Nurse Sarah Ann Clarke
Midwife, Milltown, Co. Galway
By Marguerite Slattery
Biography
Sarah Ann Clarke (nee Lavery) was born in Carnalbanagh East, Moira, Co. Down on 29 April 1892. She married James Clarke, a policeman with the Royal Irish Constabulary and they lived for a number of years in Belfast. On his retirement from the RIC in the late 1920s they moved initially to Moylough, Co. Galway, where he was originally from, and then to Connemara and later, to Milltown.
Throughout her career, Sarah Ann worked as a nurse, district nurse and midwife. She retired in the late 1950s and she and her husband made the decision to leave Milltown and to move back to Belfast to be near her family members. She passed away in June 1973 and is buried in Moira, Co. Down.
Career
Sarah Ann trained as a nurse in the Mater Hospital in Belfast, Co. Antrim. She subsequently worked for a number of years as a district nurse in the Springfield Road area of the city. When she and her husband moved to the west of Ireland, she acted as a midwife for the remainder of her career.
She worked firstly as a midwife in Oranmore, Co. Galway before being appointed as midwife to the southern part of Connemara in October 1931. Nurse Clarke was responsible for a wide geographical area including Lettermore, Lettermullen and Gorumna – small islands connected to the mainland by bridges – as well as the Aran Islands. Her mode of transport to travel around these areas was either by bicycle, pony and trap, or currach.
Nurse Clarke moved to Milltown, Co. Galway in October 1935 and resided in the village until her retirement in the late 1950s. She acted as a midwife in parts of the Tuam and Dunmore dispensary districts, again covering a wide geographical area.
According to the Milltown church parish records, almost 950 baptisms are registered for the period October 1935 – June 1959. It is reasonable to assume that Nurse Clarke attended at most, if not all, of these related births. In addition, some births at which she attended are registered for baptism in neighbouring parish records, for example, in Irishtown, Ballindine, Kilconly, Dunmore and Tuam.
Memories
Val Flattery of Drim, Milltown, was only a baby when Nurse Clarke came to Milltown in 1935 but he remembers as a young man seeing her passing his house on her ‘high nelly’ bicycle with her medical bag placed in the basket at the front.
Val vividly recalls the night in January 1956, when his cousin and godmother, Celia Flattery, was very ill and he and his mother were sitting by her bedside attending to her. Nurse Clarke and James Francis Slattery called to the house to visit Celia and, realising how poorly Celia was, Nurse Clarke stayed up all night keeping her comfortable and waited with her until Celia passed away the following day. Val said this showed the compassionate and caring nature of Nurse Clarke.
In the DVD ‘All Our Past Times’, a collection of homemade movies by Joe Gilmore which captures the social lives of the people of counties Galway and Mayo in the 1950s to 1970s, the segment on Milltown shows, amongst others, Nurse Clarke walking down the street on Easter Sunday, 1957. The narrator says ‘’and there’s Nurse Clarke who delivered generations of the Milltown population’’, thus confirming the regard in which she was held.
Before her passing in June 1973, she returned to Milltown on a number of occasions to visit friends, particularly the Slattery family beside whom she had lived for almost 25 years.
Nurse Clarke remains fondly remembered in Milltown. While, with the passage of time, not many people remain who actually knew her in person, stories of her role as the midwife in Milltown have been passed on and in the mentioning of her, she is always referred to as ‘Nurse Clarke’.
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