The last surviving nuns who inspired the hit television drama Call the Midwife are being forced to sell their community home because they can no longer pay for the repairs and upkeep.
The five sisters of the Community of St John the Divine, who have avidly followed all four series of the homely BBC series about nuns delivering babies amid the post-war poverty of London’s East End, said their decision had hit them like a bombshell but they had no alternative in the face of a massive repair bill.
The income of the five depends on pensions, donations and the small returns on a few longstanding investments. It’s enough for their simple existence in keeping with their vow of poverty, but insufficient to pay a bill of about £17,500 to fix a leaking roof and a crumbling 18th-century chimney on their Grade II-listed property. Now they have begun clearing cupboards and packing possessions ahead of moving to smaller premises once they find a buyer for their rambling, 20-bedroom building.
Meanwhile, the BBC has exported Call the Midwife to 212 territories, contributing to total global sales of £276m for BBC Worldwide in 2014-15. A Christmas special will be followed by series five, which is aired in January.
When asked if the nuns resent the disparity between their straitened circumstances and the BBC’s income from their life stories, there was an uncomfortable pause from Sisters Christine Hoverd, 75, and Margaret-Angela King, 79. “It would be nice to be thanked in the [programme’s] credits,” Hoverd said eventually.
The religious community Hoverd joined at the age of 21 was established in 1848 as a nursing sisterhood, whose members worked alongside Florence Nightingale in the Crimean war. After taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Hoverd became a midwife, cycling to deliver babies in Poplar and Bow’s back-to-back terraces and, later, tower blocks. For the last 12 years of her working life, she was employed by the NHS.
In the 1970s, the community relocated to Alum Rock, a rundown district of Birmingham, when faced with a steep increase in rent on their east London home. In recent decades, they have offered space for prayer, contemplation and retreat, hosting 1,600 people in 2014 – “quite a flourishing ministry of hospitality”, said King. But now that the full-time members of the community have dwindled to five, it has become unmanageable.
Hoverd said: “We prioritise and economise very carefully and try to keep the building in a good state of repair. But the roof was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We just don’t have that sort of money [for repairs]. We realised we have been sailing very close to the wind.”
The nuns have no financial help from the Diocese of Birmingham. “It’s so expensive to run. We’re run off our feet, deadbeat tired. We had to be realistic,” said King.
The property – an 18th-century farmhouse, which includes a chapel –was valued at between £800,000 and £900,000. The sisters have refused to consider selling to a developer, wanting the house to go to another religious community. They thought there might be interest from local Muslims, who form the majority of the Alum Rock population. But so far there has been only one derisory offer from another church group, which the nuns have rejected.
They need enough capital to buy a smaller home and provide a financial cushion. The days when the sisters were earning NHS salaries have long gone, and there is no sign of young novices wishing to join the community.
“Women have more opportunities these days – including being ordained,” said Hoverd. There is greater interest in “new monasticism” – living in spiritual communities for short periods. “Fewer people are willing to take vows for a lifelong commitment.”
The five sisters rise at 5.30am and start the day with personal prayer, followed by breakfast, and then a morning service in the chapel. Their days are busy with visitors, meetings and one-to-one spiritual guidance as well as administration, gardening, sewing, baking and volunteering locally. Each nun has a day off each week to spend as she pleases.
From January, the sisters will once again disrupt their usual Sunday evening routine, abandoning their long refectory table to eat supper from trays in front of the television. They say that Call the Midwife is a good reflection of their earlier lives in east London, if not 100% accurate. But they have been carefully consulted and regularly receive urgent calls during filming on questions of dress or conduct. In real life, the women discarded their nuns’ habits for “mufti” 20 years ago.
They said they were “gobsmacked” at the success of the drama series, but hoped that a serious history of their religious order might be written to record its work. “Call the Midwife has encouraged many more women to become midwives, but not many to become nuns,” said King regretfully.
