Heaven: 2021 November Book Discussion: Call the Midwife, A True Story of the East End in the 1950s
For October we are reading Call the Midwife, A True Story of the East End in the 1950s by Jennifer Worth, the inspiration for the TV series of the same name. I will post up discussion questions on the 20th of November and all are welcome to join in. Looking forward to hearing from those with lived or research knowledge of the time and place the book is set.
Content warning: I have been rereading and note that the medical and labour scenes are more graphic than the TV show and the book also includes true stories of sex work, exploitation and child sexual assault.
Content warning: I have been rereading and note that the medical and labour scenes are more graphic than the TV show and the book also includes true stories of sex work, exploitation and child sexual assault.
Comments
I have recently been part of a group researching maternity services in Aberdeen, ahead of the opening of the new Baird Family Hospital, and was part of a group which got a plaque for Maggie Myles (author of Textbook for Midwives first published 1953.)
I aim to please.
I usually miss, but I seem to have got one absolutely on the cross at the centre of the gold on the target this time. Brilliant result for everyone, by the sounds, and no-one's opened the book yet!
[1] Close as in they lived together for over 40 years until one of them died.
For women, of course, not for men.
https://www.amazon.ca/Call-Midwife-Memoir-Birth-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B008MFVH0C/ref=sr_1_2?gclid=CjwKCAjwiY6MBhBqEiwARFSCPqQ-O--T7KAqUjBXJ-TggTyCoh7LjKLgjrBkaM0ospXAZ2kQnyEcTRoCbNMQAvD_BwE&hvadid=230030426818&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9000135&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=4549902607276518446&hvtargid=kwd-306932541586&hydadcr=21797_10107422&keywords=call+the+midwife+books&qid=1636033064&sr=8-2
I think so: as far as I know Jennifer Worth didn't write much else, and clicking on the 'hardback' link brings up an image with the 'true story' subtitle - which suggests that Amazon thinks they are the same.
The historical author Mary Renault and her partner met while they were both working at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, iirc.
My great, great grandmother was married with six children when she started nursing, but was separated from her husband and her extended family helped care for her younger children. Her family seemed to be quite well off while her husband was constantly in financial trouble and served jail time for various frauds. I'm not sure how common it was for married women and mothers to work in nursing in the first half of the 20th century in Australia.
I thought at first it was a memoir, but presumably not.
The book is a memoir, published a long time after the events. It will be interesting to discuss the value of and limitations of memoirs in understanding the past.
I'm confused about about the history of midwifery, as per the introduction and the chapter on rickets.
In the latter she says "In 1902 the Midwives Act was passed, and in 1903 the Central Midwives Board issued their first certificate to a trained midwife."
While it's true that the first CMB certificate was issued in 1903, this sentence reads to me as though there were no certificates for trained midwives before that - is that how everyone else reads that?
I don't know when trained midwives were first issued with certificates, but the earliest one I have seen is dated 1842. It's framed and hanging in the Med-Chi building at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. I can't find an illustration, but the archival record is here:
https://calm.abdn.ac.uk/archives/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=AMCS/4/15
Generally, she makes it sound as though midwifery has only become a profession in the last 150 years.
Tracing midwives in your family: https://www.rcog.org.uk/globalassets/documents/guidelines/library-services/heritage/rcm-genealogy.pdf
A History of Scottish Midwives: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/learning/features/safe-delivery-a-history-of-scottish-midwives
Some women still today choose to free birth without anyone to assist. Legal authorities only seem to get involved if there is a poor outcome for mother and/or baby.
I'm getting lots of ideas for discussion questions. Definitely will add one about formally trained and traditional midwives and perceptions of their role throughout history.
Yes. My mother and father met whilst working in West Africa. They travelled back to Scotland one leave to get married, but kept it a secret, partly due to parental opposition, but also because my mother had one more tour to complete and would have lost her job if the hospital authorities had found out about the marriage.
Twenty minutes getting lost down Google wormholes later... the Primo Carnera connection led me (via a wrestling website... first one of those I've ever visited!) to this! Nailed it!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-West-Voices-Streets-Post-War/dp/0552153753
1. The book is a memoir, based on the memories of the author and told from her point of view. We cannot be sure it is entirely historically accurate or that Worth has remembered or recorded everything exactly as it happened. What are the benefits and drawbacks of learning about the past through memoir as compared to a well-researched history book?
2. Worth has positive views towards the registration and formal training of midwives. Others have argued that the loss of traditional midwifery has medicalised birth and disempowered mothers (and others) during the birth process. What are your views of the positives and negatives of increased regulation of midwives?
3. Did you have a favourite person or story from the book?
4. What did you think of the role of Christian faith of the nuns and Worth herself in the book? Did you find this to be a central aspect of their lives, or peripheral to their nursing work?
5. Did you learn anything interesting about the time and place the book is set that you did not know before?
6. Given the time, could Mary have been helped in a way that led to a happier outcome for her?
7. Some of the stories explore class among the nuns and nurses and the residents they care for. What did you think of working-class background Sister Evangelina’s approach to her patients as compared to Jennifer Worth and the other medical staff from middle class and upper-class backgrounds?
8. In the book we meet Mrs. Jenkins, who spent many years in a workhouse. I was shocked by how recently workhouses continued to operate for in the U.K. Does anyone have any personal experience of knowing people who spent time in a workhouse?
In several of the stories, Worth is describing events which she could only know of through hearsay - Tom and Bella's wedding, for example. There's no suggestion she was there, but the description was detailed. Is she describing a generic lavish East End wedding? Or weaving together accounts from people who were there?
It is a truism to say that history is written by the winners. But it is also true to say that most of our historical records were also kept by "the winners." The people in charge. The further back you go, the more that history tends to be about nobility and royalty. During Victorian times, increasing bureaucracy meant that records were kept about the poor, but not by the poor. We know statistics which somebody felt were important to record, rather than the lived experience of the people. Archives are filled with documents which somebody considered important; and their sense of what is important to save was informed by their own views.
"Properly researched history books" can only go so far. Memoirs such as this fill out our sense of the lived experience beautifully.
I would be thrilled to find a similarly written memoir about my own area of research (mid-late Victorian Scottish female school teachers. The closest I've got so far is the diary of a woman attending Teacher Training College in the 1880s - midnight feasts, hiding candles to use after "lights out," birthday cakes, deciding which church service to attend based on which young men were likely to be there. It's glorious, and gives more of an insight than a whole stack of School Board records.
Sod remembering which king of England delivered a speech at the gates of Harfleur (or was it Honfleur?), I want to know what Hywel ap Ieuan, wet and sick Welsh bowman makes of the great words (given than 'Enery was born at Monmouth, and a sizeable chunk of his audience were Welsh archers I've often wondered whether it should start "Beth ydy e sy'n dymuno hynny? Fy nghefnder Westmoreland? Na, fy nghefnder teg:" rather than "What’s he that wishes so? My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:")
School history put me off something I loved - I don't really care about King Thingy or Lord Wotsischops, but I do care about people I could relate to, and they were completely absent. I'd be as excited as NEQ by that diary, because it's real and relatable.
It could be legitimately argued that certificates were available in 16th century England, as all midwives were required to be licensed by the Bishop, but they were certainly not a profession then as all they needed to prove was that they were good upstanding Christians (and would ask the parentage of illegitimate children), and not that they had the skills to deliver a baby.
"Of mixed descent III" - the story of Ted and Ted, junior was my favourite.
Did you learn anything interesting about the time and place the book is set that you did not know before?
Lots. I know very little about the East End of London, and I don't know much about the 1950s.
No. Aberdeen's workhouse (Oldmill) was converted to a military hospital in 1915, and thereafter became a hospital (still in existence today - Woodend Hospital). From 1915 on, there were smaller poorhouses, but nothing like the workhouses described in the book. Prior to 1915, male inmates at Oldmill maintained the extensive kitchen gardens, including a small piggery, while the women did laundry work, cleaning, kitchen work and knitting. I hope this was less horrific than the stone breaking or oakum picking described in the book.
My great great grandfather was an inmate of a poorhouse in Banff. He left the poorhouse and returned to the family farm to hang himself. This was in 1901, when my great grandmother (his daughter-in-law) was pregnant with my grandfather. I don't know why he ended up in the poorhouse, with his son taking over the tenancy of the farm. Another son was living in Glasgow and reasonably well off. When my gg grandfather registered his wife's death, he did so with a cross. He was able to sign his name on his marriage certificate and when registering the births of his children, so something robbed him of the ability to write. Thinking about the stories of the workhouse makes me curious as to my great great grandfather's life, and what went wrong.
My grandmother was born in the East End. She always told a story of rushing back with the laundry because it was dark and everyone was worried about Jack the Ripper. She dropped some in her haste and when her dad(?) went to look for it it was still there because everyone was too scared to go out. Her mother died in an asylum, apparently as an alcoholic. The paper work is in the attic so I'll look up which one next time I'm up there. Her dad died of TB when she was fourteen and she went to live with her older sister and care for her children. I guess that helped her avoid the workhouse. Sometime in her early thirties she became pregnant and despite not being married kept the baby. When she married my grandfather her daughter, my aunt eventually came back to live with them. My mother always told a story of going to collect her sister. I guess mum must have been about three and my aunt ten.
Though she never actually was in the workhouse or if she was she never spoke of it, I could see how the threat of it hung over her. She always felt hospitals were somewhere to avoid.
I'll come back to the other questions later.
My mother grew up in Surrey Docks, sort of across the river from Poplar. Once each school holiday in the sixties I would be given money to go on the Metropolitan line to visit her maiden aunt (lots of maiden aunts after WW1) and pay for my lunch in my mother's parental home. It had an outside toilet with a door that had about of foot of draught space at the bottom, which seemed a bit primitive to a boy from Stanmore, especially when it had snowed.
My grandfather was a weights and measures engineer for the docks, which I think meant that he went round ensuring that scales were correctly calibrated. I think his family was slightly better off than many of those in CTM.
I was lucky enough to have midwife-only pregnancies for my son and daughter. I saw a doctor at 12 weeks, then didn't see another until after the births, both of which took place in the Midwives Unit which was part of the Maternity Hospital. So I got the best of both worlds.
My third full term pregnancy was very medicalised. My baby had severe skeletal malformations and was ultimately still born. However, the consultant was brilliant and I didn't feel disempowered by her. There were some other doctors I saw in passing who seemed to think my choice not to terminate meant that I didn't understand my situation.
Overall, my experience in the 1990s was that increased regulation of midwives didn't preclude traditional midwifery. My daughter was a caul baby (i.e. my waters didn't break and she was "born in the bag"). It was my midwife's tenth caul delivery and she divided a piece of the caul, giving one piece to me and keeping the other for herself. She said she kept her pieces of caul in matchboxes. I didn't actually want a caul charm at the time. I neglected my piece and it desiccated. However, having a lucky charm made out of my baby's caul seems to me to be a perfect example of traditional midwifery within an NHS setting.
I'm glad you got great care with all your babies North East Quine, especially with your baby who was still born. That would be terribly hard.
I don't have children, but am one of five. The first three of us (including myself) were born in a private hospital, but my mum chose a birth centre within the public women's hospital for my youngest two siblings and found those births the better experiences. Us older children could even watch the birth once it was determined all was running smoothly. I chose not to watch my sister being born, but watched my youngest brother's birth when I was nine. This was in the 1980s and I didn't realise how unusual it was until much later! The midwife there was a man as well, which I think is still uncommon, and he was a very good midwife.