Midwife Cycled Between the Bombs

While most people ran to the bomb shelters during an air raid, midwife Ethel May Rich would be preparing for the inevitable call that one of her expectant mothers had gone into labour.

Attaching the black metal box containing her delivery kit to the back of her bike, the woman known as Nurse Stork would cycle through dropping bombs to reach women whose labour was brought on by the panic of an air raid.

One ferocious bombing attack on Thornton Heath swimming baths saw May Rich deliver at least one baby on the pavement on the corner of Woodville Road, surrounded by chaos.

May's nieces, Irene, 82, and Sylvia Bradbrook, 74, contacted Heritage after seeing a picture of their Auntie May in the Croydon Guardian two weeks ago.

The pair, who still live with each other in Carew Road, vividly remember their aunt who came to Croydon in the mid 1930s. "May was my mother's sister and I was about eight when she came to stay with us," says Sylvia. "She used to ride a black bike with a metal box on the hack. I was convinced she used to keep the babies in the box and wondered why she kept it under the stairs. She delivered a large number of babies during the war and was very well known in the area."

May's job was a dangerous one. While families waited out air raids in the safety of their bomb shelters, May would be on her way to a delivery.

Ethel May Rich

"As soon as the air-raid sirens went off someone went into labour," says Sylvia. "During one raid she was cycling over the bridge on Sandfield Road when she saw these little things coming down on parachutes.

"She thought they were angels but they were Molotov cocktails, bombs on parachutes.

"When she realised they were coming pretty close she pedalled for her life.

"The next morning the shock of the bombs had turned her eyebrow and lashes on one side of her face completely white overnight."

'I was convinced she used to keep the babies in the box and wondered why she kept it under the stairs.'

Because of May's job, the family were one of a few who had a telephone and it was here that Nurse Stork was informed of pending births, "Either that or a panicked dad to be would turn up on the doorstep," adds Irene. "It was a dangerous job, but she wouldn't have done anything else." The sisters believe May was one of four municipal midwives for Croydon during the war. She stayed in Thornton Heath until the early 1940s when she moved to New Addington and continued delivering babies as one of the estate's first municipal midwives. On her retirement in 1955, one of the first babies she delivered in New Addington presented her with an engraved commemorative silver tea set. May Rich died peacefully at a Broadstairs nursing home in January 1968, aged 72. "Over the years we have met quite a few people who tell us their own babies were delivered by our Auntie May," adds Sylvia. "She never married. Her fiancee was killed in the First World War.

She went to Waterloo station to meet him and he wasn't on the train. "She threw herself into work and perhaps that's why she was so good at what she did because she was so devoted. Maybe all the babies she delivered compensated for the fact she never had any children of her own. Everyone knew her and liked her," adds Irene. "Strangers would shout out, 'you're Nurse Stork's niece' in the street. Her job made her happy. Why else would she spend so long doing it? She helped a lot of women through childbirth in very difficult times."