| Description | It is unclear when the Maternity sub-committee was founded. There are references to reports being made by it in the Board of Guardians minutes as early as 1912, but no further information could be found. However, it is clear that the sub-committee was set up by the Boarding Out committee to look after the care and relief of pregnant women both within and outside of the workhouse. The minutes contain frequent references to individuals, along with more general issues relating to pre- and post-natal care.
Confusingly, the volumes are labelled in a number of different ways, at first leading one to suspect that several committees were in existence. Further confusion results from the fact that the volumes do not run in strict chronological order. As the title 'ladies rota' suggests, it appears that a number of separate sub-committees worked in rotation, in a similar way to the Visiting committees. Each volume only contains the minutes for every third or fourth meeting, so that in order to gain a full picture of the sub-committee's work, one needs to move between several different volumes. This fact also accounts for the overlapping dates between each volume. |