This article focuses on Mrs Bull, the ‘handywoman’ who for a fee attends women in childbirth and also lays out the dead in the world of Hanky Park, despite the fact that it was by the 1930s illegal for her to do the first without being a qualified midwife. However, it will also look at Mrs Haddock who is ‘a certificated midwife’, and yet turns out to be the least trustworthy of the two. Material comes from both of Greenwood’s Hanky Park narratives: Love on the Dole and The Cleft Stick.
See: ‘Call the Handywoman!’: Birth and Death in Hanky Park (1933-1937) *
Enjoy! – Chris.
Walter Greenwood: Not Just Love on the Dole 