A woman in wartime: Molly Newhouse

Archives and Manuscripts have just acquired a short but vivid memoir of wartime service in the RAMC (MS.8766) by Dr Muriel "Molly" Newhouse, who is primarily remembered for her work in occupational health and in particular establishing the connection between asbestos and mesothelioma.

While there have already been a significant number of studies of medical women's service in the Great War, a good deal less work has been done on their involvement in World War II. This may well be because instead of having to bang fruitlessly on the doors of the War Office demanding to serve their country, or setting up their own hospital units under the auspices of the Red Cross, medical women were taken as a routine occurence and a group who fell under the usual provisions for war service.

Newhouse records that in 1942 she was intending taking a post as a medical officer at an ordinance factory - 'undoubtedly extremely worthy war work, but considerably dull' - when she was called up for the RAMC, She thus spent 4 years in the Army without any great enthusiasm, but found herself later looking back 'with amusement and affection' on those years and thus wrote this memoir.

As a woman she was very much in a minority in the RAMC, but claims to have found 'very little prejudice' on account of her sex, and that 'the Doc's word, man or woman, was law'. There was apparently some hostility among officers of the ATS towards women medical officers, at least partly due to the fact the latter were entitled to wear a cross strap to their Sam Browne, a privilege not accorded to the ATS.

Her early postings were to various camps, depots and hospitals around the UK. Newhouse found her ambition to use this 'ideal opportunity for medical research' thwarted, and her life taken up with the horrors of 'documentation' - 'for every ten minutes by the bedside fifty were spent on paper work'.

In 1944 she accompanied the Expeditionary Force to Normandy, where her first professional activity was to deliver the baby of a local French family who in the circumstances were unable to contact the usual midwife. Later on Newhouse, although a physician who normally dealt with cases of sickness rather than injury, found herself undertaking surgical duties at Bayeux. She later remarked that she had never got any further than seven miles from the coast during the whole time she was in France.

Following her return to the UK she was then posted, rather reluctantly, to India, eventually fetching up in Secunderabad in what she found to be rather startlingly luxurious conditions, given that it was wartime. She was subsequently posted to Singapore but the memoir concludes rather abruptly with an account of an RAMC mess meeting there.

Newhouse concedes that she could 'pretend to no very heroic experiences, no great hardships', but this memoir nonetheless provides a valuable insight into life in the medical services in wartime.

Kitchen sink dramas

Is it just me, or does recipe-swapping seem to be spreading across the media like a benign virus? Every weekend paper worth its salt has a recipe-exchange corner nowadays, while online you’re spoilt for choice, from the reassuring videos on What's Cooking Grandma? to the erudite and frankly surreal offerings on Ken Albala’s Food Rant.

Recipes have long been a staple of the print media, but perhaps the economic downturn is sharpening our appetite? Recipe-swapping is just so comforting – it gives us a warm glow to imagine ourselves thrifty cooks using up those leftovers, to recall beloved family and friends through meals shared, to enter a virtual community of fellow swappers.

Popular interest in recipes is matched by a growth in academic research into historical recipe collections. You would expect to find food history and material culture on the menu, but recipe collections provide rich pickings for a wider range of themes including women as medical practitioners, cultural and economic trends, and the literary role of recipes in life-writing.

Research by Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell on recipe exchange as a form of currency highlights just how familiar our recipe-swapping would seem in early modern England. 17th century housewives didn’t blog, but their recipe collections were as interactive as any wiki, the frequent amendments and annotations reflecting their compilers’ social, familial and economic networks.

The issue of trust spans the centuries - both manuscript and online swappers need to make judgements about the reliability of the recipe’s source. As Leong and Pennell show, the same criteria came into play then as now – do we know the source personally? If not, do we have a friend in common? Or is the source trustworthy by professional reputation?

Well, I’ve think I’ve talked myself into swapping some recipes. As my cooking is definitely not worth trusting, I’ll share some from the Wellcome Library’s manuscript collection. Digital images of the 17th century recipes are now available online, so to tempt you into exploring this rich resource and to test your kitchen skills to the limit, I’ll be posting 17th century recipes here from time to time. To start things off, I’ll do a little name-dropping with a recipe for ‘Sugar Cakes’ from Lady Ann Fanshawe, the wife of Charles II’s ambassador to Portugal and Madrid:

‘Take 2 pound of Butter, one pound of fine Sugar, ye yolkes of nine Egs, a full Spoonfull of Mace beat & searsed [sifted], as much Flower as this will well wett making them so stiffe as you may rowle it out, then with the Cup of a glasse of what Size you please cutt them into round Cakes & pricke them and bake them.’ (Reference MS.7113, p.286)


Let us know how you get on…