Black Country town wept for a much-loved Victorian nurse

The funeral of Dorothy Pattison, or Sister Dora, as she was better known, was a spectacle unlike anything Walsall had seen before.

After the official procession entered the cemetery, the gates were closed behind, but so desperate were the masses to see her last moments, that the masses who had been shut out broke them down. Despite this, it is said that they all remained quiet and respectful as she was laid to rest.

In 1875, within months of the launch of the Evening Express, Walsall had been gripped by a cholera epidemic, and Sister Dora had put her life on the line to treat infected patients.

As the epidemic gripped the town, a special hospital was set up in the unfortunately named Deadman’s Lane – now sensibly renamed Hospital Street – where Sister Dora worked for six months, risking her own life to treat infected patients. Many credited her work during this time, and her obsession with cleanliness in particular, to preventing the town from being over-run by the disease. But it was breast cancer rather than cholera which ultimately took Sister Dora's life at the age of 46. Her death came as a shock to her thousands of patients, from whom she had carefully concealed her illness.

Her funeral, on December 28, 1878, brought Walsall to a standstill as her coffin was carried through the town. Her personal life had been a somewhat messy affair, marred by a controlling father, a troubled family and a complicated love life in her youth. And some of the horrors she experienced during her 14 years as a nurse at the height of the Industrial Revolution would have left many people traumatised.Sister Dora arrived in Walsall in January, 1865, called to replace another nun who had been taken ill.

She initially went to work at Walsall’s first tiny hospital in Bridge Street, before later moving to the cottage hospital at The Mount. Industrial accidents were very common at this time, and in Walsall railway workers in particular found themselves in need of hospital treatment. In her early days, many working-class men in the town were suspicious of the sisters, believing they would take advantage of the patients’ dependence on them to further their message. But Dora proved adept at winning them over, demonstrating a tolerance of their prejudices and a readiness to nurse patients in need of care, regardless of how they responded to her dress or beliefs. She prayed for her patients as well as nursing them, but never used the influence given to her to press her faith on them.

A combination of Dora’s outstanding medical skills, coupled with her cheery but no-nonsense manner, led to her developing a great bond of friendship with many of her patients, and the railwaymen in particular.

So great was their love for the nurse, that these modestly paid rail workers managed to raise £50 to pay for a pony and open carriage so that Dora could more easily visit her housebound patients. A dozen of her former patients turned out in their best suits to present her with the carriage in June, 1873.To begin with, Dora was not well-trained or knowledgeable, even by the standards of the day. But eager to know more, she took every opportunity to learn the latest techniques, and had no problem finding doctors willing to share their skills – and their workload – with her.Dora was notably skilled at removing foreign bodies from eyes, and ran a large outpatient clinic where she dealt with many cases without reference to doctors. She became, in effect, a house surgeon and was so competent that she was pressed by one of the doctors with whom she worked to move to Edinburgh where she could have trained as a doctor. But, unwilling to tear herself away from the community she had grown to love, she rebuffed the offer.

The following year, an infection closed the hospital at The Mount, around the same time as an explosion at an ironworks which left many men with horrific injuries. The hospital moved to temporary accommodation rented from the London North-Western Railway in Bridgeman Place, overlooking the town’s station.

During 1876, Sister Dora attended 12,127 patients, and it is thought the workload seriously affected her health. In 1877 she contracted breast cancer, but continued to work, keeping the illness a secret. And when she was no longer able to tend to the patients, she went to London to study Joseph Lister’s controversial new work with antiseptics which she was convinced would be the future of medical care. Aware that her days were numbered, she ordered that all these new measures, which are now basic medical practice, be implemented in Walsall shortly before her death on Christmas Eve, 1878.

While the affection which the town held for Sister Dora was largely down to her bedside manner, that was not the full extent of her work. She was also an extremely shrewd hospital manager and an adept politician. No doubt influenced by her austere youth, she was highly skilled at ensuring her hospital made the most of its limited funds. Great use was made of student nurses, who not only worked very hard for the hospital, but also paid for the privilege of doing so. Relations were always strained between the doctors and the great-and-the-good in charge of the hospital, but Dora had a knack of striking a balance that kept both sides happy.

But while the railwaymen, factory workers and shopkeepers turned up in their droves to pay their respects on a cold December day, one man was conspicuous by his absence. Her elder brother Mark, who had been a tower of strength to young Dorothy as she sought to escape the abuse of their controlling father, turned his back on his sister when she decided to become a nurse. He considered such work to be beneath a member of his family, and refused to attend her funeral.

The working men who did attend saw things rather differently, though. They decided that her modest gravestone was not a fitting memorial, and began an appeal to pay for a statue in the town. It took seven years to collect the £1,200 to pay for an 8ft white marble statue of Dora, most of the money coming in small sums from works collecting-boxes. The statue, mounted on a plinth, was unveiled in 1886 – in a ceremony which itself was a sight to behold.

Each January, the town of Walsall marks Sister Dora’s birthday with a service of thanksgiving at her statue in The Bridge. The coronavirus may have led to ‘Clap for Carers’, but the truth is people in Walsall have been doing it for decades.

A newspaper is born, and a chance meeting in a railway carriage

Fresh from a lively visit to the Liberal Club in central London, Thomas Graham clambered aboard the train back to his adopted home town of Wolverhampton. As he took his seat, he found himself sharing a compartment with a fellow Scot, and the two got on famously from the outset. Both men hailed from Dunfermline, from families in the fabric-weaving industries. And both had escaped the grinding poverty north of the border to make their money elsewhere. As they chatted on the journey north, they both shared their visions for a different Britain, rooted in progressive politics. And they both agreed that the most effective way of furthering their Liberal cause was through the emerging newspaper industry.

This dream was a much more realistic prospect for the one man than the other. Thomas Graham, still in his 20s, was a successful and respected local businessman, having bought a bacon-curing business in Wadhams Hill, Wolverhampton, in 1862. Whereas Andrew Carnegie, six years his senior was the richest man in the world.

Carnegie, who had moved to Pittsburgh in the United States as a child, had made his fortune in the steel industry, and became known around the world for his philanthropy. But his vast wealth and his radical anti-monarchism meant he was viewed with a mixture of fear and suspicion by the established order. Here was a man not merely interested in the trappings of wealth, but also had a burning desire to use his money to change the world order. Having left Britain to make his fortune in the Land of the Free, he fervently believed that the future lay in creating a go-getting, free-market republic where everybody was born with equal opportunities. And he believed the West Midlands, with its atrocious living conditions for those who worked in the sprawling factories and coal mines, would be ripe for revolution.

Graham, a more considered and moderate man, had reservations about some of Carnegie’s ambitions, but the two nevertheless became firm friends and Graham’s dream of becoming a newspaper proprietor had moved a step closer.

November 1874 saw the launch of the paper that would become the Express & Star, the Wolverhampton Evening Express. Suffice to say, it wasn’t to Graham’s taste at all. Safe, cautious, and staunchly Conservative, it was the opposite of the radical vision that Graham had for a newspaper. But what would he do about it? He had the business nous, friends in high places, and a fabulously wealthy ally. All he needed now was a plan of action....How would the young entrepreneur shape the local newspaper industry to his liking? He had the vision, his friend had the money, and there was already an embryonic newspaper in town. All he needed was a way of bringing the three together....