This trilogy lovingly recounts the life of a midwife through a memoir series. Follow her experiences in the East End of London during the 1950s as she encounters diverse characters and navigates profound human stories. It's a poignant narrative of life, death, and community strength that captures the spirit of an era.
Life in London's East End in the 1950s was tough. The brothels of Cable Street, the Kray brothers and gang warfare, the meths drinkers in the bombsites - this was the world Jennifer Worth entered when she became a midwife at the age of twenty-two.
In the 1950s Jennifer Worth was a district midwife in the Docklands of East London where the aftermath of the war meant many lived in shocking conditions. She worked with the Nursing Sisters of St John the Divine, nurses and midwives whose vocation was to work amongst the poorest of the poor. Despite the official closure of the workhouses in 1930, there was nowhere else for many inmates to go so they changed their names and carried on much as before. In 'Shadows of the Workhouse', Jennifer tells the stories of the men and women she met who began their lives in the workhouse.
Farewell To the East End: the Last Days of the East End Midwives