Farewell To The East End

practitioner, answerable to no one. At the turn of the nineteenth century it was estimated that around 40,000 handy-women were practising in Great Britain, many of them calling themselves ‘midwives’. Some of these women had acquired a knowledge of childbirth handed down through generations, and they were good and conscientious practitioners. However, others were slatternly and often illiterate. Many women could not afford even a handy-woman, and delivered themselves, with just the help of a friend or older relative. No woman had any antenatal care, not even if she was rich, so the fact of pregnancy was not recorded.
    With this lack of medical attention it would have been easy for a baby to be born and to die without anyone knowing, apart from the immediate family, who may have had any number of reasons for wanting to conceal the birth.
    Illegitimacy was the main reason for hiding a birth. Young people today cannot imagine the disgrace that was once attached to a birth out of wedlock. So great was it that sometimes a young girl would commit suicide rather than reveal she was pregnant. Many a poor woman would conceal the pregnancy beneath her skirts, work until the day she went into labour, deliver the baby herself, and go straight back to work. If she did not register the birth, who would be any the wiser? If the baby died, as many did, who would know? The rich had a more subtle way of dealing with an errant daughter – she could be certified ‘insane’ and confined to a mental asylum for the rest of her life. The baby would then be removed and placed in a private home or orphanage, with no stain attached to the family.
    Another reason for concealing a dead baby was the expense of a funeral. A burial cost money, and every respectable working-class mother spent a few pennies each week on insurance to cover family deaths. A pauper’s grave was the ultimate disgrace, and to be thus shamed in front of her neighbours was every self-respecting woman’s dread. But many could ill-afford burial insurance, so it would be better for women caught in this trap to pretend it had never occurred and slip the little body into the river. In the 1950s I nursed a woman who had done just that thirty years earlier. 6
    If the respectable poor were driven to conceal the birth and death of a baby because of the cost of registration and burial, what of the abject poor?
    In 1880 nine dead babies were found in a box on the steps of an undertaker in Long Lane, Bermondsey, East London. This was reported in all the newspapers. Would a doctor or midwife have attended the birth of these babies? Would these infants have been registered by parish or state? Could the parents, or at least the mothers, be traced? Not a chance. These nine babies would have been but a few of the nameless children thrown into an unmarked grave, the offspring of the abject poor who were destitute and starving, who were outside any census and beyond enumeration, and whom Charles Booth (1844-1916), the first social statistician, numbered at 255,000 for all London and at 1.95 million for Great Britain as a whole. 7 Later surveys considered this estimate to be conservative, stating that the figure was nearer to 3 million.
    Obvious mental or physical disability was another reason for concealing a birth. Fear was the catalyst – fear, amongst the poor, of having to support a sickly child who could contribute nothing to the family income. There was also fear of the stigma attached to having a disabled child. It was widely supposed that congenital defects were due to something vaguely sinister ‘in the blood’, which would mark the family out from its neighbours. The baby could be left to die (probably with the connivance of the mother, or the women who had helped with the birth) and then described as still-born. The father would probably have been unaware of any impairment, because men rarely had anything to do with birth in those days. ‘Women’s matters’ were taboo, a silence enforced as much by women as by men.
    The upper classes – aristocracy and royalty – were particularly fearful of the stigma of a disabled child in the family. It could lead to ostracism because of so-called ‘tainted blood’, and the upper classes were not above smothering their own babies at birth.
    Poverty led to the abandoning of babies. How much of this really went on I don’t know, but we midwives were always being told about it. The women of Poplar would say ‘Gor! You don’