04th April 2018
Mary Enoch, district nurse
Today we welcome a guest blog post from Rosemary Cook of Dringhouses Local History Group about her researches into local nurses:
One of the joys of local history research is that it leads you to people and places you never meant to go! I was trying to find out about the history of Queen’s Nurses in York, and discovered that the reason there was hardly any mention of them was that the York Home for Nurses, founded in 1870, had cornered the market in district nurses. They even managed to oust the few QNs there were from the outlying districts!
The district nurse for South Bank, Clementhorpe and Dringhouses turned up in the archives of the Home, one of the few nurses to be recorded by name. Nurse Mary Enoch lived in Albemarle Road from around 1906, and in Knavesmire Crescent from 1913 onwards. She was much appreciated, and the Reverend Canon Argles, from the local church, praised her work and argued successfully for a pay rise for her. Nurse Enoch was also involved in a local scandal in 1905, after a young governess died in a hotel on Micklegate, getting her name into the national papers. The following year she represented the Home at the funeral of the Lord Mayor of York, Alderman William Bentley as one of the principal mourners.
