![]() Not a nun herself, she was one of a number of secular young nurses who worked with an order she has chosen to call the Sisters of St Raymond Nonnatus after the patron saint of midwives, obstetricians, pregnant women, childbirth & newborn babies. In the 1950s Jennifer Worth became a midwife attached to a convent in the East End. ![]() The system wasn't abolished until the 1930s and then only in name. ![]() What most of us don't realise is how long 'the Workhouse' survived. But it did have a ring of finality about it, a fate every bit as terminal as a revolution tumbrel. The very fact that we use those words carted off implies an inescapable fate. Pictures of grimy people in 1800s unable to fend for themselves, ending up destitute and scared and carted off to the workhouse. What does that make you think of? Dickens probably. Evocative, heartbreaking, and a valid historical social record. In Shadows she shares some of their life stories with us. ![]() Summary: Jennifer Worth worked as a midwife-cum-district-nurse in Poplar and the Isle of Dogs in the 1950s, working among people whose lives had always been hard. ![]()
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