A well-known and popular Rushden figure, Nurse Mabel Florence Goosey, is retiring after 18 years’ work as nurse and midwife in the town. Her retirement, she informed an “Echo and Argus” representative, was due in part to an accident in which she was involved on Easter Saturday when driving her car through London to see her son, Bernard, at the Duke of York's Royal Military School, Dover. She was hit by an oil-lorry which ran into her car at the rear when she was stationary at the traffic lights, completely smashing her vehicle. Although uninjured, Nurse Goosey suffered considerably from the shock of the collision.
Two years ago Nurse Goosey retired from her midwifery practice, receiving £417 out of £700 paid in the whole county for the voluntary surrender of her midwifery certificate.
"I had one of the largest practices in the county," she said, "because I was one of the first nurses ever to buy a car, and I used to go outside Rushden. The late Dr. L. Gregg, the former County Inspector of Midwives, once told me that I held the record for the number of babies I had helped to deliver for three years in succession."
Nurse Gloosey is retiring shortly after Dr. O. A. J. N. Muriset’s announced retirement a few weeks ago. She has been associated with Dr. Muriset since she came to Rushden.
Coming from her native town of Derby in 1915. Nurse Goosey entered the Northampton General Hospital where she nursed during the war and obtained her general nursing and midwifery certificates. She recalls working sixteen hours a day for 4s. 9d. a week, and when she was a sister in charge of a ward of thirty men she was earning only 7s. 6d. She met he husband, a Kettering man, while he was a patient at the hospital and married him at Derby in 1921 with nurses as bridesmaids.
Her son, Bernard, is 17 years of age, and her second son, David is only four. She does not intend leaving Rushden, which she likes very much, but she admits that she finds dusting carpets very unexciting after spending most of her nights on duty. Perhaps she will go down to fame, however, as the midwife who helped at the birth of Rushden's one and only Coronation Day baby in 1937".