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Gillbee, Sarah Ann (1803 - 1882)

Born

18 September 1803
Parish of St John, Hackney, London, Middlesex, England

Died

24 February 1882
Stawell, Victoria, Australia

Occupation

Midwife

Alternative Names

• Sarah Barfoot
• Sarah Griffiths

Summary

Prepared by Madonna Grehan, 2006

Sarah Gillbee was appointed inaugural matron to ‘The Melbourne Lying-in Hospital and Infirmary for Diseases Peculiar to Women and Children’ in August 1856 at the age of 53. The term of her tenure as matron is unclear. Sarah Gillbee claimed education and practical training as a midwife under a Scottish medical practitioner, Dr John Thatcher who had established a Lying-in Institution in Edinburgh.

Following her emigration to Australia in 1836, Sarah Gillbee lived and worked as a midwife in Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land until 1848. With her family, Sarah Barfoot moved to the Victorian settlement of Port Phillip, later called Melbourne. From 1862 to 1881, Mrs Barfoot was listed in Melbourne’s Sands & McDougall Business Directories as a “midwife” at Emerald Hill. The yearly rate rolls of the Emerald Hill Town Council record her occupation from 1864 to 1880 as being: midwife, accoucheur or Accoucheures (sic).

Details

Mrs Sarah Ann Gillbee (also known as Sarah Barfoot) was appointed matron to the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital and Infirmary for Diseases Peculiar to Women and Children in 1856. There are many details about Mrs Gillbee that cannot be confirmed, such as her claim to education as a midwife, how she came to be matron at Melbourne’s Lying-in Hospital, how long her tenure was, and why, in taking the position of matron, she relinquished her married surname of Barfoot to resume the surname of her first husband, William Gillbee.

What we do know about Sarah Gillbee is that she married three times, and was known correspondingly by three different surnames: Gillbee (sometimes spelt Gilbee, Gilby, or Gilbey), Barfoot, or Griffiths. In the exposé of Sarah’s life presented here, the surnames Gillbee, Barfoot and Griffiths are used according to how Sarah was named on documentation recorded at the time.

Sarah Gillbee was born Sarah Ann Bryant Ward in Hackney, London in 1803. Members of her family claimed that before her marriage, Sarah was ‘a beauty’ at the Court of William, Duke of York.(1) Sarah’s first husband, William Gillbee, was reputed to have served in a military regiment connected with the same Prince Regent, the future King George IV, although these connections have not yet been substantiated. The precise date of William Gillbee’s and Sarah Ward’s marriage is unknown, but is likely to have been in 1823.

William Gillbee died, possibly in 1832 aged at around 40, leaving Sarah with four young children. In Edinburgh in September 1833, Sarah married a fellow Londoner, Mr Uppington Bracee Barfoot. At that time, Sarah Barfoot was operating a circulating library and bookshop in Edinburgh.

Midwifery education in Edinburgh circa 1834
Sometime in 1834, Sarah Barfoot commenced training to become a midwife. The occupation of midwife in the nineteenth century is frequently portrayed as being a lowly labour from which people aspired to elevate themselves, and it is true that the practice of midwifery was taken on by men and women without any skills or education whatsoever. But in Scotland from the mid-eighteenth century, midwifery training for both men and women was available through private medical practitioners and recognised by the City of Edinburgh.(2)

John Thatcher, a Fellow of the College of Surgeons, was one medical practitioner whose paying pupils learnt their craft through his Dispensary for Affording Advice and Medicines, gratuitously, in the Diseases of Women, Infants, and Children; and for attending Poor Married Women during In-lying.(3) Thatcher’s Institution was not a hospital as we know them to be, but a place where poor but respectable (married) women could obtain medicines, and through which they could apply to have a trained attendant at childbirth. Male and female midwifery pupils undertook the same theoretical training and, equally, were expected to be able to manage uncomplicated and complicated labours and births. But this equitable approach to midwifery education and preparation for practice had changed by the mid-nineteenth century when the realm of complicated labours became the domain of male medical pupils.(4)

Thatcher’s Institution had opened in 1816, but his records from 1824 until 1933 only have survived. These take the form of one large volume, Dr Thatcher’s Book, in which all of the births attended under the auspices of his institution are listed. Entries in Dr Thatcher’s Book included the name and domicile of the labouring woman, the outcome of the birth and the person(s) attending. Male birth attendants, most of whom were doctors, were named when they were present at a birth; female attendants were sometimes named, and otherwise were recorded simply as ‘female pupil’.

One entry in Dr Thatcher’s Book dated 16 March 1836 bears the name ‘Mrs Barfoot’ as the birth attendant. We may never know if the Mrs Barfoot mentioned in Dr Thatcher’s Book and the Mrs Barfoot/Gillbee who later became the first matron at the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital was the same person. But six weeks after that entry in Dr Thatcher’s Book was made, Sarah Barfoot and most of her family sailed for Australia. Her eldest child William, then twelve years old, remained in Edinburgh to complete his education.

Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land
The Barfoot’s emigration came about through the scheme of the London Emigration Committee (LEC) which was designed to increase the number of single women living in Australia. From 1833 to 1836, the LEC advertised throughout England, Scotland and Ireland for potential females to migrate to the Australian colonies.(5) Sarah’s eldest daughter, Harriet, secured the government bounty of £12 as a single female. After passage by steamer from Edinburgh to the port of Gravesend in England, a pregnant Sarah, five of her six children, and her husband Uppington boarded the barque Amelia Thompson and on 28 April 1836 began their journey to the port of Launceston in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Four months later, on 26 August 1836, they were met at Launceston wharf by an official welcoming committee of LEC, one of whom was Mrs Alicia Jennings, the wife of a prominent Launceston lawyer and property owner.

Within six weeks of their arrival, the Barfoots had made the journey south to Hobart Town where they settled at 58 Murray Street. Sarah placed her first advertisement as a midwife in a local newspaper on 14 October 1836, claiming her credentials (more than two years’ training in midwifery, successfully passing an examination and earning a Diploma) obtained under Dr Thatcher’s tutelage. Three months later in January 1837, Sarah’s advertisements offered to supply personal recommendations from clients who were satisfied with her services.

In Hobart, Sarah Barfoot reportedly had a fine reputation as a skilled midwife, but this was severely tarnished following events which occurred in September 1841, when Mrs Elizabeth Roberts, who had engaged Mrs Barfoot to attend her, died following the birth of a stillborn baby.(6) Rumours were afoot that Mrs Barfoot had been negligent in her treatment. To counter them, and with the sanction of the deceased woman’s husband, Mr James Roberts, Mrs Barfoot placed an advertisement in several of Hobart’s newspapers defending her care of the deceased. Several days later, however, Mr Roberts retracted his support of the midwife through his own newspaper advertisement. The Barfoots saw this action as libellous and sued Mr Roberts for damages in the Supreme Court, but they were unsuccessful. A week after the case was heard, Uppington Barfoot filed for bankruptcy.

Port Phillip/Melbourne
Despite the damage to the family’s reputation which the Roberts’ case must have inflicted, the Barfoots remained in Hobart Town for the next six years. In 1848, the family sailed to the settlement of Port Phillip, later called Melbourne, where Sarah advertised her services as a qualified midwife from her home near the Temperance Hall in Little Bourke Street. She was able to offer references from satisfied clients she had attended in Hobart and who now lived in the district.(7) The Barfoot family later moved to Murphy Street at South Yarra. Eventually they were joined in Melbourne by Sarah’s eldest son, William Gillbee, who had studied medicine in Scotland and England, and gained considerable experience as a ship’s surgeon. William accepted an appointment as surgeon to the Melbourne General Hospital.

Little about Sarah’s life during her first ten years in Melbourne has come to light, but in July 1855, Sarah lost her husband of twenty years, Uppington Barfoot, after he sustained injuries in a traffic accident. A post-mortem to establish the case of death was performed for the coroner by John Maund, a local medical practitioner. Sarah Barfoot took civil action against the driver of the cart which had collided with her husband’s, and after a protracted hearing in the Supreme Court, she was awarded £1800 in damages, some of which was owed to her husband’s creditors.(8)

The Melbourne Lying-in Hospital
In August 1856, one year after Uppington Barfoot’s death, Sarah Barfoot became matron to the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital. Newspaper accounts and archival records of the Hospital’s founding do not give the name of the person who was selected to be matron or the process by which this occurred. Reports of the first formal meeting of the hospital’s entire organising committee simply state that ‘a matron was appointed’, giving an indication that a suitable candidate had already been secured.(9) This leaves us to speculate how the position was actually filled. The post was not advertised in the newspapers that we know of, but there were three individuals who may have had a hand in Sarah Gillbee’s appointment.

The first of these was Mrs Alicia Jennings, the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital’s inaugural treasurer who had known Mrs Gillbee (as Mrs Barfoot) in Van Diemen’s Land. Mrs Jennings first met Sarah and her family at the Launceston wharf in August 1836; later, Alicia Jennings resided for a time in the small community of Hobart where Mrs Barfoot lived and worked as a midwife. Another possible patron of Mrs Gillbee was Dr John Maund who, with his colleague Dr Richard Tracy, was a founder of the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital. A year earlier in July 1855, Maund performed a post-mortem on Sarah’s husband, and gave evidence at the inquest into his death. John Maund was also well known to Mrs Alicia Jennings socially and as her medical advisor.(10) The third individual of potential influence was Dr William Gillbee, Sarah Gillbee’s surgeon son. William Gillbee, although not directly connected to the Lying-in Hospital, knew John Maund and Richard Tracy professionally. It may be that this personal and professional network held some sway in awarding Mrs Gillbee the position of matron at the Lying-in.

Why Sarah relinquished her married surname of Barfoot and took the surname of her first husband, Gillbee, at the Lying-in Hospital we can only guess. Perhaps it was a strategic move on her part to avoid any association with her unpleasant, and very public, Hobart court case fifteen years earlier which had painted her as an incompetent midwife.

The work of matron
The Melbourne Lying-in Hospital was a quite different enterprise from Thatcher’s Institution in Edinburgh where Sarah Gillbee claimed to have gained her education as a midwife. In Mrs Gillbee’s time, Thatcher’s Institution did not admit patients; instead, midwifery attention was provided ‘outdoors’ at the person’s own home with the Institution’s Dispensary occupying the actual building. But by the time the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital was established forty years after Thatcher’s, conventions had changed and lying-in hospitals around the world began to accommodate poor women as in-patients during labour and the post-natal period. With women housed in the hospital, the matron was expected to live on the premises and seek permission to leave the grounds. How this impacted on widow Gillbee’s family life is open to speculation.

In contrast to hospital management today, the position of matron in the nineteenth century required no specific skills other than a capacity to superintend a large household. Gaols, immigrant ships, hostels, and asylums had matrons who managed the various institutions’ activities. It is generally assumed that women in these positions had no training for the job, but Sarah Gillbee was different. She had claimed training as a midwife in the Scottish tradition, had practiced in that capacity for almost twenty years, and had borne 15 children, equipping her with a combination of qualities and personal attributes that made her ideal for the position of matron at Victoria’s first hospital devoted to the care of women.

Exactly what was Sarah Gillbee’s day-to-day work as matron is difficult to establish as the records of this period have not survived. Rules for the matron to follow were published in the 1856 Annual Report (see below) but it is not clear if these restrictions applied to Sarah Gillbee’s tenure. In its first year, at the location of Albert Street, East Melbourne, the Lying-in Hospital could cater for up to seventeen women at one time. Apart from the nursing of women before, during, and after, birth and caring for their babies, as well as nursing the women with intractable gynaecological conditions, there was linen to wash, floors to scrub, rooms and mattresses to air, food to purchase, and meals to cook for the in-patients. For overseeing this work, Sarah Gillbee’s annual salary was a handsome £100. Two servants, Phoebe Dunston and Sarah (surname illegible), were the only other staff employed in 1856. They were paid £30 and £25 respectively.

A midwife at South Melbourne
The length of time that Sarah Gillbee remained matron at the Lying-in Hospital is a mystery. In November 1856, she married Thomas Griffiths, at that time the publican of the Wattle Tree Hotel at Malvern. Records which might have indicated when Mrs Gillbee left the employment of the Lying-in Hospital have not survived, but by 1859 it seems Sarah was again a widow. She had resumed her name of Barfoot and was living at Clifford Place off Dorcas Street in Emerald Hill, now called South Melbourne, where she occupied a weather-board cottage of three rooms. Sometime in 1859, she moved around the corner to Dorcas Street where she rented a four-roomed brick and slate cottage from David Farrier, a local carpenter and builder. When that house was sold in 1874, Sarah moved to a weather-board, three-roomed cottage at 94A Moray Street on the south side bounded by Chessell, Market and Clarke Streets.

From 1862 to 1881, Mrs Barfoot was listed in the Sands & McDougall Business Directories as a "midwife" at Emerald Hill.(11) The Emerald Hill Town Council’s yearly rate rolls from 1864 to 1880 recorded her occupation as: "midwife", "accoucheur" or "Accoucheures" (sic).(12) Sarah’s final move was to the home of her niece at Stawell in Western Victoria where she died in February 1882. After a career as a midwife spanning more than 40 years, her passing was marked by the entry in a Melbourne newspaper of two death notices: one under the name of Barfoot, and the other under the name of Griffiths. Sarah Barfoot was buried at the Stawell Cemetery. Her headstone bears the name Sarah Brien (sic) Griffith (sic); her age was put at 74.

Madonna Grehan
Director, Australian Nursing and Midwifery History Project
With the assistance of the extended Barfoot family and thanks to Terence Lane, National Gallery of Victoria

References
1. O'Sullivan, David M. (1966) "William Gillbee 1825-1885 and the introduction of antiseptic surgery to Australia". The Medical Journal of Australia, no. 2:871-77.
2. Mortimer, Barbara. (2002) "The nurse in Edinburgh c. 1760-1860: the impact of commerce and professionalisation". Unpublished PhD Thesis, Department of Economic and Social History, Faculty of Social Science, Edinburgh.
3. Dr Thatcher's Case Book, (1824-1933). Unpublished. Held by Lothian Health Services Archive, The University of Edinburgh.
4. Mortimer. (2002) "The nurse in Edinburgh c. 1760-1860."
5. Rushen, Elizabeth (2003) "Single and Free: Female Migration to Australia, 1833-1837" Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty. Ltd
6. Grehan, Madonna (2006) "'Incompetent Women' and 'Medical Gentlemen': Maternity Turf Wars in Van Diemen’s Land circa 1841", Proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, Medical History Symposium, Medicine and Society: Past Present & Future, Launceston, Tasmania, 6-9 July 2006.
7. The Argus, 28 July 1848.
8. The Herald, 18 December 1855, p.7.
9. The Herald, 16 August 1856, p.5.
10. Diary of Alicia Jennings January 1856-September 1856 Jennings family: diaries and papers. Accession number MS 9432 1792/3, Held at the State Library of Victoria.
11. Grehan, Madonna (2003) "Midwives and Nurses in Colonial Victoria: Sarah Barfoot and her contemporaries", The Genealogist, Journal of the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies, Vol X, No.11.
12. South Melbourne Council, "Emerald Hill Rate Rolls". City of Port Phillip Collection, Microform No. 1864-1882. Accoucheur (m) or accoucheuse (f) is the French word for a childbirth attendant.

Sources: Primary
The Herald newspaper
The Argus newspaper
Rate Rolls of South Melbourne Council
Diary of Alicia Jennings
Dr Thatcher's Case Book, (1824-1933). Held by Lothian Health Services Archive, The University of Edinburgh.

Sources: Published
Grehan, Madonna (2003) "Midwives and Nurses in Colonial Victoria: Sarah Barfoot and her contemporaries", The Genealogist, Journal of the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies, Vol X, No.11.
Grehan, Madonna (2006) "'Incompetent Women' and 'Medical Gentlemen': Maternity Turf Wars in Van Diemen’s Land circa 1841", Proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, Medical History Symposium, Medicine and Society: Past Present & Future, Launceston, Tasmania, 6-9 July 2006.
Mortimer, Barbara. (2002) "The nurse in Edinburgh c. 1760-1860: the impact of commerce and professionalisation". Unpublished PhD Thesis, Department of Economic and Social History, Faculty of Social Science, Edinburgh.

Archival/Heritage Resources

City of Port Phillip Collection

• Emerald Hill Rate Rolls, 1864 - 1882, Microform No. 1864-1882; City of Port Phillip Collection [ Details... ].

Lothian Health Services Archive, The University of Edinburgh

• Dr Thatcher's Case Book, 1824 - 1933; Lothian Health Services Archive, The University of Edinburgh [ Details... ].

State Library of Victoria, Australian Manuscripts Collection

• Diary of Alicia Jennings January 1856-September 1856 Jennings family: diaries and papers, January 1856 - September 1856, MS 9432 1792/3; State Library of Victoria, Australian Manuscripts Collection [ Details... ].

Published Resources

Books

• Rushen, Elizabeth, Single and Free: Female Migration to Australia, 1833-1837, Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty. Ltd, Melbourne, 2003. [ Details... ]

Conference Papers

• Grehan, Madonna, '"Incompetent Women" and "Medical Gentlemen": Maternity Turf Wars in Van Diemen’s Land circa 1841', in Medical History Symposium, Medicine and Society: Past Present & Future, 6-9 July 2006., Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, Launceston, Tasmania, 2006. [ Details... ]

Journal Articles

• Grehan, Madonna, 'Midwives and Nurses in Colonial Victoria: Sarah Barfoot and her contemporaries', The Genealogist, Journal of the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies (Melbnourne), vol. X, no. 11, 2003. [ Details... ]
• Mortimer, Barbara, 'The nurse in Edinburgh c. 1760-1860: the impact of commerce and professionalisation', Department of Economic and Social History, Faculty of Social Science, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 2002. [ Details... ]
• O'Sullivan, David M., 'William Gillbee 1825-1885 and the introduction of antiseptic surgery to Australia', The Medical Journal of Australia, no. 2, 1966, pp. 871-77.. [ Details... ]

Newspaper Articles

• The Argus (Melbourne), 8 July 1848. [ Details... ]
• The Herald (Melbourne), 18 December 1855, p. 7. [ Details... ]
• The Herald (Melbourne), 16 August 1856, p. 5. [ Details... ]

Images

Title

Gillbee, Sarah

Type

Image

Creator

Unknown

Details

Prepared by: Robyn Waymouth

Created: 9 November 2006, Last modified: 26 November 2006