Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950S

with bitter opposition from colleagues and politicians who regarded antenatal care as a needless expenditure of public money and medical time.
     
    At the same time the struggle by visionary and dedicated women was in progress to gain properly regulated training in the art of midwifery. If Dr Ballantyne was having a hard time, these women found it harder. You have to imagine what it was like to be on the receiving end of vicious antagonism: sneering, contempt, ridicule, slights about one’s intelligence, integrity and motives. In those days, women even ran the risk of dismissal for their opinions. And this treatment came from other women, as well as men. In fact, “in-fighting” between various schools of nurses who had some sort of training in midwifery was particularly nasty. One eminent lady - the matron of St Bartholomew’s Hospital - branded the aspiring midwives as “anachronisms, who would in the future be regarded as historical curiosities”.
     
    The medical opposition seems to have arisen mainly from the fact that “women are striving to interfere too much in every department of life”. 2 Obstetricians also doubted the female intellectual capacity to grasp the anatomy and physiology of childbirth, and suggested that they could not therefore be trained. But the root fear was - guess what? - you’ve got it, but no prizes for quickness: money. Most doctors charged a routine one guinea for a delivery. The word got around that trained midwives would undercut them by delivering babies for half a guinea! The knives were out.
     
    In the 1860s the Council of Obstetrics estimated that, out of around 1,250,000 births annually in Britain, about 10 per cent were attended by a doctor. Some researchers put the figure as low as 3 per cent. Therefore, all the rest - well over one million women annually - were attended by women with no training, or by no one at all, other than a friend or relative. In the 1870s Florence Nightingale wrote Notes on Lying-in Infirmarie s, drawing attention to “the utter absence of any means of training in any existing institution”, saying “it is a farce or mockery to call women who attend childbirth, midwives. In France, Germany, and even Russia they consider it woman-slaughter to practice as we do. In these countries everything is regulated by Government - with us, by private enterprise.” The guinea earned by doctors for a delivery was a significant part of their income. The threat of being undercut by trained midwives had to be resisted. The fact that thousands of women and babies were dying annually for want of proper attention did not come into it.
     
    However, the courageous, hard-working, dedicated women eventually won. In 1902 the Midwives Act was passed, and in 1903 the Central Midwives Board issued their first certificate to a trained midwife. Fifty years later I was proud to be a successor of these wonderful women, and to be able to offer my trained skills to the long-suffering, cheerful, resilient women of the London Docklands.
     
     
    At the church hall, the antenatal clinic had been set up again. It was mid-winter, and the coke-stove was burning fiercely. It was well guarded on all four sides for the protection of the numerous little children running around. Lil had been in my mind on and off during the past fortnight - a curious mixture of revulsion and admiration. Whilst I admired the way she coped, I hoped I would not have to meet her again, at least not in the intimate patient/midwife relationship.
     
    The pile of notes on the desk told me it would be a busy afternoon - no time to brood about Lil and her syphilis. There were seven piles of notes, with about ten folders in each pile. Another seven o’clock finish, if we were lucky.
     
    I glanced at the top of the first pile, and saw the name Brenda, a woman of forty-six with rickets. She would be admitted to hospital for a Caesarean, and she was booked with the London Hospital in Whitechapel, but we were looking after her antenatally. At that moment she hobbled in, punctual to the minute for her two o’clock appointment. As I was at the desk, and the other staff were not available, I took her for examination and check-up.
     
    My heart went out to little Brenda. Rickets showed itself in malformation of the bones. For centuries it was not known what caused the condition. It was thought, perhaps, to be inherited. The child was thought to be “puny” or “sickly” or even just lazy, as rachitic children