There was little about Amelia’s early years which might have led her to a feeble suicide attempt in a provincial police station. She was born in 1838, the youngest of five children. She spent her childhood in the hamlet of Pyle Marsh, a cluster of houses nestling in the mining district to the east of Bristol. Her father, Samuel Hobley, was a respectable, hard-working man, a cordwainer – a master shoemaker. Her parents valued education, and Amelia’s brothers did well for themselves: by 1861, Thomas, her eldest brother, had stepped into his father’s boots, as a shoemaker; James was a ship’s carpenter and William, just two years her senior, a cabinetmaker and carver. These were solid, respectable trades. Amelia’s education had also been funded by her father (at a rate of two shillings a week in a Church-run National School, for the children of the working classes), until she was fourteen.
In this respect, Amelia could consider herself especially lucky: only a quarter of the twenty thousand school-age children of Bristol received any schooling at all in the year of her birth; most were destined to remain illiterate. Amelia, however, reached adulthood with a sound, if basic, grounding in the “three Rs”; she wrote competently with a sweeping cursive hand, and she had acquired a reasonable grasp of grammar. Moreover, she had discovered a love of literature and poetry that she was to sustain throughout her life.
Things could have been worse. Far worse. Bristol was no place to be poor. By 1860, it was pock-marked with slums. Crumbling Georgian tenements, long since uninhabitable, were home to thousands of families. Lashed across the underbelly of these tenements were six hundred inter-connecting passageways, known as “courts”, where entire families lived in single rooms. Here, in dark, damp spaces, crawling with vermin, dozens of families shared a single standpipe and privy. Misery and disease were the hallmarks of daily life and gang crime, theft and violence were rife.
Amelia had escaped the squalor on her doorstep. She had enjoyed a simple but comfortable childhood, in a close-knit, stable community, amid the honest values and Christian morals typical of her class. But for all that, she had not escaped hardship.
In 1848, when Amelia was just eleven years old, her mother, Sarah, died. Amelia was to be forever haunted by the memory of her mother’s final days. At the age of forty-five Sarah contracted typhus fever and Amelia witnessed her mother’s spectacular mental decline: altered, dysfunctional speech and elaborate and horrifying delusions followed by wild hallucinations and periods of mania. Amelia’s father entrusted his wife to the care of Dr Fox, who ran Bristol’s first purpose-built private asylum just a few miles away, in Brislington. Fox attracted some of the most prominent lunatics of the day: he could even claim the (now somewhat dubious) honour of having been called to Windsor to help treat King George III. His name was synonymous with the treatment of the well-heeled unhinged. He accepted patients from whichever class could afford him; but he also reserved a few beds for pauper lunatics.
For a while, Sarah’s fever appeared to abate, but once she was allowed back home there was no respite for her ravaged mind. Amelia had looked on in horror: although her mother was able to breathe and speak and chew and swallow, she was nevertheless left entirely vacant, unable to express even hunger or thirst. Then meningitis set in and death followed swiftly.
Eleven years after the death of her mother, Amelia’s father died of bronchitis, by which time Amelia had already left home. She was later to recall that when she left school at the age of fourteen she was sent to live with an aunt in Bristol’s marketplace. Thereafter, she served an apprenticeship with a corset maker. Then, in the late summer of 1861, at the age of twenty-four, Amelia took a room in a lodging house in Trinity Street.
Trinity Street was a small row of damp and draughty Georgian terraced houses, running perpendicular to the harbour. To the east was a skyline of ships’ masts and rigging and to the west the cathedral. College Green, with all its sophistication and opulence, was just a street away.
Number 2 Trinity Street was home to fourteen people. Three rooms were occupied by boarders, paying for their meals as well as their lodgings. The lodging-house keeper was Fanny Ross, thirty-eight-year-old mother of three, who cleaned the rooms, cooked the meals and, for an additional charge, took in laundry. The extra rooms were converted into income from her lodgers.
When George Thomas took rooms with Mrs Ross, he wasn’t a typical boarder. A mature man with a good trade as a master carver and gilder, he had buried his wife just a few months earlier. At the age of fifty-seven, he was considerably older and more experienced than the men living around him. Later Amelia recalled that her acquaintance with George Thomas began while she was still living with her aunt.Intriguingly, George had left a good home with his married son in Clifton to move into these meagre lodgings, suggesting that he came to Trinity Street in order to live with Amelia. Certainly it didn’t take long for the couple to formalize their relationship: five months after the death of his first wife, George Thomas and Amelia Hobley were married at the Bristol Register Office.
It was, by Victorian standards, an unceremonious occasion for a young woman’s first wedding. There was no father at her arm; no mother dabbing an eye in the front pew. She had already become estranged from at least one of her brothers, James, for reasons now lost to time. Meither a Hobley nor a Thomas acted as witness. It seems that neither family knew of the union. Perhaps they even disapproved of it. The couple’s marriage certificate gives a tantalizing indication of how the newlyweds felt about their substantial thirty-four-year age gap: George claimed that he was forty-eight, shaving ten years off his actual age. Amelia added an extra six years to hers, insisting that she was thirty. Mr and Mrs George Thomas thereby effectively halved the difference between them.
Two years after her marriage, Amelia Thomas took up a position with the Bristol Royal Infirmary, as one of Bristol’s very first team of nurse pupils to undertake regular nurse training. The BRI was a well-regarded and well-funded voluntary hospital. Behind its imposing edifice were four storeys of vast, wallpapered wards, the whole placed in the nightly care of a single nurse. Amelia gained experience on general, surgical and medical wards in three-month rotations.
Nursing was a thankless occupation in 1863, certainly no job for the genteel or those of a delicate disposition. It was demanding, gruelling work, from which Amelia emerged with all the characteristics of a mid-nineteenth-century nurse: an emotionally sturdy, dispassionate and self-reliant woman. Amelia worked sixteen-hour shifts, starting early in the morning and working late into the night. Medical expertise would not have formed part of her training: this was regarded as entirely the concern of doctors. But with anaesthetics, pain relief and surgery still unsophisticated, pain and infection would have been commonplace. A report on conditions in the outpatients department at the BRI in the mid-century paints a colourful image:
The atmosphere of the room in which the patients waited was described as tainted and poisonous; a policeman was employed to keep order and when a fresh batch was wanted, the door of the common room was opened by one or two of the attendants and the crowd of maimed and diseased wretches shouldered and fought their way into the place where they were seeing the Physicians and Surgeons who had to arrange and sort them as they came in.
In 1864, when Amelia was twenty-six, she fell pregnant and was not permitted to continue working once her pregnancy became obvious. Later that year, she gave birth to a daughter, Ellen Thomas. At about the same time, a fortuitous meeting with a midwife named Ellen Dane was to introduce Amelia to a means of earning an income beyond anything she had thought possible, setting a course she would steer for the rest of her life.