Ada Woodcock

Born 1860, died 1940
Nurse at Mitford and Launditch Union Workhouse, 1903 – 1905;
Head Nurse 1915-1916
Researched by Bridget Howarth

Ada’s obituary in the Halifax Evening Courier on 14 May 1940 gave an account of her nursing career. “A native of Mytholmroyd [West Yorkshire]…well known as a private nurse and a maternity nurse.  In that capacity she was associated with a number of local families. On leaving the district she held posts as matron at several hospitals, including Ripon and Alnwick.” What the newspaper report failed to mention was that she had not always been a nurse; she had spent 29 years working locally as woollen piecer and blanket weaver.

Ada was the fifth of seven children born to stone mason James Woodcock and his wife, Martha. Aged 14 in 1874 she took a job with a new blanket manufacturer in Midgley, Thomas Ratcliffe & Co. While working she studied with John Henry Thompson, a doctor in Mytholmroyd and Medical Officer for the Todmorden Board of Guardians. 

She eventually resigned from Ratcliffe’s in April 1903 to take up a training post at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Described as “the oldest hand in the employ of the firm” she was presented with a lady’s gold guard, a chain that would typically carry a watch. They wished her “every success in ministering to the needs of those who were suffering.”

The Rotunda in Dublin was one of a number of accredited teaching hospitals and Ada completed her training in October. By December she had been confirmed in post as Assistant Nurse at Mitford and Launditch Union Workhouse, Gressenhall with a salary of £25 per annum. Ada’s name was formally added to the Central Midwives Roll in July 1904. 

Ada was appointed Nurse by the Barnsley Board of Guardians in February 1905 and returned to Yorkshire. By 1911 though, she had moved to Bradford and was boarding with Frederick & Lydia Allsop, who she had known from Mytholmroyd while actively involved with the Baptist church in Brearley, when Frederick had been pastor there. Ada was, by this time, working as a Maternity Nurse “on her own account”.  

Her obituary stated that she had been Matron at a hospital in Alnwick but it is not known whether this was before or after her years in Barnsley. With this additional experience, she was able to return to Mitford and Launditch Union Workhouse at Gressenhall as Head Nurse in 1915 with a salary of £35 per annum, with an additional bonus “of £10 per annum during the period of the war.” She stayed for exactly one year, before returning to Yorkshire once again to be Head Nurse at Ripon Workhouse Infirmary.

She remained in Ripon until her retirement in 1925, aged 65.  She returned to Bradford where she was listed as a retired nurse in the 1939 Register. She died, aged 80, in May of the following year in the Waddilove Samaritan Home for Women established by Sir Joshua Kelley Waddilove, a local preacher and generous benefactor of Methodism and other causes. She was buried back in her hometown of Mytholmroyd.