Corporal Buckets Revenge

A rather harassed and portly male operating theatre orderly called “Corporal Bucket” is the subject of many Orpen cartoons. 

He is variously drawn adjusting lights, holding a child’s legs on the operating table, taking a break and searching the floor for a dropped suture needle – a scene familiar to all surgeons.

Bucket is how Orpen chose to caricature herself having been given that nickname by the surgical staff. She collected them together in her personal records as “The Book of Bucket”. John Barron, a plastic surgeon at Hill End Hospital during the time, describes in the letter seen here to the Collection’s founder, Mr. Tony Wallace, how Orpen came to be given the name.

During a flu epidemic and Orderly shortage, Orpen stepped in to undertake their normal duties. Moving lights, cleaning floors and carrying around buckets of dirty water. “So the rude surgeons dubbed her “Bucket”, which remained her nom de plume for a long time so when she decided to get one back on us by doing the sketches she called it “The Book of Bucket.”