Learning from the past: a midwife's tale

Abstract

There was a pile of official reports I should have been reading but I am always hooked as soon as midwives start talking about their work. I could not resist the memoirs of a midwife who had trained and worked in the 1950s in the East End of London – the area where my grannie had borne and raised eight children. With memories of visits where I marvelled at her big pots of stew, shining brass bedstead and snowy white bed valances, I was unprepared for Jennifer Worth's vivid account of the devastating poverty and cramped, filthy living conditions in the area in such recent times (Worth, 2002). And this was soon after the 1939–45 World War, when there was full employment and the population, though battle-scarred, was far more prosperous and better fed than in pre-war days. The nuns who trained her, lived and worked in a deprived area around the London docks, where policemen went in pairs, but the highly respected midwives were safe to cycle alone.