Faith, Hope and Family

The recent release of the film ‘Testament of Youth’ has provided an opportunity to view yet another portrayal of nursing during the Great War.  Based on Vera Brittain’s book of the same name this isn’t the first time it’s been dramatized – it was a popular television series first broadcast in 1979. Vera Brittain was not a fan of trained nurses who on the whole she regarded as both socially and educationally inferior, lacking in imagination and altruism.  As readers of her work will know, one nurse she met in France and with whom she formed a lifelong friendship was the character she refers to as Hope Milroy – in real life Faith Moulson.  In common with most professional nurses Faith Moulson is not known to have been a writer nor did she come to notice for noble deeds, so Vera Brittain’s account of her as mad and eccentric is the only one available to us today. Both the television characterisation and that of the current film are rather different, so is the Sister of the 'Hun' ward, the Hope Milroy we read about or see on the screen anything like the real Faith Moulson?  Although sadly I’ll never know, I have found out a little about the Moulson family and while it won’t answer the question as to her mental state, it does shed some light on her life during the 19th and 20th centuries.

     Faith Moulson was born in 1885 in India, either Ferezepore or Abbottabad according to source, where her father John Moulson was a chaplain.  In ‘Testament of Youth’ Faith is described as coming from a long line of Bishops on her mother’s side and actors and writers on her father’s.  While the former is undoubtedly correct, her paternal grandfather was a commercial traveller and if there were actors in Faith’s past there is no obvious or immediate link to be found.  Her parents John Moulson and Lydia French were married in Amritsar, India, in November 1881. Lydia was born in Agra, the daughter of the Reverend Thomas Valpy French, first Bishop of Lahore, and to whom John Moulson was Chaplain.  Over the next ten years they had five daughters, Ruth, Muriel, Faith, Dorothy and Irene, all born in various parts of Northern India and then in 1892, back in England, their sixth and final child, a son, Geoffrey.

     During the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century the family travelled frequently to India but with Lydia Moulson and her children spending more time in England while her husband continued his ministry in India. There is some evidence to show that John Moulson was an abusive and violent man in private life. The following newspaper report is one of many similar accounts of an incident which occurred when the family were spending time in Devon in 1888, the case having been brought to court by the newly formed London Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children:

A CLERICAL BABY-BEATER.
On July 17 there was disclosed at Axminster Petty Sessions a tale of cruelty to a child so revolting, and in some of its circumstances so unprecedented, as to be almost incredible. The Rev. John Moulson was charged with having, on May 15 last, committed an aggravated assault upon his child Dorothy, aged 16 months. The reverend gentleman is an army chaplain in India, at present on furlough, and residing with his family in lodgings at Seaton. He happens to be the son-in-law of the Bishop of Lahore. The prosecution was instituted by the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. On the morning in question the nurse had been out with the child, and brought it in about noon to prepare its food. Before the food was ready the child appears to have begun to cry. The nurse distinctly says that it was not naturally a fretful child, but not only was it waiting for its food, but the little thing was teething. It had cut about six teeth at this time. The defendant met the nurse coming out of her room with the baby, and ordered her to go back, lay the child on the bed, and leave the room, which she did. The scene which followed may be best told in the nurse's own evidence :—

" When I got halfway out he pushed the door against me, forced me out, and then locked himself in, ... I remained out- side the door listening. My mistress was not at home. I heard the defendant slap the child very violently. I heard the baby shriek at each slap which was given her, and I think this continued for five minutes. I did not count the number of slaps, but I should think there were a dozen at least. I went downstairs for about ten minutes. When I went up again the defendant came out, locked the door, and kept the key in his possession. ... It was two hours before I obtained admission. For the whole of those two hours, with the exception of the short time the defendant was in the room himself, the baby was in the room alone. I asked Mr. Moulson to let me have the key, and he told me to go to my work. . . . I was afraid the child would die, but I was not able to get access to the baby until after 2 o'clock, when I found her quiet. . . . Her little hands were terribly swollen and very red. When I took her in my arms she shrank from me as if in pain. I was horrified at the finger marks on the baby's hips and on the lower part of the body. . . . I kept the child in my arms for the remainder of the day. The baby was fretful, as if in pain, and she looked very pale, and did not like to be touched. She did not take her food properly. During the night the child suffered and could not sleep. Next day I showed the marks to Mrs. Still. There were then marks of congested blood under the skin where the finger-marks were to be found."

This evidence remained substantially unshaken on cross-examination,     although the defendant had the good fortune to be represented by the Hon. Bernard Coleridge. It was strongly corroborated. Mrs. Still, a lady lodging in the same house, saw the child next morning, and says: —

"I saw marks on her as if she had been struck with a stick. In one or two places the skin was almost broken — on the edge of the blows. The blows were half an inch or an inch in width. . . . The baby looked very pale and very languid. I considered it had been beaten, and it would have been cruelty to have beaten a 10 year-old child in the same manner. I should think it endangered   the child's life."

One or two witnesses to character endeavoured to show that the reverend defendant was a model   of everything that is good and noble in a father. Two young ladies, friends of the parents, saw the child at a second-floor   window on the afternoon of the assault, when, according to one, "she waved her hand and laughed," and " looked as happy and well as usual." They also alleged that on the next day the baby's hands were as smooth and white as they should be — the one conflict of evidence in the case. There was also an attempt to show that the child had an abnormally delicate skin. A doctor was called for the defendant — one Evans, a surgeon practising at Seaton — who said— " When children are teething they are naturally very irritable. A child with a hasty temper is liable to have its health seriously injured by giving way to that temper. You must use some discipline to correct it." The five Axminster Justices retired for five- and-twenty minutes. They then dismissed the summons, on the ground that "the evidence did not support the very serious charge made against the defendant;" they next proceeded to stultify themselves by ordering that as "Mr. Moulson showed a want of judgment in administering corporal punishment of that kind to a child of such tender years" he should pay the Court fees, amounting to £1 11s.

***

     Following this incident the family moved, perhaps the result of gossip and unpleasantness from neighbours in Devon and when in England they lived first in Chislehurst, Kent, where Geoffrey was born and later in Winchester. The return to South Devon finally happened during the First World War when the family went to live at Redlands, Sidmouth.

     In 1906 Muriel Moulson moved to London and began a three year nurse training at University College Hospital qualifying in 1909, the same year that Faith decided to follow her elder sister’s path when she became a nurse probationer at the East Sussex Hospital, Hastings.  London was home to the United Kingdom’s most prestigious teaching hospitals; young women aspired to be accepted at one or other of them and records show that the hospitals themselves favoured the daughters of clergy as probationers, so Muriel fitted perfectly into an accepted pattern.  The hospital at Hastings was small and provincial with just 86 beds and it’s not clear what factors were instrumental in Faith preferring that to somewhere more exclusive, or whether she had perhaps been refused a place elsewhere.  After qualifying in 1912 she took midwifery training in London before returning once more to Hastings. Accounts of the life of ‘Hope Milroy’ suggest that she turned to nursing to move away from university and an academic life, but there remains the possibility that Faith and Muriel Moulson saw nursing as a safe and immediate way to gain independence and escape family life and whatever problems it had produced for them.

     None of the five sisters ever married and Faith and Muriel both served as military nurses throughout the First World War until 1919. Faith initially offered her services to the British Red Cross Society [BRCS] and worked in France at Sir Henry Norman’s Hospital, transferring to Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve in April 1915. Muriel was a member of the Territorial Force Nursing Service attached to No.2 London General Hospital and later also worked in France although the sisters’ paths never crossed professionally while there. By the end of the war Muriel was suffering from symptoms of mitral valve disease of the heart contracted following rheumatic fever nine years earlier and that could have been a contributing factor to her relatively early death in 1945.

     At the start of the war Geoffrey Moulson was a medical student at St. Thomas’s Hospital, but he set aside his training and went to France in 1914 with the BRCS as a ‘dresser,’ returning to his studies in London in 1915 and qualifying as a doctor the following year.  From 1917 he had a very long and distinguished career as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in two world wars and finally retiring in 1954 with the rank of Colonel. In 1919 he was married in Bombay to Irish nurse Eileen Rynd, also a wartime nursing sister in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and who served on hospital ships, at Mudros, and in India where it seems likely she and Geoffrey met.

     Following the Great War Faith went back to India, first on a temporary posting with Queen Alexandra’s Military Nursing Service for India, and later as Lady Superintendent at the Sassoon Hospital, Poona, where she worked until her return to England in 1935 following the death of her father and her sister Ruth.  India runs as a thread through the lives of the whole family as do houses in Bournemouth and South Devon where most members of the family lived over the decades, and eventually died.  Faith died in Devon in 1964, immortalised as Hope Milroy in ‘Testament of Youth.’ I wonder how she regarded her other life as Hope?

*****

Main Sources:
The National Archives WO399 for service files of Faith and Muriel Moulson and Eileen Rynd.

Drew’s Medical Officers in the British Army 1660-1960, Volume 2, for details of Geoffrey’s career

The Great War at Fairlynch - Hunting Geoffrey Moulson

Testament of Youth - An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-25; Vera Brittain Various publishers over many editions

Testament of Youth, 1979: available on YouTube

Findmypast  For almost everything else!

After the Crimson Field

7 General Hospital, Malassises, Imperial War Museum

     According to the Economist there have been more than 25,000 books and scholarly articles written about the United Kingdom's part in  the Great War since 1918. I can't vouch for the figure, but it seems perfectly plausible to me. Most relate to the soldiers' story, to strategy and tactics, to organisation and administration and every detail of life in various armies during the conflict. If you need to know how a soldier enlisted, what he was paid, how he was transported, fed, equipped; how he washed and relaxed and 'went over the top' there's plenty of choice on where to find the answer, in official records, books, film, TV and increasingly on the web. If official accounts become a bit dry they can be supplemented by thousands of surviving first-hand accounts and memoirs. There must currently be hundreds of historians and researchers of the Great War who would have no difficulty at all in instantly giving chapter and verse on all aspects of a soldiers' life.

     This is far from the situation in relation to any area of women's service. A relatively tiny number of books have been published on nursing during the Great War and the majority of those are personal accounts in which the facts cannot always be verified or substantiated. In recent years female academics have tried to close the gap a little but however well-researched, the results are often unappealing to the general public and inaccessible due to the high cover prices set for the academic market. These books also appear to turn their back entirely on giving the same grass-roots information about the fine detail of nurses' service which can be so easily found in similar books relating men within a military setting. The result is that to the question 'Can you recommend a good book about nurses' the answer will invariably settle first around Lyn Macdonald's 'Roses of No Man's Land,' Vera Brittain's 'Testament of Youth' and occasionally something else that probably doesn't even relate to a British nurse's experience of war. It seems almost impossible to find the answer to same questions of organisation and administration relating to women's service that are so clearly defined for men.

     The fine detail of military nurses' service during the Great War is largely lost - it's a yawning gap waiting to be filled. In some respects you could fill it with anything and few people would be any the wiser. There would be few opponents to a statement that nurses earned £20 a year, or £50 a year or £200 a year because it's information that's hidden and difficult to find. There would be few opponents to comments that Great War nurses could marry, or maybe couldn't marry, or if they could marry they had to leave - or perhaps they were allowed to stay? And did VADs actually spend their time outside washing bandages or collecting sticks in the woods? Who is there who knows? So when the BBC decided to commission 'The Crimson Field' they had a gap to fill and unfortunately it was a gap that to the viewing public was an 'unknown.' They had the freedom to fill it with whatever they felt was suitable regardless of whether it was historically correct. And by 'historically correct' I don't mean the tiny things like fine details of uniform and kit, but the basic knowledge of what life was like for nurses and doctors and how hospitals worked in France at that time. What's missing from the programme is any deeper understanding of the nurses and hospitals - their foundations are missing and experience and integrity have been removed.

     To those who say 'it's only drama' I'd reply that it's historical drama and has been heralded by the BBC as an important part of their Great War Centenary programming. Because of that it has a duty to be as historically accurate as possible. To those who say that it's no different to believing that 'Holby City' is an accurate portrayal or that crime drama fails to reflect modern policing, I insist that there is an enormous difference. Hospital life and police procedure today are part of our current knowledge. If we watch modern hospital drama we have experience to judge it by, either our own or that of our friends and family. We can dismiss what is unbelievable because we have the personal knowledge of what it's really like. In 'The Crimson Field' the BBC have produced a programme that has filled an existing gap in history that is outside people's experience and they have filled that gap with stories that could not and would not have happened.

     Because of the high regard in which the BBC is held, the programme has made itself historically correct and has set a model for the future. It has given a representation of nurses, doctors and hospitals that will now be followed, honoured and repeated for decades. Mention of the programme is already being used to give credence to many serious centenary projects and books in order to boost visitors or sales regardless of whether it has any relevance or validity.  In my opinion it has set the serious research of nursing in the Great War back to a point where there may be no hope of ever resurrecting it - why bother in the future when it can be wiped out at a stroke and with such ease?

Dead Man's Land - Robert Ryan

I'm a great reader of crime fiction, often to the exclusion of doing other, more important things.  On the whole I stick to British authors, like complex plots, skip over too much gratuitous violence, and prefer to arrive at the end actually understanding what's gone on in the middle. So about eighteen months ago I was intrigued and rather flattered to be asked by Robert Ryan if we could meet up to discuss a new book he was working on (these days a bit of flattery is so very welcome).  He intended to include 'some plucky VADs' and wanted to make sure that they would be appearing all present and correct.

Over the next months I was kept up to date with the progress of the book and then asked to check the first draft to see how the VADs were doing.  Anyone who has read this blog on a regular basis will know that of all the bees that float around my bonnet, the indiscriminate placement of VADs in Casualty Clearing Stations on the Western Front is the one that stings hardest, and in this book their inclusion in very forward areas was going to be essential to the plot. If I have learned one lesson from the exercise, it’s this.  If you’re a writer of fiction and make fundamental errors because of inadequate research and blissful ignorance, the wrath of pedants will be unleashed upon you.  On the other hand, if you include factual inaccuracies and weave them in an intelligent way, in full knowledge of your sins, you will always be forgiven (fingers crossed).

Dead Man’s Land was published at the beginning of this month with the full approval of the Conan Doyle estate. It follows Dr. John Watson’s travels around the Western Front during the Great War, and where Dr. Watson goes, death and intrigue are right on his heels. By most estimations he must be getting on a bit in age, but his physical limitations are highlighted, not glossed over, and his place as an elderly medical practitioner in wartime never seems extraordinary. The military setting is sound, and the depiction of hospitals and casualty clearing stations in wartime is thorough. The VADs are skilfully introduced into a place where they would never actually have been, with the difficulties and regulations surrounding their employment made clear. Even I was heard to clap. The story is unusual and absorbing, it has complexity, but with enough clarity to prevent it becoming confusing, especially for those who don’t usually dabble in ‘war,’ and it should appeal to everyone who enjoys crime fiction of any era, but perhaps especially to devotees of Sherlock Holmes.  Yes, of course he’s there as well.

And my thanks to Rob for his kind words in the acknowledgements where he accepts all errors as his own.  May I take this opportunity to clear my conscience and admit that there might just be one that’s mine!

Downton Abbey - More Tales of the Unexpected

Julian Fellowes was rather upset last year about criticisms pointing out inaccuracies in the first series of Downton Abbey:

"There was also an assumption in the media that the complainant was automatically correct and we were wrong, which was frustrating... When there was a television aerial in shot, as there was once, I was happy to hold my hands up. But I expended a lot of energy getting agitated about accusations that such-and-such piece of music wasn't released until 1922, when in fact it was being played in 1910. Or the butler should have been in uniform when they came out of uniform in the Regency period - I mean, just shut up!"
Fellowes added: "This year I think it might be nice to have a column called 'This Week's Downton Blunders', where I have the right of reply and can say either, 'It's a fair cop' or, 'No, we got it right, they did wear bathing costumes in 1761' or whatever. That might be a much better way of handling all the excitement."

In the absence of such a column, I once again feel the need to comment on one or two of the latest blunders. Now the Abbey itself has opened as a convalescent home for officers there’s no improvement in the sardine-tin formation of the beds, and still no room for lockers or anywhere to keep personal items. Mrs. Crawley seems to be conducting affairs at Downton, and with Major Clarkson and Lady Sybil spending every waking minute there as well, it makes me wonder what’s happening down at Downton village cottage hospital. It was chaos there last week, and with 50% of the staff gone, things must be reaching a critical point. I say 50%, but with Thomas moving down the road as well, more like 75%.

Thomas Barrow. In the first series he was exposed at Downton as a thief. With war on the horizon he decided to jump before he was dismissed and joined the Territorial branch of the Royal Army Medical Corps. This ensured (so he thought) that he would get a cushy number when the wartime chips were down. Somehow he ended up in the thick of the fighting, having a few fags in a trench under constant bombardment. I can’t quite work out what he was actually doing in that trench. Was he attached to a Regimental Aid Post, or attached to a Field Ambulance perhaps? If it was ever explained, I missed it. Apologies. He intentionally exposed himself to sniper fire and after recovering from his self-inflicted injury, and by the miracles of modern television script-writing, he ends up in charge of the convalescent home at Downton Abbey.

Thomas Barrow. Thief, liar, manipulator, coward. Just the man for the job. Well, not exactly, as no UK convalescent home had RAMC staff. There was absolutely no way a RAMC corporal (sorry, Acting-Sergeant) would work in that type of unit or give orders to sick officers. Complete drivel and tosh. There should at least have been a trained nurse, but unfortunately no provision has been made for even one in this series.

The surprise of the week (errors no longer being surprises) came when Lady Mary announced that a friend of the family wanted to come to Downton from Middlesbrough to convalesce, and both Mrs. Crawley and Major Clarkson were up in arms.
‘Middlesbrough General will have their own arrangements about where their officers convalesce’ declared Mrs. C. And Major C. agreed:
‘Downton must function as part of the official system or it can’t function at all.’

So Lord Fellowes KNOWS there was an official system – that rather took my breath away. Is it better to know about something and choose to ignore it, or make errors because you failed to do the research and never knew about it at all? (Vote NOW). And I must just add here (pedant that I am) that there was only one military hospital in Middlesbrough, not the General Hospital, and no officer beds in the town at all.

However I did notice one bit of light flickering in the drawing-room when the near-exploding Carson exclaimed:
‘So we just make it up as we go along?’
Spot on, Carson.

Downton Abbey - Hospital or Bedlam?

I was a keen follower of the first series of Downton Abbey. As someone from a working-class background I’ve never been too keen on toffs, but I’ve been persuaded over the past few years that as a researcher of Great War nurses, a basic knowledge of upper-class whims, desires and inter-marrying might be useful background. And so it has been. When I heard that the second series was going to see the Abbey as a hospital I was very aware that it would be too easy for the writer(s) to get it wrong. But I was unprepared for just how wrong it could be. I’ve read that the first series cost approximately £1 million an episode, so presumably this second series is no cheaper, and with that budget it might be hoped that a few pounds would be spent on decent research into the formation, organisation and administration of military hospitals during the Great War.

Not a bit of it. The portrayal falters at every step. I can see only too clearly that there are not a lot of sources out there to punch a writer in the face, and it might need a bit more digging to uncover the real story, but come Lord Fellowes, with a million an episode this is poor stuff.

During the Great War military ‘hospitals’ were divided into two types, central hospitals and auxiliary hospitals. The former were the larger units run under the auspices of the War Office. They were staffed in the main by officers of the Royal Army Medical Corps and nurses of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and the Territorial Force Nursing Service. Men were admitted to a central hospital, assessed and treated, and when appropriate (days, weeks or months) transferred out to one of the many satellite auxiliary units for which each central hospital had responsibility. The auxiliaries came under the control of the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St. John, and were staffed by nurses under contract to them. Downton village cottage hospital could be nothing but an auxiliary hospital. And as a small, local, auxiliary hospital, it would still have conformed to the very high standards set by the Joint War Committee. So where does it fail?

Auxiliary hospitals did not employ Royal Army Medical Corps orderlies. Thomas could never have worked there. But then, the whole tale of Thomas’ return is pure fantasy.

Auxiliary hospitals did not, except in the rarest of circumstances, admit men direct from disembarkation. Their patients would already have been treated and cared for at a local central hospital. The raggle-taggle stream of wounded officers, shirts hanging out, blood oozing from their dressings, arms in slings bandaged over their uniforms was less likely than Haig riding in on his horse. Are these supposed to be men ‘straight from Arras.’ Quite ridiculous.

So many beds would never been crammed into such a small space. How does the writer imagine that nurses would have walked between the beds? Washed the patients and dressed their wounds? Fed them? Cleaned the floors? The ward looked worse than the worst of the casualty clearing stations on the Western Front in 1914. Far worse than Bedlam. Is Lord Fellowes aware that officers were treated rather differently from other ranks? His ‘ward’ is barely fit for pigs, let alone soldiers, and never officers.

Why is there no uniformed trained nurse? I’m afraid Mrs. Crawley, for all her wise words and ‘experience’ simply won’t do. She might act in an administrative role as Commandant, but wouldn’t be allowed to take part in giving out drugs or patient care. Mrs Crawley and the Major moving patients on stretchers was laughable (if it wasn’t so tear-inducing). And rookie VAD Miss Sybil doing a medicine round – complete poppycock. She’d have been lucky if she’d been allowed to wash the lockers or set trays.

The VADs were in the wrong uniform. They wore the grey dresses of St. John’s Ambulance Brigade VADs, but with the armlets of the British Red Cross. If they were supposed to be BRCS VADs, then they should have been in blue dresses, if St. John VADs, they should have been wearing the appropriate armlets. But of course, nobody ever gets the uniform right – only nurses so it’s hardly important.

It was fun to see Thomas being asked by Mrs. Crawley to stand in for Lady Sybil and do her VAD duties so she could go home for dinner. Fun? Nonsense.

And finally (for now), a blind officer would never, not in a million years, wash up in a tin-pot cottage hospital in Yorkshire. From fairly early in the war all blind officers were treated at No.2 London General Hospital (Territorial Force), Chelsea, where they received the most up to date and experienced care available, later almost certainly being transferred to one of the London hostels of St. Dunstans.

I suppose there’s always next week. I wonder what a ward in Downton Abbey itself will add to the hospital picture? I feel sure that it has to be better – I pray it couldn’t be any worse. And to exit where I entered, there are so few sources on Great War hospitals, and so much inaccuracy and misinformation spread around, both in books and on the web, that there is a great need for intelligent research. This Downton portrayal will now whip around the world and be used as a model of the truth by one and all, especially those who misguidedly believe it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary. It will leave a legacy of falsehoods. Julian Fellowes has the background, he has the money, but unfortunately he lacks the knowledge.