The Midwife's Tale

by Billie Hunter

  ‘I’ve worked in those homes in all the big cities and it was very good work because you can help these people. Some of them are not trained how to even set a table when they come to you, so they got this training – housewifery and laundry, care of the baby and all that, which is invaluable for young girls who had never had any experience of that kind of thing.’

  Most of the midwives implied that working with unmarried mothers was something that cropped up throughout their working lives – a sad but inevitable part of life but not something to dwell on or discuss, something that was best ‘swept under the carpet’.

  Ninety-five year old handywoman, Mrs G., on the other hand, had no such qualms. She saw pregnancy as the price you paid for immoral sexual activity:

  ‘Well, if they’ve had the sweets then they must have the sours, mustn’t they?! Can’t have yer sweets all of the time. They had to have their bottoms smacked, didn’t they? Mind you, I wouldn’t have liked to have had my bottom smacked when I was young!

  ‘They had to go into homes, didn’t they and take their babies with them. Then when the babies grew up a bit, they had to go straight out to service. They had to go out and leave someone else to look after the baby. Mind you, there wasn’t so many unwanted babies in them days – not like it is today.’

  Mother and baby homes

  Several of the midwives we interviewed had worked in homes for unmarried mothers and their babies. From their accounts, it was clear that the homes varied greatly in the quality of care and help that they offered. Florence W. was very proud of the work carried out in the Salvation Army homes:

  ‘They actually had their babies in the Salvation Army homes. They used to come two to three months before the child was born and stay three to four months afterwards. So you did their antenatal care, a doctor would come and see them, then the delivery, then the lying-in, and then the training of the girl to look after her baby afterwards. So we got to know them very well.

  ‘At Bradwych, during the war, a lot of girls kept their babies and went into service and they used to keep in touch with the home. We used to call them “Associates”. And they used to come to a special function every year with the babies, some of them with quite older children. We kept in touch with them by correspondence and often got jobs for them. We did a lot of aftercare in those early days and you really felt as if you’d done something worthwhile.

  ‘It was a house that belonged to some titled ladies and they made it into a maternity home, but we did have beds for three private patients, mainly farmers’ wives that used to come in from around there, and that was a nice little sideline. They helped to finance the place. The girls didn’t have much money. We didn’t have to employ any domestic help because everybody did something. Some of them would be there for six months. You didn’t bar them ‘cause they couldn’t pay. On the whole, they got on well together ‘cause they had to share dormitories and I think some made lasting friendships. But for some it was better to make a fresh start without keeping in touch.’

  Midwives Josephine M. and Edith B. were not so impressed with the work carried out in mother and baby homes:

  Josephine M.: ‘Well, the City of London had a home for mothers and babies at Stamford Hill and they worked them to death, they really did. They had them about the City of London cleaning and scrubbing – they kept them working right up to the last minute of their pregnancies. Oh yes, and some of these old Home Sisters, they were right old battle-axes, you know. “You’ve got yourself pregnant but you’re going to pay for it while you’re here.” And after that they got sent back to the home and I s’pose the babies used to get adopted.’

  Edith B.: ‘The first part of my midwifery training (in 1920, in Newcastle) was with unmarried mothers and they were very unkind to them. There was a terrible, terrible, prejudice about all that kind of thing. A terrible stigma, and why I can’t think because it takes two to make a bargain! It’s always women who get the bad name. Of course, the stigma very often left its mark on the child. I do remember that the mothers were not allowed anything to ease their pain, and if they had stitches – well, they just had stitches. I think they’d have done forceps without an anaesthetic. Usually, they were done under general anaesthetic – it was ordinary chloroform or ether then.’

  Family reactions

  The families’ reactions to unmarried mothers varied. Some families seemed to be little affected, while others felt ashamed and angry. Some eventually accepted the baby, but in other families the feeling of disgrace was so great that the young woman and her child were ostracised forever. Making a generalisation based on our research, it would seem that working-class households were most able to accept illegitimacy. Edie M. explains:

  ‘Amongst poor people like us I think more mothers would help their children if they got pregnant, rather than putting them away in a home. Yes, a case is coming to mind – Mary M., her name was. She got pregnant and the boy went to France for the ‘14-’18 war. And she had this little boy and the whole street stood by that girl.’

  Mary W. was a midwife in the pit villages around Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and she recalls:

  ‘We did have unmarried mothers. Not a large proportion, but we did have them. The trouble with unmarried mothers was that very often they tried to conceal the pregnancy and a few times I’ve been called to the labour at the last minute without any warning during the pregnancy … I remember being called out to a girl who had worked all day and came home and had the baby that night.

  ‘The babies were just sort of absorbed into the family. Not much stigma attached, no. The grandmother became the mother in most cases, and they were absorbed into the family. It didn’t make much difference. The grandmother would look after the baby and the girl would go back to work – in the mills or domestic work. Very often there was a quick wedding so that the baby was legitimate.’

  Elsie B., a midwife from rural Devon, describes a situation familiar to all midwives. Throughout the centuries, midwives have had to cope emotionally with the contradiction of caring for people who lose wanted babies alongside supporting those who give birth to unwanted babies:

  ‘I did have one that was sad, not from the unmarried mother’s point of view, but from the next patient’s point of view. The mother of the unmarried mother was standing there and all she kept saying was she hoped the baby would be born dead, but if it was born alive she hoped it would be all right. Of course, she was so upset about this. Anyway, needless to say, the girl had a good labour and a perfectly healthy baby. And the very next night we was called out to another person. That was a first baby, been married seven years and, needless to say, we had a stillborn baby. No fault of anybody’s you know, just one of these things that happened.

  ‘I remember one – I think the mother knew a few things. We were unlucky – it was a cord prolapse and of course we had a stillborn because mother had been pulling on the cord and she hadn’t sent for anybody. I wondered about that.’

  As in today’s society, sometimes the family itself could be a dangerous place for young women. Two of the midwives we talked to cited cases where women were pregnant due to incest. Josephine M. describes her horror of learning about such situations:

  ‘And that’s another thing with these awful old men! Sometimes I remember women would be in having babies, perhaps they already had four or more children, and they would be desperate to get home. I remember this one woman. We tried to keep her in (perhaps she was a bit run-down or something) and she wouldn’t stay. It appears – and apparently it’s going on today, too – they couldn’t leave their daughters at home with the old man. That was the first case I heard of. Of course, I was very green, only 21 years old. I didn’t know anything of the outside world, being brought up in a close family in Ireland – but that did open my eyes. Oh yes, that sort of thing went on a fair old lot.’

  Florence W. also mentioned a case of incest:

  ‘When I was in Liverpool, we had a girl of 13 and her father was in jail because he was the fath
er of her child … And she came from some little place in the heart of Wales. She had this baby that was perfectly normal and quite a big child, but although the mother was developed physically she wasn’t developed mentally. So she was like a child and this baby was like a doll. But you can’t get a baby like that adopted because of the incest – people worry that the child might have something wrong with it due to inbreeding. She was not allowed to go home because there were brothers … it was all most unsatisfactory.

  ‘She was in the care of the Salvation Army until she was 18, and the Children’s Department helped to finance her. But she didn’t seem to worry about it. She didn’t seem a bit bothered that she was in this state. And none of the family ever came to see her. Eventually, they got her a little job in one of our Eventide homes there. But she wasn’t much of a worker. Didn’t have the brains to be educated. Eventually, this baby went to Barnardos and I took it down from Liverpool on the train to Barnardos in Essex. And I often wondered what happened to that child.’

  During the Second World War, illegitimacy rates soared. Attitudes towards pre-marital and extra-marital sex relaxed and ‘war babies’ were more easily accepted, according to Katherine L. and Margaret A., midwives who worked near a US Army base in East Anglia:

  ‘There were a lot of unmarried girls here during the war. There were many American bases nearby and so they went out with the GIs. The illegitimate rate was very high but there was no stigma. It was accepted and they were absorbed into the family.’

  8

  Wartime Midwifery: ‘Everybody was for everybody else’

  ‘A lot of the men were away and we liked to think we were holding the fort for them, looking after their wives.’

  In both world wars, women and children were the targets of governmental paternalism when the men went to the front. Ken W. remembers his mother, a handywoman, talking about the financial implications this had for her during the First World War:

  ‘When the First World War broke out, my father volunteered like they all did, and she did tell me that she was never so well off as then. She got, I think, 18 shillings a week. She had six children under ten years old, and they gave a children’s allowance. She told me that before the war he couldn’t get work. So when the war came, he joined up as much for financial reasons as for patriotic reasons! Yarmouth was bombed by Zeppelins; one of the few places actually bombed in the First World War. I wasn’t even born then.’

  In the Second World War, civilians were far more affected by air raids. In fact, until D-Day in 1944, more British civilians than soldiers died. The government took action to counteract the effect of war on the home front. One such action – evacuation programmes – highlighted the appalling state of health of women and children from inner-city areas. With men away at war and women employed to fill their jobs, the State could no longer expect ‘the family’, and women in particular, to take responsibility for the health and social needs of the community.

  A new system of benefits came into effect, and the government passed bills to ensure a more even distribution of both money and food throughout the civilian population. The ensuing general improvement in health was reflected dramatically in both infant and maternal mortality figures.

  Women who attended antenatal clinics were given certificates that entitled them to an extra half ration of food, and mother and child welfare centres sold various items at subsidised prices:

  ‘We could buy things cheap from the clinics – orange juice, Virol [malt extract], Bemax [wheat germ], that sort of thing. You only paid about fourpence for a bottle of pure orange juice. I went to the clinics for these things, but not to go to buy all the things that they told you you should be doing. I think a mother should learn to use her own initiative myself.’ [Lou N.]

  Evacuation

  At the beginning of the Second World War, the government made hasty plans to evacuate all pregnant women and their children from the cities and large towns to the comparative safety of rural areas. In fact, less than one-tenth of the women who were expected to take up the scheme responded, and almost all of those who did returned home as soon as they were able. Alice F. remembers having pressure put upon her to be evacuated:

  ‘Oh, they kept on and on, right. The town hall kept coming down to me. He said, “I think that you should go away ‘cause you’re the only person down here with a child.” I said, “I know, but I still have a mother and father that I worry about.” So he said, “I can understand, but we’re thinking of the baby.” I said, “Naturally, you’re thinking of the next generation to take over.” I said, “Another war, you know.”’

  Midwife Edie B., who worked for 50 years in a maternity home in West Norwood, South London, describes urban women’s dislike of being forced to live in the country:

  ‘In 1940, we were bombed so we moved to Tring – Lord Rothschild’s place, very posh. There used to be all these bombs flying about London, so we used to take the mothers out there to have their babies. Every week they used to bring a carload of expectant mothers up, you see. But when the mothers had had their babies and they were allowed out again, they were longing to get back to London – in all the turmoil! They used to say, “We cannot stand this ‘orrible ‘ush’ [hush]! Somebody rattle a tin can or something!” Homing instinct. They couldn’t stand the country.

  ‘We had a woman come in, and she’d been in a raid, and she’d had an arm blown off three or four weeks previously. And she came in and had a perfectly normal baby. It never interfered with her pregnancy. They used to come in, frightened to death, but then they wanted to go back home.’

  Florence W., working in the Salvation Army, had similar memories of women’s dislike of evacuation:

  ‘During the war we had an evacuation centre out of London. We went to Bragborough, near Rugby, right out in the heart of the country, and that was supposed to be used for Part Two midwifery training, you know, straightforward cases. And then we had Willesley Castle in Matlock. The Mothers’ Hospital took that over for several years. These people used to come up in a coach and stay in billets in the village, then come up to the big house for antenatal care and deliveries. But nearly all of them, when they delivered, went back home. These women who were sent for evacuation, if they were Londoners, they didn’t like it. They didn’t want to stay in the villages. They wanted to get back home. They didn’t have any bingo, any fish and chip shops, any cinema. And it was all arranged so hurriedly.’

  On the whole, midwives seemed to like working in the evacuation centres, where they were the sole practitioners in charge of normal births. For Esther S., a working-class midwife who had spent her life in the city, evacuation opened up a wealth of new experiences:

  ‘When I moved to Portsmouth to finish my training, we were all in a high explosives area. A lot of the mums were evacuated out to the country, and I went out with them, to Liphook. Liphook’s lovely. We went to a big country house there; it was beautiful. And we had what we thought would be the “normal”, not “at risk” (abnormal) mums. Normal and abnormal – it sounds awful, doesn’t it, to speak like that. They used to say that in those days. They don’t so much now. It’s “at risk” and “not at risk”, isn’t it? So we used to have those that we felt would be straightforward. Occasionally, we had to have a doctor out. I have known them with a retained placenta brought back into St. Mary’s [Hospital] but normally the majority of them just delivered and all was well.

  ‘It was lovely. I loved it out there. It was a big country house, a different way of living. You saw the idea of nature around you as well. The lovely trees … Oh, it was gorgeous … Magnolia trees … and we had lovely country walks round there. And we were very friendly, us girls, with the two postwomen. In the war with the men gone, we were waiting for our letters and that … and they’d come out on a Sunday for those that were off duty and take us for walks. They knew all the country walks. They were lovely girls. We did like them. They were two sisters and they became the postmistresses. So I liked the evacuation days.’
r />   Midwife Nellie H., who worked mostly in private maternity homes, paints a different picture. She describes the disruption that evacuation could cause, as well as the spirit of co-operation in the face of hardship that it could also engender:

  ‘Dr K. asked me if I’d like to go with the women to somewhere in the Midlands. So I said, “Oh all right”, I would try it and I would come back if I didn’t like it. In those days, when you were evacuated during the war, you didn’t know where you were going. All the names and signposts had been taken down from everywhere and you had no directions where to go. Only the driver knew where he was going, but even he didn’t know the district, so it was a terrible business. We went up there; this was in 1940. And the driver said, “I don’t know where I’m going to take you. I’ve got a name here, but I don’t know it, and I’ve never heard of it”. So, I had one nurse and meself in there with about 48 pregnant women. And the nurse had been up all night, she told me. So I said, “Well, dear, you’d better lay down and go to sleep. There’s no reason for you to stay awake”.

  ‘Well, we got part of the way up there and one of the girls started in labour! I could see what was happening, you see, so I said to the driver, “If you see a hospital anywhere near, take her in, because we don’t want a baby born in the coach”. It would have been a bit of a business, wouldn’t it? Can you imagine … up there with all the other mothers around!

  ‘So he stopped at a hospital on the way, but I couldn’t tell you which hospital because there was no names anywhere. And they took her in and kept her there and apparently she had the baby in about a couple of hours. So it would have been born on the way! And I didn’t want a baby born. I mean, I didn’t mind, but I mean, it would have been a bit embarrassing for the driver – and all the mothers. Might have frightened the life out of them, mightn’t it – if it was their first baby!