Perhaps due to poetic license, or historical media hearsay (i.e. inaccuracies that become “fact” due to continuous repetition in TV, movies, and literature), the second season of Downton Abbey shows a largely abbreviated and fictionalized version of life in a country estate-cum-military hospital. Sue Light, a British Military Nurse historian and blogger at This Intrepid Band, posted about the inaccuracies here and here to clear things up (and her blog does not diminish my enjoyment of the series!). Since there are many historians and genealogists with far, far greater knowledge of WWI nursing and military hospitals, my post is to give a general overview of the topic–within the context of the show–during the Great War, using the primary and secondary resources I have on hand.

In August 1914, there were “463 trained nurses of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Nursing Service (QAIMNS), and of the Territorial Force Nursing Serving 2783…the British Red Cross, St. John’s Ambulance Association and Brigade, and the County Associations (men and women) numbered 2354.” Nurses were needed at once, and six parties of QAIMNS reserves were sent to France and Belgium by August 20th, the Naval Nurses (about 70 in reserve) were called up and sent to various hospitals, and the Territorial force were called out on August 5th, “and in ten days 23 Territorial General Hospitals in England, Wales and Scotland were ready to receive the wounded and the nurses were also ready.” Each of these Territorial General Hospitals had 520 beds, but this soon proved inadequate after a few months of war, and “the accommodation of practically every hospital was increased to 1,000 to 3,000 beds and many Auxiliary Hospitals had to be organized.”

Galvanized by the same calls for patriotism and bravery as their menfolk, ladies of the upper and aristocratic classes were eager to do their bit by volunteering as nurses and lending their estates to the military–all of which caused considerable chaos amongst the trained nursing corps and the Government. The young ladies like Lady Sybil Crawley, or her real life counterparts Joan Poynder (dau. of Sir John Dickson-Poynder) and Monica Grenfell (dau. of Lord Desborough), war work combined their desire for independence and to have something to do.

Joan Poynder had a “passion for independence…and I knew that I wasn’t going to get much in the pre-war days except through marriage…But luckily I got it immediately by pretending I was much older and going in for nursing.” By lying about her age, Joan was able to join the Red Cross, and “after a period of nursing in six hospitals in England, managed to get into a French hospital, even though at nineteen she was below the regulation age for such work.” Monica became a probationer at the London Hospital in August 1914, and three months later was accepted as probationer at the British Hospital at Wimereux, where she was the only one amongst a fully trained nursing staff.

THE VOLUNTARY AID DETATCHMENT (VAD) DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR © IWM (Q 2469)

The British Red Cross and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, worked together through the joint committee set up to administer the Times Fund for the Red Cross, and in time of war they were controlled by the War Office and Admiralty. The Red Cross had, since 1909, “organized Voluntary Aid Detachments to give voluntary aid to the sick and wounded in the event of war in home territory. There were 60,000 men and women trained in transport work, cooking, laundry, first aid and home nursing. St. John’s ambulance had the same system of ambulance workers and V.A.D.’s to call on.”

The services of V.A.D.’s–many of them from good backgrounds and with little nursing service, let alone experience in a professional capacity–were soon depended upon heavily, as it became quite clear within the first weeks of the war, that the number of trained nurses, both veteran and recent graduates, provided inadequate. V.A.D. Hospitals were opened, most of them in large private houses lent for the purpose, and within “nine months there were 800 of these at work in every part of England, Scotland and Wales.”

Vera Brittain, who left Somerville College to join the V.A.D. in 1915, wrote to her fiance, Roland Leighton:

I can honestly say I love nursing, even after only two days. It is surprising how things that would be horrid or dull if one had to do them at home quite cease to be so when one is in hospital. Even dusting a ward is an inspiration. It does not make me half so tired as I thought it would either…

The majority of cases are those of people who have got rheumatism resulting from wounds. Very few come straight from the trenches, it is too far, but go to another hospital first. One man in my ward had six operations before coming and is still almost helpless…

I have various things to do, all of which belong to the kind of work which is called probationers’ work. Another nurse & I have three wards to look after between us. Generally I do two & she does one, as she has other work like massage to do which does not come within my sphere. I have to take the men their breakfasts (they are nearly all in bed for breakfast), prepare the tables for the doctor, with hot water etc, tidy up & dust the wards & make the beds. These latter are not made in the ordinary way but in a particular method you have to learn how to do, & are called medical beds. Not every sick person has a medical bed, but cases of rheumatism always do.

Many V.A.D.’s wrote of their experiences with hostile Sisters, who despised them for not being properly trained, and “Matrons of ordinary hospitals, accustomed to a rigid system, found it difficult to handle voluntary workers, whom at first they distrusted. Class feeling also came in, and for a while in some hospitals the voluntary help did not work well.” No doubt the frivolous actions of V.A.D.’s like Lady Diana Manners, who while nursing at the Rutland Hospital (her mother, the Duchess of Rutland’s town home, converted to an officer’s hospital), spent much of her off-duty time partying into the early hours of the morning, contributed to this feeling, but for the most part, V.A.D.s proved themselves, and earned the grudging respect of trained nurses.

Caption of Punch’s satirical cartoon: Visitor. “And how did you know when you were wounded?” Tommy. ‘Saw it in The Daily Mail.”

Over the course of the war, numerous country estates and London mansions were converted into hospitals and convalescent homes for military casualties or as temporary lodgings for the scores of Belgian refugees who escaped their occupied country in 1914. At the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Abbey, the riding school and indoor tennis court were converted into a 100-bed hospital, and Blackmoor, the Hampshire home of the Earl and Countess of Selborne, was converted with the countess as commandant, and the drawing room, dining room and smoking room turned into wards, the hall into the men’s living room, the library as the nurses’ sitting room, and the billiards room became a store (not until Easter 1919 was the home turned back to its pre-war appearance). Even Highclere Castle was converted to hospital use, with the Countess of Carnarvon turning to her (rumored) biological father, Alfred de Rothschild for funds with which to equip her home with the finest service.

According the present Lady Carnarvon in an article in The Telegraph:

Thirty nurses were recruited. The family’s personal physician was hired as medical director. Arundel, a bedroom on the first floor in the northwest corner of the house, became an operating theatre. All the castle’s 41 south-facing rooms had to be fitted with exterior blinds. And when the men started to arrive, “it was like moving a house party of 50 people into the castle on a permanent basis” – with the same number of staff. [Source]

Not all estate owners were as generous: Lord Wemyss declined his wife’s suggestion to turn Stanway into a hospital, and even threatened to close the house altogether! This reaction was rare, however, and both nurses and owners of great estates experienced many traumas and hardships on the Home Front, which did much to shake up Edwardian society.

Sources:
Ladies of the Manor by Pamela Horn
Women and War Work by Helen Fraser
How We Lived Then, 1914-1918 by Mrs. C. S. Peel
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Women in the First World War by Neil Storey

Further Reading:
Country Houses in Medical Service – Jane Austen’s World
The Military Hospitals at Home
World War One: wounded soldiers and the Edmonton Military Hospital
Auxiliary Hospitals During WWI
What did the Red Cross do in WWI?
Letters home from a First World War nurse
The role of aristocratic volunteers during the First World War

When in 1896, Reeves was transferred to London as Agent-General, the representative of New Zealand government within the British Empire, the couple became fast friends with such Fabian luminaries as the Webbs, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. Maud was also active in England’s struggle for women’s suffrage, and in 1906 she was appointed to the executive of the NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies), and two years later she helped establish the Fabian Women’s Group. Through this latter group, Maud initiated a study of the daily lives of working-class families in Lambeth, a southern London borough. According to Maud’s biographer,

“The Lambeth mothers’ project, initiated by Maud, was prompted by the recognition that more infants died in the London slums than in Kensington or Hampstead… Forty-two families were selected from a lying-in hospital in Lambeth, London, to have weekly visits, medical examinations from Dr Ethel Bentham every two weeks, and 5s. to be paid to the mother for extra nourishment for three months before the birth of the baby and for one year afterwards. The money came from private donations, and the mothers wrote down their weekly expenditure. Eight families withdrew because the husbands objected to this weekly scrutiny. Eight other mothers who could not read or write dictated their sums to their husbands or children.”

This study was packaged as a Fabian tract entitled Family Life on a Pound a Week in 1912, and when it was published for the public as Round About a Pound a Week, it caused a sensation. It “argued for government reforms, including child benefit, school dinners, and free health clinics. It also noted the role of poor housing conditions in child mortality, and how prenatal nutrition could help.” Beatrice Webb, amongst others, had been involved in the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress (1905-09), and this book provided concrete evidence that social reform was necessary and needed right away, thus paving the way for the Liberal Party’s revolutionary reforms of the late Edwardian period.

Maud’s daughter, Amber Reeves (1887-1981), followed in her mother’s footsteps, choosing to attend Cambridge rather than a court presentation, and founding the Cambridge University Fabian Society (CUFS) with Ben Keeling, which “was the first society at Cambridge to enlist women from its founding. Young women met regularly with men as equals and discussed everything from religious beliefs to social evils to sex, which would have been impossible in the conventional atmospheres of their homes.” In romantic life, Amber, however, did not follow her mother, instead taking the very married H. G. Wells as a lover and bearing him a daughter. She quickly married another man, and this illicit relationship inspired Wells’novel Ann Veronica, which scandalized society just as much as Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks had two years before. Nevertheless, the Reeves women embodied not simply the evolving role for women in Victorian and Edwardian society, but the prototypes for the “New Woman” who strode boldly into the 20th century despite societal disapproval.

Further Reading:
Maud and Amber: a New Zealand Mother and Daughter and the Women’s Cause, 1865-1981 by Ruth Fry

Indian suffragettes on the Women’s Coronation Procession of 17 June 1911. The small Indian contingent was organised by Mrs Jane Fisher Unwin (the daughter of Richard Cobden). She and other representatives of the WSPU contacted Indian women living in the UK in the weeks leading up to the procession, whilst organising the decorations and the collection of subscriptions for the elephant banner that cost between £4 & £5. The India procession was part of the ‘Imperial Contingent’ and was intended to show the strength of support for women’s suffrage throughout the Empire. All corners of the empire were represented and divided into 6 sections – New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, India and Crown Colonies & Protectorates. Annie Besant also took part in the India procession.

- Museum of London

Though Indian (Parsi) and a woman, Cornelia Sorabji accomplished the unimaginable in becoming the first woman to practice law in India and Britain. Sorabji was born into a large family of nine children, her father, Reverend Sorabji Karsedji, a Parsi Christian, and her mother, Francina Ford, an Indian who had been adopted and raised by a British couple. Sorabji’s mother was devoted to the cause of women’s education, and made her mark upon Indian society with the establishment of several girls’ schools in Puna (then known as Poona). It was through her mother’s contacts that opened the door for Sorabji to become the first woman to take the Bachelor of Civil Laws exam at Oxford University in 1892.

Upon her return to India in 1894, Sorabji dedicated her time to the rights and education of women and children. Her first cases involved the women of the purdahnashins. Many of these women held considerable property, but Hindu law forbade them from communicating with the outside male world. Sorabji could enter pleas for these women in the courts, but she could not defend the cases because she lacked professional standing in the Indian legal system. She quickly rectified this, standing for the LLB examination of Bombay University in 1897 and pleader’s examination of Allahabad high court in 1899. Despite her success in these examinations, she would not be recognized as a barrister until women were legally permitted to be called to the bar in 1924.

In the meantime, Sorabji petitioned the India Office for legal advisers to women and minors in the provincial courts, and was appointed Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards of Bengal in 1904. By 1907, the need for such representation called her to all parts of India, and over a twenty year period, it was estimated that Sorabji helped over 600 women and orphans fight legal battles, sometimes at no charge. In the 1920s, she was legally able to practice law and opened a firm in Calcutta; however, male prejudice confined her to the preparation of cases, and she never set foot in a court as a barrister. Nevertheless, Sorabji–a woman, an Indian, and a Christian–led an interesting and intriguing life, “which spanned two extremes of the Raj: its zenith under a queen who ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, and its ultimate dissolution with India’s independence.”

Further Reading:

An Indian Portia: Selected Writings of Cornelia Sorabji, 1866-1954, ed. Kusoom Vadgama
Cornelia Sorabji: India’s Pioneering Woman by Suparna Gooptu
Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women’s Rights in India by Richard Sorabji
Cornelia Sorabji’s Wikipedia entry

During the late Victorian era, the name of Mrs. A. B. Marshall could be found fixed over the door of her large cooking school and employment agency on Mortimer Street, in culinary magazines, on cooking utensils, cookbooks, food products, supplies, and cross-country lectures. By the time of her death in 1905, she had sunk into obscurity and the destruction of her papers and ephemera in a fire in the 1950s further buried the legacy of a woman who, at one time, was considered as indispensable to English housewives and cooks as Mrs. Beeton.

Born Agnes Bertha Smith on August 24, 1855, at Walthamstow, Essex, she learned “to cook from home experience and work under skilled Parisian and Viennese chefs.” In 1883, she moved to London, where she purchased the National Training School of Cookery from its owners, and promptly set about building the school’s clientele and reputation. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed the beginnings of the domestic science movement, and the charismatic and determined Mrs. Marshall fit into this female-oriented movement, boosting the school’s pupils from forty within two years of purchasing the school to thousands for day-, month-, semester-, or year-long courses. Her pupils included cooks wanting to increase their skills (or, cooks dispatched hastily by their employers to learn how to prepare edible meals), middle class women desiring to run a tip-top household, and even aristocratic women picking up a unique hobby. The curriculum “offered specialty instruction in cooking, including lessons in curry from an English colonel who had served in India and classes in French haute cuisine taught by a Cordon Bleu graduate.”

Over the following ten years, Mrs. Marshall expanded her empire adding an employment agency and registrar for cooks, a kitchen shop where food prepared by students was sold to the public, cookbooks, a weekly newspaper called The Table, and “specialty foods, utensils, cutlery, cast-iron equipment, and cooking supplies including baking powder, flavorings, vegetable food colorants, leaf gelatin, and in 1888, an edible cornet à la crème (ice cream cone) made with ground almonds.” This last item, and her ice cream molds which ran up to a thousand shapes and varieties, earned Mrs. Marshall the moniker “Queen of Ices” in response to her passionate devotion to ices, ice creams, and frozen desserts.

With so many things to juggle, it was amazing that Mrs. Marshall had the time to lecture, but she did, scheduling six talks per week in Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, and Newcastle, and a second tour went to twelve additional cities. Her live demonstrations, held on consecutive Saturdays in London, drew rave reviews and even more fame, though oddly enough, she found little success in the United States (her nearest rival there was Maria Parloa).

She began to wind her career down a notch by the mid-1890s, turning from lecturing, cooking, and writing, to charity, initiating Yule dinners for the poor and maintaining winter soup kitchens. After writing one more cookbook, Fancy Ices, Mrs. Marshall retired to Pinner, her estate on the River Pinn, where she lived until her death from a riding accident in 1905, just a month short of her fiftieth birthday. Mrs. Marshall and her empire faded from view and memory as the twentieth century wore on, “but her influence and opinions endured even longer. She denounced canned food and the substandard meals served in railway cars and depots. She campaigned for the availability of fresh produce and trained kitchen staff. Her prognostications foresaw the acceptance of dishwashers, the expansion of automobile travel, the advent of supermarkets, fad diets, chemical purification of water, refrigerated trucks, and the popularization of the ice cream freezer.”

Further Reading:
Mrs Marshall, the Greatest Victorian Ice Cream Maker, with a facsimile of the Book of Ices 1885 by Robin Weir
BookRags biography
Wikipedia entry

Even though I was not wild about The Wild Rose by Jennifer Donnelly, I was interested in the presence of women mountaineers in the Edwardian era, and came upon Fanny Bullock Workman. Workman was born in 1859 to a prominent Massachusetts family, and embarked upon a lifetime of exploration after her marriage to Dr. William Hunter Workman, who was ten years her senior. They began with amazing cycling tours across the globe, and they collaborated on three books–Algerian Memories, Sketches Awheel in fin de siecle Iberia, and Through Town and Jungle–which were notable for their shared credit as “Fanny Bullock Workman and William Hunter Workman.”

Fanny first encountered The Himalayas in 1898, and in 1899 they proceeded to climb and name a series a peaks, “foremost among them 21,000 foot Koser Gunge.” At age forty, Workman’s ascent was high enough to claim the women’s altitude level, and she pushed on to climb even higher. In 1906, she climbed the Nun Kun Range of India, with an ascension of the 22,810 ft Pinnacle Peak. The Nun Kun Peak in the Himalayas, reached an altitude of 23,394 feet, and “during this climb the camp of the party was pitched for two nights at an altitude of 21,000 feet, although previous explorers had reckoned 21,500 feet as the limit at which men could live.”

This achievement was marred by a slight dispute between Workman and rival mountaineer Annie Peck, who claimed to have climbed higher, when she scaled the Huascarán in the Andes in 1904. The tenacious Workman sent a survey party to calculate the Peck’s highest point, which ended up 1,000 feet lower than Pinnacle Peak. As the undisputed champion of the women’s altitude level, Workman was in high demand as a lecturer and writer, addressing such groups as the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, and writing books and articles, and planning further expeditions.

Though Workman worked in tandem with her husband, she was the driving force behind their explorations, and her forthright personality and successes challenged her male peers, and offended many of them. Nevertheless, Workman and her husband conducted eight Himalayan expeditions between 1898 and 1912, and earned medals of honor from an additional ten European geographical societies. Their daughter Rachel followed in her mother’s footsteps, becoming a geologist and wife of Sir Alexander Mar-Robert. The Workmans moved to the South of France in 1917, where she suffered from a longtime illness until her death in 1925.

Further Reading:
Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers by Dea Birkett
Victorian Lady Travelers by Dorothy Middleton
American Travel Writers, 1850-1915. Ed. Donald Ross and James J. Schramer
Mountaineering women: stories by early climbers By David Mazel

Manufacturers make jam and pickles; women have discarded satin shoes for walking, and donned stout boots; they no longer enjoy galloping consumption, but galloping after hounds.

Women are virile and alive to-day; they hate being thought weak just as in Jane Austen’s time girls hated being thought strong.

- Women The World Over (1914)

Infanta Eulalia of Spain (1864 – 1958)

The Infanta (a title given to daughters of the Spanish monarch) incited controversy from a very young age, and consistently caused a furor until the day of her death. The youngest daughter of Queen Isabella II of Spain, Eulalia spent much of her childhood exiled with her family in France. When her brother was restored to the throne as King Alfonso XII, the young infanta said good-bye to her convent school and resumed her rank as Spanish royalty. However, according to one volume of Eulalia’s memoirs, this abrupt change in position was the root of her cynicism towards social status, and she grew determined to undermine the snobbery and strictures of exalted rank. She dutifully married a cousin, Infante Antonio de Orleans y Borbón, at 22, but after bearing two sons, Eulalia set up her own household in Paris and Madrid, and often visited England.

The year 1893 was the first inkling that the Infanta Eulalia of Spain was her own woman and cared naught for what others might think. She made plans to visit the United States for the World’s Fair in Chicago, and the Windy City’s high society brimmed with pride and delight, crowing at this coup over New York’s “400″. American newspapers were all agog over Eulalia, and city officials in New York and Chicago drew up a list of official itineraries for the Infanta, and society hostesses rubbed their hands with glee over the lavish dinners and entertainments planned for this alleged direct descendant of Christopher Columbus. Eulalia shocked everyone by smoking, she attended a Roman Catholic church in a poor parish rather than have mass in a luxurious cathedral, and even snubbed a social event to eat sausages at the fair like a regular attendee. She later courted more controversy when she tried to divorce her husband, and when she became the official go-between for wealthy, social-climbing Americans and European noble families (the grateful Americans of course showered Eulalia with automobiles or the loaning of yachts).

Eulalia’s most scandalous move yet was becoming an author. She first published The Thread of Life in 1912, where she expressed her thoughts “about education, the independence of women, the equality of classes, socialism, religion, marriage, prejudices, and traditions.” This book raised the ire of her nephew, King Alfonso XIII, who demanded to read the book before its publication–Eulalia ignored this. She added fire to the flame in 1915, when she wrote an article about the German Emperor Wilhelm II for the Strand Magazine, and published Court Life from Within, a deeper look at her life. She published two more books, the last being her official memoirs in 1935. The Infanta lived until she was 94, and though she was born to the purple, and occasionally demonstrated her royal upbringing, Eulalia held quite progressive views for her sex and rank, and during the Spanish Civil War, she wrote “We who have seen so many of our traditions crumble in the dust find our one solace in the knowledge that a new world is about to evolve.”

Read her obituary
The Thread of Life (1912)
Court Life from Within (1915)