Authors: Virginia Nicholson
our civic duty to vote; they were from the generation that had fought for
that right, and we had it drummed into us that you betray it if you don’t
exercise it.’
Another woman who looked back on the spinster teachers who taught
her at the local council school from , when she was five, also paid
tribute to them: ‘I did not realise till much later how fortunate we children were to be taught by so dedicated a group of teachers. It was as though we were their surrogate children that they never bore . . . Our classes averaged about pupils, but there was no difficulty in keeping order . . . We respected them and they were highly educated and well-read people. These cultured ladies led us into the world of art and music. I am glad to acknowledge my
debt to them.’
The old idea that education for girls was one of those things that ‘nice’
people didn’t discuss had failed to survive the post-war climate. Miss Lilian Faithfull, Principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College between and , remarked that whereas before the war per cent of her pupils returned
to their families on leaving school, after the war that figure reversed:
‘. . . certainly seventy per cent wished to have a career.’ The curriculum
quickly adapted, becoming increasingly oriented towards qualifications as
opposed to accomplishments.
A virtuous circle was created, whereby young women educated of necessity grew up to become the teachers of the next generation of girls. By the second half of the twentieth century illiterate women, or women who
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could only faint, blush and play the piano, had become the exception. In
all this the ‘Surplus Women’ schoolmarms had a deeply formative influence,
and one might argue that their independent approach to life bucked a
trend that was to evolve into the fully-fledged feminist movement advanced
by many of their one-time pupils thirty years later. Stay-at-home wives
and mothers could never have provided the role model of these valiant
mathematics and history mistresses.
Compared to the teaching profession, hospitals could be seen as good
husband-hunting territory. During the war this was probably true. If, like
Vera Brittain’s ‘Lady,
fiance´
killed . . .’, you were only too glad to marry anyone, even if ‘totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War . . .’, then the wartime hospitals were a rich source of grateful, submissive and sex-starved young men.
When nineteen-year-old Stuart Cloete’s shoulder-blade was smashed by
a German bullet at the battle of the Somme he was taken back to recover
in hospital in Reading. Watching the VADs in their starched uniforms as
they bustled busily around the ward, his mind was on their bodies under—
neath, and with nothing else to do but recover, Cloete’s sex fantasies took
hold of him. After his discharge, shell-shock kicked in and he had to be
hospitalised again, this time in London. Emerging from an amnesiac coma,
he looked up to see a tall dark-haired nurse standing in the doorway:
Her uniform was pale blue with a white starched apron, belt, collar, cuffs and cap.
I stared at her – or so she said afterwards – and instantly fell in love . . .
My nurse-wounded-soldier pattern was one with a thousand precedents. Gratitude on the part of the man, a reversion to infancy and a desire to be taken care of by a woman. On the woman’s part, her sympathy for pain, an effort to make up to the soldier for what he had gone through, and a kind of almost incestuous maternal feeling for this man-baby. A whole galaxy of instincts, feelings, thoughts and passions on both sides. All in all an atmosphere of war urgency.
War, Cloete explained, has an aphrodisiac effect. Boys were forced more
quickly into manhood; the losses on the field stimulated the natural impulse to regenerate. It was all part of the survival of the race. ‘As far as nature was concerned I was not a boy or a man. I was an organ of reproduction to be used before it was destroyed.’ He guessed that the young nurse, Eileen,
may have felt something of the same sexual pressure. Her fiance´ had been
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killed on the Somme only a few months earlier, and Stuart in some way
filled his place. Cloete returned to the front and in was wounded
again. This time his groin and spine were damaged, and both his buttocks
were half blown off; he nearly died. Five operations later, and a couple of
months before the Armistice, Eileen agreed to sleep with him. In October
they were married.
The awful injuries of returning soldiers were the inspiration for many a
starry-eyed young woman to offer herself up to a life of service to the sick.
After the First World War, there were more nurses than there were jobs
for them; , nurses joined the profession between and . One
of them was seventeen-year-old Gladys Hardy:
Mother [was] anxious about my future. She had the idea that nurses were similar to nuns, that there was no possible chance for a nurse to get married, and that eventually I would become ‘queer’ and have to be kept by my family. I had no such doubts . . . I dreamed of wearing a smart uniform and a snowy cap; of appearing as a ministering angel to the sick, and of being a very important person.
Gladys was in for a shock: she found on her first day on the ward that
she was expected to be not a ministering angel but a charwoman. There
were floors to sweep, baths and lavatories to clean, and brass to be polished.
‘By . a.m. that morning, I was tired and dusty . . . my feet ached in their new black shoes and stockings, and I felt, and looked, untidy and miserable.’
Nevertheless, Gladys felt privileged, and buckled down obediently. Though
menial, nursing was one of the few professions seen as respectable for decent young ladies, and eligible doctors were an attraction if you aspired to marriage with a man of status; but Gladys soon found out that the reality
was not as romantic as the sixpenny fiction papers would have their readers
believe.
As in so many cases, there weren’t enough men to go round. Nursing
had much to offer as a career, but this didn’t alter the fact that it was, like teaching, a job for single women, and in most hospitals a nurse would be dismissed or expected to resign on marriage. Only the determinedly – or
terminally – single could reach Sister or Matron level. By the age of thirty Gladys Hardy was a Sister Tutor; at thirty-five she was a Matron. In a job like this the responsibilities were all-consuming, and she marvelled that any professional nurses ever managed to get married, for there was simply no time to meet anyone ‘outside’; ‘Indeed I never even had the wish to get
married; for life was complicated enough as it was.’
Her mother’s anxieties were borne out by the facts, for the truth was
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A s careers manual for girls conjures the familiar stereotype of the nurse as a ministering angel in smart uniform and snowy cap that life in a hospital was more like life in a nunnery, and stretched employers quite cynically exploited the desire of young nurses to regard their job as a vocation. There was the iron discipline, the monastic rules, the compulsory daily prayers and intricate uniform, but with the addition of strenuous
physical labour, exhaustion and often repellent conditions. Although board,
lodging and uniform were provided, self-abnegation extended to the pay,
which was a pittance; a probationer started on £ a year. While women
were finding new freedoms in other professions, the life of a nurse had
become increasingly enclosed. Dedication, obedience and irreproachability:
these were the qualities expected of the band of aspiring Florence Nightingales who staffed our hospitals – virtues more suited to a company of Vestal Virgins than to the healthy red-blooded young women in their late teens and early twenties who actually worked there. It was well-known at Gladys
Hardy’s hospital that quite a few nurses would break out to meet boyfriends, but the offenders could have expected no sympathy, and probably instant dismissal. One enlightened Matron, however, took a different view.
Mary Milne, who was to become Matron of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, was born in . As a young woman she had tried secretarial and teaching work before opting for nursing in . Mary had a fiance´; at
some point during the war the fiance´ was killed in action. Nothing else is
known about him, nor about their relationship. Did she decide to become
a nurse to honour his memory, filled perhaps with compassion and fellow-feeling for others who must suffer? This is pure speculation. Whatever her motives, Miss Milne seems to have developed an unusual sympathy for her
staff when she later rose to the top of her career. Matrons were lofty, remote and usually fearsome people. In those days the private life of such an august personage would normally have been off limits to the junior staff. But at St Mary’s it was common knowledge that Miss Milne had borne great
personal tragedy. She was also renowned for her humanity and kindliness.
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Mary grew up in a medical family, so it was not surprising that she turned
to nursing at a point in history when care for the wounded and sick seemed
imperative. As a student she was exceptionally able, winning medals and
scholarships, and after working as a nursing tutor both here and in South
Africa, she gained her appointment at St Mary’s on merit, without an interview, in . She was then thirty-seven, a well-travelled, self-sufficient, modern woman, with advanced views on the hierarchies so prevalent in the hospital world. As such, she had the old guard to contend with.
Summoned for briefing by her predecessor at St Mary’s, she was kept
waiting for half an hour before being looked up and down and advised that
she would do well to disguise her fashionable bob with an artificial hairpiece.
The comfort and happiness of her staff were Mary Milne’s priority. The
majority of matrons ruled over their nurses with despotic and petty discipline. Julie Mullard,* a probationer nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in the s, remembered the awful dread of being summoned to Matron for having committed some unknown misdemeanour. After a nerve-racking
wait, she was severely rebuked for her transgression: she and a friend had
been seen leaving the hospital ‘
without wearing hats
!’ Julie stammered excuses.
‘I am disgusted with you,’ said the Matron, and sent her packing.
But Mary Milne was different. From the start she insisted her staff have
one off-duty day a week. She made improvements to accommodation and
diet. She was hands-on and kept in touch with problems. But the most
memorable difference she made was in her sympathetic stance towards the
nurses’ love lives. Nurses had of course always been prohibited from having
any contact with the (predominantly male) medical students at St Mary’s;
Miss Milne lifted the ban. Instead there were to be joint musical and
dramatic ventures, and St Mary’s Matron’s Ball was her invention. The
nurses were encouraged to bring their boyfriends, if they had them, and
Matron would invite the couples to tea in her flat before the dance. During
the Blitz St Mary’s staff remembered her coming across male students who
had penetrated the hitherto monastic sanctum of the nurses’ home. ‘I
suppose you are all busy firewatching, gentlemen,’ was her only comment.
When you are a spinster who has been deprived by fate of your natural
mate, it takes a generous spirit to show benevolence towards youthful
romances. It is tempting to interpret Mary Milne’s humanity as an expression of solidarity with girls many of whom were also heading, inexorably, * Mullard (born ) became the lifelong companion of the novelist Mary Renault (pseudonym of Mary Challans, –); they met while training as nurses at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford.
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for spinsterhood. As if that wasn’t enough, their profession locked them up
in impenetrable nunneries. When a second war broke out, likely to rob the
next generation of their fianceś, just as she had been robbed of hers, the
reaction of this remarkable woman was one of enlightened compassion.
She was admired, and blessed.
*
It would be hard to describe Mary Milne as a ‘Surplus Woman’, though
after she lost her sweetheart in the Great War she never married. Perhaps
in some way this made it simpler for her; love had died back in , and
she was to live another fifty-seven years. She had the gift of finding meaning in a fulfilling occupation. In she was made OBE, and to the end of her life was active in charities and on nursing and governmental committees.
But Matron Cassy Harker’s story is one that may well speak to our own
times, when the choices faced by women are in some regards more complex.
Her story – told in her autobiography,
Call Me Matron
() – is illuminating because, although Cassy never felt herself to be a ‘Surplus Woman’
either, her choice of nursing as a career demonstrates how hospital life in
the s could effectively scupper marriage prospects. Working in a hospital was, and is, a stressful, emotionally fraught occupation and, as Cassy discovered, its demands and rewards can be comparable to those of a
marriage. For some, that made the job a satisfying replacement for marriage, but for Cassy – a strong, passionate, intelligent woman who both loved her work and loved to enjoy herself – it took a lifetime to come to terms with