Midwifery: Midwife attended family of 22 in 1930s

Elsie Moore

A NEWS story in the Derby Evening Telegraph about a family with 14 children reminded Bygones reader Gordon Moore of a Derby family that his midwife mother attended, back in the 1930s, which had 22 children.

Nearly 70 years ago, when little was known about contraception, large families were the norm but that one must have been one of the largest in Derby.

The midwife, Elsie Moore, had found it difficult to get into nursing for it was a profession considered to be suited to the middle classes, but she worked hard to overcome the prejudice and enjoyed a long and happy career, devoting herself to the caring of others.

The final 10 years of her working life, in the 1930s and 40s, were perhaps the most rewarding when she was a domiciliary midwife working from her home in Abbey Street, Derby. She was proud of her personal record of helping with the delivery of 600 babies in the town.

She told her son about the family with 22 children.

“She would visit the house in the Chester Green area quite often,” he said.

Elsie certainly had a vocation for her work and had seen some appalling problems in her early years. She began nursing in 1914 at Ripley but when the First World War started she went to Leicester military hospital where she did general nursing.

Said Gordon, of St Clare’s Close, Derby: “I remember her telling me about attending lice-infested wounded soldiers who had been sent home from the trenches.

“Apparently the conditions in France were appalling and my mother used to have to wash their heads in paraffin and shave their heads.”

Elsie lived in the same house in Abbey Street from 1932 until she died in 1974, aged 78.

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