Judith Godden | Bathsheba Ghost, Matron of the Sydney Infirmary 1852–66 : a Silenced Life | Labour History, 87

Bathsheba Ghost, Matron of the Sydney Infirmary 1852–66 : a Silenced Life

Judith Godden^*

Bathsheba Ghost was Matron of Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary (now Sydney Hospital) from 1852–66. She has been subsumed into the 'before' narrative of the bad old days at Sydney Hospital (and Australia) before rescue by the arrival from England of middle-class nurses trained under the auspices of the iconic Florence Nightingale. Matron Bathsheba Ghost was one of the few working-class women who rose to prominence, on her own merits, from a convict past. With her recognition also comes recognition of the major Sydney hospital when it was a pre-industrial style workplace not yet dominated by medical needs. It was an institution run by prominent male philanthropists whose rules were subverted and adapted by the staff, their families and the destitute, chronically ill who found a temporary home.

Introduction

Matron Bathsheba Ghost died at her workplace, the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary on the 12 August 1866. Her death certificate stated that she was 50 years old (actually she was at least 56 years old) and that she died of a disease of the uterus.¹ This diagnosis means that her dying was a lingering and painful affair, relieved by increasing doses of opium and/or alcohol. It is unlikely she was an effective Matron in the months before she died. In terms of contemporary recognition, it scarcely mattered. She had been Matron of the Infirmary since 1852 and during those 14 years her value as an employee had been consistently recognised. She died never knowing how completely, or how soon, she would lose that public respect and recognition.

Ghost's historical nemesis was Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale. Their combined influence ensured that Ghost and her fellow hospital workers would be largely dismissed as 'Gamps'. Charles Dickens created the satirical figure of nurses Sarah (Sairey) Gamp and her friend Betsey Prig in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit. They were depicted as coarse, unfeeling, middle-aged, alcoholic, fat and very working-class nurses.² They struck a chord with Dickens' readers as they reflected popular fears of poor nursing while cleverly embodying class and aesthetic values.

The memorable caricature of Gamp was a godsend to nursing reformers such as Florence Nightingale who campaigned for trained, female, lay nurses. They enthusiastically adopted the Gamp stereotype to depict the essential 'before' figure against which the saintly, trained, clean, slender, middle-class Nightingale nurse was defined. In particular, the [later Royal] British Nursing Association regularly depicted the 'before' Gamp in contrast to the saintly trained nurse in the pages of its journal The Nursing Record.³ Additionally, much of the iconography of Florence Nightingale revolved around the assumption that it was her Nightingale School of Nursing, founded at St Thomas's Hospital in London in 1860, which — almost single-handedly — replaced the Gamps with trained angels of mercy. Much of the power of these stereotypes (almost archetypes) came from a reliance on the dichotomy of the good and bad woman. Such dichotomies have been particularly powerful in Australia as a means of dealing with the convict past.⁴

Numerous historians have challenged the unthinking acceptance of the Gamp and angelic Nightingale nurse stereotypes. Summers has been at the forefront of those defending the competence of the untrained, secular 'Gamps'. Dingwall and others have pointed to the continuities in the nursing workforce before and after the Nightingale reforms. Nelson's work demonstrated the international strength of pre-Nightingale nursing by religious sisterhoods and how Florence Nightingale's genius was to harness women's pious energy in a secular context. Bashford has outlined how these developments in nursing were gendered with female nurses embodying the role of guardians of physical and moral purity.⁵

Research into specific cohorts of 'pre Nightingale' untrained nurses have revealed that nurses were much like other workers. The majority was competent despite adverse working conditions. Studies of individuals also indicate that the Gamp stereotype did scant justice to some outstanding nurses.⁶ Continuities between the untrained nurses and those trained under the Nightingale system in Sydney have also been identified, revealing the 'new' nurses as highly mobile, frequently ex-domestic servants rather than as middle-class angels. A similar study has not been undertaken for nurses at the Sydney Infirmary before the introduction of nurse training along Nightingale lines in 1868. The only specific study of these nurses is a summary of the entire period from the Infirmary's beginnings as a hospital for convicts and largely assumes that nursing before the Nightingale reforms was uncaring and ineffective.⁷

While data on the untrained, colonial nurses is scarce, the same is not always true for the Matrons in charge of these nurses. Yet despite their elevated status in the female workforce, institutional matrons have received little attention from labour historians.⁸ They have largely been recognised in the many excellent hospital histories published in Australia. The lack of a recent history of Sydney Hospital has ensured this is not the case for Bathsheba Ghost. The first and last history of Sydney Hospital, apart from a pictorial booklet, was published in 1911. The lack of published histories is partly due to the near-complete lack of manuscript records of the Sydney Infirmary. The only known manuscript record from Bathsheba Ghost's time is the House Visitors' Book in which Board members recorded their comments on the Infirmary after their regular inspections.⁹ Even that book is hardly an adequate record for Ghost as the first entry is less than three months before her death. It is understandable that the one published history of nursing covering all the Australian colonies records that 'Very little is known' about Bathsheba Ghost.¹⁰ Most mentions of her, however, conflate the fictional persona of Sarah Gamp with the historical figure of Bathsheba Ghost as in the following example:

Mrs Ghost, a Sarah Gamp of the Southern Hemisphere... in the habit of fortifying herself against minor discomforts with a judicious choice of alcohol.¹¹

Matron Bathsheba Ghost: Contemporary Recognition

During her lifetime there was a surprising consensus about Matron Bathsheba Ghost. There was no hint that she was an uncaring, drunken Gamp. The surviving evidence is patchy but consistently points to her holding down her position with dignity and with the gratitude of her employers.

Simply being appointed Matron of Sydney Infirmary was significant recognition in itself as it was the key public hospital in the colony. Its origin was the first tents for the sick pitched on the western side of Sydney Cove, later the 'Rum Hospital' built to house sick convicts. With the cessation of transportation, the Infirmary reinvented itself as a place of care and cure for the colony's sick poor. In 1881 it gained its current name of Sydney Hospital. Its position in Macquarie Street next to the colonial parliament gave it a presence and power that it retains to this day.¹²

Part of Sydney Infirmary's importance in Ghost's time came from the sheer numbers of patients. By 1866 it was a 190-bed hospital but so overcrowded with patients that the Board planned to meet the demand with an extra 90 beds. No reliable figures are available for the whole period but typically throughout the 1850s and 1860s, at least 1,500 patients were admitted each year. Even with repeat admissions and possible over-estimation, this number meant that the Infirmary had a major impact on thousands of patients, their families and friends. The Infirmary was particularly significant to Sydney's industrial workers as accident victims were sent there. Given the rapid increase of population, and poor levels of health, the significance of Sydney Hospital was scarcely diminished by the founding of a second general hospital in Sydney, St Vincent's Hospital by the Sisters of Charity, in 1857.¹³

The Infirmary's Annual Reports consistently recorded appreciation of Ghost. A typical comment appeared in 1854, that the hospital's 'order and cleanliness' was mainly due to Bathsheba Ghost's 'unwearied personal exertions'.¹⁴ The respect given Ghost was not just in words. The Infirmary Board paid her one of the highest salaries for a woman in the colony. Her initial yearly salary of £80, with board and lodging, increased to £100 in 1854, then finally to £120. Her final salary was significantly below that of even a junior male medical practitioner who, for example, received a salary of £200, with board and lodging, as resident physician or surgeon at the Infirmary. Yet her salary was well above that of a skilled female domestic servant, such as a plain cook, who could expect a maximum of £30 per year along with board and lodging.¹⁵ The value of Bathsheba Ghost's 'in kind' salary increased in 1864 when the Infirmary Board reported that she had at last 'accommodation due to her position and long and faithful service'. For the last 20 years she had, 'with a contentment much to her credit, occupied small and unsuitable apartments'.¹⁶ Her death, unlike that of her eminent successor Lucy Osburn, was noted with a sustained comment of 'much regret'.¹⁷ Sometime during 1946–56, a memorial made of stone from the Hospital was erected over her grave in a ceremony presided over by the then Matron, Elsie Pidgeon.¹⁸

The doctors of the Infirmary also recognised Bathsheba Ghost's value. As Helmstadter has pointed out, nursing reform was a doctor driven phenomena. Doctors needed skilled, reliable nursing to implement the demanding new regimes of care.¹⁹ In Sydney from 1857 the doctors regularly petitioned the Infirmary Board to introduce trained, female nurses. After 1860 when the Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas's Hospital in London was founded, the petitions became more specific with the Sydney doctors asking for nurses trained at the Nightingale School. Despite their increasing frustration at the lack of nursing reforms, it is significant that the doctors were careful not to criticise Matron Bathsheba Ghost. In 1865 the Honorary Medical Officers reported on their 'repeated suggestions' to reform nursing and the patients' diet. In requesting an 'efficient and educated nursing staff' the medical officers insisted that 'credit is due to the Matron for energy and kindness in the performance of her duties'. Far from criticising Ghost, they qualified their demand for change with statements such as 'It has been only owing to the management and active control of the Matron, that the limited degree of comfort, &c., at present enjoyed by the patients, has been obtained'.²⁰ A similar constraint is evident when the Nightingale nursing advocate, surgeon Alfred Roberts, wrote to Florence Nightingale supporting Henry Parkes' request that she send trained nurses to the colony. Roberts described Bathsheba Ghost as a determined opponent to nursing reform who was nevertheless, a 'very old and very worthy' officer of the hospital.²¹ The likeliest reason why such a succession of doctors was so careful to exonerate Bathsheba Ghost was because she was valued as a conscientious Matron.

Recognition of Bathsheba Ghost's abilities by her contemporaries also spread beyond the colony. In 1866 a Queensland Parliamentary Select Committee considered whether they should bring out British Nightingale-trained nurses to Brisbane Hospital. Three witnesses (two surgeons and a Hospital committee member) suggested that nurses trained by Ghost not only would be an adequate substitute, but the better option. Ghost, they testified, was 'an admirable person' who trained nurses at Sydney Infirmary and could supply efficient, trained nurses for Brisbane Hospital. Her nurses, they argued, were just as competent as the Nightingale trained nurses, and had the advantage of understanding colonial conditions.²²

Bathsheba Ghost's value was also recognised by at least one eminent, middle-class overseas visitor. Maria Rye, in her role as immigration advocate, visited Sydney in 1865 and wrote to Florence Nightingale about the state of colonial institutions. She was dismayed by the horror of conditions at the Gladesville Lunatic Asylum, generally condemned colonial hospitals but wrote to Florence Nightingale that the Sydney Infirmary was 'a wonderful exception as good as any Hospital in London'.²³

Bathsheba Ghost's will provides compelling evidence that she identified with her employer with an exceptional degree of loyalty. She bequeathed the Infirmary £100 which, for most of her time as Matron, was a year's salary. It was enough to make her executor a Governor of the Infirmary, entitled to recommend the admission of one patient at any one time to the hospital. Furthermore, this legacy was to be paid before her one other bequest, to her granddaughter Eliza. Her trustee and executor was the establishment figure (later Sir) Matthew Stephen, Infirmary Director since 1857, barrister and son of Chief Justice Sir Alfred Stephen.²⁴

The picture that emerges from hospital-related contemporary records is that Bathsheba Ghost was a successful working woman who gained the respect of her contemporaries. She was one of a number of respected Matrons of colonial institutions who commanded, for women, high salaries and influential positions. Another such matron was Lucy Hicks of the Hyde Park Asylum for Infirm and Destitute Women in the same Macquarie Street block as Sydney Infirmary. Lucy Hick's annual salary had risen to £200, with board and lodging, by 1873 when she was praised for her efficient and economical management.²⁵ In one key aspect, however, Bathsheba Ghost conformed to the Gamp stereotype. Both Gamp and Ghost were working-class women. Contemporary comments about Ghost, as noted above, indicate that she operated much as would a faithful and appreciated family retainer. It was a relationship marked on Ghost's part by deference rather than labour activism. It was in this context that her private worth and public value were both recognised and rewarded by her contemporaries.

Bathsheba Ghost's grave, St Stephen's Churchyard, NewtownThe inscription reads: This stone from Sydney Hospital/In memory of Bathsheba Ghost/Matron of Sydney Infirmary now Sydney Hospital/Died August 12th 1866 Photo: Judith Godden, 2004

Bathsheba Ghost's working-class identity accounts for some of the ease with which after her death she was subsumed into the Gamp stereotype, despite sustained public accolades during her lifetime. Yet there was another factor that damned her in the eyes of later reformers: there was more to Ghost's labour history than an identity as a respectable servant.

Bathsheba Ghost, the Criminal

On 19 May 1838, Bathsheba Ghost of 338 Oxford Street, London, was convicted in the Old Bailey of receiving stolen goods. The transcript of her trial indicates she was caught red-handled, an accomplice to a jewel thief. The crime was less glamorous than it sounded. The jewel thief was 17-year-old Michael Woolf: the victims of the theft his mother and stepfather. Woolf's mother alleged that Bathsheba Ghost had persuaded them to take her reprobate son in again, after which he repeatedly stole from them, taking the jewels to Ghost.²⁶

Bathsheba's husband Thomas was present at the arrest. Gossip was repeated at the trial that they were not legally married but the court accepted that they were. He has been understandably confused with another Thomas Ghost, a farm labourer who was transported to NSW in 1834.²⁷ Bathsheba's husband was a jeweller but was not implicated in the crime. He incriminated Bathsheba when he upbraided her in front of the arresting constable, not for stealing the jewels but for 'having them there' at their home. Perhaps he was naive; perhaps it was an unguarded comment in the shock of the arrest of his wife. Another possibility is that he was effectively shifting the whole blame onto her either from self-interest or to ensure their son (four years old and also called Thomas) was left with one parent. Despite eight character witnesses, mostly shopkeepers, Bathsheba Ghost was sentenced to 14 years transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales. Her accomplice Michael Woolf was sentenced to prison for seven years and recommended for mercy. Deemed the initiator of the crime, there was no recommendation of mercy for Bathsheba Ghost.²⁸

The convict indent listed Bathsheba Ghost as born in Somerset,29 years old, a 'ladies' nursery maid', married with one son and literate. She was five feet two inches tall, with a shallow, freckled complexion, light brown hair, gray eyes and a scar inside her left thumb. Her brother belonged to the Church of England and all indications are that she did too although she was simply listed on the convict indent as Protestant. Bathsheba's family name belonged to an oral tradition and was variously transcribed by officials including as Dominick, Doming, Dominie and Dominey. She arrived in Sydney on the Planter on 9 March 1839, the year before transportation to New South Wales ceased. Six years after her arrival in Sydney she was given a ticket of leave. It allowed her to work as a free woman in a restricted area. Two years later, on 9 October 1847, she was granted a conditional pardon; free on condition she did not return to the United Kingdom. Just five years after her conditional pardon, Bathsheba Ghost was appointed Matron of the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary. She was commemorated in 1864 as having worked at the Infirmary for 20 years, suggesting she found employment at the hospital as soon as she was granted her ticket of leave. Her ticket of leave described her as working as a domestic servant in nearby Castlereagh Street but it is also possible that she had a period of sickness and her employers admitted her into the Infirmary. Convalescent patients were a common source of nursing labour and after her ticket of leave Ghost may simply have stayed at the Infirmary. In any case, Sydney Infirmary was the only place of free employment she experienced in Sydney. The intense loyalty Ghost gave to her employers can be understood only by recognising that the Infirmary was not just her workplace, it was also her home and site of re-emergence into 'respectable' society.²⁹

Bathsheba Ghost not only embodied the working class, she embodied the then dreaded 'convict stain' of Australia's white population. The role of middle-class perceptions distorting our view of such women is relevant to their depictions.³⁰ Yet there is no hint of her convict background in the surviving records of Sydney Infirmary nor in Watson's 1911 history. As Kingston summarised, in the decades after the end of transportation, Australian colonies' convict 'past was obscured and the present repressed'.³¹ That so few nurses were transported to Australia helped to hide her past. In Ghost's case, it appears that the evidence was carefully suppressed until it disappeared from memory only to be revived by family historians some 130 years later.³²

Paradigm Shift

Bathsheba Ghost was unfortunate in her timing. Ghost and other 'pre-Nightingale' matrons and nurses' reputation suffered and their achievements were negated when they were subsumed into the 'before' construct of the medical and nursing reformers. Contrasted to the 'after' construct, Ghost and her fellow workers were obscured by their successors and the myth of angelic Nightingale nurses. Given the power of Nightingale iconography, it is little wonder that the public recognition and occupational respect enjoyed by Bathsheba Ghost did not long survive her death.

There is a particular irony in Ghost's being subsumed into the Gamp stereotype. The irony is that as Matron she was only marginally responsible for patient care. The hospital matron responsible for nursing and nurses was a later invention. Bathsheba Ghost, like other hospital matrons of the time, was employed as an institutional housekeeper.³³ Hospital matrons were just like matrons of other charitable institutions, all of whom had the oversight of the domestic management of the institution. When the Infirmary Board commended Bathsheba Ghost for contributing to the 'general economy of the household', it was accurately describing her duties.³⁴ Of the eight rules formally defining Ghost's duties, only one referred to nurses. This rule was that the Matron was to ensure that the nurses, along with the servants, did 'their duty'.³⁵ That Ghost was later credited with training nurses was a sign that, like another housekeeper-Matron, Sarah Wardroper of the Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas's Hospital London, she responded to the pressures for change in the Matron's role. Training nurses or doing any nursing was never part of Ghost's official duties. The valuing of Bathsheba Ghost as a deferential upper servant and loyal housekeeper to the Infirmary, rather than as a nursing manager, was in keeping with the reality of her situation.

Bathsheba Ghost's reputation also suffered because of the adverse publicity around the death of a patient, David Gibson. Like many seamen, Gibson was admitted to the Infirmary because his employers paid an annual subscription in return for the right to admit a certain number of sick or injured employees. David Gibson's employer was outraged when, after three weeks in the Infirmary, Gibson died neglected and vermin-ridden. Henry Parkes was the government minister responsible and Gibson's death gave him the excuse to write to Florence Nightingale for Nightingale-trained nurses. The outrage over David Gibson's death suggests it was neither usual nor acceptable. Given that Gibson died on 2 July 1866 and Bathsheba Ghost the following month on 12 August, Gibson's neglect was more probably a symptom of Ghost's deteriorating health and consequent inability to ensure that the nurses or anyone else did 'their duty'. Significantly, there was no suggestion in the course of the Inquiry that Ghost was responsible for the poor conditions.³⁶

Whose voices have survived is another important factor in Bathsheba Ghost's lack of historical recognition. Bathsheba Ghost was literate but unlikely to have been highly so. Her sister could read but not write while her brother was illiterate.³⁷ Ghost operated within a largely oral culture and no record has been found which reflects her voice, not a phrase nor even an echo. She is silenced.

Ghost's successor, after a temporary appointment, was Lucy Osburn. Osburn arrived on 5 March 1868 with five other nursing Sisters to take over the control of nursing at Sydney Infirmary. They had all trained at the Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas's Hospital in London and were all, to varying degrees, literate. Lucy Osburn was especially articulate on the page, as befitted the daughter of a successful author and the sister of a successful headmistress.³⁸ One of the key sources of evidence about Bathsheba Ghost is a letter written by Lucy Osburn to Florence Nightingale. Osburn wrote the letter to justify why she called herself Lady Superior rather than Matron. The reason was, she claimed,

There are matrons here who left their country for their country's good. My predecessor Mrs Ghost was one they are not always sober often have difficulty in writing their names & like poor Mrs. Ghost though with a child or two up & down the country have no claim to the title of Mrs. Matron therefore signifies here a woman who could not get a situation as a servant.³⁹

Lucy Osburn's comments were in a private letter and never meant as a definitive statement for the public record. Lucy Osburn also wrote them as defensive comments to justify her actions to an increasingly disapproving Florence Nightingale. The general comment that matrons were those who could not become domestic servants is questionable given that the salaries of matrons were some three times higher than that of domestic servants. The specific comments about the private character of Bathsheba Ghost also are questionable. There is no evidence to support the gossip about the 'child or two up & down the country' nor that she was one of the many in colonial Australia who were 'not always sober'. She did have a claim 'to the title of Mrs' and was literate so was unlikely to have 'difficulty' writing her name. The only apparent accuracy of Lucy Osburn's description was that Ghost was one who 'left their country for their country's good', that is, she had been a convict.

The letters of Lucy Osburn to Florence Nightingale include vivid depictions of the conditions found at the Infirmary in March 1868. Osburn described the nurses as 'dirty "frowsy" looking old women, slatternly young ones all greasy with their hair down their backs with ragged stuff dresses' and how she set about providing decent beds, washbasins, and mirrors. One of the first tasks of the Nightingale trained Sisters was to teach the colonial nurses how 'to do their own hair' so there was no more excuse for a dirty, untidy appearance.⁴⁰ Sister Mary Barker's letters were less literary but even more forcefully indignant about the conditions. Her first letter to Florence Nightingale complained about the untidy wards, 'miserably dirty' patients, nurses dressed in all sorts of clothes including 'the largest crinolines I ever saw no caps and some not a bit of apron'. As the most experienced of the Nightingale nurses, she especially condemned their nursing practice,

women — who consider themselves good Nurses, would let there [sic] patients lay in there [sic] beds unmade for weeks and not even wash there [sic] hands and faces for the same length of time, with this excuse, the doctor says that he or she is not to be disturbed ... In many cases ... it was necessary to wash the patient and have them lifted into a clean bed, the old bed was quite rotted away and good mattresses in the same condition, just the shape of patients body from head to foot. They are so lazy, that when they se [sic] a patient covered with bed sores and vermin, it is looked upon quite as a matter of course.⁴¹

Given the graphic nature of these letters, it is understandable that they have been used to describe 'pre-Nightingale' conditions at Sydney Infirmary: understandable but misleading.

What has not been made clear is that the letters were not meant, and were not, a description of conditions earlier than March 1868.⁴² Ghost died nearly 19 months before Lucy Osburn, Mary Barker and the other trained Nightingale nurses arrived in the colony. Since Ghost's lingering death in 1866 there was a temporary matron. All the staff knew that the temporary matron would be replaced or demoted when the head of the nurses sent to the colony by Florence Nightingale arrived. Under such demoralising conditions, it is not surprising that conditions were bad by March 1868.

Lucy Osburn's actions did not quite match her and Mary Barker's rhetoric, and suggests that the change from untrained to trained nursing at Sydney Infirmary was less abrupt than usually assumed. Osburn kept a register of nurses and her entries reveal that she accepted three of the existing nurses for retraining as 'Nightingale' nurses. Three is a misleadingly small number as it was at least half the female nursing staff. As was common in hospitals with predominantly male patients, most of the nurses at the Sydney Infirmary were men. The historical obscurity of these male nurses has been heightened by the use of the term 'wardsman', interchangeably used with (male) nurse. Once Lucy Osburn arrived, the men's competency as nurses was irrelevant. The Nightingale system of nursing only allowed male nurses as the exception, for those nursing tasks deemed indecent and/or requiring great physical strength such as nursing male patients with sexually transmitted diseases and/or mental illnesses. For example, female Nightingale nurses were trained to insert enemas in male patients but not catheters which required genital contact.⁴³

There is a further indication of the competence of the three female nurses Lucy Osburn retained. They did not receive the usual training of being rotated around different wards for a year. Rather, two were left on one ward for the whole year, while the third was kept on one ward for six months. The main sign of their retraining was that they were entered on the Nurses Register as probationers (students) and were paid probationers' wages of £26 a year. Such deviation from the norm suggests a token apprenticeship and that Lucy Osburn did not consider they needed thorough retraining. All three proved satisfactory nurses and left voluntarily. Ann Brannagan nursed at Sydney Infirmary for 11 years, while the other two, the sisters Jane and Elizabeth Morrow, took their new skills to, respectively, Maitland and Newcastle Hospitals.⁴⁴

Work Culture

Grounding perceptions of Bathsheba Ghost in evidence from contemporary records not only separates her from historical stereotypes but also enables her working life to be better understood. One important aspect of this working life was the radical change in the role of hospitals, including the Sydney Infirmary, while Ghost was Matron. At first the Infirmary was truly that, basically a place where the infirm received care, but by the time Ghost died doctors viewed it as a site of medical cure for the acutely ill.

Helmstadter has outlined the medical changes that meant that untrained, ill-educated nurses became increasingly inappropriate. She argued that, especially during the 1840s and 50s, advances in medicine necessitated the use of conscientious, literate nurses. From the 1840s, the medical regime gradually changed from 'depletion' therapies such as bloodletting and purging, to that of 'nourishing' regimes with medical orders for frequent fluid and nutriment replacement. From the 1850s, the use of anaesthesia during surgery not only made operations less a nightmare of agony, it dramatically increased the range of surgical interventions possible without the patients dying from the effects of shock and pain. These results in turn meant a reliance on nurses to manage the increasingly complicated post-operative needs of patients. In the late 1860s the more demanding practice of antiseptic medicine and nursing was, as Poovey argued, slowly and unevenly developed.⁴⁵

One sign of the increasing sophistication of medicine at Sydney Infirmary was the appointment of a hospital dispenser in 1850, and an additional one in 1867. Another step in the increasing medicalisation of the Infirmary was the formal acceptance in 1851 of the hospital's role as a teaching hospital for medical students. The following year saw the innovation with the greatest impact on surgery at the hospital: the introduction of anaesthetics during operations. Anaesthetics during operations were in general use by the end of the decade. Another sign of the increasing medicalisation of the Infirmary in the 1850s was the attempts to allocate patients to wards not just in terms of gender, but in terms of their medical needs. In 1855, for example, an accident ward was opened, and further medical classification was adopted in 1859 when additional wards were opened. In the 1860s a new generation of doctors accepted the use of stethoscopes.⁴⁶

As the President of the Infirmary Board explained to Florence Nightingale, by 1866 long-term patients with chronic illnesses and disabilities were only admitted to the Infirmary 'on grounds of humanity' as they tried to restrict patients to 'acute cases of the pauper class, requiring immediate medical or surgical relief'.⁴⁷ As an increasing number of acutely ill patients were admitted, they not only required more skilled nursing but also were less able to help nurse others. The work culture at the Sydney Infirmary around Bathsheba Ghost did not respond adequately to the demands of the new medical culture, with its need for regular routines, compliance to medical orders for treatments, and the imposition of stricter standards of cleanliness and hygiene.

The demand for routine was a trend reflecting broader changes as Australian colonists gradually learnt to regulate their life to clock time. At the same time, a more general trend of 'scientific' surveillance in institutions was increasingly adopted with its stress on the impartial gaze and unchanging routine. Such a context made the disciplined obedience of Nightingale-trained nurses highly valued.⁴⁸ The two biggest changes to the Infirmary when the Nightingale nurses arrived was firstly, an insistence on a clean hospital, patients and staff, and secondly, a regimented work culture. Under Lucy Osburn both nurses and patients were required to wear uniforms, bodies were cleaned and hair tidied, and regular hours of work, mealtimes and sleep imposed. Underlying it all was a stress on middle-class morality. Accordingly, one of Lucy Osburn's first 'reforms' was the introduction of prayers morning and night.⁴⁹

Few of these expectations for regularity and order appear as part of the work culture in Bathsheba Ghost's time. The impression is that the hospital housed a host of servants and their families who had a similar standard of living as the patients and other working-class inhabitants of Sydney, shared in the work and were paid in cash and kind. The work culture had a lot in common with the milieu of the inhabitants of the Rocks area of Sydney in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁵⁰ A brief glance at the management style of, and family networks around, Bathsheba Ghost is provided by an aborted 1866 inquiry, set up by Henry Parkes as Colonial Secretary. It was aborted when the Board of Directors refused to co-operate and Parkes discovered he had no legal grounds to continue. Four Directors of the Infirmary requested the inquiry within a week of Bathsheba Ghost's death. They objected to a range of conditions best summarised in their complaint, 'an absence of the necessary regularity and order which ought to exist'.⁵¹ The disorder and petty corruption it revealed was probably at its most extreme. Not only was the Infirmary then without a permanent Matron, it is unlikely that Ghost exercised effective control in the previous months when she was dying of uterine disease.

In the three days the Inquiry lasted, no evidence even hinted at the precise, post-industrial work culture increasingly associated with efficient workplaces, nursing and hospitals. The hours of work employees actually worked was one source of contention among the Infirmary employees. Irregular work attendance was a common problem in British hospitals as in other workplaces. Even in 1890, after ten years of iron rule at the London Hospital, the Nightingale-style Matron Eva Luckes still could not tell at any one time how many nurses worked in the hospital. As was typical of older London hospitals, it was difficult to distinguish just who were employed and what were their entitlements. At Sydney Infirmary the Inquiry heard accusations of widespread petty pilfering which were usually accusations of extended family members taking hospital provisions. For example, Mr Williams admitted that his wife sometimes had dinner at the hospital but claimed she was only sharing his rations.⁵²

The 1866 Inquiry at Sydney Infirmary incidentally revealed that, in this 190-bed hospital, at least 23 people lived on the premises. They were not just employees but also members of their extended families, some of whom earned wages, others their keep, still others benefited from any spare provisions or waste. During the 1860s the family nature of the hospital workforce dramatically increased with the arrival of Bathsheba Ghost's extended family. As newly arrived, largely unskilled migrants they exploited Ghost's hard-won position at the Infirmary. Sometime after 1862 her son Thomas migrated and left his young daughter Eliza, just four years old when her grandmother died, to live with Bathsheba at the Infirmary.⁵³

More of Ghost's family arrived on the ship 'Africana' on the 15 March 1866. Among the passengers were Ghost's brother Solomon Dominie, her sister Bethia Fry, their spouses and, between them, their nine children. Such an extensive family migration suggest that they were both taking the opportunity to farewell their dying relative and taking advantage of her position at Sydney Infirmary. It was alleged that both Solomon Dominie and Thomas Ghost benefited from Infirmary supplies. Her sister Bethia Fry was formally employed, taking on the unpopular duty of night nurse. Such nurses were permanently on night duty and finding skilled nurses rather than women who sat out the 'night watch' soon became a key demand of medical and nursing reformers.⁵⁴ The new Nightingale nurses were expected to be literate but Fry conformed to the older expectations in that she could read but not write. She lived on the premises with the three oldest of her children: 22 year old William employed in the kitchen, 14 year old Amelia 'on the books in laundry', and 12 year old James who worked 'in the kitchen for his meat'. Her husband John, 'lately come from the country', lived on the premises with Bennet the messenger, Bennet's wife, their two children, Bennet's mother and 'Harry the painter'. Even Bennet's horse was accused of living in the hospital grounds and existing on hospital provisions. There was a similar extended family living in the house surgeon's quarters with the surgeon, his sister, his nephew, and 'a boy Wetheral'.⁵⁵ The 1866 Inquiry also revealed some of the informal arrangements including some salacious gossip involving Bennet's alleged affair with one of the maids.

The reason for the cluster of families living at the Infirmary hinged around the difficulties unskilled workers had in keeping their families together and in obtaining employment. While Bathsheba Ghost's sister and her three eldest children obtained a home and employment at the hospital, John Fry returning from 'up the country' suggests a fruitless search for work. Like his brother-in-law Solomon Dominie, he was illiterate and a farm labourer in England. Only those old enough to earn their keep could live at the Infirmary so the two youngest Fry children, aged eight and five years when they experienced the upheaval and prolonged discomfort of assisted migration, were boarded out with a foster family or families in Camperdown.⁵⁶

Dickens' caricature of Sairey Gamp was of a hard-hearted woman. In contrast, the 1866 Inquiry revealed Ghost's kindly approach to her, sometimes unruly, subordinates. Given its timing just after her death, this depiction is predictable. Yet the comments were not so much praise about her as incidental revelations about her actions. No-one seemed to think it unusual when it was revealed that the dying Bathsheba Ghost was 'too kind-hearted' and delayed five years before giving notice to a servant who went on drunken rampages and, it was alleged, approached Bennet, 'half-dressed, with her hair streaming in a disgraceful condition, praying me to get over the fence and get rum for her'. Ghost was alleged to have given the laundress notice telling her, 'to get yourself well as soon as possible, and leave this place at the end of the month'. Similarly another laundress told the Inquiry that when the same servant was drunk and disturbing her sleep, Ghost offered her and other servants the refuge of her own bedroom, which they 'would not do it for putting her about'.⁵⁷ Given the absence of earlier evidence it is impossible to know whether Ghost's 'kindness' was sustained or more due to passivity. Another factor is that while Ghost had the responsibility for staff, she could only dismiss them with the agreement of the Infirmary's House Committee. It is possible that Ghost had little choice but to work around incompetent staff who the Board may not have agreed to dismiss.⁵⁸

The evidence of Ghost's attitude towards the patients is sketchy and ambiguous. When the Infirmary's Honorary Secretary John Manning denounced the inadequacy of the care given by well-intentioned but rough male nurses he mentioned the pain endured by a patient with wounds on his arms and only a rough shirt with sleeves to wear. Manning wrote of Bathsheba Ghost's response as the Infirmary failed to find a sleeveless shirt, 'this torture [continued] for three months— ultimately the Matron lent this patient some article of clothing of her own'.⁵⁹ On the one hand Ghost gave her own clothing when the Infirmary could not supply the necessary shirt but on the other it did take three months before the patient's agony was relieved.

In assessing this evidence about the management of the Infirmary, it is worth remembering Abel-Smith's perceptive comment. For all its nursing and medical benefits, perhaps patients regretted the new, regimented hospital regime. In the more chaotic, dirtier, family-run institutions workers and patients shared class and cultural values.⁶⁰ In Sydney Infirmary there is evidence that patients combined to protect their more vulnerable members from middle-class reformers. Just before Bathsheba's death staff and patients refused to divulge any information to the Infirmary Secretary, John Manning, about one patient who, against the rules, had managed to find refuge at the hospital for some 10–12 years. Even when Manning condemned the nursing at the Infirmary he noted that the 'patients themselves [were] generally satisfied'.⁶¹ The patients' attitude reflected their low expectations and inexperience with any other hospital regime, yet the possibility remains that for some (perhaps most?), the older, more chaotic culture was preferable to the hygienic discipline, middle-class order, uniforms, prayers and strict regimentation of Nightingale nursing.

Conclusions

Bathsheba Ghost's story reveals a major disjunction between the contemporary and historical record. The disjunction is between the individual who redeemed herself to become a respected Matron and the historical individual dismissed as a stereotypical Sairey Gamp and/or ignored in the history of colonial working women. The term 'matron' as used in hospitals is a linguistic trap for historians unless it is appreciated that it absorbed the fundamental changes and increasing power of medicine and nursing in the second half of the nineteenth century. The sad and almost total lack of surviving manuscript records at Sydney Hospital during the colonial period has contributed to ignoring this major employer and institution for the colony's working class.

Uncovering Bathsheba Ghost and her individual contribution entails multiple recognitions. Bathsheba Ghost can be recognised, not as a Sairey Gamp, but as a deferential servant of a hospital not yet dominated by medical needs. In recognising Ghost, it is not just the individual who emerges but also a colonial work culture that is typically pre-industrial, where the private and public spheres overlay each other, and where working life was also family life. In the Infirmary an extended network of families provided tension but also workmates, social security and a degree of labour solidarity. Above all, in recognising convict and matron Bathsheba Ghost we recognise the resilience of a survivor, one who overcame adversity to reconstruct her life, and belatedly that of her family, in a colonial setting.

Endnotes

^*�I gratefully acknowledge: help from Bathsheba Ghost's family historians Wendy Rutter and Barry Sylva; Sydney Hospital for permission to use their records; the advice and enthusiasm of Elinor Wrobel, Sue Rosen and Janelle Cust; and Society of Australian Genealogists (hereafter SAG) volunteers especially John Kelly. This paper has been peer-reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees.

^1.� New South Wales (hereafter NSW) Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Death Certificate for Bathsheba Ghost, 1866/000978; International Genealogical Index, Bathsheba Doming, baptism 25 December 1809.

^2.� Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit [1843–44], Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984.

^3.� The stereotypes were regularly pictured in The Nursing Record, see www.rcn.org.uk/histricalnursingjo urnals .

^4.� For example, Lucy Seymer (comp.) Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale, Macmillan, New York, 1954; Anne Summers, Damned Whores and Gods Police, Penguin, Ringwood, 1975.

^5.� Anne Summers, Female Lives, Moral States, Threshold Press, Newbury (UK), 2000, ch. 7; Robert Dingwall, Anne Marie Rafferty and Charles Webster, An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing, Routledge, London, 1988; Sioban Nelson, 'Say Little, Do Much'. Nursing, Nuns and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2001; Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution, Macmillan, London, 1998.

^6.� Alan Pearson, Bev Taylor and Cathy Coleborne, The Nature of Nursing Work in Colonial Victoria 1840–70, Research Monograph Series, 10, Deakin University, 1977; Janet McCalman, 'The Power of Care: the Women's Hospital 1884–1914', Nursing Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 4, December 1998, pp. 204–11.

^7.� Judith Godden, 'Matching the ideal? The first generation of Nightingale nursing probationers, Sydney Hospital', Health and History, vol. 5, no.1, 2003, pp. 22–41; R. Lynette Russell, 'The Sydney Infirmary and its nurses, pre 1868', in J. Covaevich et al (ed.), History, Heritage and Health, Australian Society of the History of Medicine, Brisbane, 1996, pp. 209–12.

^8.� An exception is Noeline Kyle, 'Agnes King Inter Alios', Journal of Australian Studies, no.15, November 1984, pp. 59–68.

^9.� Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction?, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1984; for example, Anthea Hyslop, Sovereign Remedies, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989 and Janet McCalman, Sex and Suffering, Melbourne University Press, 1998; J. Frederick Watson, The History of the Sydney Hospital from 1811–1911, Government Printer, Sydney, 1911; Ann Mitchell, Pictorial Guide to the History of Sydney Hospital, Sydney Hospital, 1978; Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary (hereafter SI&D), House Visitors' Book, 1866–85, held at Sydney Hospital.

^10.� Bartz Schultz, A Tapestry of Service, Churchill Livingstone, Melbourne, 1991, p. 69.

^11.� Freda MacDonnell, Miss Nightingale's Young Ladies, Angus & Robinson, Sydney, 1970, p. 21.

^12.� Watson, History of Sydney Hospital; E. Stokes, The Jubilee Book of the Sydney Hospital Clinical School, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1960.

^13.� For example, SI&D, Annual Report, 1863, p. 9 (1,536 patients); Alfred Roberts, memo with Henry Parkes to Florence Nightingale, 21 July 1866, British Library MSSADD (hereafter BLMSS) 47757; Elizabeth Harford, Blood, antiseptic and stale beer: a history of casualty and casualty nursing in Sydney 1870–1939, PhD thesis, Department of Clinical Nursing, University of Sydney, 2003.

^14.� SI&D, Annual Report, 1854, p. 9.

^15.�Ibid; Edward Knox for SI&D, Melbourne Hospital sub-committee into nursing, 1870, Melbourne Hospital, p. 27; SI&D, Annual Report, 1867, p. 8; NSW Statistical Register, 1870, p. 11.

^16.� SI&D, Annual Report, 1864, p. 8.

^17.�Ibid., 1867, p. 7 and 1892, passim.

^18.� Reeve collection, entries for Bathsheba Ghost, SAG 11/6/7/213; Alan Nichols (ed.), Camperdown. A History of Camperdown Cemetery & St. Stephen's Newtown, Camperdown Press, Sydney, 1976, p. 20; Ghost's grave, St Stephen's Cemetery, Newtown, Sydney; Undated newspaper clipping provided by Wendy Rutter, email to author, 26 June 2004.

^19.� Carol Helmstadter, 'Early Nursing Reform in Nineteenth-Century London', Medical History, vol. 46, 2002, pp. 325–50.

^20.� Honorary Medical Officers to Board of Directors, SI&D, October 1865, reproduced in Report of the Inquiry into David Gibson, NSW Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings (hereafter NSWLA, V&P), 1855, p. 4.

^21.� Alfred Roberts to Florence Nightingale, 24 January 1867, BLMSS 47757; Sarah Wardroper to Florence Nightingale, 25 March 1867, BLMSS 47429.

^22.� Select Committee of Inquiry on the Hospitals of the Colony, Report, Queensland Legislative Assembly Votes & Proceedings, 1866.

^23.� Maria Rye to Florence Nightingale, 20 May 1865, BLMSS 47757.

^24.� SI&D, Annual Reports, 1857–66; NSW Supreme Court, Will of Bathsheba Ghost, Series 1, number 6920; Martha Rutledge, 'Stephen, Sir Matthew', in G. Serle and R. Ward (eds.), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 6, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1976.

^25.� Royal Commission into Public Charities, Second Report, NSWLA, V&P, 1873–4, vol. 6, p. 108.

^26.� Central Criminal Court, London, Seventh Session, 1838, pp. 119–21.

^27.� Convicts Indent, 1829, p. 14; Government Gazette, 13 May 1834; Sydney Distance Educational High School, www.ssdec.nsw.edu.au/history/camperdown/Bathsheba/html accessed March 2004.

^28.� Central Criminal Court, 1838, pp. 119–21.

^29.� Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Printed Indent, 1839, p. 150; NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Death Certificate for Bathsheba Ghost, 1866/000978; Information from Wendy Rutter; Ticket of Leave for Bathsheba Ghost, 7 April 1845, number 45/757, SAG; Passenger list for Africana;Government Gazette, 12 October 1847, p. 1096.

^30.� Michael Sturma, 'Eye of the beholder: the stereotype of women convicts', Labour History, no. 34, May 1978, pp. 3–10.

^31.� Watson, History of Sydney Hospital; Beverley Kingston, Glad, Confident Morning, vol.3, The Oxford History of Australia, paperback edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993, p. 159.

^32.� Angela Cushing, 'Convicts and care giving in colonial Australia', in Anne Marie Rafferty, Jane Robinson and Ruth Elkan (eds), Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 108–132; Wendy Rutter and Barry Sylva, pers. comm., 2003–4.

^33.� Carol Helmstatder, 'Old Nurses and New', Nursing History Review, vol. 1, 1993, p. 56; R. Lynette Russell, From Nightingale to Now, W.B. Saunders, Sydney, 1990, pp. 12–13.

^34.� SI&D, Annual Report, 1859, p. 10.

^35.� SI&D, Rules and Regulations, 1863, p. 34

^36.� Gibson Inquiry, pp. 24–30.

^37.� Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Printed Indent, 1829, p.14; Passenger list for Africana, SAG reel 3116.

^38.� British Library catalogue for William Osburn; Dunloran School, Dunloran, Harrogate, Harrogate, n.d. [c. late 1890s]; John Griffith, 'Lucy Osburn', in B. Nairn, G. Serle and R. Ward (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1974, pp.377–78.

^39.� Lucy Osburn to Florence Nightingale, 26 February 1869, BLMSS 47757.

^40.�Ibid., 4 December 1868, BLMSS 47757.

^41.� Mary Barker to Florence Nightingale, 30 May 1868, BLMSS 47757.

^42.� For example, Russell, 'The Sydney Infirmary and its nurses, pre 1868'.

^43.� Lucy Osburn, Nurses' Register, Sydney Hospital; Knox submission to Melbourne Hospital Inquiry, 1870; St Thomas' Hospital, Nightingale School of Nursing, Nurses' Training Registers, London Metropolitan Archives, London.

^44.� Lucy Osburn, Nurses' Register, Sydney Hospital, entries 1–3; Godden, 'Matching the ideal?'

^45.� Helmstadter, 'Early Nursing Reform'; Carol Helmstadter, 'Two Centuries of Clinical Knowledge,' Knowledge Development, Proceedings of Workgroup of European Nurse Researchers (Helsinki, Finland, 1988), pp.13–22; Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments, University of Chicago Press, 1988.

^46.� SI&D, Annual Report, 1867, p.7; Watson, History of Sydney Hospital, pp.110, 115–6.

^47.� Edward Deas Thomson to Florence Nightingale, 23 July 1867, BLMSS 47757.

^48.� G Davison, The Unforgiving Minute, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993; Bashford, Purity and Pollution; Dingwall, Rafferty and Webster, Introduction to Social History of Nursing, pp.24–34.

^49.� Mary Barker to Florence Nightingale, 30 May 1868, BLMSS 47757.

^50.� G. Karskens, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1997.

^51.� Inquiry into Sydney Infirmary, NSWLA, V&P, 1866, p.2.

^52.� Helmstadter, 'Old nurses and new', p.52; Sydney Infirmary Inquiry, p.8.

^53.� Sydney Infirmary Inquiry, pp.7–9.

^54.� Carol Helmstadter, 'The passing of the night watch', Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, vol.11, 1994, pp.23–69.

^55.� Sydney Infirmary Inquiry, p.7.

^56.� Sydney Infirmary Inquiry; NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, marriage of Eliza Ghost, 06902, 8 October 1898; Immigrants Agent's List for Africana, 1866.

^57.� Sydney Infirmary Inquiry, p.9.

^58.� SI&D, Rules and Regulations Instituted in the Year 1844, 1863, pp.34–5.

^59.� John Manning, report in SI&D, House Visitors' Book, 28 July 1866.

^60.� Brian Abel-Smith, A History of the Nursing Profession, Heinemann, London, c.1960, pp.34–35.

^61.� Manning, House Visitors' Book, 28 July 1866.

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