AS OCTOBER of 2002 entered its last week, the big news story in Swindon was the imminent completion of Great Western Hospital.

Even as the contractors applied the last licks of paint, controversy surrounded the replacement for the decrepit Princess Margaret Hospital.

Great Western was shiny and new, but there were those who said that wouldn’t mean much unless problems in the NHS were addressed.

Among the dissenters was a nurse called Shirley Smith, who was about to return to her native New Zealand after two and a half years on a general ward at PMH.

“There were too few nurses,” she said, “so often nobody had time to take people to the bathroom and help them to wash. I talked to registered nurses who had never been trained to give somebody a bed bath.

“And there are no guarantees that at the new hospital this will be any better.

“In my view, the showers at the Great Western Hospital are too small. There also isn’t room to push patients in wheelchairs into the bathrooms.”

Shirley, 45, who had seen PMH patients on trolleys crammed into bathrooms, added: “Is that situation likely to improve?

“Everybody on the PMH staff knows there are too few beds at the new hospital.”

Swindon and Marlborough NHS Trust refuted the suggestion that the hospital would be too small for its catchment area.

Director of nursing Elaine Strachan-Hall promised that it would be uncrowded and clean, and that all patients would be accommodated either in single rooms or four-bed bays.

Later in the week, some of the hospital’s staff voiced fears that there wouldn’t be enough car parking spaces, but were assured that innovations such as a staff ‘cycling centre’ with changing facilities, lockers and storage would keep problems to a minimum.

In rather more dramatic news, Swindon retained firefighter Steve McRae had a shock when his watch was called to a blaze at Redlands Residential Home in Old Town – and he ended up putting out flames in his mum’s bedroom.

It was only when he arrived at the scene that Steve, a postman, realised he was at his mum’s workplace.

Wanda, who stayed there while working overnight, had awoken to find smoke and sparks coming from her TV. She raised the alarm and all 20 residents were taken to safety.

The first glimpse Steve had of her was as she stood in pouring rain wearing only her pink pyjamas.

He said: “I arrived at the scene and thought ‘this is where my mum works’ and started to panic.

“I got out and asked someone if they knew whether mum was on duty. When they said she was and there was no sign of her outside I became very anxious.”

Swindon featured in a grim storyline in EastEnders that week, with savage villain Trevor Morgan leaving his mistress, Donna, unconscious on the floor at her home in the town.

At the same time the ongoing absorption of the “Swindon lot” was the ongoing theme of the second series of The Office.

Swindon mayor Stan Pajak said he enjoyed The Office but found EastEnders depressing.

Earlier in the year, the Royal International Air Tattoo had featured an uninvited guest in the form of indefatigable peace campaigner Lindis Percy.

The 60-year-old was found guilty of aggravated trespass by Cheltenham magistrates of having strolled around a stealth fighter aircraft while carrying a stars and stripes flag embroidered with the words: “Independence from America.”

And how had she breached the cordon around this state-of-the-art military technology?

“Martin Setchell, prosecuting, told the court that Percy had stepped over the waist-high wire fence to get into the tattoo event in July and avoid paying the £35 admission fee.

“Percy told the court that armed MoD security officers who had surrounded the top secret aircraft had ignored her but police took her to their control post and then ejected her.” It was only on the third occasion of nipping in that she was arrested. Magistrates’ chairman Philip Judge condemned the lack of security, conditionally discharged the protester, ordered her to pay £260 in costs and took her flag away. In the years since, Lindis Percy has become one of the country’s most prominent peace campaigners.

Returning to Swindon news, the end of an Old Town landmark was nigh.

The Art Deco facade of the old Fads shop in Devizes Road had been familiar to generations of local people, but they were soon to be demolished to make way for flats and shops. The site was already fenced off, with only the striking roof peering forlornly over the barrier.

We reported: “The home decorating store closed its Old Town shop in January 2000, but disputes about exactly what form the new development would take delayed work.”