Jennifer Worth

An article in the journal Midwives in January 1998 complained that midwifery had produced almost no literature of its own, nothing to match what James Herriot had done for veterinary work. Its author, Terri Coates, heard back from a retired musician in her sixties who had once ridden a bicycle around Poplar with a delivery bag. Jennifer Worth, 1935 to 2011, left school at fifteen, trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, then nursed and delivered babies with the Anglican sisters of St John the Divine at their Poplar mission, in London's poorest streets, in the late 1950s. She wrote her memoir by hand and posted it to Coates, who checked the clinical detail and later advised the television version. Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s came out in 2002. Shadows of the Workhouse, in 2005, follows people who had grown up inside that institution, and Farewell To The East End closed the trilogy in 2009. Worth had given up nursing in 1973 for music, taking a fellowship of the London College of Music in 1984. She died in May 2011, months after a cancer diagnosis.