The Midwife's Tale

by Billie Hunter

  ‘I used to tell the fathers to do what they were told and all. I used to say to the father sometimes, you know, “You mind your business now. You’ve had your share!” No, the fathers were never there at the birth, never, no. I don’t know, maybe he should be? If he puts it there, why can’t he see it come out? See the work he’s done, all the trouble he’s caused? That’s true, isn’t it? I dunno … but still, there you are …

  ‘I wouldn’t say people helped each other out more, no. I’d say they just got on with it. You have to get on with it, don’t you? You don’t not make a fuss when it’s put there and then make a damn fuss when it comes away. Goes in a little bit and it comes out a damn great lump!

  ‘The children were never there [at the births], no. I didn’t like it if there were children about. If the mother left it too late and there was no one to take the children, I used to say to them, “Clear off, I’ve cut me finger”. They’d say, “All that blood comes from your finger?” And I’d say, “Yes. Buzz off!” [Laughter] They used to look at me, sweet like. You don’t know what to say for the best, do you? You can’t open their eyes too much though, can you? They used to laugh at me though, some of them.’

  In Chapter 11, we can see that although Mrs G.’s understanding of the anatomy and physiology of childbirth was decidedly limited and her practice at times somewhat meddlesome, nothing she described could be labelled as ‘dangerous’ or ‘life threatening’. Mrs G. was proud of having received a double award for first-aid from the St John’s Ambulance Service and the Red Cross. People obviously saw her as an expert to whom they could turn in a variety of situations:

  ‘When people were sick, I used to go and sit with them at night. Or if they were a bit barmy I used to go with them. What’s the good of being frightened of people?

  ‘One lad, who’s sailed round the world, when he was little, his mother brought him to me. She said, “I spilled soup on him.” I said, “Good! [Laughs] All right bring him in”. So I sat him up on the table, cut the back of his shoe off, got it off and done it up. And I said, “It’s not hurting, is it, love?” “No, it’s not hurting”. So I said, “That’s all right then”. I said, “Bring him back tomorrow morning and don’t you touch it”. “All right”, she said. So she brought him back every morning for a week. Anyway I got it better for him and he was all right and happy with it. And every time he saw me as he grew up, he said, “My foot’s still better!” I’d say, “You’re asking for trouble, boy!” [Laughs] Oh, there’s been some funny people in this road … Never mind!’

  A different sort of handywoman

  When people talked about ‘the woman you called for’, they referred to a local, working-class woman. However, midwife Mollie T. remembered ‘somebody who would go’ who came from a very different background:

  ‘When I was young, we lived in a small village on the Kent coast. In about 1935, we moved away, but I used to go back every year to stay with an elderly lady and her husband. She was quite an interesting person because she was the niece of William Rathbone, who started all the health care in Liverpool, and as a family they were very public-spirited. She must have been quite a threat in the village, but the Jubilee [a trained midwife; see Chapter 3] seemed to get on very well with her and I’m sure she had an unofficial liaison with her. I’m sure they worked together quite a bit, but nobody was supposed to know about it.

  ‘When I was staying there, there was an emergency call to a cottage in the next village. When we got up there, the woman had had her baby unattended, and I gathered from noises off that she was bleeding quite considerably, but I didn’t get told anything.

  ‘There were quite a lot of children around in a very small space and it was very squalid. I was quite confused, but I was set to work, washing up and getting the kids washed, while this old family friend of ours got going. Having dealt with everything she then sent a message to the Jubilee midwife, who said that if she was there, it was OK and she’d come up the next day.

  ‘I think quite a lot of this sort of thing did go on. It was bound to when you had a single-handed person out in the country with no transport besides her own two feet. This old family friend had had no training but everyone knew that she would turn a hand to anything that needed doing; that she would go into any old “pigsty” and not bat an eyelid and work untramelled through the most awful conditions. But she had no official capacity at all. She was just “somebody who would go”.’

  Laying-out

  Handywoman Mrs G. was eager to talk about her role as the person who was called to lay out the dead and to describe the intricacies of this task. Although she was unforthcoming as to whether people paid her for midwifery work (possibly because of its illegal status), laying-out was definitely a task for which she was paid:

  ‘Yes, of course they used to pay me for the laying out. Well, some people did. If they were dead I laid them out, ‘course I did. The dead can’t hurt you. I’ve laid out hundreds. I’d get called all times of the night and day. It was either to get one in or to take one out.

  ‘I laid out my mother’s grandmother. No, my mother didn’t teach me. I laid out my first body on my own. My mother said that was the best way to learn. But I used to go with my mother sometimes to lay out bodies. It’s no trouble laying a body out. As I say, you live and learn, love, as you go through life. You can’t expect to learn everything at once. You’ve got to learn gradually. It’s nothing to be frightened of. People say, “Ooh, it must be difficult”, but it’s not. It’s easy. They used to say, “How do you wash them?” And I would say, “With soap and water, mate!” It would frighten the death out of people, and I’d say, “What did you cover their face for, stupid?” I never cover dead persons’ faces. Why should you? They’re not doing you any harm. They can’t pull faces at you, can they?! Why worry?

  ‘So you’d wash them and make them look nice. You’d wash their face naturally, then their front, put a towel on the bed, turn them over and wash their back, and then if it’s a man you’d get a shirt – if he’s an awkward size and you can’t get it on him, you’d have to slit it up the back, then slip it over their arms, you see, and then just draw it with linen thread through the middle. It’s so simple when you know how. It was no trouble.

  ‘I used to wash them all over and then put a clean shirt or a clean nightdress on and a clean pillowcase and sheet. But when I laid them out I always used to leave one hand out of the bedclothes, and I would put a Bible or a flower in their hand. That’s how I would do it so they would look natural. But some people didn’t. Some people, when they lay out a body, they do the silliest thing. They put the arms across it. Stupid thing to do ‘cause sometimes the undertaker has to break them to get them down [in the coffin], you see.

  ‘One thing they nearly always do, nearly everyone passes a death motion. They nearly always do, so I used to get a napkin or an old towel and pass it through like a nappy. Then, if they done anything, there’s nothing for the undertaker to get his hands in or anything. You have to think of all these things. It’s amazing what there is to be taught in life, really. There is an easy way and there’s a hard way.

  ‘And a clean sheet over them, but never over their chin, always under the chin. I used to comb their hair and make it look nice, and of course, push their jaw up. You have to do that and you have to hold the eyes down for a while, pennies on the eyes. Then you just put a bit of cotton wool inside them for a few minutes. If the jaw won’t stop up, you get a bit of bandage and you tie it round onto their head while you wash another part of the body. Then, when you’ve finished, you just take it off ‘cause by then it’s set. D’you know what I mean?

  ‘When I finish, they say, “Don’t they look nice. Are they asleep?” I say, “Yes, they’re having a good sleep now”. I say, “No good you looking at them now. They won’t talk now. Come on”. And away they go.

  ‘I’ll tell you a funny story. A man lived down the road here. He thought he was a gentleman. He thought he was, but he wasn’t. And his sister died. Di
ed on Christmas morning. I had my granddaughter there and she was playing, “Show Me the Way to go Home” on the piano. When I opened the door, he was on the step crying. He said, “Guess who’s gone?” And I said, “Where’ve they gone to?” So he said, “She died”, and I said, “Don’t talk rubbish”. He said, “She’s dead. Will you come down?” I said, “Yes, I’ll come”. So I went down, away I went down.

  ‘I had to get her nightdress off to do that job. You have to cut it up the back. So I did that. Then I tidied her up as best I could after I’d washed her. Then I wrapped the nightie up in newspaper and took it down to the daughter-in-law and asked her to burn it. She said, “What is it?” I said, “You mind your own business. Just burn it please”. It was the nightdress and you didn’t want that lying about.

  ‘So the next day, he comes up and he says, “What did you do with her nightdress?” And I says, “You ask her daughter-in-law, she burned it”. And he says, “What, a new nightdress!” [Laughter] Fancy coming and asking for it – a man – what’s he want a nightdress for?!

  ‘So, he said, “I’ll give you one of them souvenirs from Jessie because you know she thought a lot of you”. I said, “I don’t want it”. So he said, “Will you come down to my house?” So I said, “Yes, I’m not frightened of you”.

  ‘So, he said, “Come upstairs”. So I went upstairs and he had a little cupboard by the fireplace. So he said, “Now I’ve got some nice things for you here”. And he pulled out an old pair of corsets, one of them that laces up the back! So he says, “A lovely pair of corsets here”. So I said, “What will I do with them? I don’t wear them!” I said, “You wear them! The damn dirty things!” They’d been quite good once but not any more! He must have been quite mad. I said to him, “I’m not taking that dirt out of your home and into mine. Not likely!”

  ‘He comes to visit me sometimes and he still talks about me refusing the corsets! But if you heard him, you’d think he was a gentleman! [Mimics accent]’

  Mrs G. had many other stories about laying out the dead but she referred to this one as her favourite:

  ‘I’m going to tell you a joke. You won’t never believe it! Now when I was about 24 or 25 I was staying with my sister and the man next door to her he died. At half eight one evening, the wife came along and she said, “Can you come? There’s something the matter with Jimmy. I don’t know what it is. I couldn’t tell you ‘cause I’ve run away”. So I went in and I went upstairs and I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t help him now ‘cause he’s dead, y’see”.

  ‘I had to wait for a doctor to come and certify the death before I could move him. So the doctor came and gave me the registration of the dead – ‘cause the undertaker won’t come until you’ve got that.

  ‘His wife wanted him brought down and put in the front room on the table. They used to do that one time. Well, the funny part is, he was rather a tall man, and anyway I got him along the passage and onto the landing – I put him on a blanket and pulled him along by myself, dead. By myself, I was. I was it all. Funny thing though was, I couldn’t get him down the stairs. So I walked past him on the landing like, and there was two men come by the front door of the house, so I said, “Excuse me, would you be kind enough to come and give me a help?” They said, “Yes, Madam, certainly we will.”

  ‘Well, there was this dead bloke on the stairs but I’d got a blanket under him so we could pull him on that. So I said, “I’ll take his shoulders”. That meant I had to bend over him. “You two men, you take the weight from his torso to his feet. Go each side of him and one take one leg and one take the other, but put your hand up his back so his back don’t break.” Though it wouldn’t have mattered ‘cause he’s dead!

  ‘Anyway, “I think we’ll manage”, I said. And these two men, they stood each side of him but of course the staircase is not very wide. I think we got him down about three stairs after that, maybe about half way down, and of course moving the body caused it to let out wind! And what happened? These two men, they dropped him and they ran! They left me and as they dropped him, I fell over and was laying on top of him and d’you know, he wouldn’t make love to me at all!

  ‘I got him down in the end and got him into the front room. Then I took one of the panels out of the table, put it down like that, put the blanket on it, then him on the blanket, then I went to the other side of the table, pulled the blanket and sort of levered him up onto the table. Then I said, “You’re all right now, matey!” And my arm and my chest was aching with the weight of it. But fancy two men running away!’

  Many handywomen, like Mrs G., found that laying out became the main focus of their work once legislation made it impossible for them to practise as midwives. Over the next decades, however, death, like birth, became progressively more institutionalised. Today, most people will be laid out in a hospital or in the premises of an undertaker. The chances are that the last rites will be performed by a stranger, rather than by a neighbour, relative or friend.

  Resistance to the new midwives

  While the handywoman tended to be an older woman known to everyone by name, the new, certified midwife was likely to be young, middle-class and wearing a uniform, the official badge of her status and training. From the testimony we gathered, it appears that the relationships between professional midwives and their clients were sometimes acrimonious when there was a recent memory of a handywoman losing her livelihood due to the new legislation. Elizabeth C., who worked in Battersea, describes the resistance she encountered on the district in the 1930s:

  ‘The handywomen were illegal then, you see. You had some who were very jealous of your being there to do it because they’d always done it. You’d meet those ones, the ones that were really upset – you know, they’d do things like they wouldn’t give you hardly any boiling water. I remember one superintendent [on a supervisory visit] saying, “You haven’t got much water, Miss C.?” I said, “Well, I can’t get it. I’ve tried everything. Her father and all the people around her are resistant.” The father’s mother, or someone, used to do it, you see. So I couldn’t get anything out of them. I just had the bare necessity out of them and no more.

  ‘It must have been hard for them when they couldn’t practise anymore because it was their livelihood, not that it was much of a livelihood for them. They didn’t get much apparently, but then people didn’t have much.’

  Mary W., who grew up in a Yorkshire mining town, experienced resistance to change of a different sort when she returned to the area to work as a qualified midwife in the 1930s:

  ‘The image of the midwife was of a mature, motherly old lady, and I didn’t get on at all well to begin with. I remember having quite a battle with one of my old aunts. She came and watched me bath this baby and she said, “I like flannels on bairns.” “Oh,” I said, “Well, I do occasionally but there’s no need for it.” And, of course, my new ideas took a lot of getting used to with these people, and it was quite a fight with the grandmothers. You see, in a village, these old customs are hard to eliminate. “Me grandma says this and me grandma says that!”

  ‘They had some very peculiar old remedies. I once went to a house and this woman had a breast abscess. This was something you very often got because of the lack of antibiotics. And she said, “Me mother-in-law’s put me a cow clap poultice on today.” Oh dear! Can you imagine? Cow dung on an open abscess! They had great faith in cow dung poultices! And this old woman – oh, she was a frightful old thing! So I put a stop to that very quickly and told the old lady off. You had to fight them.

  ‘And putting the babies in bed with them, that was another thing you had to fight. They sometimes had a cradle that was passed down through the family, and some of them wouldn’t mind using a drawer or something to put the baby in if they didn’t have a cot. But then again, you’d usually go and find the baby in bed with its mother, you know. And strangely enough, there were very few cot deaths in those days’ (see Chapter 11).

  When we suggested to Mary W. that women might have accepted her b
ecause she was a local woman who had married and had a baby herself, she retorted:

  ‘Married with a baby, yes. But coming from round here, no Because – have you heard the expression – “A rabbit isn’t a rabbit in his own country?”

  ‘Once I was really hurt. A woman I’d known all my life, and she said to someone, “I can’t see how she knows so much. She’s no’ but a lass!” And I was 25 then and done four years in hospital, besides doing midwifery training! So I was really quite hurt about it. I think of course you think “I’m going to show them”. But, you see, they thought that experience meant more than training.’

  Handywomen and midwives working together

  In the late 1930s, legislation had ensured that all local councils were providing a midwifery service. By this time, the role of the handywoman had changed almost beyond recognition. She was no longer ‘the midwife’. Instead, she had become the ‘odd-job woman’ or ‘the woman who does’ – often working alongside the midwife. Mary T., who lived for most of her life with Elsie Walkerdine, a certified midwife, explained to us how women in Deptford, South-east London, employed a handywoman to work alongside Elsie:

  ‘There was always a woman that followed Elsie and did the donkey work. She used to take home the washing and the mother’s dirty linen and such like, and she used to turn round and get a meal for them if they had other children and there was no one else.

  ‘Oh, Elsie very, very seldom had to do her own donkeywork. The family paid these women. At the births they did the donkey-work, got the water, cleared up, looked after the other kids – all that sort of thing.’

  Sissy S. had several babies with Elsie Walkerdine as the midwife in attendance. Here, she describes the working relationship between Elsie Walkerdine and the various handywomen. It is a relationship not unlike the much praised Dutch system today, where the maternity-aid nurse works alongside the midwife, carrying out practical tasks at home births and in the postnatal period: