Rebecca Baker

Born 1833, died 1910
Nurse at Mitford and Launditch Union Workhouse, 1869

Researched by Bridget Howarth

Born Rebecca Holman, her father was a thatcher and farmer in Gressenhall. She married John Baker, a tailor from Norwich, in 1855 and lived with him in various places around the country: Norwich, Kings Lynn, Macclesfield and Hackney, London, until she was widowed in 1862.

Rebecca returned to her parents in Gressenhall to provide a home and schooling for her children while she found work to support them.  She was working as a Monthly Nurse, supporting a mother and her newborn baby, in 1869 when she applied for a post as Nurse at the workhouse in Gressenhall.  The only qualification required was that she could read and write, but undoubtedly her limited nursing experience will have helped make her a suitable candidate.

This was a new post at Gressenhall; only one paid nurse had been responsible for looking after all the sick and infirm in the workhouse; men, women and children until a recent inspection had suggested that a second nurse was needed.

Rebecca started work in March 1869 with a salary of £20 per annum, living in the workhouse close to the infirmary, while her children will have stayed with their grandfather in the village. She was given responsibility for the male wards, looking after elderly men, younger men with health issues and some of the older children. Her fellow nurse, Sarah Mitchell, who had been in post since 1863, will have been a great source of help and advice.

Rebecca married again in January 1870, leaving Gressenhall to live in Beetley with her husband, shoemaker John Rumbold Beck.  They had two more children, before Rebecca was widowed once again in 1882.  In August 1890 she married for a third time, this time to Jeremiah Shady, a Chelsea Pensioner, and they lived not far from the workhouse in Gressenhall.  The marriage was not a happy one however, and in December 1891 Rebecca left Jeremiah.  She was alone again, but was taken in by her youngest son, Horace Beck, a grocer’s assistant in Hertford.  She was still living with him when she died in Vernhams Dean in Hampshire, in 1910.