A personal connection with a photograph in the Museum of East Dorset collection
by Clare Small
One of the photos in the collection is of Nurse Hodder, who was a midwife in the 1930s.
This is what I know of her from memory:
She lived and worked in Gaunts Common, firstly at Yew Tree Cottage, which is now my home, and then at a cottage at Pill Well, near where the Football Club is now, but I have never been able to pinpoint which one.
I was told that there was a photo of Nurse Hodder at the Museum in Wimborne (the Priest’s House Museum at that time) so I went down and looked at the collection on their computer and found her. I asked if I could have a copy and happily there is now a photo of her back at Yew Tree Cottage.
In 2004 I was told by an elderly resident, Vera Pound, that Yew Tree Cottage used to be a maternity home and that it was where Nurse Hodder lived and where local women would go to have their babies if they did not have them at home. Vera herself lived at Yew Tree Cottage from 1946-1948 before moving to a cottage at Row.
In 2006 Yew Tree Cottage was re-thatched by Tony Cotteral. One day he asked me if an old friend of his could come and visit the cottage as he said he had been born there. He came the next day and was delighted to see the cottage. I was able to recount to him what Vera had told me of her time living there, how the cottage would have looked back then, and what she had said about Nurse Hodder.
This is what he told me:
In the 1930s his mother had lived in Hinton Martell. She had walked over the hill, through the fields and lanes to Yew Tree Cottage to have her baby, returning a few days later, carrying him in her arms.
In those days few people had cars so the footpaths and lanes were used by locals to get around every day rather than for recreation as they are today.
The telephone was around in one form or another in most villages at that time. There was a post office with a phone box in each village. There is a red phone box in the Travel and Communications Room at the Museum of East Dorset.
David, my husband, and I walk each year from Yew Tree Cottage over the hill to the Hinton Martell Village Fete so we know the way well. It takes about twenty minutes to half an hour and comes out by the fountain in the centre of the village.
Clare Small