Dancing

There was a good deal of dissatisfaction during the Great War, particularly by Canadian and American nurses working in France, that dancing was forbidden to members of the nursing services, either in their own, or in Officers' Messes. There seemed to be little lack of understanding as to why this rule was in place, and what its advantages were, but it was frequently held up as an example of the petty bureaucratic practices which were seen to be in place only to restrict nurses' enjoyment while on active service overseas. Maud McCarthy, Matron-in-Chief with the British Expeditionary Force in France, often pointed out that this was not her rule, but had been in force for many years after discussions between the War Office and the Nursing Board. She firmly believed that nurses should not lose sight of their purpose in France - that of caring for the wounded - and it would not help the morale of the soldiers to hear talk of dances and gaiety while they lay wounded and in pain.
So to put the record straight, I've found the source of the rule, and the action that followed. It started with a question in the House of Commons, put by Mr Athelstan Rendall, MP for Thornbury, Gloucestershire, to Richard Haldane on November 1st, 1906:

Mr. Rendall: I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether he will explain why nurses at Netley Hospital, and in the Army's service generally, are not permitted when off duty, except when on furlough, to take part in public or private dances, seeing that the prohibition does not apply to medical men in the same hospitals; whether a highly trained professional class, such as nurses, are to be placed in a different position on the ground of sex to officers in the Army, who, provided they are on duty at the appointed time have no restrictions placed on their use of time when off duty; and whether he will at once free the nurses from this interference with their liberty.

Mr. Haldane: I have consulted the Nursing Board which contains among its members many ladies of great experience in these matters, and they have advised to the following effect: 'The Nursing Board requires for Her Majesty's Nursing Service gentlewomen who are devoted first and foremost to their work for its own sake and the sake of their patients, and who will, therefore, desire to live quietly and unostentatiously without looking for much gaiety. Occasional attendance at operas, theatres, concerts, and other places of amusement is not incompatible with the due performance of their duties, and is allowed at discretion of the matron; but the late hours involved by attendance at balls and dances, in the opinion of the Board, incapacitates them from giving proper attention to their patients on the following day.

At a meeting a few days later, the Nursing Board discussed the rule and Sydney Holland moved that the Board should adhere to it, saying:

The main reason for the decision was that the late hours involved by attendance at balls and dances incapacitate Nurses for the due performance of their duties on the following day. If further reason is required it may be stated that the Nursing Board requires for Her Majesty's Nursing Service gentlewomen who are devoted first and foremost to their work for its owon sake and the sake of their patients, and who are content to live quietly and unostentatiously without craving for gaiety and excitement.

'It was therefore proposed by Mr Holland, seconded by Lady Roberts, that the Board adhere to the opinion expressed in the above quoted minute. Miss Stewart moved as an amendment that nurses in Military Hospitals should, in special cases, be permitted to attend dances under the strict supervision of the Matron, and provided that they return to their quarters by 12 o'clock midnight. The amendment was not seconded, but was put to the vote and rejected. Mr. Holland's proposal was then put to the vote and carried as a resolution of the Board.'

In All Those Lines

Some months ago I was sent a copy of this book to read. It is based on the diaries of Elsie Tranter, a member of the Australian Army Nursing Service, who worked in a variety of hospitals in France during the Great War. The original of the diary is held at the State Library of Victoria, and it's been dusted off, edited and published by Jennifer Gillings and Julieanne Richards. And what a worthwhile job they've made of it.
Unlike some similar memoirs, it's not simply a catalogue of wounded, dead and dying; of hardship and despair. Elsie Tranter makes her wartime journey very much more interesting than that, giving accounts of the places she visits on her travels, and a great deal of information about her life in general and her leisure time, well-balanced with stories of the soldiers she cares for and her life as a professional woman in wartime. There are many tiny incidents included which give insights into a nurse's life in France not normally found elsewhere, and which make this a unique account of that time. It also demonstrates that nurses with an adventurous spirit could find all sorts of ways to bypass certain rules, regulations and restrictions which were rife in France. She spends a good deal of time catching midnight trains and hitching lifts on lorries to visit places she should not really have been in. It's definitely the story of an Australian!

'In All Those Lines - the diary of Sister Elsie Tranter 1916-1919'
Edited by J. M. Gillings and J. Richards and published by the editors, 2008: ISBN:9780646495590

Honours and Mentions

Several times recently people have contacted me to say that I've failed to include their relative in a list of awards of the Royal Red Cross that I have on the Scarletfinders web site. Initially I found this a bit puzzling as I don't have any details of RRCs on there, but eventually the penny dropped. I recently put up a couple of pages on awards of the Military Medal to members of QAIMNS and the Territorial Force Nursing Service, and that seems to have caused some confusion in people's minds between the two. I wrote a fair bit about Military Medals here in October last year, but just to clarify the vast differences in the numbers of awards I've been checking some of the figures.

During the course of the Great War, there were only 135 Military Medals awarded to women - all nationalities, all theatres of war. Of these, 87 were to nurses working with either QAIMNS or the TFNS in France and Flanders. As for the Royal Red Cross (1st Class) and Associate Royal Red Cross (2nd Class) there were simply thousands in total, not only to nursing staff, but to any woman who had done good work in any capacity concerned with the care of the British soldier. The number awarded to nurses working in France and Flanders under the auspices of the War Office alone was 264 for the RRC and 919 for the ARRC, with another 1755 mentioned in dispatches. When you start adding those women working in the UK and other areas of war, the list starts to look endless. So sheer numbers have excluded the inclusion of a list of RRC awardees on the website, although I do have a complete digital copy of the relevant volumes of the RRC Register, and should be able to find any individual entry if needed. Perhaps at some time in the future I will settle down and organise an online index of the RRC Registers, but I really hope that The National Archives do it first!

Our Hospital ABC

T are the Tents whos inmates maintain,
They are fine healthy places in spite of the rain

Several years ago I bought a copy of a book called 'Our Hospital ABC'. Published in 1916, it's a variation on a child's alphabet book, but based on a VAD's life in a military hospital. All the illustrations are by Joyce Dennys with verses by Hampden Gordon and M. C. Tindall. Joyce Dennys died in 1991, and since then there has been a great surge of interest in her work, and I thought it might be of interest to include a couple of the pages from this small book which is becoming increasingly rare. Some difficulty with scanning has resulted in the image colours not being quite true, and the uniforms are more blue in the original, but they are still a delightful look back at life as it was then.

N are the Nurses, the right sort of wenches,
To look after the lads who are back from the trenches

Difficulties with Recruitment 1903

When QAIMNS was formed in 1902, many of the staff and conditions of service were carried over from the old Army Nursing Service. At the same time, it was planned that the new Service would be an elite, forward-thinking one which would be the envy of civil hospitals and aspired to by many nurses. However, when the Nursing Board met in September 1903, it was to discuss the failure of their recruitment process to supply adequate numbers of nurses of the right calibre. The following abridged notes are taken from the minutes of that meeting, and set out some of the perceived reasons for the problems [The National Archives, WO243/20].

'The Nursing Board are face to face with the position that they cannot get nurses to join the Q.A.I.M.N.S... The terms of the service have been circulated amongst the civil hospitals, and there is but one opinion, that the terms offered are inadequate.
The Nursing Board must either be empowered to offer better terms, or the military service must be the dustheap into which is shot those nurses from civil hospitals whom the civil matrons do not want to keep, or female nursing of soldiers must be abandoned.
The Nursing Board want to attract into military nursing, firstly, the really good nurse, women who would assuredly succeed in civil nursing, and not the failures, who are many in number; secondly, women of good social position - very important.'

'When a young woman of 28 has finished her training at a civil hospital she looks round and decides what her future is to be, whether she will stay in hospital work, or, whether she will take up private nursing. In the former case, if at all good, she is quite certain of getting almost at once to be a sister, and from that position to gain, as she feels sure she will, a salary of £60 to £100... She then sees before her a matronship, perhaps first of a cottage hospital, with six to ten beds, and then of a larger hospitals, with a salary of £150, £300 and even £400...
If she stays in her civil hospital promotion is rapid. Few people realize how rapid...
But in the military service the promotion will be, and always has been, very slow. In civil work there are many openings for obtaining a better position and salary, in military nursing very few. Another reason why promotion must be slow in military nursing is that once having been in it for any length of time a nurse, never mind what her position, is absolutely debarred from any nursing appointment outside the Service. No matron of a civil hospital would take into her hospital a nurse who has been in a military hospital - a nurse who has had no experience in the nursing of women and children or of old people. It is a specialized service. So equally no committee would ever appoint as matron of a civil hospital a nurse from a military hospital; she would not have been in close touch with all the modern improvements which every year take place in the big civil hospitals. Thus all outlets are closed to women in the military service ... and the result is that "once in, always in" must be the state of affairs for any woman taking up military nursing. To sum up, if a nurse stays in military nursing she unquestionably loses her nursing pecuniary value. Her capital, so to speak, is depreciated.'

The Nursing Board solution to these problems was to offer a new, increased salary and pension scale which still did not look particularly attractive alongside the civil hospital scales that they had just set out. I find it interesting to reflect on the "once in, always in" comment, and the depressing view that on leaving the service, these well-trained and educated women would be found useless in civil nursing. Neither have the Board extolled the virtues of the Service, particularly the opportunities of overseas travel, and a certain security in their everyday life. I'm sure that many 'leavers' went on to have productive and rewarding careers after leaving military nursing, but these notes do provide an interesting angle on QAIMNS and its perceived 'elite' status.

What's in a Name?

Soon after War broke out in 1914, No.3 London General Hospital (Territorial Force) was mobilised at the Royal Patriotic School, Wandsworth Common. The Commanding Officer, Colonel Bruce Porter, agreed to take on a group of men as Royal Army Medical Corps orderlies, all members of the Chelsea Arts Club, who were either too old, or unfit for military service, but who wanted to contribute to the war. Thus, he accumulated a wonderful collection of artists, sculptors, writers and poets, and laid the foundations for a hospital journal which became a prince among all others - The 3rd London General Gazette. It contains artwork, poetry both serious and humorous, cartoons, anecdotes of daily life in the hospital - hard to describe such a treasure trove. One of these Chelsea Arts Club men, Ward Muir, became the editor of the Gazette, and continued to write prolifically throughout the war. Here he describes the problems of addressing women in general, and some pitfalls facing the unwary when in the proximity of the trained nurse.

SISTER by J. Ward Muir

"There is a deal of difference, in hospital, between the word Sister and the word Nurse. Sister is, of course, a Nurse. But Nurse is not a Sister. However, there is nothing to prevent you calling Nurse 'Sister' - provided that Sister herself is not at your elbow. If she is, you had better be careful, both for your own sake and for Nurse's.
Some wearily-wise orderlies, and many patients of my experience, apostrophise all the female officials of a hospital as 'Sister.' The plan has its merits... Apart from the fact that it can offend none, and will cajole not a few, some universal appellation of this sort is - the soldier finds - almost a necessity in his constant dealing with women who are strangers to him.
He comes into contact with a host of women, especially after he is wounded; not only nursing women, but women on the ambulances, women who serve refreshments at halting places, women clerks who take his particulars, women who trace casualties, women who transact postal errands, and so on... To address them each indiscriminately as 'Miss' is absurd... 'Madam' is pedantic. 'Nurse' is in many instances manifestly ridiculous; you cannot call a clerical V.A.D. or a Y.M.C.A. waitress 'Nurse.' So, by a process of elimination, 'Sister' is reached.
Thus is comes to pass, the Mlle. Peroxide of the Frivol Theatre who takes a turn at ladling out cups of coffee in a railway-station canteen (with a press photographer handy) finds that the mud-stained Tommies are saying 'Another slice of cake, please, Sister,' or 'Any fags for sale here, Sister?' The Duchess, too, who is cutting bread-and-butter hears herself hailed by the same designation. And if both Miss Peroxide and the Duchess are not flattered (and maybe a little moved, too) I should be surprised.
For really, you know, 'Sister' is the happy word. It fits the situation - all such situations. Wouldn't it be possible to add one perfect touch; that our women comrades should drop into the habit of addressing us as 'Brother'? Officers and men alike - 'Brother'! It would be a symbol, this, of what the war ought to mean to us all; a fine collaboration of high and low, equals in endeavour...

When I was first put into a ward to serve as an orderly I was instructed beforehand that the only person to be entitled Sister was the goddess with the Stripes. Eager to be correct, I addressed the Staff Nurse as 'Nurse.' At once I divined there was something wrong. Her lips tightened. In a frigid voice she informed me of the significance of the Cape: all Cape-wearers held a status equivalent to that of a commissioned officer in the army, and must be treated as such by privates like myself. All Cape-wearers were to be accorded the proper courtesies and addressed as Sister. Furthermore, the speaker, realising that I was now a recruit, and therefore perhaps ignorant, would have me know that all Cape-wearers had undergone certain years of training... The speaker concluded by a sketch of her past career - I was held up in the midst of an urgent job to hearken to it - and a rough estimate of the relative indispensability of the female compared with the male staff. Finally I was dismissed with an injunction to hurry, and finish my incompleted task. 'Very good, Sister,' I replied.
Half an hour later, in a pause in the morning's rush, I was beckoned aside into the ward kitchen by Sister herself. She gently apprised me that, as I was a new recruit, she thought perhaps I was not yet aware of the accurate modes of address and the etiquette customary in a military hospital. Etcetera, etcetera. She had overheard me call the Staff Nurse 'Sister.'

Enough. One may smile at these exhibitions of feminine human nature (and I could match them, absolutely, on the male side), but when all is said and done 'Sister' is a beautiful title, and most of the women who receive it - whether correctly or because, by war service, they have had it bestowed upon them - richly deserve it as a token of gratitude and honour."

Blue Plaque - an update

In May this year I wrote about English Heritage Blue Plaques, and said that I'd sent in a proposal for a plaque to be placed on one of the two houses in Chelsea that was home to Dame Maud McCarthy. Born in Australia, she came to England in 1891 and trained as a nurse at The London Hospital. She served as a member of the Army Nursing Service Reserve in South Africa during the Boer War, and joining QAIMNS in 1902 she later became Matron-in-Chief with the British Expeditionary Force, serving in France and Flanders from 1914 to 1919.
This plaque proposal was considered (with many others) at English Heritage's Committee meeting in October, and yesterday I heard that it has been considered worthy to go forward for full historical research. They always have many proposals in the pipeline, and this next step is likely to take at least two or three years, but it's very encouraging that the first hurdle has been overcome.

English Heritage Blue Plaques