Win Coll's First Matron

International Nurses Day is on 12 May each year and aims to mark the contributions that nurses make to society. As Win Coll, we are looking back at one of the nurses who has worked here.

Louisa D’Arcy was the first matron of the new sanatorium at Winchester College when it opened in 1886.

She was born in 1839, the daughter of John D’Arcy, rector of Galway in Ireland. She trained as a nurse at Winchester Hospital in 1869, then went to work at Newcastle Hospital in 1877, followed by time at Grimsby Hospital in 1879 and midwifery training in 1880. Louisa then worked in India as a midwife from 1880 to 1885, and then at Worcester Infirmary before coming to Winchester,

Miss D’Arcy was appointed to the position at Win Coll by the Headmaster, WA Fearon, in September 1886, just before the start of the new academic year. Fearon wrote to the Bursar about the appointment, ‘she is, I am glad to say, a thorough lady …. and is most highly recommended, so that I have every reason to hope she may prove a valuable person’.

By the following year, Fearon was able to report to the Governing Body that Miss D’Arcy was a ‘lady of admirable tact and experience’, and she stayed at Winchester until she retired in December 1903. In 1901, Fearon first hinted that she should think about retirement and commented that Miss D’Arcy had ‘great gifts of managing and controlling boys during their convalescence’.

Louisa lived in Sutton Scotney during her retirement, in a house she had built in an area of the village called Egypt. She died, aged 80, in 1919 and is buried in the churchyard at Wonston. Obituaries were published in The Wykehamist and in the local newspaper. Fearon wrote that her ‘ready resourcefulness, her unfailing cheeriness, her Irish humour’ made her many friends and the boys under her care ‘were on terms of affectionate intimacy with her, but would never have dreamt of taking any liberty’.

These characteristics are perhaps the reason why we have a small collection of papers kept by Miss D’Arcy from her time in the San. Preserved in a little handmade padded envelope are some colourful sketches, drawn by one of her patients, of attempts by the medical staff to keep Scarlatina (Scarlet Fever) at bay, along with a delightful tribute to the work and care of Louisa and a fellow nurse called Fanny, both described as ‘Goddesses of Sickness and Health’. There is no date for the outbreak depicted but the Headmaster's Report for 1896 refers to an outbreak from one house of 18 'mild' cases of Scarletina, 

Our archives hold very few records of staff other than teaching staff, and even fewer of female employees like matrons and nurses. These papers relating to Miss D’Arcy are therefore a much-treasured part of our collection.