34. Move over St Patrick .... for our laundry workers.

Key words/phrases: St Patrick's Day, George Orwell, Catherine and Tom Cookson, the launderies of Joyce Green Hospital, South Shields Workhouse & Hospital, Hastings Workhouse & Hospital, telangiectasia, the Hastings Writers' group, Simonside Protestant School.

No. 34

“I gaze in awe at the mystic saint
who dwells in the light that rainbows paint;
but I love the saints that darn and scrub
and the tired old saint of the washing tub.” Anon

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world celebrated St Patrick’s Day yesterday. Perhaps you were one of them ? But this short poem seems to be trying to get us to re-focus our attention on those far less well known “saints” who get on with the task of turning mountains of dirty washing into clean, freshly laundered linen everyday.

George Orwell once remarked that "All people who work with their hands are partly invisible .... and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are."

This could be said of many different groups of ancillary staff who work in hospitals, including of course the domestic and the catering staff but the fact is that these latter two groups are at least partly visible, whereas laundry staff are hardly ever seen or noticed.

Out of interest for instance, how many of the laundry staff at Joyce Green Hospital did you actually know ?

Perhaps at this point someone is going to catch me out here and ask me if I know ‘for a fact’ that the hospital linen really was washed on the Joyce Green Hospital site ? Well the short answer is: I can’t actually remember, although perhaps you can ?

I certainly remember that Bexley Hospital near Dartford Heath had a large laundry and perhaps Joyce Green’s dirty linen (or at least some of it some of it) was dealt with there ? But the point I am trying to get at here is that those who work at the cutting edge of patient care often don't know very much at all about the hard work and difficulties of those who work behind the scenes.

Did you realise that the novelist Catherine Cookson was someone who had first- hand experience of working in hospital laundries ?

This famous English author was born in Tyne Dock, South Shields in 1906 and was brought up by her grandmother Rose and her step-grandfather John McMullen; her unmarried mother, Kate Fawcett, returning “to service” soon after her birth.

Catherine's first school was Simonside Protestant School but since her grandfather wanted her to have a Roman Catholic school education she was later transferred to Saint Peter and Paul's School in Tyne Dock.

At the age of 14yrs she became a servant to a lady in Harton Village, South Shields, earning a 9 shillings a week (roughly 45 pence) but at the age of 18yrs, and as the result of some help that she had from the local Roman Catholic priest, she started work in the laundry at the South Shields Workhouse.

She apparently worked for 7 years at as “checker” in the laundry there situated in the grounds of what is now the South Shields General Hospital after which time she moved to the South of England where she took on a similar role in an Essex hospital.

Next, something drove her into moving on again and in 1929 she arrived in Hastings where she worked in the local hospital workhouse laundry, finally becoming it’s manageress and earning £3.6s a week.

Once there, she set about saving every penny she could in order to buy herself a large Victorian house, at which point she started to take in “gentleman lodgers” in order to supplement her income.

In June 1940, at the age of 34 yrs, she married Tom Cookson who was a teacher at Hastings Grammar School. Their's was a happy marriage but after experiencing four miscarriages it was discovered she was suffering from a telangiectasia.

As a result of her illness and her miscarriages she suffered a mental breakdown, a problem that was to last over 10 years. At one point in her depression her G.P. suggested that she took up writing as a form of therapy and she joined the Hastings Writers’ Group.

She complete her first novel "Kate Hannigan" in 1948 at the age of 42yrs and in total wrote almost one hundred stories, many of which are set in her native region.

She and her husband continue to live in Hastings until 1976, after which she returned to live in the North-East of England with her husband. She eventually died in 1998 just prior to her 92nd birthday, having seen many of her books translated into different languages and having been made a Commander of the Britsh Empire, a Dame of the British Empire and awarded an honorary M.A.

Some laundry-women, don't you think ? Although I think that it almost goes without saying that thousands of other hospital laundry workers also deserve similar words of praise for their generally-unreported efforts ?

So maybe St Patrick won't mind us swinging the spot-light away from him for a short while on St Patrick's Day and bringing it to bear briefly on to those who worked to provide clean laundry for Joyce Green Hospital throughout it's long history - as Catherine Cookson once did in South Shields, in Essex and finally in Hastings ?