John Smith's Family Tree Website

Smith family

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Part 5: Smith Descendants

Amelia Smith (1884 - 1964)

Nursing career

Amelia Smith was known as ‘Millie’ to relatives. She was the illegitimate daughter of Annie Smith and was born 06 September 1884 in Northowram, Yorkshire. After her mother married Abraham Schofield Turner, she kept living with her Smith grandparents. Amelia felt the stigma of illegitimacy keenly and decided she could never marry. She became a probationer nurse 31 May 1905 and began training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. By this time nursing was considered a respectable profession for women (before the advent of Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole et al, it was viewed as dirty and hazardous and only done by women of a lower class). However, it was not until World War I that it was regulated and training could last between one and three years, depending on the hospital.

Amelia left just over a year later, 28 August 1906, and her next appointment was in Wakefield, much nearer to home. It is likely she stayed here for a number of years as the 1911 census showed her at her Uncle Joah’s house near Halifax, probably on a Sunday visit. Amelia devoted her life to nursing and she worked in Bury, Colchester, Birkenhead and Dundee. She became Assistant Matron at King Edward VII Hospital in Cardiff towards the end of World War I and then in early 1919, was appointed Matron at Northampton General Hospital, beating 53 other candidates! It is thought she was one of the youngest ever women to be appointed Matron, being only 34 years old at the time.

As Matron, Amelia was the most senior nurse in the hospital and oversaw patient care, the efficient running of the hospital and was responsible for the nursing and domestic staff. She was accorded high status in the community and also had a variety of responsibilities that were probably never mentioned in a ‘matron’s job description’: overseeing decorating and celebrating in wards at Christmas time, making newspaper appeals for egg donations, opening fêtes, judging parades and dances at hospital fundraising events, to name but a few. She once had the honour of carving a hospital Christmas turkey which was usually the preserve of the male doctors!

Encounters with royalty

Amelia met several members of the royal family on formal and informal visits to the hospital. In 1920, the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII) paid a flying visit to see an acquaintance who had broken his leg hunting. The anecdote was recalled p9 in the ‘Northampton Mercury’, 24 January 1936 with the ascension of the new King. Apparently, Amelia had been quickly informed of his presence and “she met the Prince as he was advancing down the corridor, with hand outstretched”.

A more choreographed visit took place by the Prince in 1927 to Northampton and Amelia was presented to him when he visited the hospital. In May 1930, she was presented to his brother the Duke of York (the future King George VI) on an official visit to Northampton. At another occasion, she met the Princess Royal, although it is not clear whether that was Louise (daughter of Edward VII) or Mary (daughter of George V).

In October 1935, it was announced that Amelia would be retiring on New Year’s Eve. The ‘Northampton Mercury’ wrote of the “universal respect and esteem” toward her and her “charming and cheerful personality”. The governors and hospital board granted Amelia a larger pension in recompense for retiring early due to poor health “[owing to] the vast amount of work entailed in a hospital of this size”. It was noted that “[a] post like Miss Smith’s to-day [in 1935] commands a very different salary to that which she has been paid for a considerable number of years”. Amelia was only 51 and she would have assumed she would remain a Matron until she was 65.

Later life

A year after she retired, Amelia was presented with a hand-inscribed vellum vote of thanks from the Duke of Connaught (Prince Arthur, a son of Queen Victoria) for spending the past seventeen years working for the St John Ambulance Brigade in Northamptonshire. Part of this work involved being a judge for Ambulance shields where teams competed in mock emergency scenarios.

Sometime in the late 1930s, she moved to Eastbourne and became the matron of Eastbourne College, which was a private boys-only high school at the time. Her final position was as sanatorium matron at the Uppingham School in Rutland around the start of World War II. In 1954, Amelia retired from Uppingham. Her health deteriorated in the 1960s and she died of congestive cardiac failure at Pitsford House Hospital, near Northampton, 21 July 1964, aged 79. She was buried in the family grave in Ambler Thorn.

Footnotes