Overview
This collection belonged to Barbara Cook (née Coleman) and relates to her time as a Karitane Nurse. For much of the twentieth century Karitane nurses were part of the iconography of the Plunket Society. Wearing crisp blue and white uniforms, they acted as ambassadors for Truby King’s hugely influential ideologies in hospitals and homes throughout the country.
Barbara Cook
Born in Ngāruawāhia in 1926, Barbara was ‘born travelling’. Her family lost their farm during the Great Depression, so Barbara moved a lot during her childhood. She had been to seven schools by the time she dropped out of school to work at age 15 and continued to travel the country using money she made as a telephone operator.
After the Second World War the New Zealand Government recruited veterinarians from Britain and Canada, and a Scottish couple came to stay with Barbara’s family. They had had a Karitane nurse and convinced her that becoming a nurse would be a great way to see the world.
Barbara began her training at the Truby King Karitane Hospital in January 1947. She trained for 16 months, learning to care for premature babies, newborns and infants who did not feed well. The hospital had an annex where mothers were taught Mothercraft and how to breastfeed their babies, but most babies were in the wards where they were cared for by the nurses.
Barbara enjoyed her training and described her time at the hospital as ‘wonderful days’. The matron was ‘very tall and grey and rather forbidding’, but she absolutely understood babies. Babies didn’t go home until they were at least five pounds, and although the treatment was quite simple, it worked. Only one baby – weighing barely four pounds – died while Barbara was training at the hospital.
Hospital training
The idea for Karitane nurses and Karitane hospitals came from Frederic Truby King, founder of the Plunket Society, who in 1907 offered his holiday cottage at Karitane, north of Dunedin, as a licenced home for premature and malnourished babies. The babies cared for there did well on the strict feeding schedule and ‘humanized milk’ (a formula of cow’s milk, water, and lactose sugar) King prescribed. The Dunedin Plunket Committee was quickly convinced of the need for a permanent hospital for babies and young children, and the first Karitane Hospital opened in Anderson’s Bay in December that same year. Five other hospitals opened around the country between 1917 and 1927, all run by Plunket Head Office in Dunedin but with voluntary boards and local management committees.
The success of Karitane hospitals depended on the recruitment of Karitane nurses – young women recruited to train at the hospitals and therefore to staff them. There was no school certificate requirement for recruits, but they did have to demonstrate that they could use simple percentages and decimals in the preparation of baby foods. Initially the training lasted 12 months but it was later increased to 16, during which time the nurses learnt 60 practical procedures for the care of babies and infants. These included preparing baby foods, treating skin conditions, making a complete layette and caring for premature babies.
Trainees worked without recompense and until the late 1950s they had to pay a tuition fee and buy their own uniforms. This meant that initially only young women from comfortable backgrounds could afford the training, although from 1950 bursaries were offered to support trainees. Numbers of Karitane recruits rose steadily from 330 in the 1920s to 714 in the 1930s, 1056 in the 1950s and 1119 in the 1970s.
Working in private homes
Once they had completed their training in the hospital Karitane nurses started ‘casing’ in private homes, residing temporarily with new mothers and teaching them to care for newborns. They were, in essence, private operators, and had to build up their own clientele. Although they were aligned with the nursing profession, Karitane nurses’ ‘casing’ duties often had more in common with domestic service and nannying, and frequently involved household chores.
Barbara completed her training in 1948 and spent a year working in New Zealand. She visited all sorts of homes in rural and urban areas; Karitane nursing required adaptability as every family had slightly different requirements. Some former Karitane nurses recall instances of exploitation and harassment in homes they worked at, while others forged lifelong connections with families and children they nursed.
Barbara sailed to England in 1950; one of a number of Karitane nurses who found work in the United Kingdom and Australia. Truby King actively promoted his Mothercraft principles overseas, so Karitane nurses were in demand. For many, Karitane training was ‘a passport for a working holiday overseas’, and the opportunity to travel continued to attract recruits even though ‘casing’ wages weren’t high.
It was during the 28-day voyage to England that Barbara met her future husband, Alleyne. They kept in touch for many years although Alleyne moved to Vancouver in 1954, and they married in 1961. Barbara had always wanted to go to Canada – a country so big that it had different time zones!
Nursing in Britain
Upon arrival in England Barbara spent two weeks at a training facility where she was taught different formula names and the childcare situation in England. The people running the facility found Barbara her first job, then she had to find her own.
Barbara was very good at nursing, but with so many sleepless nights she got burnt out. There was no one to help if she got into trouble, and she sometimes experienced harassment from men in the homes she worked in. She found it useful to wear a uniform and veil so she would look ‘stiff and starchy and not approachable’.
The benefit of working as a Karitane nurse was that Barbara was her own boss so could save money during winter and then hitchhike around Europe in summer. She travelled in Holland, Germany, Austria and Denmark on her own, then when her brother came to visit, she travelled with him to France, Spain, and Italy. She had a bit of trouble with men getting too close to her on the streetcars, so would raise herself up as high as she could go on her toes and then stamp down on their feet.
Karitane nursing was not often a long-term career, as broken sleep, irregular income and adjusting to a wide variety of working conditions quickly took their toll. After four years in England Barbara was burnt out and thin – food was still rationed post-war, and she found that it was not enough for her. She returned to her family farm to restore herself, then worked in Hamilton writing advertising copy for radio. She moved to Vancouver in 1961 to reunite with Alleyne.
End of an era
By the 1970s neo-natal units in public hospitals had taken over many of the functions of Karitane hospitals, and mothers no longer wished to stay in a hospital to learn about breastfeeding and the care of children. In 1978 the Plunket Society decided to close all six hospitals down, and Karitane nurses gradually moved into other services such community family health and special education.
References
- Bryder, Linda. 2003. A Voice for Mothers: The Plunket Society and Infant Welfare 1907-2000. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
- Cook, Barbara. 2023. Personal correspondence with curator.
- Powell, Joyce. 2007. A Suitable Job for Young Ladies: The Karitane Story 1907 to 2007. Palmerston North: Heritage Press.
- Sullivan, Jim. 2007. I Was a Plunket Baby: 100 Years of the Royal New Zealand Society (Inc). Auckland: Random House New Zealand.
- Tennant, Margaret, and Lesley Courtney. 2017. ‘“The Karitane” The Rise and Fall of a Semi-Profession for Women’. New Zealand Journal of History 51, no. 1, pp. 113-134.