Although the first District Nurse to live in The Bungalow was unquestionably Nurse Liddell in 1913, she was not the first to hold the office, as the Vicar of the time, the Reverend Arthur Leigh Barker, notes in his Journal under "Parish Affairs 1902-10":

"Our nearest doctors were four miles away at Lymington, and I found that in many cases the poor were being shamefully neglected in sickness. It was mainly to remedy this that we started a village nurse, but I afterwards found curious evidence of the benefit of it by examining the Parish Burial Register. In the middle of the last century, year after year, more than half of the burials in Sway Churchyard were those of infants under two years old. Gradually, this horrible proportion had diminished, until for the five years before I came to Sway [in 1899] it had been about 20%. But in the first five years after we had a District nurse at work the number fell with a drop from 20% to 5%.

Valuable as a good parish nurse is, it seems inevitable that this woman, her appointment and her duties, should be a source of discord in a Parish. All sorts of questions arise, such as, for instance, whether the nurse should be allowed to attend births of illegitimate children and set people by the ears with almost incredible bitterness.

We did not avoid such trouble, and it culminated after some years in the one really serious village feud that I remember. It passed, of course, as all such quarrels do pass, but it left its traces, and particularly on Eleanor [the Vicar's wife]. She had from the first been Superintendent of the Nurse, with a Committee of Ladies to help her. They were all forced to resign by a stupid outburst of village sympathy with a troublesome nurse whom they had dismissed and an entirely new Committee was elected......Eleanor felt deeply that she had been superseded in her work that she had long managed, and from that time on gave up all regular parish work entirely, neither visiting the poor or teaching in the Sunday School, but letting herself become more and more unknown to the people."

What is clear from Leigh Barker's Journal is that Sway had no District Nurse prior to 1902 but that his wife's Committee employed several nurses in those early years. They were certainly always female - and single: it was not until 1947, nearly a century after nursing began, that the first man was accepted for training as a District Nurse!

So, back to Nurse Frances Sarah Liddell (or Liddle, according to the Electoral Register).

How did a trained nurse (the first training school for District Nurses was founded in London in 1874) get to hear of a vacancy in a small village like Sway? What better than through contacts of the Vicar or Vicar's Churchwarden, Herbert Moser, who was clearly one of the wealthiest men in the village? He would almost certainly have known Reginald Hargreaves, very much his contemporary and owner of Cuffnells, a 160-acre family estate at Lyndhurst, where he lived with his wife Alice, formerly Alice Liddell (pronounced Liddle) of Christ Church in Oxford, where one of the deacons Charles Dodgson became famous as Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice books. Sadly, the Lewis Carroll Society has been unable to trace a link between Alice Liddell and Nurse Liddell, but it is an unusual name - and it would have been simple enough for the latter to have travelled from Oxford by train to Sway to take up her new position. Maybe we will never know, although Mrs Esme Burt of Lymington recalls her mother telling her how, on 23 March 1916, the District Nurse marched through heavy snow to see her safely delivered at Wilverley Lodge. So, maybe someone knows more about those times than we have uncovered to date.

It seems likely that Nurse Liddell stayed several years, with no alteration to the Electoral Register until 1919, when Miss Alice Lloyd began a nine-year stint in Sway. Of her, though, nothing is known, recalled or noted, so she must have been a model District Nurse at the very least, and presumably left the village for another position or a happy retirement elsewhere.
Sad to say, we know more about her successor because she died in post and not only was buried in Sway Churchyard but also received an Obituary notice in the "New Milton District Advertiser and Lymington Times" (which was only published from 1928 onwards).

"An angel of mercy hath folded her wings to Rest," says the inscription on the grave of Annie Maria Southerden, who died aged 51 on 16 April 1937 following a short illness. Prior to Sway, she had been District Nurse at Broughton and Preston Candover. "Miss Southerden devoted a great deal of her time to the Sway Infant Welfare," records the Obituary, "and all her local journeys were made on a bicycle. She covered many miles a week." She has more recently been recalled as Nurse Sutherland (sic) [even the 1928 Electoral Register contained this error, duly corrected for the next and subsequent editions]: the November 1986 "Sway News" recalls her "doing her rounds on a bicycle: a wooden box strapped to the rear carrier held her little black bag. Her salve for burns was very good indeed."

The principal responsibility of a Sway District Nurse in those days was that of midwife, and Annie Southerden's successor was to bring well over six hundred babies into the world during her significant thirty-year "reign". Muriel Florence Lipscombe was also the first married District Nurse, her husband Thomas also resident in The Bungalow along with their newly born daughter Patricia a few years later, and her own mother, Sarah Shilton. For thirty years, through the War and more, she became something of a local legend, "known affectionately as 'Nurse' or 'Lippy'...(she) was always ready to help anyone, day or night and frequently sat with sick people all night. 'She was a wonderful nurse.' 'Nothing was ever too much trouble.' 'She would do anything for anybody.' are just a few of the tributes of her that I received," according to Canon Douglas Paine [Sway's Vicar] in the December 1983 "Sway News", which recorded her well-attended funeral the previous month following her death of the age of 75. Like Nurse Southerden, Muriel Lipscombe initially used a bicycle to visit her patients, but within a few years she progressed to a black Austin 7 motor car to complete her rounds of the village. Her daughter Pat and family still live in Sway, as does the last baby she delivered before retiring, James Drodge, whose own mother (the former Miss Pat Gale) she had also brought into the world.

Although Mrs Lipscombe was District Nurse until 1967, she and the family moved out of The Bungalow in 1961 into private accommodation in preparation for retirement (although, sadly, her husband died in 1962). This explains how Mr and Mrs Rowley came to live here, as mentioned earlier.

The last nurse to live in The Bungalow was Hazel M Gibson, who took over from "Nurse" in 1967 and lived here until 1983. She later retired to Wales, but made a return visit to The Nurse's Cottage in the 1990's to see how it had changed (at that time) into a licensed guest-house, yet still dispensing care and hospitality to the needy, albeit visitors to the area rather than the infirm inhabitants of Sway!

Since Nurse Gibson's retirement, the District Nursing function has been co-ordinated through the Sway and Brockenhurst Primary Health Care Team, with two Practice Nurses and a number of District Nursing Sisters and Auxiliary Nurses visiting the housebound sick.

STATION ROAD, SWAY, LYMINGTON, HANTS. SO41 6BA
© The Nurse's Cottage 2003 - 2010