N
Nailmaker
The work is not one that is suitable for women,’ wrote a commentator in 1876, but nearly 11,000 women were engaged in nailmaking in the Black Country, the main centre of the trade – ‘that portion of the South Staffordshire and Worcestershire coalfield which borders Stourbridge, Dudley, Cradley, the Lye, Rowley and Halesowen, while a smaller detachment is found near Bromsgrove, and also at Belper in Derbyshire’. Nailmaking was a home industry with a long history, though by the early 19th century it was at the start of a long decline.
The work was carried out in small forges attached to the workers’ cottages and there were thousands of these workshops in existence. Each had a forge and a bellows to heat the iron rods. ‘The nailer has to find his own bench and set of tools, at an outlay of from five to ten pounds,’ wrote Robert H. Sherard for Pearson’s Magazine in 1896. ‘The bench is fitted with a peg, or miniature anvil, on which the red hot iron is pointed, a hardy, or fixed chisel, over which the iron is bent and partially cut, and a bore into which the severed length is inserted previous to the fashioning of the head of the nail. This is effected by means of the Oliver, which is a heavy hammer worked by a treadle, and restored to its upright position by a simple system of leverage. The completed nail is ejected from the bore by means of a lever, operating on a tit or tiny steel rod, which, jerked upwards, expels the nail.’
In 1889, in evidence to the parliamentary enquiry into the sweated trades, Caroline Cox, 15 years old and one of a family of ten, said she ‘pointed dog-head nails about three inches in length and half an inch square. She and her mother cut the nails. Her food consisted mostly of potatoes and bread, and occasionally bacon. She was glad of a bit of meat for dinner on Sundays. She could get plenty of work even if she was restricted to the smaller kind of nails.’ According to a commercial dictionary of 1878 there were ‘nearly 300 different sorts and sizes of nails, applicable to all the various purposes of the carpenter, joiner, shipbuilder, wheelwright etc’.
It was hard, dirty and monotonous work. It also became increasingly difficult to make a living wage, especially when the middlemen, or ‘foggers’ (who could be women), paid in kind with food or beer tokens rather than cash. Several nailers might work together in the same forge, renting a ‘hearth’ from the owner, so that each one was independent.
The women did most of the work, a clever nailer making an attractive proposition as a wife, but even if all the family worked they could still hardly rise above starvation wages. In the factories that began to take over the trade from the 1860s, mostly in Wolverhampton, Leeds, Newcastle and Newport (Wales), the machines could cut and fashion a more standard product, so that by the end of the 19th century the home forges were being used for specialised items only, such as brush nails. The nailers could never hope to match factory wages.
See ‘Hard as nails’, Sara Wilson (Family History Monthly, December 2005); there are also two articles on the nailmakers’ workshops of Birmingham and Harborne on the website of the Birmingham and District Local History Association (www.bdlha.org). A rescued Bromsgrove nailshop is at the Avoncroft Museum of Historical Buildings, Stoke Heath, Bromsgrove B60 4JR (www.avoncroft.org.uk).
Nanny
Otherwise called the head nurse, the traditional nanny (often called ‘Nurse’) ruled the nursery in upper and middle class households. She was almost always working class herself, and rose to command through experience and ability. In a ‘big house’ she might have a whole suite of rooms: a day nursery, a night nursery, a pantry, and somewhere for the maid(s) to sleep – she herself would probably sleep in the night nursery with her young charges. There was a clear demarcation between her kingdom and the rest of the household servants and she could wield a great deal of power and influence, answering to no one but the mistress of the house.
She was in effect a surrogate mother, and in some cases raised the children with very little input from the parents. ‘As the hopes of families, and the comfort and happiness of parents are confided to the charge of females who superintend nurseries of children, no duties are more important, and none require more incessant and unremitting care and anxiety,’ said The Complete Servant in 1825. The influence of the nanny on generations of children was immense and the demise of the old-style nanny did not come about until after the Second World War. From the end of the 19th century, however, college-trained nannies were increasingly common (see nursery nurse).
Read The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (Hodder and Stoughton, 1972) for the full story. See also domestic servant.
Needlemaker
The importance of needles, which came in all sizes from the finest domestic sewing needle to the huge and hefty sailmaker’s needle, can be judged by the existence of the Company of Needlemakers, which was granted a charter of incorporation in 1656. Evidence of needlemaking exists from early times, therefore, in London and other places such as Chichester, but during the 19th century the manufacturing industry became firmly rooted in Redditch in Worcestershire. By 1912 it was estimated that about 20,000 people were employed in the process, and many of them were women. The manufacture of fish hooks and fishing tackle was an allied trade. Visitors to the mills in the 19th century commented on the attractiveness of the surroundings and the generally superior grade of worker employed there. To make such a seemingly simple item, there were over 20 separate processes, starting with coils of steel wire arriving from Sheffield.
In the 1870s women could earn from 8s to 15s a week in the factories. They were particularly concerned with certain parts of the process, including hammering the needles straight, checking for defects, and packing them in coloured paper, some of the women being able to count and paper 3,000 needles an hour. At one time a girl called a ‘header’ or ‘ragger’ was responsible for turning the needles so that all the heads were one way – she had a rag or ‘dolly’ on the forefinger of her right hand and with her left hand pressed the needles against it, so that the points stuck in the soft cotton. It was reckoned in 1912 that Messrs Milward had an output of seven to nine million needles a week.
The Forge Mill Needle Museum, Needle Mill Lane, Riverside, Redditch, Worcs B98 8HY (http://redditch.whub.org.uk/home/
rbc-al-forge-mill.htm) is housed in a Victorian needle polishing mill. See Needlemaking, John G. Rollins (Shire Publications) and The Worshipful Company of Needlemakers 1656–2006: A Commemoration of 250 Years, David John de Courcy Henshaw (2006).
Needlewoman
The term, as with ‘seamstress’, covers a wide range of female trades in the 19th and early 20th centuries, involving working at home as an outworker or in factories; hand-sewing or using a sewing machine. After the 1870s when sewing machines became common the terms ‘machinist’ or ‘sewing machinist’ might be used. ‘Sewing’ involved far more than clothing, see also bookbinder; boot and shoe stitcher; corsetmaker; dressmaker; glovemaker; hat maker; hosiery worker; mantua maker; military clothing maker; milliner; tailoress; upholsterer.
In the 1880s it was thought that the new sewing machines would make life easier for the women working in the ‘sweated industries’ such as dressmaking, tailoring, millinery etc – but the reality proved different. Outworkers rented machines from Singer, but any slump in the trade meant they lost not only their income but also their machine if they could not keep up with the weekly payments.
Net maker
Net making, or braiding, was women’s work all around the coast of Britain. At Fleetwood in Lancashire, for instance, they worked either in braiding rooms or at home, where they produced sections of net which were collected by the middlemen of the industry, the ‘net-fixers’.
One woman who started work as a 14-year-old girl in a braiding room in Grimsby in the 1930s recalled that after the first day her hands were swollen and blistered – the girls rubbed Friar’s Balsam into their fingers to harden them, and an ointment containing laudanum to take the pain away. A wrist strap was sometimes worn, as the work, holding the nets, was so heavy. For the first two years she worked as a needle filler, earning 10s 3d the first year and 12s 6d the second; when the girls reached 16 they were allowed to make the nets and she then earned about £2 a week, which was ‘as much as some men were earning’. She continued working during the Second World War, making camouflage nets (Lincolnshire Within Living Memory, Lincolnshire Federation of WIs, Countryside Books, 1995).
Bridport in Dorset was a famous centre for ropemaking and braiding – the women made seine nets for fishing, nets for tennis courts, the small nets that go in the corners of billiard tables, and even bags for Brussels sprouts. Bridport Museum, The Coach House, Gundry Lane, Bridport DT6 3RJ (www.bridportmuseum.co.uk) has details; and the Bridport Museum Trust has an oral history project online (www.spinningyarns.co.uk).
Nurse
For much of the 19th century nursing was unskilled work carried out by women of little education or aptitude, castigated by Florence Nightingale as ‘too old, too weak, too drunken, too stolid, or too bad to do anything else’. Efforts to improve standards in hospitals were being made by the 1840s, with the foundation of church-based ‘sisterhoods’, but it was Miss Nightingale who grasped the attention of the public and forced a re-evaluation of the care of the sick. Yet progress was exceedingly slow and, by the 1880s, it was still being said that changes needed to be made in hospitals before women ‘of decency and refinement could study in them with much advantage or comfort’, despite the ‘advancing spirit of the day’ which was bringing a better class of women to consider nursing as a career.
Nurses attending an operation at the Charing Cross Hospital in the early 1900s.
In the 1880s many voluntary hospitals trained their own nurses (St Bartholomew’s school opened in 1877), but some contracted with outside institutions to supply nursing staff. The Royal Free, for instance, got its nurses from the British Nursing Association, which also supplied other London hospitals, while at St Thomas’s nurse training was undertaken by the Committee of the Nightingale Fund, founded by Florence Nightingale in 1860.
Entry qualifications, grading and salaries varied from place to place, as did the length of training, some hospitals offering two years, others three, as each hospital was autonomous, and the class structure further complicated the successful creation of an efficient nursing service. At St Thomas’s, for instance, women entered as Nightingale probationers for one year, during which they received £10 and part of their uniform costs, on acceptance by Mrs Wardroper, the matron at the hospital. For the next three years they were bound to go wherever the Fund sent them to work, whether at St Thomas’s or another hospital, as a nurse probationer with a salary starting at £20. After successfully completing their training, if they were taken on the staff at St Thomas’s, they were known as staff nurses, working under the ward sister.
‘Ladies’ at St Thomas’s (daughters of clergymen and other professional men) had a different career structure: they could enter as a Nightingale probationer for one year on payment of a premium of £30, after which they were immediately eligible to become ward sisters, or to leave the hospital to perhaps go into district nursing. At the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, ladies entered as ‘sister probationers’ – sisters were exempt from menial duties and took their meals with the matron – while the nurses themselves were ‘drawn from the class of domestic servants, wages being £12, £18, £21, and £23 16s per annum, with uniform’. Probationer nurses were normally housed by the hospital, under the supervision of a lady superintendent.
Anyone could call themselves a ‘nurse’, with or without training, but there were a number of forceful women who were determined to create a regulated and respected profession. One was Ethel Fenwick (née Manson), who started her nursing career as a probationer in Nottingham, and before her marriage was superintendent of nursing at St Bartholomew’s in London. She headed a protracted campaign to create an official register of nurses and in 1887 founded the British Nurses’ Association. The General Nursing Councils of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland were created in 1921 with responsibility for the training, examination and registration of nurses. A Register of Nurses was first published in 1922; however, state registration was not compulsory for a nurse until 1943.
The Royal College of Nurses was founded in 1916 as the nurses’ professional association, later their trade union. They have an excellent range of aids for anyone interested in a nursing ancestor – see their website for a factsheet on ‘Tracing Nurses’ in England and Scotland (www.rcn.org.uk/resources/historyofnursing/factsheets-tracingnurses.php). They also have historical nursing journals online, fully searchable by name or subject, including the Nursing Record 1888–1956 (http://rcnarchive.rcn.org.uk/). A History of the Nursing Profession, Brian Abel-Smith (Heinemann, 1960) is a good introduction to the background.
Apart from the voluntary hospitals, nurses may have found employment in a wide range of places (see below). See also Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service; Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service; Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service; Voluntary Aid Detachments.
Nurse, Assistant
A new hospital grade that appeared in 1943, later to be known as the State Enrolled Nurse (SEN), which regularised the position of women who had been working for some time in hospitals or sanatoria who had not completed a recognised full course of training but were nevertheless useful members of staff. The General Nursing Council became responsible for supervising their training (two years) and examinations, and their names were recorded in the Roll of Assistant Nurses.
Nurse, colonial
In 1896 the Colonial Nursing Association (CNA) became the recognised source from which the Colonial Office could supply nurses, in government employment, to the Crown Colonies; the first nurse was sent to Mauritius in that year. In 1902 a sick-pay fund committee was created to ensure that nurses who fell ill abroad should not be left to cope on their own. In most cases the nurses went to work in Government hospitals and cared for British expatriates (‘pioneers of the Empire’, as the British Journal of Nursing had it in 1913), but they were also supplied to local groups, such as the South African Church Railway Mission, which managed a nursing service for employees on the Cape to Cairo Railway.
Applicants had to be fully trained, including in midwifery (except, for some reason, if they were going to West Africa or Western Australia), and women aged over 27 years were preferred. Salaries began at £60 per annum for private nurses in the employ of local colony committees, while for government appointments they varied between £30 and £150. The usual term of engagement was three years. A spirit of adventure was an asset, as a colonial nurse could be sent anywhere, at any time. Perhaps there were other lures too: ‘Doctors take good care that colonial nurses shall not suffer from homesickness and boredom, and they get up dances, dinners, and tennis parties, to which the nurses are invariably invited. Colonial life, moreover, as everyone knows, is very much more of a holiday than life over here.’ However, it was impressed upon every applicant that she would be an ambassador of her country, and of her class. One colonial nurse was Mary Johnson, who trained at Manchester’s St Mary’s Hospital and had her first appointment in 1901 in Cyprus at the government hospital, before becoming a sister at the hospital in the Federated Malay States.
In 1919 the name of the CNA was changed to the Overseas Nursing Association (ONA) and between the wars there was a change in emphasis to training local people in nursing skills. Over 8,000 nurses went through the CNA/ONA’s hands before it closed in 1966.
A useful article, with reference to the archives of the Association, is reproduced at www.historycooperative.org.uk/journals/hah/7.2/rafferty.html, ‘The seductions of history and the nursing diaspora’ by Anne Marie Rafferty, from Health and History. The National Archives also holds some records under the country in which nurses worked.
Nurse, cottage
The Cottage Benefit Nursing Association (based at Denison House, Vauxhall Bridge Road, London) was founded by Bertha Marion Broadwood (1846–1935) in 1883 and was based upon the idea that people were often better nursed in their own homes than in hospitals. Her aim was to send ‘working class nurses to country cottages’, and the Association trained young women in basic nursing and midwifery, ‘to visit the sick in the homes of labourers, artisans, small farmers, tradespeople, and others’; they usually lived in and would also help with looking after the home if the mother was ill. The Association preferred to appoint country women, and training was given free on condition that the nurse stayed with them for up to four years; in 1911 salaries started at £16 a year in the first year after training. By 1906 there were 200 branches around the country, employing over 500 nurses.
Miss Broadwood’s papers, diaries etc are held at the Surrey History Centre, 130 Goldsworth Road, Woking GU21 6ND (www.surreycc.gov.uk/surreyhistoryservice).
Nurse, district
The district nurse on her bicycle (or latterly in her little car) was a familiar sight in both town and country in the earlier 20th century. Many of them became much loved members of the local community, seeing people into and out of the world and caring for them in between. District nursing had its roots in 19th century philanthropy and was supported by voluntary contributions until well into the 20th century.
There were a number of charitable organisations in the second half of the 1800s which existed to send nurses out into, particularly, the slum areas of cities to care for those who were sick but unable to afford any medical help. Some of them were also Christian missionaries, sent into ‘darkest England’ (see nurse, Ranyard). However, it is generally accepted that the origins of today’s district nursing service lie in Liverpool in the 1860s, where a pioneering nursing scheme was started by William Rathbone. He was also instrumental in getting Florence Nightingale’s support for a similar scheme in London, and the Metropolitan Nursing Association was founded in the 1870s, under Miss Florence Lees.
In 1889 money collected by ‘the women of England’ to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee was used to found the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for Nurses (from 1928 the Queen’s Institute for District Nursing), and to extend district nursing schemes. One of the oldest was in Lancashire, for instance, at Garston and Grassendale, formed in 1893. People paid a subscription and were then able to call on the nurse if they needed help, and such schemes went on being funded locally right up to the 1940s and the start of the NHS, though local authorities were compelled to become involved in their support in the inter-war years. A ‘Queen’s nurse’ was always fully trained, and some took on the supervision of village nurses and midwives. From 1919, state registration with the General Nursing Council was a requirement. ‘District nursing is a branch of the profession which often attracts those who desire a more independent form of work,’ advised a careers book in the 1930s.
See A Hundred Years of District Nursing, M. Stocks (Allen & Unwin, 1960) for background, and nurse for sources.
Nurse, head
The title given to the traditional nanny in a large household. Later, may mean a ward sister, with permanent charge of a ward, or a staff nurse grade, with charge of a ward on a short-term basis in the third year of training. In 1910 at Guy’s Hospital, Emily McManus was made head nurse, under a ward sister, in her third year; her status was marked by the addition of ‘strings’ to her cap – ‘a little stiff white bow under your chin’.
Nurse, industrial
The first industrial nurse is thought to have been Philippa Flowerdew, who was employed by Colmans in Norwich in the 1870s. Neither industry nor government was quick to take up this specialism, and it was 1893 before the first female medical inspectors were appointed to inspect factories and industrial working conditions; they were trained district nurses. From the time it was created, the Royal College of Nursing was involved in preparing members for work in industry and in 1934 it set up an Industrial Nursing Course. In 1949 the Industrial Health Service was set up under the Ministry of Labour. ‘Industrial nursing’ became, of course, ‘occupational health’ from the 1950s. See nurse for sources.
Nurse, monthly
The monthly nurse was a familiar figure throughout the Victorian period and well into the 20th century – a woman who was employed to live in with a family for a month after the birth of a baby. Dickens’ Sarah Gamp was not the only literary caricature of a monthly nurse of the 1840s and 1850s, which implies that they were commonly seen as despotic, ignorant, drunken and dirty. However, Queen Victoria had a ‘monthly nurse’ (Mrs Lilly) in attendance at the births of her children, and it was not only the upper classes who employed such women – the 1851 census for Hertfordshire records them in the households of a cooper, a police constable, a journeyman carpenter and a schoolteacher, for instance.
In 1860 Mrs Beeton recommended that a monthly nurse should be ‘scrupulously clean and tidy . . . honest, sober and noiseless in her movements . . . possess a natural love for children, and have a strong nerve in case of emergencies’. The latter was particularly important, as she would be in charge of a birth and recovery that might at any time present life-threatening problems (hopefully with medical back-up if the family could afford it). Childbed was a hazardous time for women and their babies and a good monthly nurse must have been worth her weight in gold. Not all were good, of course, and they were sometimes blamed for carrying dangerous infections from one house to another. By the end of the 19th century calls for the training and registration of midwives were gathering steam, and after 1902 (see midwife) the women who made their living as monthly nurses were given a ten year period of grace to train and be certificated (either as midwives or as general nurses), or to cease their work. Other names: dry nurse, handy woman, untrained midwife, certificated monthly nurse, confinement nurse. See also wetnurse.
Nurse, Nightingale
A Nightingale nurse was one who had trained as a Nightingale probationer under the Nightingale Fund at St Thomas’s Hospital (see nurse).
Nurse, pauper
see nurse, workhouse.
Nurse, private
She might be employed through an agency, for a fee. Such nurses did not have to be registered, though obviously more reputable agencies would ensure their nurses were fully trained. An agency nurse might also be used in nursing or convalescent homes. See also nurse, sick.
Nurse, Queen’s
A nurse employed by the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for Nurses (Queen’s Institute for District Nursing) – see nurse, district.
Nurse, Ranyard
A nurse working for the Biblewomen and Nurses Mission founded by Mrs Ellen Ranyard (d.1879). From 1868 trained nurses were being sent out into poor working class areas (usually near where they lived) to offer help and advice, and by the 1890s they were over 80 in number. Costs were all met by charitable donations. See The Story of the Ranyard Mission 1857–1937, E. Platt (Hodder & Stoughton, 1937). The Mission was still working up to the 1960s, in co-operation with the London County Council District Nursing Service. See also bible woman.
Nurse, Red Cross
The British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War was formed in 1870, and in 1905 became the British Red Cross Society. Following the First World War the League of Red Cross Societies was formed to change the focus to ‘the improvement of health, the prevention of disease, and the mitigation of suffering throughout the world’. In 1921, for instance, the first blood transfusion service in the UK began under the Red Cross, while overseas branches spread throughout the world. Today they continue to work wherever conflict or disaster strike.
During each world war the Red Cross and the St John Ambulance Brigade combined to support the services through the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), but there were also many nurses who served with the Red Cross outside wartime. The British Red Cross Museum and Archives are at 44 Moorfields, London EC2Y 9AL (telephone: 020 7877 7058; www.redcross.org.uk). They have personnel indexes (extensive but incomplete) from both world wars but nothing for the pre- or inter-war years. However, there are county branch records that may be of help.
Nurse, Registered General
Name in Scotland, originally, for a State Registered Nurse.
Nurse, sick
A sick nurse can sometimes be found enumerated in a household at census time, and her inclusion points to someone in the family suffering either a short term illness or long term invalidism or disability, physical or mental. She was not necessarily a trained (or, later, registered) nurse, though her references would obviously have been key to her employment. In the 19th century she existed in something of a no-man’s-land in a household, neither servant nor family, like the governess. By the 1880s it was being mooted that if she would only take recognised nursing training, she would be seen as ‘a valued and respected member of every family she may enter, to be received on terms of an equal and familiar footing’.
Nurse, staff
Originally a nurse who had completed her training and been taken on the permanent staff of a hospital, reporting to the ward sister.
Nurse, State Enrolled (SEN)
The later name for an Assistant Nurse; not with the same level of qualification as a State Registered Nurse and with a different career structure within the National Health Service.
Nurse, State Registered (SRN)
It became compulsory to be state registered to be employed as a nurse in England after the 1943 Nurses Act.
Nurse, under
The second in command in the nursery of a big house, under the nanny and above the nursemaid.
Nurse, workhouse
It had never been intended that workhouses would become hospitals, but that was precisely what happened over the 40 or so years after the passing of the New Poor Law Act in 1834 as it became common practice to admit sick paupers rather than leave them outside to die. Yet nursing was wholly inadequate to the task. Nurses in workhouse infirmaries were initially often drawn from the inmates themselves. They were not trained and had little interest in their work; stories of their harshness, idleness and thieving were rife. In 1844 at Liverpool Infirmary the nurses were said to leave patients to take their own medicines and to be entirely uninterested in cleanliness – most of them were over 60 and habitually drunk. Efforts were made to reform the system, and Liverpool opened its first training organisation in 1855, with the assistance of the Royal Infirmary.
In the 1860s there were inquiries into the state of workhouse nursing and the use of pauper nurses, revealing that outside London there were only six trained nurses employed in workhouses. In London, Florence Nightingale pressed for an inquiry into workhouse nursing after a particularly scandalous death occurred in Holborn Workhouse in 1864, and under her leadership the first poor law school of nursing was established at Highgate Infirmary, followed by a second at St Marylebone Infirmary. There were simply not the number of trained staff to go round at this time. Stories of terrible abuse continued to arise: in 1868 in Wigan a child died as a result of treatment at the hands of ‘a batch of five nurses – two of whom are idiots, one paralytic 73-year-old, the fourth a feeble old woman of 79, and the fifth a pauper of 81 years’ (The Lancet). Once improvements began to be made in nurse training in voluntary hospitals, it filtered down to the workhouses as well, although extremely slowly.
In 1913 the Poor Law Institutions (Nursing) Order required guardians to appoint trained nurses and the nursing of the sick by fellow inmates was forbidden. Larger institutions appointed a superintendent nurse to oversee the infirmary, while those with three or more staff appointed a head nurse (responsible to the Matron); both grades had to be qualified midwives. From 1930 until 1948, when many of them became general hospitals in the new National Health Service, workhouse hospitals were under the control of county or county borough councils. See matron, workhouse and nurse.
Nursery maid, nursemaid
The girl who carried out household duties in the children’s nursery, as well as taking the children out for walks morning and afternoon. Because she, unlike the other servants, got out of the house for several hours a week, a pretty young nursery maid flirting with the soldiers in the park was a common theme in Victorian cartoons. In 1911 she might expect a salary of about £12 a year. She did not mix with the other servants but took her meals in the nursery – she would be under the direction of a nanny or head nurse in larger houses, where the nurseries might be an extensive suite of rooms including a day nursery and night nursery, a small kitchen and the servants’ accommodation. She was up at 6 am to light the fire and clean the nursery before the children were up, took the nanny her tea, made the children’s breakfast and had them out of the house by 10 am. After lunch another outing was taken, then it was time for nursery tea, and afterwards to dress the children to be taken downstairs to see their parents before baths and bedtime. See also domestic servant; nanny.
Nursery nurse
A nursery nurse might work as an assistant to a qualified teacher, employed in a day nursery or crèche, a hospital, school etc, or as a nanny in a private house. The difference between her and the traditional nanny was that she had a college-based training and qualification.
One of the greatest early influences on this professionalisation of the role was Emily Ward (née Lord, 1850–1930), who founded the Norland Institute in London in 1892 (www.norland.co.uk). She felt strongly that nurses held a great responsibility for their charges and should be educated and trained in their work, and the rules of her college forbade corporal punishment and followed her motto: ‘Love never faileth’. Those accepted on her early courses were all middle class and educated women, some of them into middle age, and this aura of being well brought up and well connected stayed with the ‘Norland nannies’ into the 20th century.
In 1911 the training extended over a year, starting at the Institute in Pembridge Square, London. There the girls were instructed in domestic work (‘cookery, laundrywork and housewifery’), needlework (making and mending children’s clothes, dressmaking), hygiene and nursery management, how to manage sick or incurable children, and how to educate children. Then they went to the Norland Nurseries for hands-on training. After six months with a family, the nurse would be awarded the Institute’s certificate. Other colleges had opened by this time, including the Princess Christian Nursery Training College in Manchester in 1901. By the 1920s these trained nannies were coming to dominate employment in the home nursery.
Elsewhere, recognition of the work done by nursery nurses and assistants – in day care crèches, for instance, was slow to come. It was not until 1945, when the increased number of women working outside the home made the provision of day nurseries essential, that the National Nursery Examination Board (NNEB) was created.
See The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (Hodder and Stoughton, 1972).
Nursery superintendent
A variation on the nanny, a lady with a middle class background, ‘educated, intelligent and refined’, who could take charge of the nursery and the children’s upbringing and supervise the servants, especially for families living abroad. Cassell’s Household Guide in the 1880s suggested that ‘In India especially this plan has met with warm encouragement, Indian residents being only too delighted to treat the lady as an equal, and to be relieved from the infinite anxiety of trusting native servants to the extent they are compelled to do so at present’.