
Call The Midwife's Jennifer Kirby gives birth to first child with Killing Eve actor Robert Gilbert - and keeps it secret for MONTHS
baby joy Call The Midwife's Jennifer Kirby gives birth to first child with Killing Eve actor Robert Gilbert – and keeps it secret
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
CALL The Midwife star Jennifer Kirby has announced that she and Killing Eve actor Robert Gilbert welcomed their baby into the world - but kept the news quiet.
Actress Jennifer shared the happy news on social media and explained how she had to have an emergency C-section in December.
Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter
Sign up
1
Call The Midwife star Jennifer Kirby has revealed she gave birth to her first child via emergency caesarean section
Credit: instagram/@furkirbs
The BBC Nurse Valerie Dyer star showed off her scars in a candid selfie showing off the realities of child birth and praising her body for all its hard work.
The 36-year-old shared the moving picture with fans, stood in front of a mirror wearing a floral black shirt and black underwear.
She showed off her labour war wounds with pride and looked happy and content in the behind-the-scenes snap.
The period drama star told followers: "One emergency caesarean, many crying sessions, a few panic attacks, infinite love, one glorious little baby and one whole year."
She added: "Thank you little body for all you've endured and all you've done.
"I won't take you for granted again."
Fans commented: "Nurse Valerie would have been proud of you."
A second added: "Beautiful."
A third agreed: "Beautiful lady. I have a similar scar too from my C-section with my second. Just amazes me how utterly fabulous our bodies are."
Jennifer and Killing Eve actor Robert met when they both starred in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Henry V in 2015.
BBC releases first trailer for Call the Midwife Christmas special 2017
The raven-haired beauty played Nurse Valerie on Call The Midwife from 2017 until 2020.
She proudly left the award-winning period drama after four seasons as it was time to 'move on'.
She took to X to reveal the news and wrote: 'After four joyful years spend with Call the Midwife, I have decided to say goodbye to Nonnatus, Val and the wonderful cast, crew and production team.
"The programme is truly a national treasure, and it will always be a huge honour for me to have been a part of something so wonderful.
'I can't wait to keep watching our beloved Nonnatus from the other side of the screen. Long live Call the Midwife. So long, chicks."
Call the Midwife is a BBC drama series about a group of midwives working in the east end of London in the 1950s and 1960s.
They are based at the fictional nursing convent Nonnatus House in Poplar district carrying out nursing and midwife duties.
The show is based on the memoirs of the same name by Jennifer Worth.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Daily Mail
10 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
BBC director-general Tim Davie is on 'last strike' after series of scandals - but corporation wants to save him
BBC director-general Tim Davie is on his 'last strike' after a series of scandals has plunged the BBC into chaos but the Corporation is determined to save him, sources have claimed. The Corporation is facing serious questions after it came under attack on three fronts this week. And while there is widespread feeling Davie is one scandal away from losing his high-profile role, a former executive told The Sunday Times that the BBC has deployed 'Operation Save Tim'. On Monday, the BBC was forced to admit that its documentary about children in Gaza had breached editorial guidelines by failing to disclose that the narrator was the son of a senior Hamas official. Hours later, a damning probe into Gregg Wallace 's behaviour on MasterChef was published, with 45 out of 83 complaints, including one count of 'unwanted physical contact', upheld. The report also upheld two out of 10 complaints - relating to swearing and racist language - made into other individuals, who were not identified. That was until the BBC was thrown into another crisis when Wallace's co-host John Torode publicly declared that he was the individual who had used racist language. Torode, 59, was sacked on Tuesday in a move he claims the BBC had not made him aware of. He said he was 'seeing and reading' he had been dropped from the show and had 'no recollection' of making a racist comment. In the following days, it was reported that he had used the N-word at a filming wrap part in 2019 while singing along to Gold Digger by Kanye West. But the investigation is understood to have upheld a separate complaint made the year prior when he used the same racist word on the MasterChef set. A BBC News report claims the racial slur was directed towards a MasterChef staff member. The Gaza documentary and MasterChef scandals add to a tumultuous period for the BBC, who also came under fire for their handling of the live streaming of Bob Vylan's Glastonbury set last month. The band sparked a backlash after leading chants of 'death, death to the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] during a live broadcast on the BBC. The BBC also said it will no longer broadcast live performances deemed 'high risk' – as Bob Vylan had been assessed – and its director of music, Lorna Clarke, also reportedly stepped back from her day-to-day duties. The corporation issued an apology after the Bob Vylan set at Glastonbury, saying: 'We deeply regret that such offensive and deplorable behaviour appeared on the BBC and want to apologise to our viewers and listeners and in particular the Jewish community. 'We are also unequivocal that there can be no place for antisemitism at, or on, the BBC. After Glastonbury, which Davie attended, culture secretary Lisa Nandy told parliament there was a 'problem of leadership' at the BBC. But BBC chair Samir Shah has doubled down on his support for the director-general, insisting Davie 'has shown strength, confidence and decisive leadership in a very challenging environment'. Another insider claimed his position with some board members was 'more precarious than people realise' after the Glastonbury scandal, but this was disputed by a source close to the board who insisted they were backing him. While the scandals alone would not be enough to see Davie sacked, the revolving door of scandals has raised huge questions about the management of the BBC. It also comes at a time when Davie's salary jumped £20,000 to £547,000, while Deborah Turness, the BBC News chief executive, saw hers rise £17,000 to £431,000. Since Davie became director-general in September 2020, the BBC has shelled out almost £10million addressing scandals. Almost half of that - £4.5million - comes from the fallout from the Martin Bashir 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana. Although the original controversy came before Davie took on his role, the sum includes £539,000 of legal fees in fighting journalist Andy Webb's internal emails about the scandal. Another £3.3million was spent on an external investigation into its handling of complaints about Radio 1 presenter Tim Westwood. Allegations against Westwood were first made public in 2022 when several women accused him of sexual misconduct. He has strongly denied all allegations. A review, which was carried out by barrister Gemma White KC and included contributions from more than 120 people, found people were 'concerned that they would not be believed or might be blamed' for his alleged behaviour because he was so 'popular'. The BBC also faced a £1.3million bill from the Huw Edwards scandal, although the report's findings have never been published. The review into the Gaza documentary, carried out by the director of editorial complaints Peter Johnston, cost £98,500. The Sunday Times reports that there is widespread feeling at the BBC and the wider media that Davie cannot afford another crisis, but his allies remain supportive and warn 'nobody should underestimate his strong survival instincts'.


The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Again and again, we are shocked by the treatment of learning-disabled people. Yet we never learn from the past
BBC Radio 4 has just aired a short series about the writer Virginia Woolf, to celebrate the centenary of her novel Mrs Dalloway. According to the publicity blurb, the aim of Three Transformations of Virginia Woolf was to explore what she 'has to say to us today', and how she 'captured and critiqued a modern world that was transforming around her, treated mental health as a human experience rather than a medical condition, and challenged gender norms'. Because the three episodes immediately followed the Today programme, I distractedly caught two minutes of the first, before flinching, and turning it off. The reason? Only a few days before, I had read a diary entry Woolf wrote in 1915, presented alongside the acknowledgment that she was 'suffering deep trauma at the time', but still so shocking that it made me catch my breath. It was a recollection of encountering a group of learning-disabled people, who were probably residents of a famous institution called Normansfield hospital. 'We met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles,' Woolf wrote. 'The first was a very tall man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, and looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature … It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.' That passage arrives a third of the way through a brilliant new book titled Beautiful Lives, straplined How We Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong. Written by the playwright and drama director Stephen Unwin, its story goes from the Greeks and Romans to the 21st century. Much of it is a history of the misunderstanding, hatred and appalling mistreatment experienced by endless millions of people. But partly because Unwin has a learning-disabled son – 28-year-old Joey, who he says has 'challenged everything I was brought up to believe in and turned it on its head' – it is also a very topical demand for all of us 'to celebrate the fact that such people exist and have so much to offer'. A sign of the ignorance Unwin spends some of the book railing against is the fact that this superbly original work, published in early June, has not been reviewed in a single mainstream publication. In the context of the attitudes he writes about, that is probably not much of a surprise – but there again, the book is so timely that its passing-over still feels shocking. After all, it follows the same unquestionable logic as all those high-profile discussions and debates about institutional racism and empire, and demands a very similar process of reckoning. On this subject, there is a mountain of questions to ask. Some are about language that still endures: 'imbeciles', 'morons', 'cretins', 'idiots'. How many of us know about the first official Asylum for Idiots – later the Royal Earlswood Institution for Mental Defectives – founded in Surrey in 1847, and infamous for what Unwin describes as 'widespread cruelty … and soaring mortality rates'? However much young people study history, do their syllabuses ever cover the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which formalised the idea that people categorised as 'idiots' and 'imbeciles' (and all disabled children and young people) should be institutionalised, let alone the fact that it granted local councils powers to remove such people from their families by force? Why is the US's record on institutional cruelty and cod-psychology even worse than the UK's? There is another part of the same story, centred on a slew of 20th-century politicians and cultural figures who believed that learning-disabled people – and disabled people in general – were not just pitiful and wretched, but a threat to humanity's future, an idea expressed in the absurd non-science of eugenics. They included that towering brute Winston Churchill, DH Lawrence (who had visions of herding disabled people into 'a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace'), and lots of people thought of as progressives: Bertrand Russell, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, the one-time Labour party chair Harold Laski, and the trailblazing intellectuals Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Their credo of pure and strong genes may have been discredited by the defeat of the Nazis, but we should not kid ourselves that everyday manifestations of loathing and condescension that underlay those ideas do not linger on. Ours is the age of such scandals as the one that erupted in 2011 at Winterbourne View, the 'assessment and treatment unit' in Gloucestershire, where people with learning disabilities were left out in freezing weather, had mouthwash poured into their eyes and were given cold showers as a punishment. The year 2013 saw the death in an NHS unit of Connor Sparrowhawk, the autistic and learning-disabled young man whose life was dramatised by Unwin in a profoundly political play titled Laughing Boy, based on a brilliantly powerful book written by Sparrowhawk's mother, Sara Ryan. As well as its principal character's life and death, it highlighted the fact that the health trust that ran the unit in question was eventually found to have not properly investigated the 'unexpected' deaths of more than 1,000 people with learning disabilities or mental-health issues. Right now, about 2,000 learning-disabled and autistic people are locked away in completely inappropriate and often inhumane facilities, usually under the terms of mental health legislation. Only 5% of learning-disabled people are reckoned to have a job. Six out of 10 currently die before the age of 65, compared with one out of 10 for people from the general population. But this is also a time of growing learning-disabled self-advocacy, which will hopefully begin to make change unavoidable. One small example: at this year's Glastonbury, I chaired a discussion about the cuts to disability benefits threatened by the political heirs of Laski and the Webbs. The speakers onstage included Ady Roy, a learning-disabled activist who is involved in My Life My Choice, a brilliant organisation that aims at a world 'where people with a learning disability are treated without prejudice and are able to have choice and control over their own lives'. He was inspirational, but it would be good to arrive at a point where what he did was completely unremarkable. It may sound a little melodramatic, but it is also true: such people, and allies like Unwin, are at the cutting-edge of human liberation. Far too many others may not have the same grim ideas as Woolf, Lawrence, Keynes and all the rest, but their unawareness and neglect sit somewhere on the same awful continuum. That only highlights an obvious political fact that all of us ought to appreciate as a matter of instinct: that the present and future will only be different if we finally understand the past. John Harris is a Guardian columnist


Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
BBC legend dies as devastated colleagues pay tribute to 'champion of local radio'
A star of BBC radio has sadly passed away as tributes from his former colleagues and friends pour in for the iconic one-time Managing Editor of BBC Radio Lincolnshire Colleagues have been paying their respects to Charlie Partridge following the announcement of his passing. The respected media figure had a long-standing career with the BBC, serving as Managing Editor of BBC Radio Lincolnshire from 1999 until his departure in 2020. Tributes poured in over social media on Saturday, July 19, led by former BBC News Foreign Correspondent and presenter Jonathan Charles. While the cause of death has not been disclosed, Jonathan shared his personal reflections on Twitter: "I am very sorry to hear of the loss of Charlie Partridge. More than 45 years ago, he taught me a lot about broadcasting @BBCNottingham - he was a great guy and we stayed in touch, occasionally swapping messages in the years since. Sometimes discussing @springsteen - My thoughts are with his family." He also shared a tribute from John Hess, who expressed his sorrow and celebrated Charlie's life and contributions to public service broadcasting and local radio. BBC Radio Lincolnshire's own Sean Dunderdale joined in commemorating his late colleague with a touching post accompanied by a photo of the two together. He wrote: "As others have posted online, I'm deeply saddened to have learnt yesterday of the death of Charlie Partridge." In a further tribute, Sean recalled his personal connection to Charlie, saying: "I remember - and often reminded him - of how, when a teenager, I listened to his breakfast show on Radio Humberside." "When he was appointed Managing Editor at Radio Lincolnshire, I showed him around Lincs FM and spent years winding him up with daft stunts - including parking my Lincs FM car right outside the BBC reception doors and other such tricks. "I was proud to then become his final presenter appointment before his well deserved retirement from the BBC. His love of radio - especially local radio - shone through everything he did. He continued to judge the National Hospital Awards for me right up until earlier this year and was always full of praise for the winning entries." Sean added: "He was the genius behind Lip Dub Lincoln (check it out on YouTube) and created Lincolnshire Day and the Lincolnshire flag - neither would have happened without Charlie. Next time you see the flag, think of the great Charlie Partridge. Lincolnshire is poorer for his passing but much richer for the time spent he with us." Former BBC presenter Andy Comfort posted on Twitter: "Oh my goodness. How sad. Charlie was indeed a champion of BBC Local Radio and I very much enjoyed working with him, especially in my NUJ role. Condolences to Jill and family and friends. RIP Charlie." BBC radio fans also paid their respects, with one writing: "Sad to hear Jonathan, John. Charlie was a lovely man, who believed in truly local radio. He was also very kind and supportive. Thoughts with his family." Another added: "It is indeed very sad Jonathan. Lovely man." This follows the announcement five years ago that the editors of BBC Radio Lancashire, Radio York and Radio Lincolnshire, including Charlie, had opted for voluntary redundancy.