Vera Jane Ellis-Crowther was born in Liverpool on 27th
August 1897. She emigrated to New Zealand in her twenties and became a
prominent, pioneering midwife and feminist.
Her parents were Joseph Hodgson, a grocer’s assistant, and
his wife Jane (née Hayes). At the time of Vera’s birth the family (Vera was the
oldest of nine children) lived in Toxteth at 28 Fernie Street L8 (now
demolished), moving to 25 Enid Street L8 by the time of the 1901 census. By
1911 they had moved to Seacombe on the Wirral.
After living in the east end of London for six months she
returned to Liverpool and in 1923 she married Harry Linton Crowther, a chemist.
Linton’s father edited a Labour Party newspaper and Vera began her lifelong
commitment to socialism. The following year they emigrated to New Zealand. The
couple bought a farm at Maramarua but sadly her husband was killed in a truck
accident in 1932. Vera subsequently bought an orchard at Glen Eden, West
Auckland and decided to retrain as a nurse and midwife. She became a forceful voice
in support of the use of anaesthetics in childbirth, opposed by doctors
(predominantly male) who advocated anaesthesia-free natural childbirth.
In 1945 she opened the Waitemata Obstetric Hospital on her
land at Glen Eden. When the hospital building was not ready at the time set for
opening she operated out of disused railway carriages. She sold the hospital in
1954, returning to England for a period, before resuming her work as a midwife
in Auckland. Later in life she was drawn to the home birth movement and by the
time of her retirement in 1974, aged 79, she had delivered over 1,000 home
birth babies. She died in Auckland on 6th July 1983 aged 85.
Her daughter Joan, was born in New Zealand in 1929. In 1941
she married her second husband, David Ellis.
