Sister Mary Jaques was instrumental in providing medical care to the growing working population of mid-nineteenth century Middlesbrough, profoundly shaping the development of modern healthcare in the region.
Born in London in 1813, Frances Mary Rachel Jaques belonged to a well-respected family. Her mother, Elizabeth Frances Gore, was descended from a prominent political family, while her father, Thomas George Jaques, served as an army officer, and later ran a successful brewery in Leeds. By 1841, census records show that that ‘Fanny Jaques’, as she was then known, lived with her father at the Kirkleatham Free School (now the Kirkleatham Museum). This was part of the Kirkleatham estate, owned by the Turner family for more than two centuries. Well-educated, an accomplished musician, and fluent in French, Fanny Jaques was an ideal companion to Lady Turner of Kirkleatham Hall. After Lady Turner’s death in 1844, she received a generous legacy in her will: £50 a year during her life, which gave her the freedom and means to pursue ambitions of her own.
Reports of the appalling hospital conditions during the Crimean War (1853-56), together with Florence Nightingale’s pioneering work to improve sanitation and patient care, ignited her interest in nursing, which was becoming a respected vocation for middle-class women. During the 1850s, she travelled to the Kaiserswerth Deaconess Institute in Germany for nursing training, where Florence Nightingale herself had also studied. Kaiserswerth offered an innovative and influential model for nursing education, blending practical skills with spiritual devotion, reflecting the institute’s Protestant mission. On her return to England she joined the Christ Church Sisterhood in Coatham, founded in 1858 by Teresa Newcomen of Kirkleatham Hall, the daughter of her former employer, Lady Turner. After joining this Anglican religious community devoted to caring for the sick, Fanny Jaques took the name Sister Mary.
The sisterhood’s mission was critical: nearby Middlesbrough had become one of the unhealthiest places in the country. As the town became the focus of a booming iron industry, between 1841 and 1881 the population increased more than tenfold. Severe environmental and health problems inevitably followed. Overcrowded housing encouraged the spread of contagious diseases, while dangerous working conditions meant that accidents were becoming commonplace. In June 1858, a devastating explosion at the Snowdon and Hopkins Ironworks highlighted the urgent need for local medical care. Seventeen men were injured by debris and scalding steam, two men died on the way to the nearest hospital in Newcastle, while others were taken to their own homes or lodgings where they were cared for in overcrowded, unhygienic conditions. After visiting the injured men, John Jordison, the owner of the town’s printing works, wrote to Coatham requesting the Sisterhood’s help.
Paying the costs herself, Sister Mary rented 46 and 48 Dundas Mews, and two houses in Albert Road which she converted into a cottage hospital with 12 beds. This was among the first of a new type of hospital in England. Emerging in response to the lack of accessible medical care in rural areas and towns, cottage hospitals provided medical treatment for the sick and injured, avoiding long and hazardous journeys to the county hospital. Over 160 cottage hospitals were founded between 1860 and 1899, with bed numbers ranging from 4 to 42. By March 1859 the work on the houses was complete and the hospital received its first patient: John McNally, a foundry worker, whose leg had been broken in a drunken brawl. In its first nine months, the hospital admitted 55 patients and treated 490 outpatients in their own homes, including those with fractured and amputated limbs, severe bruises and scalds, fractured skulls and concussions, tumours and abscesses. One local resident of Albert Road recalled looking out of his bedroom window to see ‘some half-dozen men with bandages, slings or crutches in the back-yard of the cottages opposite’, who, he was told, were Miss Jaques’s patients.[i]
It soon became clear that a larger building was needed for the growing number of patients. In July 1860 the foundation stone was laid at a site in North Ormesby, and by 1862 the hospital could accommodate 25 patients. Along with the original cottages where the sisters continued to treat outpatients, North Ormesby Hospital quickly became essential to the working men of Middlesbrough and their families.
Photograph of North Ormesby Hospital, undated. Image courtesy of Teesside Archives.
Sister Mary was a familiar sight to hospital visitors, habitually dressed in the distinctive uniform worn by the Kaiserswerth deaconesses: a brown dress with white collar and cuffs, and a close-fitting brown bonnet and veil. One visitor who asked to have her pointed out, was told: ‘If you meet a lady at both ends of the hospital at the same time that will be Sister Mary’.[ii] As Sister-in-Charge, she took responsibility for the nursing arrangements, the domestic management of the house, as well as for the hospital chapel. She trained new nurses, instructing them to see all aspects of their work as acts of Christian service, and to say prayers by each patient’s bedside every night. Her sense of humour and compassion earned the respect of her patients. Caring for the sick, however, carried considerable risks. During an epidemic of scarlet fever in the winter of 1864-65, several nursing sisters fell ill, including Sister Mary herself. ‘Delicately organised, and of slight frame,’ remembered one contemporary, ‘she was continually over-working herself, for her active mind would give her no rest’.[iii]
In 1874, Sister Mary returned to London, buying a house in Stoke Newington where she founded a new charity: St. Raphael’s Home. There she nursed 26 female patients with chronic or ‘incurable’ diseases, including several women she had cared for in Middlesbrough. However, in July 1877 she fell gravely ill and died within a few days. Although her remarkable life was cut short, Sister Mary Jaques left an enduring legacy in Middlesbrough and beyond, pioneering accessible and compassionate nursing care for those most in need.
[i] Geoffrey Stout, History of North Ormesby Hospital, 1858-1948 (G. Stout, 1989), p. 7.
[ii] William Hall Burnett, Old Cleveland: Local Writers and Local Worthies (Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1886), p. 143.
[iii] Blackburn Standard, 5 September 1896, p. 7.
