Ship of Fools: Call the Midwife

Thread: Call the Midwife Board: Ecclesiantics / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

I suppose not a few shipmates are addicted to this excellent series. For those who aren't, it recounts events in the daily life of a group of Anglican Religious Sisters who lived in Poplar, East London, in the 1950s and early 60s, and who worked as nurses (chiefly as midwives) along with several lay professionals. It is based on the real-life memoirs of one of their former colleagues, and as far as I can see is an accurate (and often moving) depiction of the poverty and social attitudes in that working-class community at that time.

The religious aspect of all this also rings true, except there is one niggle which has prompted me to ask a rather anorakky ecclesiantical question.

The local priest is a curate (no sign of a vicar) who is addressed and referred to as 'Mr Hereward' (his surname). His liturgical practice is rarely seen, but in a few glimpses seems to be rather on the low side (surplice and stole for the eucharist, for example). It's not unlikely in principle that a catholically-inclined community should work in a MOTR parish, but I wonder whether that is true to the facts. Poplar is or was renowned as a hotbed of anglo-catholicism.

Posted by Crotalus (# 4959) on :

In the first series IIRC we met Fr Joe (Williamson), the Parish Priest, who unfortunately was given an Irish accent. In reality he was a Londoner

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Angloid:
I suppose not a few shipmates are addicted to this excellent series. For those who aren't, it recounts events in the daily life of a group of Anglican Religious Sisters who lived in Poplar, East London, in the 1950s and early 60s, and who worked as nurses (chiefly as midwives) along with several lay professionals. It is based on the real-life memoirs of one of their former colleagues, and as far as I can see is an accurate (and often moving) depiction of the poverty and social attitudes in that working-class community at that time.

The religious aspect of all this also rings true, except there is one niggle which has prompted me to ask a rather anorakky ecclesiantical question.

The local priest is a curate (no sign of a vicar) who is addressed and referred to as 'Mr Hereward' (his surname). His liturgical practice is rarely seen, but in a few glimpses seems to be rather on the low side (surplice and stole for the eucharist, for example). It's not unlikely in principle that a catholically-inclined community should work in a MOTR parish, but I wonder whether that is true to the facts. Poplar is or was renowned as a hotbed of anglo-catholicism.

Geek alert
I've not seen any of the latest series, but I did see two rather glaring incongruities for the late 50s early 60s, in a previous series. What date has it reached now?

1. One was a wedding which included 'you may now kiss the bride'.
That was unknown until quite recently.

2. The other was a free standing altar positioned for west facing celebration.
Until the 1970s, altars were hard up against the wall. I know of only two exceptions, one of which is historically very interesting. The celebrant stood either at the north end, facing end on to the altar, or in front of the altar with his (invariably 'his' of course) back to the congregation in 'crouch over the table and mumble' position. Churchmanship decided which position a clergyman used, but my impression from memory is that the north end was slightly more prevalent.

At that era, anything more than a surplice and stole was either high church or a bit civic.

What sort of collar does he wear? In those days, most clergy wore a stiff collar that went completely round, above the shirt. One inside the neck of the shirt was markedly high church, though from memory, even that sort of collar would have gone right round. I don't recollect the inserts that seems to be more usual irrespective of churchmanship these days having existed at all.

I agree that having a sisterhood in the parish, and being in Poplar ought to be Anglo-Catholic. In that era, liking to be called 'Father' marked someone as fairly high and probably celibate. Even not very old parishioners would have hissed through their teeth at a vicar or curate who was keen to be known as 'Dave' or 'Jim'.

Posted by Crotalus (# 4959) on :

Incidentally, I wonder whether 'Mr Hereward' is in fact "Dick the Knife" .

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

Yes, sorry, a correction on collars. Seeing that picture, from recollection, the all round collar of which only the front bit was visible went with a stock or a cassock that enclosed the back and side parts of it.

Posted by Pomona (# 17175) on :

I suspect part of it is wanting him to be recognisably Anglican to modern viewers - it took quite a while for viewers to realise that the sisters are not Roman Catholic, and I wouldn't be surprised if many think they are. An Anglo-Catholic priest plus nuns would just suggest Roman Catholics to most views - Anglican nuns are enough of a novelty.

Mr Hereward wears a band collar, not a tab collar. I'm also intrigued as to where the priest is - why do we only see the curate, and why is he there so long?

Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

Pomona's suggestion makes sense. I didn't really watch the first series but I vaguely remember seeing 'Father Joe' and thought it was a bit odd.

Enoch's comments about nave altars etc are generally accurate, but several new churches in the 60s had them, and they weren't unknown in older ones. But trad MOTR and catholic ones would have the 'eastward position' (which, contra Enoch, I would have thought was the norm), while evangelicals would take the north end (in black scarf rather than stole).

Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :

I haven't seen any of the series (clearly, I've missed a treat), but has the parish church itself been shown at any time?

I was wondering if perhaps the curate is supposed to be in charge of a district or mission church within a larger parish, this district being that in which the Sisters work. Such churches were common in urban parishes many years ago, though not perhaps during the 1950s/1960s.

Mind you, missions were often considerably spikier than their parent church!

IJ

Posted by Spike (# 36) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Bishops Finger:
I haven't seen any of the series (clearly, I've missed a treat)

I haven't either, but judging by the number of people posting on Facebook saying how much it makes them cry, I'm guessing it must be pretty awful.

Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Spike:
I'm guessing it must be pretty awful.

They're doing thalidomide at the moment.
I know this is Eccles, but I think (and the producers certainly think) that because it's on at 8pm on a Sunday it's been unfairly characterised for the last 7 years or so as "Sunday night telly" - something warm and undemanding.

It is not.

CTM is actually quite brave television, and it's been getting braver as the years have gone on. It's obviously beautifully shot and acted, but it's also very far from unafraid to avoid happy endings and smack you in the face just when you're getting cosy.

Quietly, it's Game of Thrones in 1950s Poplar...

Even in my office of 20 and 30 somethings, it's required viewing even for most of the males.

[ 07. March 2017, 09:14: Message edited by: betjemaniac ]

Posted by Higgs Bosun (# 16582) on :

Those we refer to as 'curates' are more accurately 'assistant curates'. The rector or vicar is the curate, as they have the responsibility of the cure of souls of the parish.

On collars, when in 1979 I received my PhD, I decided to buy the proper academic dress (including a very fetching 'velvet bonnet'). In the top floor of Ryder and Amies, "Acadmic and Clerical", there was a series of shelves with boxes marked "Vicar 1 inch" "Vicar 1 1/4 inch" "Vicar 1 1/2 inch". However, at that date all round collars were on the way out. It was about that time that a clergyman friend described the convenience of the pop-in front. "If you cannot find one, you can always cut something out of a Fairy Liquid bottle." That convenience overrode the saying of the time "the higher you go, the less collar you show."

Posted by Pomona (# 17175) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Spike:

quote:
Originally posted by Bishops Finger:
I haven't seen any of the series (clearly, I've missed a treat)
I haven't either, but judging by the number of people posting on Facebook saying how much it makes them cry, I'm guessing it must be pretty awful.

It's not awful, just emotional and as betjemaniac says, pretty brave. I cry lots and I love it!

Posted by Twilight (# 2832) on :

quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:

quote:
Originally posted by Spike:
I'm guessing it must be pretty awful.
They're doing thalidomide at the moment.
I know this is Eccles, but I think (and the producers certainly think) that because it's on at 8pm on a Sunday it's been unfairly characterised for the last 7 years or so as "Sunday night telly" - something warm and undemanding.

It is not.

CTM is actually quite brave television, and it's been getting braver as the years have gone on. It's obviously beautifully shot and acted, but it's also very far from unafraid to avoid happy endings and smack you in the face just when you're getting cosy.

Quietly, it's Game of Thrones in 1950s Poplar...

Even in my office of 20 and 30 somethings, it's required viewing even for most of the males.

Yes, my husband still has a bit of PTSD from an early breech birth episode, but he's sure to watch it with me.

After a few seasons, the show ran out of stories from the memoirs it is based on, so the writer is inventing these later ones from scratch. They get a tiny bit preachy once in a while but in a good way, and the show remains very authentic and true to it's era.

I agree, it is not cozy. We've seen a young woman whose father had made her work as his trade ship's resident prostitute to keep the lads contented.

We've seen a brother and sister, raised in the work house, who went on to live as husband and wife. The show actually made us sympathetic to their situation and showed the nuns as being more understanding to it than the lay nurses.

We've seen stillbirths, women get back street abortions, typhoid epidemics from filthy shared toilets, birth defects, thalidomide babies and the doctor who proscribed the drug having a break down over it. Two of the nurses are lesbians, one of the nuns was raped.

No, definitely not warm fuzzy TV.

Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :

And a salutary reminder that the 1950s were not the 'good old days' (at least for some).

IJ

Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Bishops Finger:
I haven't seen any of the series (clearly, I've missed a treat), but has the parish church itself been shown at any time?

Yes, higher end of MOR. The first couple of series had more services in the order's own chapel - lots of "Therefore We Before Him Bending," etc. One of Mrs May's Desert Island Discs that, incidentally.

They've made 48 hour long episodes so far, so you've got time to catch up between now and the seventh series starting next January...

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Higgs Bosun:
It was about that time that a clergyman friend described the convenience of the pop-in front. "If you cannot find one, you can always cut something out of a Fairy Liquid bottle."

Of course, if he had been a "Blue Peter" clergyman he'd have had to say "washing-up liquid bottle" and make sure no-one saw the trademark while he was cutting it out.

Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on :

BTW I agree with Pomona (just wrote your old name there!) - I think in the first series everyone thought they were RC, so the vicar came a long way down the candle in subsequent series.

Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :

And, BT, he'd have to use 'sticky-backed plastic' to fasten it to his shirt (if necessary).

[Big Grin]

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

Well, the thought had entered my mind!

To continue the dog-collar tangent: one Sunday I didn't realise that I'd put on the wrong shirt, one without a clerical "slot". I only twigged when I tried to put on the plastic collar, having duly arrived at church.

There was no time to go home and change, so I stuck the thing under the shirt collar with a good dollop of Blutak either side. It looked fine ... until it fell off halfway through the sermon!

Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :

Usually, of course, 'greyish-blue adhesive putty' would be your friend....

Back to CTM...I'd love to catch up with the series, but I possess neither TV nor TV licence, and these days would have to buy the latter in order to use iPlayer.

Bits seem to be available on YouTube, but not full-screen.

Sounds as though the Sisters are indeed quite High Church - singing Tantum Ergo rather brings to mind Dr. Neale's daringly advanced Convent at East Grinstead back in the 1860s.

IJ

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

My wife, who did midwifery in addition to her general nursing training, loves it, but tells me that recent episodes have become a bit didactic and PC.

As a pathetic male for whom a "man cold" is a major health crisis, I find it unwatchable (despite having attended, out of a sense of duty, my own kids' births).

Posted by Latchkey Kid (# 12444) on :

The statement by the senior nun in one episode when she was asked where God is in some tragedy was something like "God is not in the action. God is in the response." . That sits well with me, and a few places on the internet quote it positively.

Posted by Pomona (# 17175) on :

Bishop's Finger - if you have Netflix, it's on there. You can always make Youtube videos full screen by clicking the square button in the bottom right of the video. Press esc to quit full screen mode.

Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :

Thanks, Pomona - I haven't yet explored Netflix, but it sounds like a Good Idea.

Re YouTube, what I meant was that, despite clicking for full screen, the film itself is still in a small area, surrounded by some sort of background, IYSWIM. YouTube's way of censoring, I think!

IJ

Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

Sister Monica Joan is a saint (even if she fakes more dementia than she actually has, in order to steal biscuits).

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Twilight:
I agree, it is not cozy. We've seen a young woman whose father had made her work as his trade ship's resident prostitute to keep the lads contented.

We've seen a brother and sister, raised in the work house, who went on to live as husband and wife. The show actually made us sympathetic to their situation and showed the nuns as being more understanding to it than the lay nurses.

Both of those stories come from the original books (which I've read). There wasn't much detail in the original books about services, other than naming the church, which still exists in Limehouse/Poplar, in an area which is largely rebuilt. (I worked in that area as I was reading the books. There's not much left but some of the road names that's recognisable, changed by the combination of the rebuilding described in the books and the Docklands Regeneration of the 1970s and 1980s.)

Sister Monica comes from the original books with dementia / stealing.

Iirc from the books, the nuns stopped working in midwifery/nursing in the 1960s but I can't remember which particular social dynamics changed things. The last of the books described the physical and social changes in the area as it was rebuilt and people rehoused. One of the stories that made me cry was that of a man Jenny Lee visited to dress his ulcerated legs. He had fought in the Boer War, lost his sons in WW1, lost his wife and daughter in WW2, and was rehoused when his tenement block was knocked down, into an old work house with many other elderly single men and women. He died of gangrene from neglect of his ulcerated legs.

Posted by Anglican_Brat (# 12349) on :

I just finished the first three episodes of this series via Netflix and am loving the wonderful acting and storytelling of the series. I also think this series quietly presents Christian values of service, empathy and compassion.

Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

This is the order that the series was based on. Now as you can see in Birmingham.

A little more info here.

(Edited because the above website is not very informative!)

[ 08. March 2017, 12:29: Message edited by: Angloid ]

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Twilight:
... After a few seasons, the show ran out of stories from the memoirs it is based on, so the writer is inventing these later ones from scratch. They get a tiny bit preachy once in a while but in a good way, and the show remains very authentic and true to it's era. ...

Twylight, I'm not so sure it is. And I found a marked change when the series shifted from dramatisations of the original Jennifer Worth material - after all she had really been there - to fresh scripts written on the same theme because the first series had been such a success.

Heidi Thomas is an excellent script writer. Her rendering of I capture the castle was a pleasure to watch. But she wasn't born until 1962. The first episodes got a lifelike 'messiness' from the original source that the later ones do not have. It's much easier to write a script where each episode has a theme, be it diphtheria, thalidomide or even prosecution for cottaging. It's particularly tempting where a script can present some version of 'that's how they did things in the bad old days; thank goodness we don't think like that now'. Even if a scriptwriter is consciously trying to make allowances for the way the past is a foreign county, the temptations work their way through subliminally.

Though I grew up in a different part of the country, the first series started in the threadbare years of bomb damage and rationing which coincides with the cusp of my earliest memories. More recent episodes are well into an era and an ethos that I remember well. I haven't been following the series so closely but to me, the script-authored rather than script-written episodes come over much more as a sympathetic critique of the recent past than a genuine recreation of it.

Its being supposedly set in a world I knew, I feel much more confident making this evaluation than I would about, say, Mad Men which is set in an era I remember but a culture I never knew.

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

Second post

quote:
Originally posted by Bishops Finger:
... Sounds as though the Sisters are indeed quite High Church - singing Tantum Ergo rather brings to mind Dr. Neale's daringly advanced Convent at East Grinstead back in the 1860s. ...

Though there were differences in degree, nuns and orders were always at least moderately Anglo-Catholic in those days. Non-Anglo-Catholics did not organise their social and charitable endeavours in the same way.

Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :

Very true. The con-evo Church Of My Yoof (1960s) employed (at various times) one or more lady 'Parish Workers' - as though no-one else in the parish did any work! - and, a little later, daringly, a 'Deaconess', complete with red dressing-gown...

We also had at least one Assistant Curate, and sometimes two of those now rare beasts.

All this in a mostly middle-class urban not-particularly-large parish (population 10000), with no real levels of poverty or deprivation, at least by East-End standards. Those were the days...

IJ

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Bishops Finger:
Very true. The con-evo Church Of My Yoof (1960s) employed (at various times) one or more lady 'Parish Workers' - as though no-one else in the parish did any work! - and, a little later, daringly, a 'Deaconess', complete with red dressing-gown...

Curious. It's my recollection, which may well be faulty, that stipendiary lay workers (female) wore plum coloured cassocks and deaconesses wore blue ones. But it's 30 years since I've encountered either. Does anyone know?

Canon law still provides for both, but does anyone know how many of either still exist?

Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :

Actually Enoch, it's my memory that may be faulty! Now I come to think of it, Deaconesses did indeed wear blue, though I don't recall our 'Parish Workers' wearing anything other than civvies. Maybe one of them wore a red cassock at one time, hence my vague recollections...

IJ

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

According to Peter Anson's The Call of the Cloister the Nursing Sister of St John were the least High Church of the early sisterhoods and did not take vows until the C20 under the influence of the Cowley Fathers.

I seem to remember some fifteen or more years ago a picture of one of the sisters at the Lesbian and Gay Pride March handing out free condoms.

Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :

There's a certain amount of mild resentment towards CTM in my native South Wales as they always reckoned the East End Dockers had it relatively cushy compared to the dockers and merchant seamen in Cardiff and Newport and the miners 'up the Valleys'.

They reckon the London dockers were paid a lot more and had tellies and so on long before workers did in South Wales. I don't know whether there's any truth in that, but it's what my brother tells me from old maritime families he meets around Barry.

Posted by Pomona (# 17175) on :

If they had it relatively easier though, it doesn't mean their lives were actually easy. I'm sure if someone had written a bestselling book about being a midwife in a Welsh mining community there would be a TV show about that - it seems pretty mean-spirited to gripe about a show that is based at least in part on someone's real-life experiences. I'm not sure 'well Welsh miners have it worse' would be particularly comforting to someone having a backstreet abortion in 50s Poplar, nor would it be very kind or fair. In the recent episodes there's a clearly well-off mother using the same NHS prosthetics clinic as a Poplar mother, for their children affected by thalidomide. Being rich hasn't meant that having a child disabled by thalidomide hasn't happened, nor does it make it less painful.

I don't know, I'm from a working-class manufacturing family and it seems like an unpleasant chip on shoulder situation to complain at the portrayal of working-class struggles just because the people involved are paid slightly more and have a slightly more comfortable lives. They're still working-class people living in poverty! Whatever happened to empathy?

Posted by Anselmina (# 3032) on :

Yeah, no-one should really want to go down the path of 'we lived in a shoe in the middle o't road'. After all, even the most poverty-stricken colliery worker's family still lived in paradise compared to some other poor sod starving to death on a famine-consumed continent; or hacked to death during local conflicts in Africa or Eastern Europe.

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

I've no telly but the book sounds fascinting. It is on my get-round-to-reading list.

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

Books - there are three of them.

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

And I saw hem all in Waterstones this week. I'll wait till I've finished a few outstanding books first (Carlyle, Mrs Oliphant and George Borrow among others.)

Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pomona:
If they had it relatively easier though, it doesn't mean their lives were actually easy. I'm sure if someone had written a bestselling book about being a midwife in a Welsh mining community there would be a TV show about that - it seems pretty mean-spirited to gripe about a show that is based at least in part on someone's real-life experiences. I'm not sure 'well Welsh miners have it worse' would be particularly comforting to someone having a backstreet abortion in 50s Poplar, nor would it be very kind or fair. In the recent episodes there's a clearly well-off mother using the same NHS prosthetics clinic as a Poplar mother, for their children affected by thalidomide. Being rich hasn't meant that having a child disabled by thalidomide hasn't happened, nor does it make it less painful.

I don't know, I'm from a working-class manufacturing family and it seems like an unpleasant chip on shoulder situation to complain at the portrayal of working-class struggles just because the people involved are paid slightly more and have a slightly more comfortable lives. They're still working-class people living in poverty! Whatever happened to empathy?

Well yes, Pomona and yes, Anselmina ...

I agree with you both.

There can be a kind of 'nobody had it as baaa-aard as we did, mind ...' thing going on in South Wales at times. I've come across similar attitudes in Yorkshire too. I've lived in both places.

My own view is, "Well, tough ... the books are set in Poplar. Get over it. You had 'How Green Was My Valley' and A J Cronin's 'The Citadel' - so it's not as if South Walian misery and angst hasn't been under the spotlight ..."

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

Just to thank Angloid for drawing my attention to this wonderful series. I was very moved, informed and gently amused by the first volume and I want to read the others. I haven’t seen the TV version, but it must miss Jennifer Worth’s individual and lovely tone: totally unsentimental, she describes without emotional manipulation scenes of harrowing squalor as well as the human spirit that copes. She is very amusing both about herself, her friends, her clients and the sisters without a trace of malice. In a very understated and powerful way she describes her growing appreciation of the sisters’ religious faith.

I read the book when I was vulnerable in many ways and found it a great source of faith in both humanity and God.

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

I loved all three Call the Midwife books from Jennifer Worth. There is a story in the last one that reduced me to tears.

I was working in and around Poplar for a few weeks when I was reading them and tried recognising the places that still exist. I think St Anne's, Limehouse may be the church in the books. There are not many other old churches around there. The Mission is still there, but now as flats. Both are on the extremely busy A13, Commercial Road. Most of that area has been gutted and rebuilt.

There's an amazing dragon sculpture to mark the original Chinatown, on the corner of Salter Street, Grenade Street and West India Dock Road. It's on a post on a triangle between the roads amongst modern buildings. There are a few original buildings on Commercial Road to the east of St Anne's Church, including something that has old signs of ropemaking above the building, and a few warehouses around the canal and on Salter Street, many of which are the worse for wear. But if you look east along Commercial Road or West India Dock Road the view is of the buildings of Canary Wharf.

The DLR through that area gives a good view of some of these sites, but Poplar station is in a wasteland of roads and new building, next to the West India Road, here a dual carriageway, next to the new Billingsgate and the back of Canary Wharf (and the Crossrail station).

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

St Anne's was definitely evangelical forty years ago. The Sisters wouldn't be as fussy as some, but I'd be surprised.

I wept pretty freely at times in the first book - particularly the older husband who fully accepts as his son the obviously mixed race baby his wife gives birth to. (Husband and wife being both white.)

Posted by Galilit (# 16470) on :

Me too.
I also gave the book to an English friend here who said her grandparents lived in Poplar at that time and she said it brough back all her memories of visiting them.
The one that got to me was the Captain's daughter on the Danish? ship docked there. She had been prostituted by her father for years with the crew. The nuns actually climbed on board (one getting badly injured in the process). Harrowing but she had a wee girl and her father agreed to set her up in a proper house on their return.

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

The only other churches I can think of that are still there are the one that names All Saints DLR which is supposed to be high Anglican and the Bow Church which is isolated in the middle of the Bow Road and doesn't tie into the stories. (I worked with a flaky student in Bow for years and walked all around that area waiting for them to surface for a while). All Saints still has a market, as does Roman Road and a few other places, although now surrounded by flaking tower blocks that are being rebuilt and tidied. Just around the corner from All Saints is an overpainted Banksy on the side of a warehouse that was being converted and abandoned part way through: That whole area has little street markets everywhere.

1952 map of the area compared with 2000 - there's a lot of current building around Canning Town and the island created by bends in the River Lee.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

Miranda Hart, who plays Camilla "Chummy" Fortescue-Cholmondeley-Browne, was interviewed at this year's Alpha Leaders' Conference at the Royal Albert Hall, where she discussed her Christian faith.

Not sure how many points this information is worth.

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