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food to help to increase the supply of food to the war-torn
nation. Prior to her WI role Lady Denman had run the
Smokes For Soldiers Fund
turning the ballroom of her
house in Buckingham Gate into a cigarette and tobacco
packing station. Patron of the Society was none other
than Queen Alexandra who, apparently, liked a secret
puff herself. Volunteers greeted soldiers and sailors at
ports and railway stations with free cigarettes, tobacco
and pipes:
They are hungry for smokes
said Trudie
Denman
, give them tobacco and there is no hardship
they will not cheerfully suffer.
Field Marshall Lord Roberts (who’d helped Rudyard
Kipling get his boy Jack into the Irish Guards) was the
Victorian veteran hero of everything from the Indian
Rebellion of the 1850s (during which he was awarded
the Victoria Cross) to the Second Anglo-Afghan War
of the 1870s and the Second Boer Wars which ended in
1902. Lord Roberts had died of pneumonia in his 80s
while visiting Indian troops at St Omer in November
1914 and his fame as a national hero was enough to fund
the single-handed campaign of Miss Gladys Storey who
sold sixpenny portraits of the Field Marshall to raise
money to send Bovril to the troops in the trenches.
Meanwhile at Highclere Castle Almina, the 5
th
Countess
of Carnarvon wasted no time at all in setting up a hospital
receiving the first injured men from the battlefields of
Flanders within a month of the outbreak of the war.
Some aristocratic ladies even went so far as to venture
close to the battlefields themselves in their eagerness
to nurse the wounded men. Constance, Duchess of
Westminster, who had won a bronze medal for sailing
at the 1908 London Olympics, ran the No 1 British Red
Cross Base Hospital at Le Touquet from October 1914
until July 1918 with her trusty Irish Wolfhound by her
side. The Countess, with a coterie of aristocratic friends,
society ladies like herself, cheered the men they nursed
every day by appearing every night on the wards decked
out in full evening dress and tiaras. Not far away in the
dunes behind Calais Millicent Leveson-Gower, Duchess
of Sutherland also brought the country house experience
to her field hospital (The Number 9 Red Cross Hospital)
by encouraging her staff to dance to gramophone records
beneath the stars until midnight. How gay! How unlike the
grim picture painted by BBC’s The Crimson Field!
Meddlesome Millie, the Red Duchess
horrified many of her
peers with her liberal, some said socialist views. Novelist
Arnold Bennett satirised her in his Five Towns series set in
the Potteries as
Interfering Iris
after she campaigned for the
welfare of pottery workers, notably managing to outlaw the
use of lead glazes. Millicent, aged 47, arrived in Belgium
with eight nurses and a surgeon, Mr Oswald Morgan of
Guys Hospital, in the first few weeks of the war setting up
her first field hospital in a convent. Finding herself trapped
behind enemy lines she talked herself free with her fluent
German and personal acquaintance with the Kaiser! Back
in London she published an account of her experiences
entitled
Six Weeks at The War
.
By November 1914 she was back in business, this time at
the Hotel Belle Vue at Malo-les-Bains, Dunkirk as an
evacuation hospital with up to 100 beds and then from July
1915 Number 9 Red Cross Hospital became a Tent Unit at
Bourbourg. It only operated here for six months but was
to be immortalised in a remarkably beautiful series of ten
paintings by French artist Victor Tardieu, who having
fought and received wounds in the trenches became a
patient at what would become known as the
little hospital
in the oatfield.
Tardieu painted his canvases
en plein air
while a patient and anyone who takes the opportunity to
see them displayed together at the Florence Nightingale
Museum until 26 October 2014 will find that these vividly
coloured pictures, full of light and full of life will live in
their minds for a long time.
The artist was clearly much enamoured of the Duchess
depicting her almost as an
angel who floats above the
bed of one of her charges.
Indeed Hugh McCorquodale
,
wounded at Passchendale
(and who was later to marry
novelist Barbara Cartland),
who was treated at the hospital
said exactly that, the Duchess
dressed all in white and
always wearing pearls,
used to look like an angel.
Back in Blighty, author Enid
Bagnold, born at Rochester
in Kent and best known for
her novel National Velvet
published in 1935, was a nurse
at the Royal Herbert Hospital
in Woolwich. Named after
War Secretary Sidney Herbert,
the man who had sent Florence
Nightingale to the Crimean
War as an observer, the Royal
