News & Diary - 20.05.2026
Winchester College’s first Matron: Louisa D’Arcy
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 HM, 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’.
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, is buried in the churchyard at Wonston, shown here.
Obituaries were published in The Wykehamist and in the local newspaper. Fearon writes 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 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’.
