Read The Nightingale Shore Murder Online
Authors: Rosemary Cook
Urith left all her belongings, worth just over £5,600 net, to her sister. Florence herself made a Will in April, using part of her sister's legacy to set up a trust fund for the benefit of one of her cousins, Stuart Hobkirk. He was by now a reputed St Ives artist, and living in Tonbridge with his mother, Florence's aunt, the Baroness Farina. But Florence was not to be in England for long. By 1915 the War Office was making special appeals for nurses, and Florence and Mabel were amongst many Queen's Nurses who joined Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve.
The âQAs' had not been in existence for long. In 1897, Princess Christian, one of the daughters of Queen Victoria, had formed the Army Nursing Reserve that carried her name. One hundred of these reserve nurses, including Florence and Mabel, had been to South Africa during the Boer War and were joined by nurses from the London Hospital, organised by Princess Alexandra, wife of the future King Edward VII. When the British and Indian army nursing services were amalgamated, the now Queen Alexandra gave her name to the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service, in March 1902.
In 1908, the QAIMNS took over the reserve force and members of this force were employed on a contract basis for the duration of the war. By 1914, there were 297 regular members of QAIMNS, the numbers limited by the requirement that members be unmarried, aged over 25, and of higher social standing. These criteria were changed during the War. By the end of 1914, there were more than 2,000 regular and reserve QAs. By the time the War ended, more than 10,000 qualified nurses had worked with the QAs, including those working for the Territorial Force Nursing Reserve.
The nurse in overall charge of the British nurses in Europe during the war was (Emma) Maud McCarthy. An Australian by birth, and educated there, she had trained as a nurse in London in 1891, and was a ward sister at the London Hospital, Whitechapel by 1894. She was one of the select group of London hospital nurses chosen to go to South Africa to nurse the wounded of the second Boer war in 1900 with the Army Nursing Service Reserve, of which Florence and Mabel were both members. In 1910, Maud McCarthy was appointed Principal Matron at the War Office. As head of the British Expeditionary Force of nurses, she arrived in France in August 1914, and left in August 1919, to be awarded honours (including being made a Dame) and medals from Britain, France and Belgium for her work.
Florence's service with the QAs began when she signed up on 10
th
August 1915 at the Hopital Militaire, Fort Mahon, Somme, France. She was 50 years old. She was sent as a staff nurse to 14 General Hospital at Wimereaux, a coastal town three miles north of Boulogne, where a Red Cross hospital had been set up very early in the war. In October that year, she went to 14 General Hospital for six months, before a fortnight's leave in England the following April. A report in August 1916, describes her health as good, her conduct, excellent, and her character as â
very contented and has a good influence'
. Cryptically, the report notes that she is â
considered especially suitable for duties on barges
.' (Barges were used to transport cases that would suffer most from the jolting of road transport, including âwounds of lung and abdomen.') Under âRemarks', it notes that â
Miss Shore is a very capable nurse and quite fit for charge duties, but she does not wish for responsibility or promotion
.'
*
Later, she worked at the No 32 casualty clearing station, Warlingcourt, France. The nurse who ran this station from the time it was set up in March 1917 was Sister Kathleen E Luard, also a veteran of the South Africa war. She kept a diary of her experiences, later published under the title âUnknown Warriors'. She describes the station where she and Florence worked, consisting of tents and huts hastily constructed by army engineers, on a ridge about six miles from the battle line. At the beginning of March, in the middle of a freezing winter, there were just seven Sisters for 700 planned beds, though more arrived, supported by orderlies, as time went on. The staff worked in conditions of great hardship, with never enough food, or space for all the wounded brought in to them, and sometimes unexpected personal danger:
âFor the Mess', Sister Luard wrote, âyou settle for a rice pudding, but there is no rice, and the cows have anthrax so there's no fresh milk, and the canteen has run out of Ideal Milk. Well, have a jam tart; lots of jam in the British Army, but no flour, no suet, no tinned fruits, no eggs, no beans or dried peas, not one potato each. But there is bacon, ration bread and tinned butter (when you can get it), jam, marmalade sometimes, cheese, stew, Army biscuits, tea, some sugar, and sometimes mustard, and sometimes oatmeal and cornflour...
We're in the middle of terrific work. All the casualties from the attack on Hainy and Croisilles came to us; we hadn't nearly enough Sisters to go round and it never stopped all day and all night and all today until 5pm. So many die that I shan't possibly be able to write to their mothers, and some have no trace of next of kin. I had to run a ward equipped for 14 officers and had to get 28 in, on stretchers on every inch of the floor, some badly wounded; they were all angels of patience and uncomplainingness...
A boy with his face nearly in half, who couldn't talk, and whom I was feeding, was trying to explain that he was lying on something hard in his trouser pocket. It was a live Mills bomb! I extracted it with some care, as the pins catch easily.'
In the Spring of 1917, Florence's brother Offley and his wife Caroline were travelling up through France, returning from India to England. They cabled Florence to see if they could meet up, but by then she was working on a hospital train based in Rouen. Instead, Offley and Caroline visited the hospital at Wimereaux:
â⦠where Flo worked for so long⦠[the town] is a charming place, most certainly a bit of England in France ⦠Nurses of every age and kind in all the varied costumes adopted by this war, hospitals and ambulances and motors everywhere and men and women flying around in equal independence. Many of the nurses with military rank and in khaki and it gives one a very strange feeling and certain shock at first, and coming from the land of so much ceremonial and salaaming as I have so lately.'
Later that year, Florence visited her sister-in-law in London while she was on brief leave. Caroline was missing Offley, now on a mission in Russia, and was not entirely grateful:
âFlorence, who came home on a short leave from France is still here with me â and she is in a way a comfort â but the poor girl she does not make herself very congenial â and I am utterly lost without O.'
During another of Florence's visits on leave, Caroline wrote to her father:
âPoor old Florence â she is shy and difficult, though I know she adores O. and takes me into her big, kind heart with the same adoring affection â but she is entirely wrapped up in her work â a great blessing of course â but I find her so hard to understand. I go on chattering like a magpie and she says nothing but âYes' and âNo'. I find she knows several people â I might have had to meet her â but she only tells me all too late.'
Florence's dedication to her war work was not going unnoticed within the nursing service. In January 1918, with the war more than three years old, the Principal Matron of the QAIMNS reported about Florence
:
âI have found her a very good ward sister, and most devoted to her patients for whom she can never do enough. She is an excellent medical nurse. For a time she had charge of a unit of five wards and they were very well run. She manages her staff and orderlies well â she is always cheerful and ready to give any extra help where it is required and has been very useful to me in my work. Miss Shore is very likeable and most conscientious. Very retiring by nature, it is not until one gets to know Miss Shore that one learns how capable she is â her influence good. She is suitable for promotion.'
Florence's promotion, and her reluctance to accept it, was soon being discussed at the highest levels of the service. A letter from the Matron in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Maud McCarthy, to Dame Becher, Matron in Chief at the War Office, dated 11
th
November 1918 â the day peace was declared â says:
âWith regard to Staff Nurse F N Shore, QAIMNSR, she has always had quite good reports. She seems to be of a quiet and retiring disposition, and so far has not been promoted as some time ago she herself said she did not wish to be given responsible work. I have been making special enquiries and her present Matron says that Miss Shore seems a very sensible woman, and, I should imagine, capable of more responsible duties. A report on this lady is attached. I will now arrange for her to do a Sister's duties. I am glad this matter was brought to my notice.'
Maud McCarthy's letter also signals for the first time something of the impact that nearly four years of war service had had on the now 53 year old nurse:
âMiss Shore served at a CCS [casualty clearing station] from 20.3.18 to 18.4.18, but could not cope with the rush and strain of work in the front area, and was therefore transferred to the Base.'
Florence was moved to the 24 General Hospital at Etaples, fifteen miles south of Boulogne, in April 1918. After Florence's death, her old Matron at the hospital wrote to Mabel Rogers:
âShe was one of my staff at 24 General Hospital, and one of the most unselfish people I have ever met, and absolutely devoted to her work. It seems terrible that one whose life was wholly given up to doing good to others should meet with such treatment.'
Florence might have struggled with the rush and strain of the casualty clearing station, but her devotion to her patients and her leadership of other nurses was undiminished. In Etaples, it was reported by the West London Observer, she was
âone of the heroic band of nurses there who, when bombed by German aeroplanes one night in May, 1918, refused to go to the dug-outs prepared for them, but insisted on remaining to tend the patients, many of whom had been hit. As a result of their heroism, two nurses were killed and five wounded.'
Florence's aunt, the Baroness Farina, was the source of the story. She added that, when ordered to take shelter by the commandant, Florence asked to be allowed to remain in the ward with her patients, who were unable to move. Florence's words afterwards, according to her aunt, were:
âI could not allow the poor fellows to be left alone'
or â
I could not desert the boys in a moment of danger
' â her aunt gave different accounts to different journalists. Her brother Offley also knew something of the incident: he wrote to his father-in-law in June 1918 that:
âFlorence says deuced little, but I conclude came in for some of the recent Hun bombing of the hospitals tho' she seems terrified of mentioning the occurrence! I have told her we read all about it in our newspapers.'
Sharing Florence's experiences at 24 General Etaples around this time was the writer Vera Brittain, who arrived in August 1917 as a VAD. The hospital nursed both allied soldiers and German casualties, in separate marquees, and Vera Brittain worked first on a German acute surgical ward. The operations were mostly amputations. She reported that â
Our own men are very good to them; they come in and see them and give them cigarettes and fetch them drinks...'
Later she moved to a medical ward, nursing men who had been gassed, which she described as
âmore wearing than anything on earth... in the end there seems nothing definite to show for it â except that one or two people are still alive who might otherwise have been dead ...'
As a sister in charge of the frantically busy wards of front-line military hospitals, Florence was probably very grateful for the work of VADs like Vera Brittain. But back in England, her old school acquaintance Ethel Bedford Fenwick was vehemently opposed to them. The War had broken out 25 years into Bedford Fenwick's personal campaign to ensure that all âfully trained' nurses were listed on a national register. The aim was to end the confusion, variation in standards and risk to patients caused by anyone, with any or no training, using the title ânurse' to gain employment. Nurse registration became a huge cause celebre within the profession, with rival groups of eminent nurses arguing for and against the concept â and Florence Nightingale herself in opposition. Different associations were founded to promote or oppose the measure, and even those who agreed with the idea managed to draft two different Parliamentary Bills and tout them to different MPs in the hope of getting a debate in Parliament.
The notion that women with minimal training â such as VADs â could act as nurses in any capacity was anathema to Bedford Fenwick, and she disseminated her views in part through the pages of the British Journal of Nursing, which she edited. In an editorial in January 1915, the journal stated:
âMembers of V.A.D.'s are to be used as orderlies [as opposed to nurses] in both these hospitals, let us hope in such a minority as will not interfere with the discipline of the nursing department, and that their duties will be strictly defined in print, so that they will understand before engagement what a woman orderly's duties are. Frankly, unless they are the duties of first year probationers we are at a loss to know what they are. Anyway, unless they help with the nursing in strictly defined positions as probationers, they have no right to wear nurses' uniform, and if they are there for that special purpose there should be no running in and out, but they should enter into a contract to serve until the end of the War, or until these hospitals are no longer required. Thoroughly trained nurses only should be employed on foreign service. It is simply a waste of money to transport untrained women in any capacity whatever. Such service in military hospitals should be the reward of the patriotism of the professional nurse who in time of peace has qualified herself for her responsible duties.'