‘Capturing the spirit of the place and the challenges and threats it faced, some from the predominantly male establishment of the time, was very important to me. It was a unique and special place. I wanted it to live again, even if only in a crime fiction book.’
– Julie Anderson, author of The Midnight Man
[ About The Midnight Man ]
Winter 1946
One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door.
Two women from the hospital join forces to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue – The Midnight Man.
[ My Review ]
The Midnight Man by Julie Anderson published April 30th with Hobeck Books and is Book 1 in The Clapham Trilogy. Set in the 1940s, Julie Anderson based her novel in and around The South London Hospital (The SLH) for Women and Children, which was officially opened in 1916. The hospital was founded by Maud Chadburn and Eleanor Davies-Colley, but its doors were closed for the final time in 1984. Julie Anderson felt strongly that its memory should live on, and this trilogy is her tribute to these remarkable women. You can read more about The SLH in a fascinating guest post by Julie Anderson below.
Faye Smith runs the canteen at The South London Hospital in Clapham. One busy Sunday, on a cold November day, she notices a mysterious woman sitting at one of the tables. On investigation Faye discovers that her name is Ellie Peverill. Ellie has recently returned from Nuremberg, where she worked as a legal clerk during the trials and is struggling to find her feet. Faye, initially sceptical, tentatively decides to help Ellie. Faye has experienced enough personal troubles to recognise when someone else is struggling. When The SLH took her in, she was young and lacking in knowledge, but with proper mentoring and support she has risen to a managerial post, with good prospects for her future within the hospital. Ellie is clearly not local. Her manner and dress would suggest a very different background to Faye’s but the war has been a great leveller and Ellie has a determination that Faye recognises. Faye offers Ellie a temporary position within the canteen and organises accommodation for her with one of the nurses, Beryl MacBride.
Ellie has her own private reasons for being in Clapham, but these take second place when the body of a nurse is discovered behind a locked door of one of the tunnels used during the wartime raids. Ellie had heard a scream one evening and quickly realises that she may have unintentionally witnessed the last moments of the victim. The police are stretched and take her account of the evening’s events very lightly. Ellie is frustrated and alongside Faye, they embark on their own bit of investigating. What unfolds is a tangled and sinister web that requires the pair to take risks with dangerous consequences.
The Midnight Man is the perfect launch for The Clapham Trilogy, setting the groundwork for the remaining two books in the series. Faye Smith and Ellie Peverill are two strong and formidable characters, fearless in their search for justice. The SLH was a hospital established by two courageous women and, through this locked-room mystery, Julie Anderson has written a wonderful tribute, giving life, again, to the hospital and its staff.
I must mention the cover of the book, which I know Julie Anderson was very adamant would reflect the noir element of that era. The shadowy Raymond Chandler type of image is a fabulous throwback to that period, and, in the novel, The Odeon gets a mention as the nurses conversation, at times, revolves around a particular movie. There is a real atmospheric vibe throughout the novel which is a credit to Julie Anderson and the research she obviously has undertaken in a bid to reflect time and place.
The Midnight Man has all the elements one would expect from a mystery novel set in the 1940s. It’s an engaging and fast-moving tale, an evocative and immersive story with a very authentic edge and a splendid start to a new series.
[ Guest Post – A unique hospital for women]
This is the story of indomitable women and how two such women, with the support of many others, founded a hospital where women could treat women.
Maud Chadburn, born in 1868, was the daughter of a congregational minister from Middlesborough. Determined to be a doctor, she defied her father, who denounced her from his pulpit claiming he would rather see his daughter dead than see her 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. Their meeting was 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 (it was believed to have come from a female member of the royal family), they collected enough to set up the South London Hospital for Women & Children. At first the hospital operated in two large houses near Clapham South underground station. Then, in 1916, Queen Mary opened a purpose-built eighty bed hospital, the largest women’s general hospital in the UK.
The hospital took only female patients, plus boys up to the age of seven. When I was researching for my book The Midnight Man which is set, in part, in the ‘South London’ or ‘SLH’, I found copies of minutes of the meetings of the management board of the hospital in Lambeth Archives. Almost all the names listed are female, the only men were clergymen governors and the hospital engineer. The staff records show all women, including porters, gardeners and general staff, as well as nurses, physicians and surgeons.
In 1946, when my book is set, there was an acute shortage of nurses across London, with some hospitals resorting to increasingly desperate attempts to attract nursing staff, for example, by raising wages and offering retraining to returning soldiers. The SLH never had that problem; doctors, nurses and midwives, all women, wanted to work there. I spoke with a number of those who did, in the 1970s and 1980s, and they attested to the camaraderie and dedication of the workforce at all levels. It was one of the elements I wanted to incorporate in the novel, which is a classic ‘locked room’ mystery.
It must have been an unusual and special place to work. When its closure was announced in 1984 a petition to save it raised 60,000 signatures and prompted letters to The Times and a deputation to Downing Street. Women from all over the country came to demonstrate and, after closure, nurses occupied the building and proceeded to stage a ‘work in’ offering services to local people as before. There is a Facebook page called South London Women’s Hospital occupation 1984-85 for those who protested and want to remember. I am now an honorary member.
Yet today, the hospital, and its history, has almost vanished. The buildings are now apartments above a large supermarket. Its prize-winning gardens are the supermarket car park. Capturing the spirit of the place and the challenges and threats it faced, some from the predominantly male establishment of the time, was very important to me. Not just because there are people out there who would be able tell me that it wasn’t like that, but because I wanted to honour the original founders and all the remarkable women who worked there afterwards. There are, as far as I could find, no biographies of Maud or Eleanor and no history of the SLH. Yet it was a unique and special place. I wanted it to live again, even if only in a crime fiction book.
I hope, in a small way, that I have given it another lease of life in ‘The Midnight Man’ (published 30th April 2024 by Hobeck Books).
Join Julie Anderson, in an event hosted by the Royal College of Nursing Library and Museum, as she explores how an historic hospital run by women for women inspired her new novel
Thu, 5 Sep 2024 18:00
Booking: The Midnight Man and the South London Hospital for Women and Children
[ Bio ]
Julie Anderson is the CWA Dagger listed author of three Whitehall thrillers and a short series of historical adventure stories for young adults. Before becoming a crime fiction writer, she was a senior civil servant, working across a variety of departments and agencies, including the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Unlike her protagonists, however, she doesn’t know where (all) the bodies are buried.
She writes crime fiction reviews for Time and Leisure Magazine and is a co-founder and Trustee of the Clapham Book Festival.
She lives in south London where her latest crime fiction series is set, returning to her first love of writing historical fiction with The Midnight Man, published by Hobeck.
X ~ @jjulieanderson
Website ~ https://julieandersonwriter.com/
