The Midwife's Tale

by Billie Hunter

  Josephine M. expressed strong feelings about the idea of men being involved in childbirth:

  ‘Oh, no, no, no! The husbands were never there when the babies were being born. I remember the fight I had with one dirty old devil. She, poor soul, had a baby every year and this was number nine or ten. He spent all their money in the pub and was always in trouble with the cops. That was one of those cases where you couldn’t take the maternity pack – you know the pack with all the pads and everything in it for the delivery – to the home in advance because he’d take it straight down to the pawn shop! This creature, what he used to do was pull the cloth across to see what was going on when she was having the baby – the dirty old dog! But it was sad, terribly sad. Oh no, you didn’t want them there.’

  During labour, children would be banished from the house onto the streets, or into the care of a neighbour or relative. Elsie B. remembered a situation in the 1930s where no such support was forthcoming:

  ‘In a country district, there was a big house and the lady of the house was throwing a big party. Well, the poor butler’s wife went into labour on the night of this big party and the lady of the house wouldn’t release him or any of the other staff to help. She wasn’t very thoughtful to the woman having a baby even though she was pregnant herself. So there was no one to look after the woman’s little toddler. But anyway, we managed. We had the toddler in the room all the time and she was perfectly all right. She was funny, really funny. Now I hear they let the children in.’

  Elsie K. bore the brunt of ‘sibling displacement’ when she was hired to live in with a family in order to attend the mother – a common practice in the 1920s and 1930s in middle-class circles, particularly in rural areas:

  ‘I didn’t enjoy my first case at all. It was a third baby, and of course, I always had to be living in the house at the end of the pregnancy, waiting for the labour. I had to share a bedroom with this two-year-old and he used to wake early and throw his toys at me to wake me up. He was very upset with life. I used to take him out in the afternoons to give the maid a break, and eventually it got better. But I didn’t enjoy the experience because the husband was drinking himself to death, unfortunately. It wasn’t a happy household.’

  Working hours

  Mary T. remembers the restriction to Elsie Walkerdine’s social life caused by the need to be accessible at all times:

  ‘If she went to the pictures, the little Picture Palace up the High Street (Deptford), they’d always know where she was sitting, so they could call her. She didn’t have any off-duty, not like they do now. She was always on call, but in August – she never booked any confinements for August. That was her time off and then she’d take her aunt and uncle away. She went to Clacton religiously.’

  In pre-NHS days, ‘off-duty’ time was practically non-existent. Mary W. recalls:

  ‘I didn’t get any time off at all when I was working on my own [as an independent midwife], of course, but then after I was employed by the council I got half a day a week off. I had one Christmas day off in all the time I was working, from when I started my training. You had very little time off. If you’d had a lot of deliveries – a lot of nights up, no one made it up for you, you just had to go on and get it over and get your sleep when you could. I remember one week when I didn’t see my husband to speak to. At the end of the week, he said, “Oh, you still live here then, do you?” Yes, they come all together, babies, don’t they, and they come in bad weather. When I was walking, if I had a booking at the far end of the district and it was snowing, a baby’d be sure to come.’

  Lack of time off led to midwives working incredibly long hours, as Esther S. recalls:

  ‘One weekend I had seven babies single-handed and that’s when I had that big baby (twelve and a half pounds!). That was the only time I’ve been so desperate. I was “drunk” – I never understood the saying “drunk with tiredness” until then. I was high as a kite! I never went to my bed for four nights and four days. I was fed in the houses with bits of toast but I never went for my meals at all. From one to another – sterilizing bowls in the houses as I went around.

  ‘And when I got home on the last day, my legs were so swollen I could not put them on the bed. When I went in, my mother said, “At last, you’re home. Where have you been?” It was about 7 a.m. She heard me come in. I said, “Oh Mum, I don’t think I can get up the stairs.” So she came down and she pushed me up and said “I’ll go down and make a cup of tea.” (I’ll always remember this story.) And when she came up I was laying on the floor. She said, “You’ll have to get on the bed ‘cause you’re going to sleep!” I said, “No, I’m too tired.” She said, “Let me get some clothes off for you.”

  ‘She got me undressed, pushed me on to the bed and I never woke up for 48 hours. I never passed urine, I never woke for food, I never did anything, and my mother was so frightened that she rang in the supervisor and said, “She’s just in a coma.” Supervisor said, “Well, she’s been having lots of deliveries and everything. Go over and get her midwife friend, get her down and see what she thinks.” So she (my midwife friend) said, “No, she’s not in a coma, she’s just in a dead sleep.” And I never opened my eyes for 48 hours. And when I woke, I didn’t know what time it was, what day it was.’

  Besides the official demands of their work, midwives often did a lot that was over and above the call of duty. Mary T., for example, remembers her friend’s dedication to midwifery:

  ‘Elsie’s work was her life. It was “her babies”, and if somebody paid her so much money a week, which they used to, and they hadn’t paid enough by the time the baby came, Elsie couldn’t turn round and say, “Well, I’m sorry I can’t come”. That wasn’t Elsie. Elsie used to turn round and make allowance for it. And she was always knitting for the babies. Some people would pay her in kind, like food and stuff, especially when the war was on. Now, I do know that Elsie exchanged her margarine for their butter because they couldn’t afford butter, people with children. The women loved her. Really and truly she was idolized. The description of them people was, “She’s an angel”.’

  One of Elsie’s clients, Sissy S., remembers the care she received from her:

  ‘I used to go round to see Nurse Walkerdine about once a month during my pregnancies … just to pay her half-a-crown off of me bill, which was £2 in all. No, she didn’t listen to the baby’s heart or nothing. She used to say, “Well, how are you? Felt any movements yet?” – questions like that. And if you wasn’t too good – “Well, I’ll be round and have a look at you”. That was all. Yes, if you wasn’t well she’d take your blood pressure and that. She was right medical, and she knew every mortal thing what to look for. But I never had any trouble, thank God. They never examined you unless you weren’t well. The only reason I went to see her was to pay off the bill. You could go and see her if you were worried about anything. There was no “Wait a moment” with Nurse Walkerdine. If you went there, you saw her. Even if you went there when that nurse was having her dinner – “Oh, I’m sorry Nurse Walkerdine, I didn’t know you was having your lunch” – “Well, come along in, it won’t take a minute”. You wasn’t put at unease, you know, that you’d disturbed her. She was a wonderful woman.’

  Midwives and mothers

  Some of the midwives we interviewed were unusual in that, like Esther S., they were working-class women who practised in their own communities:

  ‘I lived and worked in the same area I was born in, went to school in. Therefore I watched the people, my friends, grow up. When they got married, I went to their weddings and then, of course, when they got pregnant I happened to have become the district midwife, so I was the midwife. And that to me was something super, really. Because I don’t suppose in this day and age there’s many people that live and work in their same area. That was really special. Excepting for the fact that although I was a friend I had to be their midwife, which was understood.’

  Wherever the midwives practised, they were anxious to include the element of pr
ofessionalism that their training had taught them. Mary W. explains:

  ‘When I first started, an old doctor said, “I’ll give you a tip, nurse. Familiarity breeds contempt.” He had a marvellous bedside manner and he was greatly respected. And he said, “Always keep your professional distance.”

  ‘Now I would never let them – even the people who had been to school with me and that sort of thing – never called me by my Christian name. I always sort of had my status and kept it. And they respected it. It was a good thing.

  ‘But I think they did look on me as a friend. I still see people and they like to see me. Nobody ever calls me “Mrs W.”. It’s always “Nurse W.” wherever I go. And even now that I’ve retired, they say, “Eeegh! But I called you Nurse W.”. And I say, “Well, nobody ever calls me anything else.” They all knew me by that.’

  Most of the midwives we met spoke warmly of the women they had cared for and of the relationships they had developed with them. Some were still in touch with ‘their’ mothers and babies, and indeed two of them were actually living in the home of a grown-up ‘baby’. Elizabeth C. is one of those midwives:

  ‘I don’t think they thought of me as just a midwife, more as a friend. Most of the kids and all, they used to call me “Aunty Betty” – they still write to me as “Auntie Betty”, even the adults … I think there’s a lot in being a personal friend to the person having the baby. You want a bit of sympathy and someone you can talk to just then. Not someone telling you, “Now shut up. Stop making a noise”. I used to say, “Shout if you want to dear, I won’t take any notice”.’

  Mary W. attended the births of two generations in her Yorkshire village:

  ‘Yes, you had a lot of knowledge about the families and it was rather nice to go back and deliver the girls you’d already delivered. Sometimes I’d delivered both the father and the mother of the child that I was delivering then. It was nice to get to the second generation. And I almost got to the third generation. There was one girl and I’d delivered her and then her daughter, and then her daughter had a baby but she went into hospital for it because she was only young, but I did a lot of second generations.’

  As some midwives reminisce about the particular quirks of individual mothers, their attitudes might appear somewhat patronising, but a genuine affection came across during the interviews:

  ‘One mother in particular – she ended up with 13 [babies]. Now she started off, well, when we first came here she’d got four, three of her husband’s and one, well, it could be anybody’s. Then she started with a Greek. She left her husband and went and lived with a Greek, and she had three of his – we had ‘em all didn’t we, Kath. She had three Greeks. Then he went off to London and she took in a lodger. He was a man who left his wife and seven children, and he gave her five. She had them all at home. She wouldn’t go into hospital. But we got very fond of her. She used to sit on the couch. I’d say, “Now look, you go into hospital for this one, I’m not having you at home.” And she’d cry!’ [Margaret A.]

  While Esther S. reported that she had never arrived too late for a delivery, Josephine M. who worked on the district in Croydon, implied that some women would leave it too late to call the midwife on purpose. During our interview with her, it was sometimes hard to keep up with her rapid and expressive accounts of working life in the 1930s and 1940s, let alone derive historical information from her underlying insinuations:

  ‘Of course, some of them would send for the midwife when the baby was in the bed! And of course they’d tell you all sorts of nonsense – and you knew perfectly well that she wanted to have it in the bed because she didn’t want to have us there.

  ‘You want to know why? Well now, say you’re having a baby, do you want to have a lot of nurses fussing around you? Now do you? No, of course you don’t. And anyway, there’s midwives and midwives, isn’t there? Well, there you are … And nothing ever happens. And there’s lot of babies been born into the bucket, or in the toilet – and pick them up out of the toilet, and they’re all right, aren’t they? The cord may have snapped, but it doesn’t always, and when a cord snaps it never bleeds. If a baby does fall, if it’s a long cord, it won’t snap. If it’s a short cord, it might. But it’s all right and the nipper’s in the toilet and that’s all there is to it! It’s nothing, nothing. If it’s a bit cold, wrap it up, feed it, Bob’s your uncle, put it down the bottom of the bed. The mothers would keep them warm in the beds.’

  As Josephine M. said, ‘There’s midwives and midwives …’. In fact, the testimony of most of the midwives we interviewed gave an impression of the very special relationships that can exist between women and their midwives. Many of them positively ‘lit up’ with pleasure as they relived their working lives. Elizabeth C. recalls:

  ‘It was a vocation for me. I was in my element. People say, “Oh, you can’t have done”, when I say I enjoyed every minute of it, even the up-at-nights, but it’s true. You were doing something, you see. Once the fun began, you didn’t feel tired, but you might come in in the morning and just fall into bed. But you’d find energy you didn’t know you had.’

  Several midwives also remembered how intuition had played an important part in their work. Elizabeth C. strongly believed in the power of intuition:

  ‘I do, yes. Oh, I do very much. I had a fair quantity of that. I always knew. I always knew when I was wanted straight away, you see. I can remember getting out of bed one morning for the telephone. I didn’t know her. This wasn’t my patient. It was somebody else’s. And I said to my friend, “I bet that baby’s being born now.” And I got on me bike with me pants half on and I went down to this house off York Road, a long way from us, and lo and behold, the baby was coming all right and in a big hurry! My friend used to say that if I said something was happening she never dallied on it. In one case, she’d been in and out and there was nothing much doing. It was the next street to us and they sent up again for her. I said, “I would go Anne, I would go, I wouldn’t wait.” Anne left her breakfast there and off she went, just in time to catch the baby. I don’t know what it is, just something or other that tells you what to do.’

  Midwives’ personal lives

  Most midwives we interviewed had been a midwife or nurse all of their working lives. They gave the impression that midwifery had been a dominating feature of everything they did. This was especially true for those who had remained single, some of whom had lived in the Nurses’ Home until retirement. One midwife expressed her sorrow at being childless:

  ‘I often wish I’d had a baby … Yes … but there it was … I chose the profession …’

  Midwife Mollie T. told us of situations in which unmarried midwives ‘took home unwanted or orphaned babies’ and brought them up as their own. Whether a formal adoption took place was not clear. (Adoption did not have legal status until 1926.) The prevalence of this practice was not made clear, either, but Mabel P., who worked as a midwife before training as a doctor in the 1910s, recalls combining professional and family life:

  ‘I realised early that you couldn’t work and do the things you wanted to do if you had a husband because that left you having babies – it was different then. Years later, I adopted (as babies) twin girls and a boy who was unrelated to the girls – and my family looked after them. My sister was housekeeper. So I managed to have children without having a husband and giving up my career.’

  Some midwives appeared to be clinging to memories of what they referred to as ‘my babies’. One had been hired by wealthy families to ‘live in’ before and after the birth. She kept books full of memorabilia associated with these experiences. She appeared to be as proud of ‘my babies’ as if she had given birth to them herself.

  Often we would be treated to lengthy accounts of what the babies wore, and sometimes we were given the impression that the babies were more important to the midwives than the mothers were. Indeed, there were a couple of midwives who were most disparaging about the mothers’ ability to look after their children properly. They express
ed pity for ‘the poor wee mites’ and there was an unspoken implication that they would have done better:

  ‘Some of them were very careless, didn’t care what their children did … I remember one baby being born on the floor in the ward, and of course its mother didn’t even have the sense to get on the bed – just dropped it!’ [Elsie K.]

  Mary T. reflected on the choices made by her friend, Elsie Walkerdine, with whom she lived for almost 40 years until Elsie died:

  ‘Elsie loved the babies. Her babies were her life. I mean, early on, there was a local young man who sort of wanted to court her – you know how it was those days. But no – her work came first. He said, “It sounds as though you’d prefer your work to me …” She said, “I still want to bring babies into the world.” So she kept on her own all through life. She was never unhappy though because her work was her life.

  ‘Elsie’s mother died soon after she was born and she was brought up by her uncle and aunt. They had no children and they doted on her – she was tied to their apron strings. They helped to pay for her to do midwifery – you didn’t get it like you do today. On Boxing Day, 1940, I was living next door with my sister and I was invited in for a game of cards. I stayed the night ‘cause there was no one in at home, and I never went back to live with my sister. That was the start of a wonderful friendship. I never went anywhere without Elsie. I looked on her as like my mum.’

  Some midwives formed close relationships with other midwives, with whom they lived and shared their working and domestic lives over many decades. One of the authors grew up in a village where two women lived together as a much-loved and respected ‘couple’. Together they covered all the district nursing, midwifery and health visiting in the area. In an era when midwives were expected to be totally dedicated to their vocation, such couples were seen as pillars of society who sacrificed marriage and children for the sake of their calling. Living together was, and is, seen as an ideal practical arrangement. The depth and personal importance of such relationships was also valued. It is not unusual to read acknowledgements of them in the obituary section of the Midwives Chronicle: ‘Our sympathies extend to her lifelong companion and friend’.