WW1 nurses – The Cowkeeper's Wish

embroidery ww1 — One of 60 squares on a sheet made at the Royal Staffordshire Infirmary in 1917. Each square is embellished slightly differently, and bears the man’s name and regiment. This one was worked by Sydney Frederick Hudson, who survived the war.

I recently watched a news piece about a quilt that had been made by wounded soldiers in 1917. The men were convalescing at the Royal Staffordshire Infirmary, and each had been given the task of embroidering his name, his regiment, and some decorative swirls on a small square of fabric. The 60 squares, all rendered in shades of pink and blue, were then stitched together into a single sheet. A picture exists of two men standing on each side of the finished piece, wearing their “hospital blues,” and looking out at the camera with war-weary expressions.

The stitching of the squares can be seen as a form of occupational therapy, which was quickly gaining recognition from the medical field because so many men had physical or mental injuries, or both. Working on some form of craft could potentially help patients in a variety of ways: it might encourage movement of specific muscles; it might distract the person from the pain he felt; it might give him a sense of purpose and accomplishment; and if done in a group, as with the embroidery sheet, it may foster a sense of community.

Chapter 9 - Joe Deverill circa 1915 — Sailor Joe Deverill, early in the war

The same year the quilt was made, our great uncle, Joe Deverill, was a 19-year-old Able Seaman on board the Mary Rose, a destroyer that escorted ships from Scotland to Norway and back across the North Sea. It was routine work, and the trips were rather dull until one day in October, when the entire convoy was attacked by German light cruisers. Almost everyone on board the Mary Rose perished, as well as many from other ships traveling with her, a tragedy recounted in detail in The Cowkeeper’s Wish. Amazingly, Joe survived, despite his youth and inexperience.

Family lore says that afterwards he took up rug-hooking, and that it soothed his nerves to pull the wool strands through the heavy fabric and watch a pattern emerge. It seems likely that someone gave him this task, and showed him what to do, just as someone showed the men embroidering their squares at the Staffordshire infirmary.

That someone was likely a woman who worked as a “ward aide.” Canadian women did groundbreaking work in this field, and according to Judith Friedland, author of Restoring the Spirit: the Beginnings of Occupational Therapy in Canada, many were either artists or teachers, well suited to helping the men learn simple craftwork that would build their self esteem and keep their minds and hands busy. The tasks turned out to be a crucial part of their recovery. A 1921 New York Herald article raves about the ingenious work going on at Fox Hills Base Hospital, lead by “a competent woman instructor.” The author describes walking through the wards and coming upon “men with powerful big frames except for a missing leg or a twisted arm or a hole in the neck. Each one has his head bent over the bed picking up little beads and stringing them out endlessly into something that looks as though it was going to be a shopper’s purse.” He asked one of the men if the work was hard on the eyes, and the man answered, “It’s only hard on one of them. … The other’s glass.”

England’s Imperial War Museum holds some lovely examples of work made by soldiers as a form of therapy. There are hand-painted fretwork figures of politicians and nurses and soldiers; embroidery samplers; and decorative envelopes pieced together from newspaper. There are haunting pieces in the collection as well. The rings below were considered “trench art” and incorporate a fragment from a German aluminum nose cone and an eagle cut from a German button. They were collected by Alice Rapley Wood, who served as a nurse in France from 1914 to 1916 and later worked at Summerdown Convalescent Camp at Eastbourne, which treated occupational therapy cases. It was here that the rings were made. So far I haven’t unearthed much about Alice herself, but she seems like a woman ahead of her time. She had artistic leanings and painted miniature portraits. On the 1911 census, she is listed with her second husband (having divorced the first), who was a piano manufacturer’s manager several years her junior. She makes a point of noting her own occupation as “artist.” In the decades following WW1, she appears in the Physiotherapy and Masseuse Registers, so she definitely continued with her work long after the war was over. The war had brought an incredible amount of suffering, but also profound and wonderful changes in the lives of women like Alice.

trench art alice rapley wood — A set of four trench rings collected by nurse Alice Rapley Wood. © IWM (EPH 4364)

Among the most beautiful examples of occupational therapy in the IWM collection are the intricately beaded necklaces made by Walter John Cressey, a private with the Middlesex Regiment who convalesced at Queen Alexandra’s Military Hospital in London. Cressey was blind and had lost four fingers as the result of gassing. What painstaking work it must have been to make these necklaces, with their tiny beads strung into a long waving pattern, and how sad to never be able to see them. And yet: how brilliant to construct something as a means of healing from so much destruction — to stitch, string, mould, weave, paint, paste, and knit in order to put things together again after such a painful time in history.

walter john cressey necklace

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Sources

Imperial War Museum: occupational therapy souvenirs and ephemera

Restoring the Spirit: The Beginnings of Occupational Therapy in Canada, 1890-1930, by Judith Fern Friedland, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011.

“Ingenious work is done by wounded veterans.” New York Herald, 25 September, 1921.

Lives of the First World War: Joe Deverill; Alice Rapley-Wood; Walter John Cressey

With thanks to Kevin Dance for sharing his photo of the Staffordshire Infirmary embroidery square.

LMA Stone Case Book Our Ellen 2 — The elusive Ellen Evans, otherwise Roff, otherwise Humphries, discovered in the Stone Asylum casebook at the London Metropolitan Archives (City of London). Ellen’s sad and tangled story is recounted in The Cowkeeper’s Wish. (This image appears with permission, ©LMA.)

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts how challenging it can be to find women in a family tree, because they tend to disappear behind their men. During out research for The Cowkeeper’s Wish, one of the biggest brick walls was finding Ellen, our great grandmother’s sister, who left her husband in the 1890s and eventually turned up living with someone else and using his surname, though they had not married. Sometimes women disappear even more completely behind their partner’s name and become “Mrs John Humphries,” erasing every letter of their own identity.

I recently found an example of an elusive woman while engaged in some volunteer work I do for the Imperial War Museum’s excellent Lives of the First World War website. I’ve taken a special interest in the women’s records there, and I was searching specifically for women who’d worked at the Australian Voluntary Hospital in Wimereux, France. I was surprised to come upon a page for Staff Nurse Robert Hannah nee Walter E. C., and wasn’t quite sure where to begin to untangle such a jumble of surnames that could also be first names. I double-checked the original source Lives had used — the women’s service roll at the National Archives — and the name appeared the same way there.

Since it’s highly unlikely that a nurse in 1915 was named Robert, I thought the names were simply transposed, and should read Hannah Robert nee Walter. I searched for a marriage record during the war that would confirm that suspicion, but nothing fit. And then I remembered the “E. C.” that I’d ignored on the entry the first time around. I checked the National Archives record again, this time viewing the digitized version, and saw a tiny crucial “Mrs” beside the name, and left out of the transcription. Mrs. Robert Hannah? That made more sense. I popped in a new search, still within the Lives database, and found that Ella C. Walter had married Robert C. Hannah in Kensington, London, in 1917.

That the marriage took place in London was another bonus, since Ancestry holds those digitized entries of Church of England Marriages and Banns. Here I was able to find yet a little more about the woman so recently known as Robert.

When they married on January 6, 1917, at St. Phillip’s Church, Ella Clarice Walter was a 39-year-old spinster, living at 4 Richmond Mansions, Earl’s Court. Her father’s name was John Charles Walter, and though he was now deceased, he’d been “civil servant, Melbourne,” according to the certificate — another Australian connection for the woman who’d worked at the Australian Voluntary Hospital. Her new husband was considerably older than she was; a widower named Robert Campbell Hannah, he gave his occupation as “gentleman,” and he resided at the Thackeray Hotel in Great Russell Street.

Searching backwards now, I found Ella living on her own in London in 1911, a single 30-year-old woman of private means, born in Melbourne, Australia, a British subject by parentage. What brought her to London I don’t know — but being unmarried, Australian, and keen to assist with the war effort, she was an early recruit for the hospital founded by Lady Rachel Dudley, wife of the Australian governor-general, first located at St. Nazaire, France, and soon moved to an old hotel in Wimereux. The medal roll shows that Ella joined the hospital staff late in August 1914, with the war not even a month old.

avh, wimereux

In a 1915 piece about “the good work [the AVH] is doing at the front,” writer Katharine Susannah Prichard describes the setting, and brings the photo above to life:

The Winter quarters of the Australian voluntary hospital are in a great, rambling, muddily-white French hotel. When first you see it, you want to draw it as it stands against the sea, under a clear, shining sky. You feel you want to use a rough chalk for its vermilion roof, and for its shutters and doors that are vivid, apple-green. Beyond it stretch the dunes, vague and formless, with their coarse, wind-threshed, bleached grasses, and behind it spreads a scattered toadstool growth of white-walled, red-roofed cottages. Gris Nez forms a rampart on the north, and there is a deserted, red-roofed village along the coast. The Picardy landscape the hospital stands in is so tranquil in a peaceful, pastoral way, that it is almost impossible to believe, that only a few miles away all the damnable business of war is going on.

Ella Walter and colleagues in Wimereux — Clockwise from top: Elizabeth Mundell, Patience Outram Anderson, Ella Clarice Walter, and Mary Rawson.

When the staff first moved into the hotel, they’d barely had time to settle when word came that a convoy of wounded was on its way. Ambulances began arriving even before the beds had been made to receive the wounded. “They kept on arriving,” writes Prichard, “a continuous, slow stream of khaki-covered cars, with a red cross blazed across them. They came over the brow of the hill, and filed past the hospital from 10 in the morning until after four in the afternoon.” Soon stretchers lined the corridors, and 145 men required the staff’s careful attention.

Knowing Ella’s name wasn’t Robert helped me to find this lovely picture of her and some of her colleagues, posing in uniform. She and the other women depicted are each mentioned, albeit briefly, in the unit’s 1915 war diary. In May, the diary tells us, Ella contracted the measles (as did Patience), and in August, she had a brief stay at a rest home in Hardelot. The diary mentions many of the women resting there, and the Australian War Memorial holds a picture that suggests they were happy to go. I don’t see Ella in the Hardelot photograph, and I lose track of her now until her 1917 marriage to Robert Hannah. What sent her back to London, and was she nursing there as well until she married? These answers might surface if I keep searching. But it feels satisfying to have made even some small discoveries about this stranger, to sort the name and put a face to it, and to reunite a nurse with some of her colleagues from a century ago.

hardelot — WIMEREUX, FRANCE, 1915. “SICK NURSES OFF TO REST HOME AT HARDELOT” WAITING IN A MOTOR CAR OUTSIDE THE AUSTRALIAN VOLUNTARY HOSPITAL, FORMERLY THE GOLF HOTEL. (DONOR D. MASSY). AWM, P01064.027

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Sources

Australian War Memorial: AVH in Wimereux, France

Discovering Anzacs: Australian Voluntary Hospital

“Handle with Care: Nurses Make Own Sacrifices Overseas.” Louise Almeida, Herald Sun, 23 April, 2014.

Lives of the First World War: Ella Clarice Walter later Hannah

Lives of the First World War: Australian Voluntary Hospital

National Archives: Australian Voluntary Hospital war diary, WO 95/4106/2

With thanks to Kathryn Shapland, Recollections of War, Albany, Australia, and Christine Bramble, Great War Nurses from the Hunter.

The Cowkeeper's Wish

Tag: WW1 nurses

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