Scottish Branch’s ‘wee superstar’, Michelle talks midwifery, sci-fi and Hammer Horror!
Michelle Drayton-Harrold is a much-loved member of the Scottish Branch and has many varied interests from science fiction conventions to collecting TV and film soundtracks, to horror, Hallowe’en and embroidery – and she has found the time to squeeze in a career in the Army and midwifery.
Amid a life of many varied roles and experiences, one constant for Michelle Drayton-Harrold is Glasgow. It is where she grew up, going to school at Bishopbriggs and Kirkintilloch, and she returned to the city after the Army had taken her away on other adventures.
Young Michelle grew with a background of nursing and caring for people – her mother was a midwife in the local hospital, and her father became a paramedic after his National Service with the RAF. But despite these influences, Michelle didn’t want to be a nurse at all, at least at first.
She explained: “My heart was set on becoming a vet, but I needed to pass all three sciences, and I soon discovered I was useless at chemistry. I started thinking about nursing or midwifery, like my mum. So that's the path I decided to follow.”
Michelle’s parents divorced and she lived in the East End of Glasgow for a time with her grandparents. She can honestly say she went to school in Egypt, not the country, but the small area of Glasgow near Tollcross called Egypt. Legend has it that a soldier returned from Egypt around 1800 and named his new farm after the country.
While in high school, an RAF officer visited the students to give a career talk. Michelle showed an interest and after visiting the recruitment office in Glasgow, opted to join the Army, travelling to Aldershot for a final interview in 1978.
After being accepted but with two more years until she was 18 years old, she had time to “diddle about” and explore some new experiences. She enrolled on a pre-nursing course at a local college, which provided a day release every week in a hospital for practical experience. She did that for a year but missed several shifts due to the winter of 1978/79 – one of the coldest and snowiest UK winters of the 20th Century.
Michelle’s part time job while studying was as an usherette in a cinema, cementing her lifelong love of films. “Movies are one of my passions,” enthused Michelle, “Being able to work in a cinema and watch movies without having to pay was heaven. I would go straight to the cinema after college and eat my sandwiches at the back. There were some great movies showing at the time – Superman opened that year and ran for weeks and weeks. I was always happy to watch that over again, but don't mention Grease – I saw that so many times and I absolutely hate it!”
She worked as a cook in the café at British Home Stores in Glasgow (the chain had a presence on high streets for 88 years until it folded in 2016). Michelle saw BHS as a more working-class version of Marks & Spencer and she enjoyed working there, until the time came to start her Army life.
Boarding the sleeper train to London, and then Aldershot, it turned out that Michelle was sharing a berth with a girl from Dunblane who was also enlisting, and they spent the journey in excited chatter, not getting a lot of sleep. They ended up the same squad and had the same hospital placements. They still stay in touch and their squad has a reunion every two years to catch up, with the next one being held in Glasgow later this year!
Being away from home was exciting, although Michelle was mindful of her mum’s advice to ‘make sure you always have money to come home’ – “I used to phone my mum every week, and she was so sweet, always letting me reverse the charges.”
After basic training Michelle reported to the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot for 18 months of nursing training. From there she went to the Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich, qualifying in September 1983.
Looking back, Michelle recalled: “I quite liked Aldershot. I don't think it is the same as it used to be, because the regiments have moved out, but when I was there you always saw Land Rovers & trucks going about and paratroopers jumping out of their planes and stuff like that. There was a lot of activity, lots of comings and goings.
“Woolwich was slightly different – more modern, closer to central London, right on the big common and across from the Royal Artillery’s HQ.” Michelle remembered the big upheaval in 1982, when civilian patients were moved out and the QEMH prepared for evacuees coming back from the Falkland Islands. The hospital was very busy, with many surgical, orthopaedic and burns & plastics requirements.
The future QARANC Association Chair John Quinn was Michelle’s officer in charge at Cambridge (Ward 2) during her training, then again at the QEMH, when he was promoted to Major and appointed to the plastic surgery unit. “That was quite nice,” said Michelle, “I knew how he worked, and I knew how he liked things run, and it felt quite comfortable working with somebody I worked with before. I learned so much from John and really enjoyed the interview with him in the last Gazette.
“He has a very dry wit, often with tones of sarcasm but always funny. You got to learn when he was being sarcastic or a wee bit serious.”
Michelle would have stayed in Burns and Plastics, which she found a “such a fascinating field” but her heart was set on midwifery. Soon enough she was back in Glasgow and training at the city’s Royal Maternity Hospital, which closed and was demolished in the early 2000s.
Qualifying in 1985, she later accepted a post at Guy's Hospital in 1987 but only lasted six months – whilst she loved being back in London, she didn't enjoy the placement and decided to return to Glasgow, taking a Rotational Midwife post at Stobhill Hospital, where her mum was a Senior Nursing Officer. Starting in the clinics, which also combined with Gynaecology, she then went on to Nursery, Postnatal Care, labour ward then High Dependency Postnatal care.
Michelle recollects the labour suite only had four delivery rooms. “These were right next to Theatre, plus we had a small assessment ward and a wee side room for isolation if we needed it. But our turnover was quite high with 3,500 births a year, and you learned so much so quickly.”
Midwifery was changing a lot in the 1980s and 1990s, with practitioners getting more skilled and taking over a lot of the tasks that the doctors would previously have done, like Phlebotomy and Epidural top ups. Sadly, the unit closed in 1992, much to the enduring lament of the local community.
Michelle had been diagnosed with ME in 1989, and she struggled with staying well until she decided to resign in 1993 to concentrate on getting well. She married in 1995, which provided a boost to her health, and in 2001 she had her daughter Jaiden. Previously, she had worked as the General Manager of then Glasgow Gay & Lesbian Centre in Glasgow – a job that came her way after she had been a sexual health volunteer with PHACE Scotland, supporting people with HIV and AIDS. She also worked for the Action for Children charity. As the Office Manager, Michelle helped ensure the day centres and residential homes were inspected for quality, prepared all the official reports and collated information from the media relating to child protection.
After becoming a mum, Michelle’s thoughts started to return to midwifery, recognising that “it was time to go back.” She completed a Return to Practice course at Glasgow Caledonia University – difficult after so long away from academia and not to mention all the changes that had occurred in nurse training. But before Michelle could return to work she found out she was pregnant with twins! The two bundles of joy, Xanthe and Xavier, arrived nearly 8 weeks early, on 1 December 2002, World AIDS Day, which delighted Michelle’s friends from the HIV prevention community.
Michelle worked bank midwifery, allowing her to work around the needs of her children, with her mother helping out as childminder. She moved to a part-time post, working in the clinics, Nursery and High Dependency Postnatal, where Michelle stayed until 2013.
Her mum sadly died in 2010, which meant working around her husband’s shifts. He is a full-time postal worker in Glasgow South Side, so Michelle did a lot of night shifts, which suited her. Her dad was also stricken with dementia and she often required time off to care for him. “It got so difficult and my managers got too unbending, so in 2013 I just said, ‘Well, you know what? Family comes first, I'm just going to leave’. I just resigned there and then.” She cared for her father for two years, until he died in 2015.
After that Michelle decided not to go back to midwifery – “I don’t think I could have faced it after all the hassles which forced me to leave. I became a woman of leisure,” she joked.
Speaking of which, Michelle has many interests. One of these is science fiction and she has been attending sci-fi conventions since the late 1970s. She has even helped to run several of them. Asked what the appeal is for her, Michelle explained: “I started reading when I was quite young. I read a lot old classics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The War of the Worlds, even the Narnia stories and JR Tolkien. I still read about 2-3 books a week. And growing up there was so much sci-fi on telly, it was great. We had the Gerry Anderson stuff and the Ray Harryhausen films, you know, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad and Jason And The Argonauts. And then Star Trek came to our tellies in 1969, the same year men were landing in the moon. And that just completely blew my mind.”
Star Wars also captured Michelle’s imagination when that came out in 1977. She remembers going with a friend to the cinema and joining a long queue. Whilst they waited, they rehearsed their lines for the school panto (her friend was Buttons and Michelle, the Fairy Godmother). Finally, they got in to see the film, and she remembered it being like “nothing we had ever seen” which cemented everything Michelle loved about science fiction.
She also has a love of the horror genre, having grown up watching the Hammer House of Horror shows. Consequently, Michelle has a soft spot for bats – “I always felt bats were very maligned in those horror movies” – and not surprisingly perhaps, Halloween is her favourite holiday of the year. She shared memories of trick or treating in Glasgow as a child and recalled that years ago, children would go into houses and sing a song or bob for apples to earn a treat.
Her house is suitably decorated every Autumn. “All the kids know my house, because from the first of October, my window starts getting decorated, and they start seeing the signs appear. I tend to bake and give out baked things and a few sweeties. Years ago, it would have been nuts in the bags, but you don’t see them so much as people get allergies nowadays.”
Michelle also collects film & TV soundtracks (she has over 800 CD’s & digital tracks) and she is a huge fan of Hans Zimmer, the German composer behind some of the biggest films ever made, including The Lion King, Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean.
In addition to all of this, Michelle loves embroidery and has made costumes for various conventions over the years, as well as cushion covers and bookmarks.
Not long after her dad had died, Michelle got involved with Poppy Scotland, as a volunteer poppy seller. She bumped into another QA who suggested she might like to join the QARANC Association. Michelle looked into it and joined the Scottish Branch, also because she was feeling quite lost after her father’s passing and wanted to link-up with her old Army friends.
“I fell into it quickly and that's when I met Sheila Jones, the Branch Secretary, and Karen Irvine, who was just coming in as Branch Chair. This wonderful idea they had of Coffee Catch-ups really took off; it was lovely to meet up with people regularly and some members have such wonderful stories about their service, especially the older members.”
She added: “I never really got the opportunity to work abroad but hearing about these girls’ service in places like Hong Kong or in combat situations, which I've never experienced, is really interesting. I think it's important that we learn from that and what they've experienced. Their oral histories are significant.”
Michelle thinks the Branch is great and has “so much fun”. The big events twice a year are always such a joy, and as we speak she is looking forward to the Christmas lunch in Stirling.
Branch Secretary Sheila Jones had this to say about Michelle: “She is one of the kindest people you will ever meet, and everyone makes generous comment about her. It is therefore no surprise that volunteering is in her blood. She volunteered as a ‘buddy’ for PHACE Scotland, supporting people affected by HIV/AIDS and has been a fully-fledged volunteer for Poppy Scotland since 2016.
“There is so much more to Michelle than meets the eye but since marrying her husband in 1995, she remains most proud of their three children, one of whom is a final year medical student at the University of Aberdeen. This Branch is stuffed full of really interesting people and Michelle is our ‘wee superstar’.”
Michelle Drayton-Harrold was speaking to Gazette Editor Steve Bax
Article on pages 38-40 of The Gazette (Spring Edition 2026)
