The South London Hospital for Women & Children, the main location, no longer exists, although its buildings still stand. It was founded by two remarkable women, Maud Chadburn and Eleanor Davies-Colley, with the support of many others, in 1913. It was a hospital where women treated women, a ‘woman only’ institution on Clapham Common Southside until 1985.

Maud Chadburn hailed from Middlesborough, born in 1868, the daughter of a Congregational minister. Determined to be a doctor, she defied her father, who, it is said, denounced her from his pulpit claiming he would rather see his daughter dead than see her achieve her aim. She qualified in 1894 and began work at the New Hospital for Women (later renamed the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson) in north London. Eleanor Davies-Colley, six years younger than Maud, was the daughter of a dynasty of surgeons and her father was more supportive. She joined Maud at the New Hospital in 1907. This was the start of a partnership in life and work which would last for twenty-five years. In 1911, Eleanor became the first female fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Both women despaired at the lack of provision of general medical care for women by women, as well as the limited opportunities for women in the medical profession (at the time many hospitals refused to employ women doctors and surgeons) so they began raising funds for a women’s hospital in south London. Helped by their friends, feminists like Harriet Weaver, publisher of The Freewoman and a mysterious, very large donation (it was believed to have come from a female member of the royal family), they collected enough to start the South London Hospital for Women & Children. At first the hospital operated in two large houses near Clapham South tube station. In 1916, however, Queen Mary opened a purpose-built eighty bed hospital, the largest women’s general hospital in the UK.

Patients were women, girls and boys up to the age of seven; all its staff, except for one or two men, were female, even the porters. The original list of Medical & Hospital Officers is remarkable, the only male name upon it belongs to the Chaplain. When the local health authority eventually closed it on grounds of cost (something still hotly disputed by those who worked there) the hospital buildings were occupied and an international campaign was launched to keep it open, including a petition to Downing Street.

Setting a crime novel in such a unique place, remembered with great affection by former employees and patients, brings responsibility. It is almost invariably the case that, when giving talks or appearing on discussion panels in south London, someone in the audience informs me that they, or a close relative, were a patient at the hospital. So I was anxious that I portray the hospital and its ethos accurately. I had long conversations with a former consultant surgeon there who supplied me with photographs and literature belonging to the early hospital; I spoke with a former midwife and former nurses, all of whom fondly remembered the ‘South London’ or ‘SLH’. There is even a Facebook group, to which I now belong, called South London Women’s Hospital occupation 1984─85 where those who protested at the time, many of them staff and patients, reminisce and organize the occasional get together. So, there was and is a certain amount of pressure to get my portrayal right.

When I was researching for the books, I spent a lot of time at the Lambeth Archives, reconstructing the hospital in my mind, using the architect’s plans. I also read minutes of meetings of the South London’s Management Board and some belonging to other hospitals of the time, so as to get an understanding of the context. It is instructive that, despite there being an acute shortage of nurses after the war, the SLH never had a problem attracting nurses; it was a place where women wanted to work.

Capturing the spirit of the place and the challenges and threats it faced, some from the predominantly male establishment of the time, was very important to me. Not just because there are people out there who would be able tell me that it wasn’t like that, but because I wanted to honour the original founders and all the indomitable women who worked there afterwards. There are, as far as I could find, no biographies of Maud or Eleanor and no history of the SLH. Yet it was a unique and special place and I wanted to give it a prolonged life, even if only in a crime fiction book.

I hope that my classic mysteries, with plenty of thrills and twists, reflects society and place as they were at the time and that readers will enjoy their stay at ‘my’ South London in the late 1940s.

The Midnight Man (2024), A Death in the Afternoon (2025) and Festival Days (scheduled 2026) are published by Hobeck Books and ISIS Audiobooks. If you want to find out more about the book or its setting, go to www.julieandersonwriter.com