TITILAYO BOSEDE AJAYI

Matron of UCH Ibadan who trained a generation of nurses and sang at every bedside

Matron Titilayo Ajayi could silence a ward of forty patients with a single raised eyebrow and then wake them gently at dawn with a hymn. Both skills served her well in thirty-six years at the University College Hospital in Ibadan.

She was born in Iseyin in 1940, the daughter of a weaver and a petty trader, and her mother sold yam flour to pay for her secondary school fees. Titilayo entered the School of Nursing at UCH in 1958, qualified in 1961, and went on to midwifery training at the Wesley Guild Hospital in Ilesa. She returned to Ibadan as a staff nurse, rose to Nursing Sister, and became a Matron in 1979, one of very few women in the hospital's senior management.

Her ward rounds were legendary. She inspected fingernails, bed corners and bedside lockers, and she remembered the names of patients' children. Student nurses who had once dreaded her now run wards in Ibadan, Manchester and Toronto, and several still carry the small leather notebook she gave each graduating class, with a single line inside the cover: 'Care first. Everything else second.'

She married Olufemi Ajayi in 1964, and the household she built with him ran on love, good food and noisy debate. She was an Anglican who worshipped at St. James' Cathedral in Oke-Bola, and teased her Baptist husband about the length of his sermons. She loved gele in every colour, jollof rice at Christmas, and the Sunday afternoon naps that nobody was allowed to interrupt.

Matron Ajayi died after a short illness in July 2019. She leaves her husband, three children, and nine grandchildren.

“Care first. Everything else second.”