Watch: The extraordinary life of Nurse Maude

Otago Daily Times

14-07-2025

Ninety years after the largest funeral in Christchurch's history, the legacy of Nurse Maude lives on. Eva Kershaw from Frank Film reports.
Ninety years after crowds lined the streets for the largest individual funeral in the history of Christchurch, the legacy of Emily Sibylla Maude lives on in district nursing, home care and palliative services.
Nurse Maude, New Zealand's first district nurse, is honoured in two stained glass windows – one in the former chapel of the Community of the Sacred Name and another in the chapel of Christchurch Hospital, where she is pictured holding a sick child.
While she grew up in a well-to-do family, Sibylla Maude was no stranger to sickness.
In 1862, when she was born in Riccarton, Christchurch, was an unsanitary place. The city was experiencing rapid growth with insufficient infrastructure, culminating in pollution and poverty, particularly in the poorer areas of the city. The air was thick with smog from open fires and industrial coal-burning, the street gutters held the waste of transport animals, kitchen scraps and chamber pots, and the Avon and Heathcote Rivers carried the city's runoff. The 1870s brought repeated epidemics of influenza and typhoid – diseases borne from unhealthy living conditions.
'Christchurch was a busy, thriving, well-to-do town,' Vivienne Allan, author of The History of Nurse Maude, tells Frank Film. 'Unfortunately, the people who lived on the wrong side of the railway lines were not so well looked after.'
At the time, people had to pay to go to hospital, forcing those without enough money to stay home.
'You had to be looked after by members of the family who, of course, had no training,' explains Allan.
As the eldest of eight children, Maude grew up knowing how to look after others. Her family were ardent Anglicans and she was inspired by her father, a member of the Canterbury Provisional Council, and two of her aunts, both nurses, to serve the community.
When she was 18 years old, Sibylla implored her family to send her to England to train as a nurse. She spent two years at London's Middlesex Hospital as a lady probationer (paying fees rather than working as an apprentice) and returned in 1892 to work in Christchurch Hospital. Nurse Maude was quickly promoted to matron, but her progressive ideas to improve the running of the hospital were not implemented and many who were poor remained unable to access care. Maude resigned four years later.
Maude sought to nurse, says Allan, not to organise. 'She wanted to be able to go into people's homes and nurse them at home.'
In seeking financial assistance to undertake district nursing in the city, Maude approached Reverend Alfred Walter Averill at the Church of St Michael and All Angels and wealthy parishioner Jessie Heaton Rhodes.
'Together, they made a plan,' says Allan. 'Sibylla would be paid £80 a year. She would be well equipped with a uniform, with a bag, with a washpan, with a bedpan. She would be able to go from house to house, she would knock on the door, go inside, say a prayer, and get down to business.'
Every day, except for Sundays, Maude walked the streets visiting patients. She saw 1100 patients in her first year, treating anything from a cough to pneumonia, cancer and ulcerated legs.
'She looked after people who had the most straitened circumstances,' says Allan.
Allan says Nurse Maude became well-known throughout Christchurch. 'She was a short, stocky person. She didn't have a great demeanour, and everybody always said she could look very stern. At the same time, she had a kindly face, and that was what endeared her to people because she didn't look down on anybody.'
Demand grew for Maude's services, and in 1901, the District Nursing Association was founded to lend support to the work, and several more nurses were hired. From a headquarters in Durham St, Maude operated a dispensary and treatment room, with a sewing room in the back of the building to remake clothes for those who needed them.
'Everything was focused, for everybody, on looking after the sick, poor, and the elderly,' says Allan.
Maude pioneered treatment for the community through the tuberculosis crisis of the early 1900s, establishing an open-air tent camp in New Brighton for tuberculosis sufferers.
A local newspaper called Maude 'the hardest worked woman of the epidemic'.
'She became so in demand from everybody that they ended up having to put a guard in front of her door,' says Allan.
In 1934, Sibylla was made an OBE, and presented with the insignia by Governor-General Charles Bathurst. She accepted the honour 'reluctantly', says Allan, on the condition that the ceremony be held in private.
One year later, on July 12, 1935, Nurse Maude died suddenly of a heart attack. She was 72 years old.
'At the graveside after the funeral, a kaumātua from Tuahiwi stepped forward and said 'mahi pai, pono hoke',' says Allan.
'Well done, thou good and faithful servant.'
-Frank Film