An Irishman's Diary

BEING an avid fly- fisherman, I was always keen to call a house after a fishing fly. Bibbio Cottage was attractive; Mayfly Cottage less so because so many dwellings around our great lakes carry this moniker.

Fishing flies with a medical connection were obvious possibilities, although to call my place General Practitioner Cottage could have bordered on advertising. Eventually we settled on Silver Doctor Cottage as a name with a nice ring to it.

However, it soon became clear that history was against us. Friends reported blank looks when they asked for directions to our home and initially, at least, our post took a circuitous route around Connemara before eventually landing on our doorstep. Eventually, the penny dropped: our place had been known for decades as the Nurses Cottage and it would take a lot more than my romantic notion of nomenclature to change this.

The cottage was originally built to house a “Lady Dudley” nurse. Lady Dudley was the wife of a controversial Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, William Humble Ward, Third Earl of Dudley, who served from 1902 to 1905. In 1903, concerned at the extreme poverty in the congested district boards of the west, she began to fundraise to provide a district nursing service for the counties along the western seaboard. The link with the viceroy ensured the nursing associations were seen as fashionable charities, with fundraising led by the old ascendancy families who held garden parties in aid of the Jubilee and Dudley nursing schemes.

The first Lady Dudley nurse in Connemara was Elizabeth Cusack, who was appointed to Bealadangan in August 1903, followed by Catherine Wills to Carna some two months later. Nurses were recruited and trained by the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing, which also employed “Jubilee” nurses to provide a home nursing service in towns, while their Lady Dudley counterparts served the remote rural areas.

It was a tough life for these women; their only transport for the unpaved roads was a bicycle. Much of the time they walked across bogs and mountains to reach remote dwellings. The midwifery was especially demanding, and the nurses were often left juggling two women in labour at opposite ends of the district. They worked seven days a week, constantly on call, with just a few weeks’ holidays each year.

Here are the 1908 case notes of one district nurse: “Confinement triplets. The patient is a very poor woman. The three babies were born healthy – two boys, one girl. The only garment to put on them with any warmth was an old shawl torn up”. Lady Dudley nurses dealt with serious poverty and deprivation, where disease was rife.

Sommerville and Ross wrote of weather “fit for only a snipe or a dispensary doctor”. One could well add the district nurse as they too trudged in dire weather through bogs and up watercourses to look after their patients.

The infectious disease typhus was a risk; here is one nurse’s account of contracting the disease: “I can only account for catching Typhus by being in a rather low condition. I was up all night before at a midwifery case, in a very dirty house and without food. The next day I went to attend a paralysis case. The house is built on a slope, the manure pit was at the back of the house, on a higher level than the house itself. You can imagine how the filth percolated through the earth, and the heat of the turf fire must have drawn it [the infection] into the house.”

James P Murray, in Galway: A Medico-Social History, records the memories of Mary Quain, the Lady Dudley nurse in Carraroe from 1937 to 1943. "She had to visit tubercular and other ill patients in their homes, to change dressings and make them comfortable, to carry out health inspections in the local schools and advise on child welfare. In theory she was supposed to have one half-day free each week but, in practice, she was always available and had no time off, even on Sundays. Frequently a week passed without her getting to bed, catching naps in patients' homes waiting for labour to progress."

In 1951 there were some 161 nurses employed by the Queen’s Institute and 48 employed by the Lady Dudley nursing scheme. Her scheme lasted right up to the creation of the public health nursing service, with the Lady Dudley nurses continuing in Connemara until they were integrated into the health board system in 1974.

Following her husband’s appointment as governor general of Australia, in 1909 Lady Dudley attempted to set up Lady Dudley’s Bush Nursing Scheme there, but the project faltered through lack of funds. She died tragically by drowning, but perhaps in a fitting location, while staying at Screebe House in Co Galway in 1920.

Meanwhile, back at chez Houston, while foundations were being built to extend the cottage, evidence of years of looking after the health needs of local people appeared. Old glass syringes, multi-coloured medicine bottles, dressings and other medical paraphernalia emerged from the earth at the back of the house.

For us, the find signalled the end of attempts to change the cottage’s name.

With such a philanthropic history, how could we not continue to live happily in our Nurses Cottage?