The Nightingale Shore Murder (11 page)
Read The Nightingale Shore Murder Online
Authors: Rosemary Cook
At this time, the plan was for a hospital of 100 beds, with five doctors, eight nurses and â
the usual complement of ambulance men and supernumeraries'
.
By the end of January 1900, £11,000 of the £30,000 target had been raised, and many doctors and nurses were volunteering to go to the new hospital. Beds were to be named South Suffolk, Kerrison, Woolverstone, Ipswich and Bury St Edmonds, after some of the early donors; and Queen Victoria herself donated £100 for two beds. Princess Christian presented silver badges and personally-signed certificates to forty nurses who had been selected for service at the hospital; and the first contingent of staff sailed for South Africa â a journey of around 17 days â in the SS
Norman
on the 10th February. Others, including many of the nurses, sailed on the
Guelph
. The Senior Army Surgeon in charge of the new hospital was Colonel Sloggart, and the Senior Medical Officer was Mr Alfred Fripp, who had been Surgeon in Ordinary to the Prince of Wales, and assistant surgeon at Guy's Hospital in London. Miss Mary Fisher was appointed Lady Superintendent of the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital â she had been a ward sister at Guy's Hospital, and had experience of running a cottage hospital at Watford as well as a convalescent home at Saltburn-on-Sea. With this preparation, she and her two medical colleagues formed the management committee of the hospital.
By the end of March, the base hospital at Deelfontein was open and the field hospitals were being prepared. The hospital, set on the veldt between the hills and the railway line, was huge. Its tents and prefab huts extended for nearly half a mile, with roads and named streets (with lamp-posts) running through it. One newspaper described approvingly the concerted effort to set up of the hospital, saying:
âThe whole of the staff, medical officers included, have worked with an amount of energy which would have gladdened the heart of those at home, who may be inclined to think that a medical man is never in his element unless he is clothed in the regulation frock coat and top hat.'
The hospital soon had 800 beds, and plenty of work to fill them. It became a pioneering centre for the use of x-rays in diagnosis, under the leadership of the Surgeon-Radiographer, Major John Hall-Edwards â who later lost an arm to x-ray damage. Hall-Edwards wrote an article for the British Medical Journal, describing life at the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital at the time that Florence was serving there:
âShortly before the close of 1900 our accommodation was considerably reduced by sending up country a number of marquees which had been placed at our disposal by the Government. Even now, however, we have a larger number of beds than it was the original intention of the Committee to supply, and were it not that a large number of our patients are convalescents, it would be impossible for our small staff to keep pace with the work.
For about two months prior to the invasion of Cape Colony our hospital contained so few acute cases, that to all intents and purposes it was little more than a rest camp for convalescents. Since January 1st however our work has gradually increased, until at the present time we have as much work as we have ever had with the same number of beds. At the present time our staff consists only of six medical officers, and our commandant (Colonel Sloggett). We have in hospital 587 patients, 170 of which are acute cases, including 48 cases of enteric fever. On the surgical side our work has of late much increased, and twice during the last fortnight we have, for the first time in the hospital, received wounded men straight from the field.
For the last three weeks intelligence wires and scouts have regularly arrived, telling us of the presence of Boers in our immediate neighbourhood. Last week a scout was fired at from a kopje only two miles distant from the camp, and one night a Kaffir kraal less than a mile away was visited by six Boers, who questioned the natives about the hospital. They were anxious to know how many rifles we had in stores, the number of our horses, and the strength of the guard at the railway station. On hearing of this our store of rifles and ammunition was despatched to De Aar, and orders were issued prohibiting any of the staff from riding more than a mile from the hospitalâ¦'
A telegram from Colonel Sloggart, the Chief Army Surgeon and âcommandant', summarised their work more tersely in early April:
âDeelfontein treated seven officers, 402 men ... 69 men yeomanry. Present patients 275 ... expecting 100 fresh cases Bloemfontein today. Securing all possible Yeomanry patients. Everything running satisfactorily ... base camp furnished hospital hut and bedding for sickness amongst arrivals.'
One of the nurses working with Florence and Mabel at the hospital also wrote about her experiences at the Imperial Yeomanry. Her letter, published in a Scottish newspaper, reminded people back home that, just as in the concentration camps, infectious diseases were as big a problem for medical staff as war injuries:
âNot many bad surgical cases, but so much typhoid for which of course we have special tents. We have had only 14 deaths in the 7 weeks and they were all from enteric [fever], and as we have over 500 patients, that is a very low death rate!'
An article in the British Medical Journal, written by Dr H. D. Rolleston, a consulting physician to the hospital, reported that nearly 15% of the medical and nursing personnel of the hospital also went down with enteric fever: nursing in South Africa during the War was not just demanding and stressful, it was also dangerous.
A picture of the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital shows one of the long metal huts with its windows standing wide open, and four Sisters in the doorway. They wear ankle-length white aprons over their dark dresses with red crosses on the sleeves, and long white veil headdresses. Another picture shows the tent housing the âDevil's Fountain': the camp newspaper, edited by Newland Pedley, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and formerly Senior Surgeon to the Dental School at Guy's Hospital.
Florence's time at the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital saw it set up and its services getting into full swing during the peak of the war. A letter from one of its patients describes the regime and treatment in September 1900, just before Florence left to return to England:
âAfter leaving Kroonstad hospital the major sent me over the Y. Detail camp, where I stayed a few days expecting to be sent up to Pretoria to join the fighting line again. However for some reason or another they packed some dozen or so down here to Deelfontein, much to our delight. This camp and hospital, you must understand, is organised especially for the Yeomanry, and splendidly it has been carried out, everything is tip top, the grub particularly. My diet sheet for today consists of: Breakfast: porridge, coffee, bread, butter and jam. Lunch: Mellin's food or Benger's food, and 4oz of port wine. Dinner: chicken (tinned), potatoes, rice pudding, bread &c. At 4: extras, beef tea, milk pudding. Tea: tea, toast, butter and jam. Supper: soup mince, arrowroot and milk pudding. Besides which we have a big jug of fresh milk, a can of condensed milk, a tin of cocoa and another of Benger's food ...
Lady Chesham comes round every other day with tobacco, cigarettes, cigars (all good quality), daily papers, note paper &c. For recreation there is a well-stocked library, cricket, football, concerts. Every evening church service. You would scarcely believe the amount of flesh I have put on within the last days.'
In spite of vthe enormous contribution that nurses were making to the nursing of wounded and sick people both in the camps and in the hospitals, they did not always escape criticism, as the
Nursing Notes
of 1904 recognised with its reference to the few âundesirables'. A snippet published in the October 1902 edition, from a letter sent by a nurse Superintendent in South Africa, gave some hint of the problem. She commented that â
the nurses are crowding in and no rooms are to be had',
then asked in exasperation,
âWhy do such helpless sort of creatures come and start growling about the country at once? Oh me, I fear some of them will be very disappointed. Impress on them at home â that good all round nurses are required here, and women with some grit besides their training, and that this is a new country.'
A bigger grievance amongst South African nurses â referred to as âcolonial' nurses â was that these imported British nurses were recruited in preference to local professionals, in spite of their lack of experience in the country. The Morning Post described the problem in February 1900:
SOUTH AFRICAN WAR NURSES: FROM A COLONIAL POINT OF VIEW. The trained nurses of South Africa are not in the calm and tranquil mood that befits their profession. As at first colonial volunteers were refused permission to fight in the ranks, so since the outbreak of war nearly all the applications of the colonial trained nurses for appointments on the Army Nursing Staff have met with official refusal. Local nurses are overlooked and rejected, and such volunteers are informed that “plenty of nurses are coming out from England,” “No more nurses are needed,” etc. Surely the height of absurdity has been reached when applicants in Capetown have been gravely advised that their only chance of attachment to the Army Medical Service is to journey to London and to endeavour to join a draft of nurses from home ⦠So the trained and certificated nurse stands idle while time is lost and money is expended in the importation from England of nursing material which could most satisfactorily be supplied on the spot.
It is perfectly fairâ and the colonial women are the first to concede thisâ that the British Army Nursing Reserve Corps should have a chance of active service. But it is clearly unjust to the highly-trained certificated women of South Africa that the nursing material for the Army should be chosen almost entirely from “Uitlander” sources. Many of the nurses in the Colony have gained their certificates in the best British hospitals. They are the sisters and daughters of settled colonists, men with a stake in the country. All are used to colonial ways, and have colonial sympathies. In addition, they have a specialised knowledge of malarial and local diseases. Many of them have served useful apprenticeships in mining hospitals, are “salted” to the hardships of a rough-and-ready life on the veldt, and are accustomed to the eccentricities of a colonial commissariat. In fact, they are just the women needed for camp and field hospital, and nurses with such useful practical antecedents should have had the first chance of attachment to the Army Nursing Service in South Africa.'
Whatever their shortcomings, the British nurses were brave women to risk the long journey to another continent, the perils of disease and the deprivations of life in a war zone, in addition to the danger of death or injury.
Nursing Notes
reminded readers in January 1902 that some nurses had died in the course of their nursing service in the South African War:
âThe shadow of the war has fallen on our ranks also â nursing sisters have laid down their lives for their country in battles none the less grim because waged in the hospital tent instead of on the open veldt. The response to the demand for more and yet more nurses was as ready as to the call for fighting men, and in spite of errors and mistakes, good work has been done.'
Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem in recognition of the nursing sisters who had died in South Africa, published in âThe Five Nations'. It was reprinted in
Nursing Notes
in November, 1903, under a heading which read:
âSo much criticism has been deservedly expended upon the doings of nurses in South Africa that it is pleasant to quote this sincere appreciation of the devotion shown by those who died at their work, giving their lives for their country as truly as any soldier.'
The poem, called Dirge of Dead Sisters, read:
Who recalls the twilight and the ranged tents in order,
(Now, and not hereafter, while the breath is in our nostrils,
Who recalls the morning and the thunder through the foothills,
(When the days were torment and the nights were clouded terror,
Who recalls the midnight by the bridge's wrecked abutment
(Till the pain was merciful and stunned us into silence
Who recalls the noontide and the funerals through the market
(Bold behind the battle, the open camp all-hallowed,
Yet their graves are scattered and their names are clean forgotten,
Wherefore, we they ransomed, while the breath is in our nostrils,