‘There would be the lady there to get the hot water, soap, flannels and towels, and she’d wait on Nurse Walkerdine. She was like Nurse Walkerdine’s assistant. She was always there before Nurse Walkerdine got there. When you was in labour you sent for Mrs P. She would be there – “Have you sent for Nurse?” – “Yes, Mr S. has just gone round.” “Oh good, I’ll get the kettles on.” And she had everything ready. I mean, us automatically got our bits and pieces together in a drawer, what we had to have, but Mrs P. would get all the hot water and wait on Nurse Walkerdine. And when she was finished, “D’you want a cup of coffee or tea, nurse?” “No, I won’t stop because I’m expecting another call …” or sometimes she would stop.
‘Mrs P. would stay on, tidy up, do the washing and see to the other children, and then at dinner time she’d go home, but she’d come back at night after their dad had given them tea to make sure they’d had a wash, or to put them to bed. And that was £2 – £2 with a pint of beer every night! We paid the midwife £2 and the woman what did £2. At that time my husband used to earn £2.10s a week, so you saved up your sixpences. That £2 for the midwife covered her ten days of visiting, and Mrs P. would also come for the ten days.’
Esther S., who lived and worked as a midwife in the area of Portsmouth in which she grew up, paid tribute to a handywoman known affectionately in the community as Ma Sturgess:
‘The handywoman is part of some of my earliest memories of my midwifery life. In that area of Portsmouth, everyone knew each other very well and there was a woman called Ma Sturgess – everybody called her Ma or Ma Sturgess. She was very ordinary, very homely, hair screwed back and up in a bun – a typical “Ma” that one would think of as a Ma. And she took the role of, well, if anyone needed any help in any way, she was the one that would go.
‘She would be called to lay out the dead and she’d go in for the sick as well. Sometimes she’d sit up all night. We all just sort of sent for Ma – maybe that’s why she was known as Ma. I expect they paid her in kind because she had five children to bring up on her own. She was a widow. But she didn’t do it for that reason. She wasn’t like a paid person in any official capacity. It was just word-of-mouth and kindness.
‘Of course, I knew her because she was the mother of children that I’d been at school with. (Like me, her children would have been born in the 1910s.) She was so well known that if anything went wrong up the school, Ma Sturgess was up there! [Laughter] – “Ooh, she’s up the school again, Ma Sturgess!” – she was a person that never let anything die! A very strong woman, a real character. Her niece came down from London to stay to have her baby and I delivered her niece in Ma’s house. And we had twins! – Margaret and George. They were the only set I had that were boy/girl and I had seven sets of twins on the community. And of course the niece had to go back to London with them but that will tell you how well thought of she was.
‘She was, as you would say, a most useful person. I’d go into a home and invariably Ma would be there, getting things ready, getting the water on. I might be out on another call, and she’d wait with the patient. She would calm them, make a cup of tea, be friendly with them. She’d say, “You’ll be all right by the time nurse comes …” That sort of thing. She was “handy” inasmuch as she did that part. But I have known situations where I’ve been extremely busy, and I’ve been called out literally when I’d just had a delivery. I’d have got the mother and the baby straight – and she’d say, “Well, that’s all right, you leave them to me, Nurse. Everything’s all right, you’ve done the cord and everything …” She knew what to do. She knew it all, you bet, inasmuch as I could go off to another delivery and then I would go back later. I mean, she was a person that you knew you could trust and the mums were in very good hands.
‘With Ma, my confidence in her was such that I never worried that she’d do anything other than be there to assist. I mean, the trust was such that she didn’t hang on to send for you. She just sent for you when she got there. Meanwhile, she started getting everything organised. We had a very good working relationship, Ma and I.
‘I do remember my mother used to talk to me about her mother and she was a similar sort of person – everyone went to her in the village [in Dorset] and they used to call her “Granny Bolt Upright” because she was so tall and slim! Yes, she was the person that everybody always went to. My mother was one of ten children and she always used to tell me about her mother – Granny Bolt Upright.’
After the National Health Service was set up in 1948, the role of ‘the woman that you called for’ diminished further. With an organised, state-funded home help service and increasing hospitalisation for both birth and death, the handywoman faded into extinction.
A tribute to Alice W.: ‘the woman you called for’
When Ken W. offered to talk to us about his mother, who was a handywoman, he was insistent that his sister, Florence, would be able to offer a better interview – partly because she was older and her memory would stretch back further and partly because she had trained as a midwife with the Salvation Army. Interestingly, this was not to be the case.
While acknowledging that her mother was ‘a marvellous mother who was always there for us children’, Florence was resistant to talking about her mother’s work as a handywoman. She gave the impression that years of conditioning in a system that poured scorn on ‘the old Gamps’ had led her to feel that there was something shameful about the role of the handywoman, that such topics were best forgotten.
Ken, on the other hand, related vivid memories that placed his mother’s work within the wider context of her life and struggle for existence. This chapter therefore, ends with a tribute to the life and work of Alice W., as remembered by her son, Ken, who died in 1991:
‘My mother was born in 1884, in Shotley Bridge, near South Shields, and her mother died in childbirth. Her father had been a regular army man in the Artillery when they had cannon guns, and he got deaf because he got his eardrums shattered, and so they got him a job as a level crossing keeper at Shotley Bridge. And he got killed by a train because he couldn’t hear! She’d been living with her dad at the level crossing, so there she was, an orphan at 14. So she was made a ward of court to her uncle. She ran away from him when she was 16 to an auntie and uncle in South Walsham in Suffolk. The auntie was the village nurse and the uncle the village schoolteacher.
‘They got her a job in the fever hospital in Great Yarmouth when fever hospitals were very big institutions, especially in a sea port. They asked for volunteers to go nursing there, and she did. And evidently they had a smallpox outbreak and that’s where she met my father.
‘She had 13 children and I found out recently from my sister, Florence, that she had several miscarriages as well. I don’t think in the particular culture of Yarmouth in that time it was very remarkable – they all had lots of children. I was number twelve and there must have been more than 20 years between the eldest child, Tom and myself. She had the thirteenth child four years later when she was 45. Three of the children died, and two of my brothers died in the last war. Violet died in infancy from one of the childhood diseases, and my twin brother died when he was about six months old, from diarrhoea. She wasn’t able to breastfeed both of us and she got some milk from the welfare that didn’t agree with him. I imagine it was a sort of enteritis. He most probably died of dehydration, I’d have thought. A sister called Lily died following chicken pox. She got a pneumonia and that was a tragedy. I remember the Saturday. We were all sent out to the park – we weren’t to come back till a certain time and her word was rule, you did as she said – and when we came back Lily had died and my mother had laid her out on the front room table. We hadn’t realised that she was so ill. I think she’d had a doctor, but there was no suggestion of her going to hospital. Women looked after their dying children at home. I remember my mother feeling so sad. Lily was eight. It was hard, whereas, I think when babies died there was nearly an acceptance of that – babies died, and that was part of life, you know
…
‘We lived in a little two-up, two-down in Great Yarmouth, in Fox’s Passage next door to a fish-curing place. They were little tiny terraced houses, all up the nooks and corners, and they all had big families living in those tiny houses. As the children got older, they had to move out ‘cause there were only two bedrooms …
‘There were eight of us in a double bed, a brass bed, four at the top and four at the bottom. And before that, I can remember sleeping between my mother and father. I have vague memories of them, you know … they were making love. Yes, I couldn’t have been very old. So the youngest ones obviously stayed in their bed.
‘I can remember my mother sitting at the table on Mondays, which was washing day … the big copper … she’d have been up at four o’clock getting this copper full of boiling water and I was sent to get one pound of corned beef, which was then extremely cheap. And we’d have it with mashed potatoes and piccalilli. And that was Monday morning. You sat at the table with all the sheets hanging round you. You’d push the sheets away. All ten or twelve of you sitting round the table. And sometimes we’d have two rabbits from the market place for, say thre’ pence, and they’d go into a big oval pot on the coals – a great big rabbit stew.
‘She was a good manager. She used to make clothes for us all out of second-hand clothes – all the boys’ trousers made out of second hand skirts and coats. She was always knitting or sewing … My dad was a fisherman but when the fishing all collapsed in the Depression of the 1920s, they couldn’t sell the fish or the boats and the big companies came in … He finished up a labourer by the time I was born. My father was a very quiet, accepting sort of personality, which was unusual amongst fishing folk, but my mother was a little Geordie woman and she was a fighter, you see. She had this big thing – she didn’t want any of her children to have dead-end jobs in the fishing or holiday season, or casual work – she had a big thing that they’d all get decent jobs, not blind-alley jobs. So they all went into apprenticeships. My mother really wanted us all to get out of the situation there. She put a lot of energy and ambition into it. She was a great character.
‘As a little boy of four or five, I can remember her being called out and it was either for laying people out or going to a birth. They were the two main things. I do know my mother never slept more than four or five hours all her married life. That was mostly because she’d be called out. They’d come and rattle on the window, you know, and she’d put her head out the window and they’d say “Will you come?” And mum would go. There was people who couldn’t afford the midwife. The midwife, I think, was five shillings. That, I think, was standard for delivery. People couldn’t afford five shillings so they’d come to my mother and they’d give her whatever they could. This would be early 1930s that I remember, but she’d probably been doing it for years. I think she got whatever they could afford to give her. It might have been sixpence or a shilling. But she’d always go. My memory is that babies always came at night-time, but older children and next-door neighbours would look after me when she got called out.
‘She also went out to work, washing up and that in the cafes in the summer holiday season. Anything! She scrubbed steps, took in washing … And besides doing that, she used to cut people’s hair for a ha’penny. And lay out dead bodies when people died, for sixpence. I think people came to her for advice. Apart from the house being all full of family, it was always full of other people coming. I suppose anyone who had any sort of hospital knowledge, I mean they were looked upon as having something to offer. You must remember people were very uneducated. My mother was educated. One good thing about her father dying was that when she was made a ward of court it was stipulated that the uncle had to send her to school. This was before the Education Act, so my mother had some education when most women didn’t get any. She would have had a smatter of nursing from working in the fever hospital and would have learned how to lay out bodies there. You were lucky if about a third of them survived in there, so she would have got plenty of experience. She may well have also learned things about nursing from my aunt, who was the village nurse.
‘She used to do painting and decorating too. They used whitewash then, or blue rinse – what we’d call emulsion paint now. The women did all the decorating – the men were out at sea, fishing. I can’t ever remember my father doing anything in the house. He went out fishing and then he was in the pub. He had nothing to do with the children. We used to meet my father on a Sunday night on the prom! [promenade] Local people walked along the prom on Sunday nights in their best outfits – navy-blue serge suits, a white silk scarf and a cap – and we’d meet my father as though he was a stranger. We’d all be sitting on the prom seats, and he’d come up and give us a ha’penny each! Then off he’d go to the pub. Really, he was a total stranger to me. But that wasn’t unusual … All the men spent all their free time in the pub.
‘Oh yes, she resented it. Continually. She nagged him from morn till night. But he needed it. I don’t think he ill-treated her. In fact, I can’t remember him losing his temper. I think he was too placid. I never saw him drunk. He gave her about half his wages and then the rest was for his tobacco and drink. My mother resented all that money going into beer that should have gone into the family. And we resented him, too, as we grew up. We had no respect for him. I can’t say we were unhappy as children, but we were very hard up.
‘She didn’t have a very happy relationship with the trained midwives. You can imagine how the midwives saw her. I mean, there was this unqualified person (in her eyes) … But when I came along there was some sort of Charity Midwife, and my mum knew her well because I remember meeting her in the market place and her asking about me and my younger sister. So obviously, you see what happened? I think they just sort of cooked their argument. They must have done. I think she must have stopped going out around the time when the Second World War came. By then, there were more trained nurses around, and so things began to change, and of course by then there was legislation …
‘I don’t think she ever worked with doctors. No, you only called a doctor really if you were dying. I remember she had this varicose ulcer all her life, and if she went to the doctor she would have to pay, so she wouldn’t go. Whereas my father had a penny thing on his pay, like an insurance to the local hospital. The men got that, but the wives never got anything! She had this great big ulcer, enormous great thing on her leg. I think she caught it on the fourth or fifth pregnancy on a bottom latch, you know, varicose veins and that… And she had that most of her life. I remember her going to a Chinese doctor who advised her to put it in a bucket of salt water. And that was the best thing that ever did anything (‘cause she tried all sorts and that) but the interesting thing is when it nearly got healed she’d get thrombosis and phlebitis. As long as it was discharging, she was all right. I remember bandages and the smell of it from early on.
‘She died in the late 1950s, when she was about 73. My dad died two or three years later. Florrie and I were there when she died, and we both laid her out together. We were both nurses. The interesting thing was her skin was absolutely beautiful. She’d had all those pregnancies and that varicose ulcer for years, and yet she had a lovely skin. It was the last thing we did together. We sort of washed her. We did it as a last thing for her, really.
‘My mother was a real personality, this tiny little Geordie. She was a go-getter.’
3
Midwives in Pre-NHS Britain
‘I’m glad I chose that profession. It’s lovely. But you had to be dedicated to it. It’s very hard work.’
Once midwifery was placed firmly in the hands of a professional body, the Central Midwives Board (CMB), in the first decades of the twentieth century, a strict supervisory and regulatory apparatus ensured that most working-class women were excluded from training and practice. This chapter explores the working lives of the ‘new’ certified midwives who worked in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
Training
The training for midwives was lengthene
d progressively throughout the first half of the twentieth century. By 1938, it lasted 24 months for unqualified women and 12 months for those already trained as nurses. Although small grants or allowances had been available from the Treasury for some student midwives since 1919, they barely covered basic living expenses. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, midwifery training was still an impossibility for most working-class women since student midwives still had to pay for their own equipment, uniforms, examination fees and, in some cases, for their tuition. However, sometimes an agreement was reached with the hospital whereby these things would be paid for by the student in a manner such as that described by Nellie H., who did ‘direct-entry’ midwifery training (for non-nurses) in 1926:
‘When I decided to do midwifery, I went to Plaistow Maternity Hospital. It was a very good training school and I really enjoyed it ever so much. Now I believe it’s shut up – isn’t that a shame? If we didn’t pay to be a midwife, we had to stay on another six months and teach the little nurses that were on the district. That’s what I did you see. You had to pay ten pounds – that was a lot for me – to get in. Once you were in, you were OK. You got all your meals and everything was done for you, but we didn’t get our uniform or our instruments or anything. We had to buy all those ourselves.’
Mary W., who had already trained as a nurse, paid for her training by working without payment for six months before commencing the midwifery course in 1931. As she explains:
‘When I did my midwifery training I was going to be married and so I had to go to Bradford, which was the cheapest place. I went to this nursing home and gave my SRN [State Registered Nurse] experience to her in return for the midwifery training. No salary for six months. And at that time midwives were scarce. So how on earth they got away with not paying a salary … Mind you, in those days of course, nursing was a vocation. You were never encouraged to look upon it as a job, or a means of getting money.’
The Midwife's Tale Page 8