August 14, 2025, by Chloe

Results Day Special: Midwifery Exams in the 1940s

Dinah Holt trained and then worked as a nurse and midwife between 1944 and 1986, working at various hospitals in the East Midlands and as far afield as Switzerland. A lot has changed about nursing education since she undertook her training –  the NHS would not come into existence until part way through her training, in 1946 – but some things certainly haven’t: revision, exams and the tense wait for results day!

Dinah’s archive, which is held at MSC, features – among other things –  the letters she wrote home to her parents, who she referred to affectionately as ‘Cons and Cliggy’. These records can give us a valuable insight into the experiences of young trainee nurses and midwives in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in her correspondence from 1948-9, during which time she was completing her part II Midwifery training at Welwyn Garden City. Many of Dinah’s letters focus on her social life rather than her work, though there are some glimpses of her training.

In a letter to her parents written in July 1948, she wrote: ‘At the moment I’m just snowed under with work – patients’ case histories still, and now a test paper to be written by Saturday, and by the amount of paper we’ve been given, I imagine it will take me about a fortnight to complete, but the amount I know is negligible, then there are all the lectures to write up and every week it mounts up, and apparently this goes steadily on mounting up to the grand finale at the end of 6 months, and I’m sure I’ll be a mental, nervous and physical wreck by Christmas at this rate!’

Finally, the time came for the Dinah to sit her final exams. On 10 February 1949, she wrote to her parents: ‘Well, the exam wasn’t too bad, but the questions could have been better, and I must say I finished quite a while before the end, but anyway I’m just hoping for a decent viva on the 18^th-3pm’.  A viva is an oral examination – today, this is part of the examination of PhD candidates but is not generally an element in the examination of students studying other degrees, at least not here in the UK, a change for which I, at least, am extremely grateful, as it sounds terrifying!

However, it seems that Dinah wasn’t fazed, because she wrote to her parents exuberant less than two weeks later: ‘I’ve PASSED! And I can’t believe it, ‘cos I was genuinely worried about my viva, but it’s all over now. I do hope all the others –ex QCH and QEH are through as well. Now I feel I want to celebrate but where in this one-horse town’. Apologies if any of you are from Welwyn Garden City, I’m sure it’s lovely there, but Dinah was not a fan. It seems that for her, nothing could ever live up to the dizzying heights of London, where she had previously trained and – based on her correspondence – seemed to spend most of her time queueing to buy rush tickets for West End musicals. I hope that any examinations which are coming up for all of you go similarly well, and that Dinah’s example shows that even though training can be a long process which is difficult at times, hopefully it will all be worth it in the end!

If you are interested in coming to see any items from Dinah’s archives for yourself – or indeed any items from our other collections – please email us at  mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk and we would be happy to book you in.

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