The following article appeared in the March Issue of the Crime Writers Association Reader’s News. Some of it may already be familiar to regular readers of this blog.
My new crime series is set in Clapham, where I live, in 1946, immediately after the end of World War Two. The Midnight Man is published on 30th April for Hobeck Books and its locations are real places, on
Clapham Common, clustered around Clapham South Underground station. Some of these places are highly unusual, some still exist (although they have been repurposed) and others can be visited today.
The South London Hospital for Women and Children, the main location, does not, although its buildings still stand. It was founded by two remarkable women, with the support of many more, in 1913 and operated as a hospital where women would treat women, a ‘woman only’ institution on Clapham Common Southside until 1985.
Maud Chadburn hailed from Middlesborough, born in 1868, the daughter of a Congregational Minister. Determined to be a doctor, she defied her father, who denounced her from his pulpit claiming he would rather see his daughter dead than that she should achieve her aim. She qualified in 1894 and began work at the New Hospital for Women (later renamed the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson) in north London. Eleanor Davies-Colley, six years younger than Maud, was fortunate enough to have a more supportive surgeon father and joined Maud at the New Hospital in 1907, the start of a partnership in life and work which would last for twenty-five years. In 1911, Eleanor became the first female fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
Both women despaired at the lack of provision of medical care for women by women, as well as the limited opportunities for women in the medical profession (at the time many hospitals refused to employ women doctors and surgeons) so they began raising funds for a women’s hospital in south London. Helped by their friends, feminists like Harriet Weaver, publisher of The Freewoman and a mysterious, very 
large donation which, some speculated, came from a female member of the royal family, they collected enough to found the South London Hospital for Women and Children. At first the hospital operated in two large houses near Clapham South tube station, but, in 1916, Queen Mary opened a purpose-built eighty bed hospital, the largest women’s general hospital in the UK.
Patients were women, girls and boys up to the age of seven; all its staff, except for one or two men, were female, even the porters. It was the largest woman only hospital in the UK. When the local Health Authority eventually closed it on grounds of cost (something still hotly disputed by those who worked there) the hospital buildings were occupied and an international campaign was launched to keep it open, including a petition to Downing Street.
Setting a crime novel in such a unique place, remembered with great affection by former employees and patients, brings responsibility. I was very anxious about portraying the hospital and its ethos accurately. I had long conversations with a former consultant surgeon, who supplied me with photographs and literature belonging to the early hospital; I spoke with a former midwife and former nurses, all of whom
fondly remembered the ‘South London’ or ‘SLH’. There is even a Facebook group, to which I now belong, entitled South London Women’s Hospital occupation 1984─85 where those who protested at the time, many of them staff and patients, reminisce and organize the occasional get together. So, there was a certain amount of pressure to get it right.
I spent a lot of time in Lambeth Archives, reconstructing the hospital in my mind, using the architect’s plans. I also read minutes of meetings of the South London’s Management Board and some belonging to other hospitals of the time, so as to get an understanding of the context. It is instructive that, despite there being an acute shortage of nurses after the war, the SLH never had a problem attracting nurses; it was a place where women wanted to work.
Capturing the spirit of the place and the challenges and threats it faced, some from the, predominantly male, establishment of the time, was important and I’m told, by those who’ve read it that I’ve achieved that. This classic ‘locked room’ mystery, with plenty of thrills and mystery, reflects society and place as they were at the time.
The Midnight Man is published by Hobeck Books on 30th April 2024. If you want to find out more about the book or its setting go to www.julieandersonwriter.com
Julie Anderson 