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Herbert Military Hospital was designed by Nightingale’s
nephew based on her revolutionary designs for light and
airy wards. While at Woolwich Nurse Enid Bagnold
wrote
A Diary Without Duties,
which one hundred years
later gives the reader (and, now out of copyright, it can
be read for free online) a vivid insight into life and death
on the wards of a Great War hospital:
Oh visitors, who come into the ward in the calm of the
long afternoon, when the beds are neat and clean and
the flowers out on the tables and the VADS sit sewing at
splints and sandbags, when the men look like men again
and smoke and talk and read – oh if you could see what
lies beneath the dressings!
The VADS were the members of the Vountary Aid
Detachments, some men, but mostly upper-middle class
girls and women who were trained in first aid and
nursing. In 1909 the War Office established the Scheme
for the Organisation of Voluntary Aid and the Red Cross
were given the role of training and providing volunteers
as supplementary aid to the Territorial Forces Medical
Service in the event of the war, By the time war came
there were 9000 VADS to support just 300 Queen
Alexandra Imperial Military Nurses (plus a reserve of
200 QA nurses) and 600 civilian nurses. These are the
women of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military
Nursing Service with the cherry red cloaks or
tippets
in Crimson Field. Cherry Red! No, no no! A retired
QARANC nurse (Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army
Nursing Corps) who is organising for her colleagues
to take our
Women of the Great War Tour
in September,
including a visit to the Hospital in the Oatfield exhibition
at the Florence Nightingale Museum, tells me that she
and her colleagues are up in arms that the BBC got it
wrong. Not cherry red, the tippets of the QAs have
always been scarlet! Please, on their behalf, have a quick
tut at the screen on Sunday evening at 9.00pm when you
settle down to watch the series. It is said that the tippet
cape was designed by Florence Nightingale:
to conceal curvaceous bosoms from the eyes of the
licentious soldiery
.
By the end of the Great War there were 70,00 VADS,
some abroad but most at home. They volunteered as
assistant nurses but also as ambulance drivers and cooks.
Vera Brittain, mother of Shirley Williams, (life peer and
former MP) served as a VAD at home and later in France.
She wrote one of the most famous autobiographies of the
First World War,
Testament of Youth
. I cannot recommend
highly enough, if you’ve not read it already, to buy yourself
a copy of Vera Brittain’s book, for few works tell so well
the story of women during the Great War. A film of
Testament of Youth is currently in production for release
in 2015. Vera Brittain lost both her fiancé and her beloved
brother during the war. Her words on this terrible loss,
a loss shared by so many of her generation, is haunting:
There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that
Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all
my past.
In Torquay Agatha Christie was, for a short time a VAD,
but it suited her not and she left to volunteer in a dispensary
instead. At the start of the war thousands of Belgian
refugees were arriving at Folkestone and Dover with the
authorities acting quickly to disperse them around the
country. Some went to Torquay where Christie, perhaps
influenced by a potent mix of this influx of foreigners, the
poisons in the dispensary and searching for her very own
Sherlock Holmes created Hercule Poirot.
Back in Kent Baroness Orczy, (creator of one of the first
female detectives – Lady Molloy of Scotland Yard)
Hungarian by birth but British by marriage and with her
Doctors Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson of the Endell Street Military Hospital, Bloomsbury
