught us how to use it.”
The German medical services weren’t nearly as good. When they captured Tobruk in 1942 they examined British dried plasma with great interest and were soon copying it.
The system was, of course, going to face its greatest test from June 1944. After the fall of France and the retreat at Dunkirk in 1940, British troops had been engaged in fighting in North Africa and the Far East, and then in Italy, but it was well understood that once the invasion of mainland Europe took place, things would be on an altogether bigger scale.
Throughout the war donors had been asked to come forward, and while fresh blood was being used in British military and civilian hospitals, the emphasis had been on producing plasma for sending overseas.
But with the coming invasion of Europe, immense quantities of plasma and blood were going to be needed, which was why Guy Gibson had come to town.
A campaign of advertising and propaganda was kept up to keep donors coming forward. Much of this, including a few short films from the Ministry of Information shown in cinemas, was aimed at women. This emphasised that women could do their bit by turning up for a donor session; you’d be helping the lads at the front, lads like your husband, brother, boyfriend, son…
Early 1944 saw a huge publicity drive in Bristol to attract donors(Image: Bristol Post)
As well as appeals from Gibson, General Montgomery and Prime Minister Churchill, there was also “Bloody Mary” – the name someone coined for the ABTS van, which toured the streets of Bristol, giving people information about when and where they could donate and reassuring people that no, it didn’t hurt.
The unofficial logo of the ABTS was a red vampire bat, which perhaps might put some people off now, but this was plainly a less squeamish age.
By now the ABTS even had its own public relations manager, one Charles Thomas, who leapt at every chance to give the local papers stories of local lads at the Front whose lives had been saved by Bristol blood. He scored the jackpot with the tale of a soldier from Southmead who’d benefited from a transfusion.
Giving blood, he told the local press, “is the most democratic thing that has happened in the world … It puts the humblest tramp and the king on the same footing. In fact the tramp could well turn out to be in a better blood category than the king.”
History does not record how many tramps came forward to donate blood.
Once the invasion was under way, the ABTS operation proved extremely efficient. Troops landing in France on June 6, 1944 were accompanied by medics armed with waterproof cases with all the necessary transfusion equipment and bottles of plasma and whole blood.
Transfusion officers were among some of the first to struggle ashore at the landing beaches, to be followed up by trucks carrying refrigerated supplies. Within a few days, aircraft were landing in France carrying blood which had been donated in Bristol less than 24 hours beforehand.
On June 6 and in the coming days, thousands of Bristolians responded to the ABTS’s urgent request for donors, particularly those who could just walk to the donor points at factories such as BAC and Wills’s in Bedminster.
British soldiers wounded on D-Day and in the fighting in Normandy, and who received blood and plasma were almost all getting it from Bristolian donors.
By now there were more than 60,000 registered donors in Bristol alone, and the service based at Southmead would, in the post-war years, become the National Blood Transfusion Service, the direct forerunner of today’s NHS Blood & Transplant service, which saves the lives of tens of thousands of patients every year.