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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000
Hungarian mother living a somewhat uncomfortable and
unpopular life, as an enemy alien just outside of Maidstone
nevertheless wrote of the Belgian refugees:
Dear Belgians, how we loved them, how we pitied them.
All the same, we were very thankful to our authorities
when the whole of the Maidstone district was included
in the military area where no alien, whether friend,
ally or foe, was allowed to dwell within its boundaries.
Not all women found service as nurses for, of course,
some were already fighting long established prejudices
to be accepted as doctors. Louisa Garrett Anderson was
the daughter of Elizabeth Garret Anderson, Britain’s first
female doctor. An ardent suffragette Louisa established
the Women’s Hospital Corps Team and ran a hospital in
the empty Hotel Claridge in Paris treating many men
wounded at the First Battle of The Marne in 1914.
Early in 1915 they moved the hospital to Wimereux and
gradually earned a grudging acceptance from the Royal
Army Medical Corps, who increasingly stretched by the
sheer numbers of wounded men, invited the women to
run a 500 bed hospital in London based in an old
workhouse in Endell Street, Bloomsbury, just off the
Shaftesbury Avenue. Legend has it that arriving in
London the RAMC Colonel on site greeted the new
doctors sent him with the words:
Good God! Women!
Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray would go on
to treat 26,000 men in Endell Street. It was a far cry from
the experience of Scottish doctor and suffragist Elsie Inglis
who had trained in Edinburgh under Dr Sophie Jex-Blake.
Not needed by Louisa Garret Anderson to whom she
volunteered her services Elsie wrote to the War Office
offering a 100 bed hospital unit staffed by women to be
deployed anywhere in the war zone. She received a letter
back telling her
to go home and sit still
. She didn’t go
home at all; she went with her team of lady doctors first
to Serbia and later to Russia.
Another remarkable Woman of the Great War also went
to Serbia. She was Mabel St Clair Stobart, already in her
50s at the outbreak of the war, who took a team of female
doctors and nurses to Serbia in 1915. From 31 May to
15 November 2014 if you visit the Dorset County Museum
in Dorchester you can see
A Dorset Woman at War:
Mabel Stobart and the Retreat From Serbia 1915
,
30 powerful black and white photographs of Mabel and
her team training at Studland in Dorset and running a field
camp and dressing station behind the front line in Serbia as
well as some images from their 800 mile journey through
snow covered mountains to the Albanian Coast. Please
see One To Do On Your Own on page 32 for more
information.
Continues overleaf…..
Women’s Police Service on patrol at a
London railway station from the collection
of the Imperial War Museum.
