Commentary on Leslie Wade and Christine Hallett: The dynamic city: recruitment to nursing in early 20th century Manchester

Abstract

Lesley Wade and Chris Hallett have provided a most interesting insight into the recruitment problems of the 1920s and their resonance with today. Their case study of the Manchester Royal Infirmary and the impact of its able Lady Superintendent of Nurses, Miss Sparshott CBE, illustrate well a number of singular features of the voluntary hospital of the time. The word voluntary is not misplaced. Wade and Hallett show that salaries were generally lower here than in those other Manchester Hospitals, such as Withington, which had been workhouses. This, however, was almost certainly out of reliance on the ability of the ‘better’ voluntary and teaching hospitals to recruit their probationers from the educated girls of Lancashire and Cheshire who were, by definition, more likely to be able to be supported by their parents. Right until the late 1970s recruitment strategy was aimed at the Grammar Schools of the North West on the assumption that many able girls would neither want, nor be encouraged by their parents, to go to University. We stress girls, since at the MRI men were not welcomed until the late 1960s. The wheels of a bureaucracy move extremely slowly since as early as 1947 the Wood Report had clearly identified more extensive use of male nurses as a human resource which needed to be tapped. They would prove less likely to leave for ‘domestic reasons’, but commonly were of less refined stock than their female counterparts and were often the source of disciplinary