Description:Jose (pronounced Josie) was the daughter of Charles Gibbs and his wife, Sarah Ann, nee Frost, and she was born in Latimer Street (pictured), where the Gibbs family used to live before they moved to Great Colmore Street. My Granddad died in about 1930. Most of her life, until she became too old, Grandma was what they called a “handywoman”. These women did the kind of things that later became the preserve of the National Health Service. It was difficult for some people to afford to employ a doctor or midwife in the days before National Health, so they turned to a handywoman instead. Some of the things Grandma did were helping women to give birth, looking after children who were sick with fevers, and laying out bodies in preparation for burial. There was no actual charge for the services of most of these handywomen, I understand, but people gave what they could afford, and people were good to Grandma because they knew she was clean and always did her best for them. Some handywomen were quite unpleasant, so her services were in demand, but I think perhaps she didn’t really like her calling all that much, though she did like working with children. She never really talked about what she did to Jose, though other people often reminisced about when she’d delivered their babies, or “laid out” some member of their family, and especially how she’d worked hard to keep their sick children alive, usually without medicine because they couldn’t afford anything but the most basic of quack remedies. Given this background, I was amazed to learn in quite recent years that Jose had never known why pennies were put on the eyes of dead people (to weigh down the eyelid before rigor mortis set in, so the muscle was kept in place and didn’t shrink back to reveal the eyes).
There’s an interesting story about how Jose got the odd spelling of her name: when Grandma was pregnant, she read in a newspaper about a Spanish princess who’d been sent to school in England. Her name was Maria Jose so, thinking this was the Spanish for Josie, Grandma decided that if the child was a girl, she’d call her Jose. I have come across a couple of other women of Mom’s vintage with exactly the same spelling.
( This image is of washday in Latimer Street in 1961. Latimer used to run across Lee Bank from Great Colmore Street through Cregoe Street (just north of the Woodman) and then came out in Piggott Street. Piggott Street has also gone but would have run down from Bexhill Grove).