The Nightingale Shore Murder (14 page)
Read The Nightingale Shore Murder Online
Authors: Rosemary Cook
âOffley told me how awfully kind you have been to him. I am so glad you like him so much â for he really is a dear boy â and he has worked so hard. It is so nice to see how devoted he and Lina [Caroline] are to each other. I do wish you did not live quite so far away for I should so much like to have the pleasure of meeting you.'
Offley was also hoping to sort out his sisters' futures before he returned to his army duties in India, and this episode seems to have tried the patience of their sister-in-law Caroline.
âOffley is very anxious to see his sisters settled together in a house and home above all things before we leave again for India,' she wrote to her aunt in September 1912. âAfter we did a great deal of hunting about in town they changed their minds and elect to live in the country. I am very fond of them â but they are very trying and would altogether monopolize Offley if they could. I love Florence very dearly and she is sweet and charming and practical and would â I am sure â make a charming home; Urith is a beautiful pianist and very proud of her birth and name and all that sort of thing, and to me â this is to the exclusion of many good things she might have and attain in life if she would only come down a little. I should like her to dinner but not to live with!!!!!! â¦I have little or no patience with a proud old family maid of 5 and 40 always thinking in castles and family names â âOur good name etc etc' on £500 or £600 a year. Well, I must not criticize them anymore. They had had sad lives and not the love and affection I have grown up with, but I find it very trying to stay clear and you can understand ⦠this comforts me as I would not hurt Offley for the whole world â and he holds me up as a marvellous example to the sisters which is again awkward. With Offley the sun rises and sets in me and with them it rises and sets in Offley!'
What Florence felt about her brother's attempts to find her a house to live in with her sister, when she was already living and working at the Nurses Home in Sunderland, are not recorded. But in 1913, both Florence's and Mabel's long service with the Sunderland District Nursing Association came to an end. Florence resigned from the Institute âfor home duties' â in fact, to take her ailing sister Urith abroad for treatment â and was awarded a Certificate of the Queen's Institute to mark her service. Mabel retired from her position as Superintendent at Sunderland at the same time.
âA presentation has been made to the late Superintendent of the Sunderland District Nursing Association, Miss Rogers, on her retirement from a post she has held for fifteen years', the Queen's Nurses' Magazine reported. âThe present and many of the former nurses joined together to show their appreciation and esteem for Miss Rogers. The presentation consisted of a silver cream jug and sugar basin, a pair of silver candlesticks, and a framed picture, by McWhirter, “Silver Beeches”.'
Mabel was not intending to retire from nursing, however: in October she took up a new post as Superintendent of the Hammersmith and Fulham District Nursing Association based in Carnforth Lodge in London. Here she took over a thriving Association, built up by her predecessor, Miss Curtis, over many years from two nurses to a staff of 10. Miss Curtis had also â
seen the development of innumerable agencies for helping people to help themselves, and not a few of these owe some part of their utility to her vigorous interest and care'
, according to the Queen's Nurses' magazine. Minor illness treatment centres had been set up in both Hammersmith and Fulham; new interests and funds had been brought in, patrons cultivated, and the Association established as valued local agency. In fact, Miss Curtis had done in Hammersmith what Mabel Rogers had accomplished in Sunderland; and Mabel would take the Hammersmith and Fulham Association even further forward during her tenure as Superintendent.
What plans she had for the Association were quickly put on hold, however, when war was declared in 1914. Mabel and Florence were about to become Army nurses again.
âHow deeply and terribly it does concern us'
As soon as war was declared, Queen's Nurses were determined to get involved. The Queen's Nurses' magazine reported enthusiastically that the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for Nurses provided
âa large organisation of trained district nurses [giving] scope for so many and varied branches of work in connection and in cooperation with all agencies which exist for the assistance of the poor in their own homes, [as well as] actual nursing.'
By October 1914, 37 reservists had been called up, and 42 Queen's Nurses had volunteered for Red Cross work. More than 200 District Nursing Associations up and down the country were helping with Red Cross and St John's Ambulance work, with the Queen's Nurse in most instances acting as Lady Superintendent and professional adviser. This work included giving classes in nursing work â bandaging, bed making, splint padding and general ward work â in temporary hospitals. These had been swiftly set up with accommodation ranging from 10 to 500 beds, ready to care for the wounded or convalescent. Their first patients were Belgian refugees and soldiers billeted in the area who fell sick. Queen's Nurses formed more than a quarter of the staff of the Second Eastern General Hospital, established in Brighton Grammar School with 520 beds in thirty wards. Nurse Tait McKay was acting Matron of the Fourth Southern General Hospital in Plymouth when she wrote to the Queen's Nurses' magazine:
âThe business of transforming Salisbury Road Schools and the adjacent Baptist Church into a War Hospital of 520 beds was completed on August 20th and patients were admitted from the adjacent forts⦠The first batch of 102 wounded warriors arrived from the Front on August 21st, forty of those were stretcher cases, and as soon as news leaked out considerable excitement prevailed ⦠The second batch numbering all 132, including fourteen Germans, arrived on September 25th.'
Another Queen's Nurse, L. Ethel Nazer wrote about nursing Sikh and Gurkha wounded at Netley:
âFive out of the last twenty were hand and arm wounds and these walked in; the other fifteen were all heavy stretcher cases; some had six or eight wounds from shrapnel and three were badly frost-bitten; one has since died, another developed tetanus and several amputations have had to be done; all the wounds are horribly septic on arrival but it is surprising how quickly they clean up with regular dressing and attentionâ¦'
Other volunteer QNs were taking over district posts from those who had left for war work, or taking the strain of the war's effect on their communities, as an editorial in the magazine reported:
âEverywhere Queen's Nurses are in request for special work, in addition to their own duties, heavily increased as these are and likely to be during the coming winter. For suffering through the war is not confined to our soldiers, and their families, but is felt acutely in unemployment and consequent privation, sickness, and general misery in every corner of the land.'
In fact, so enthusiastic was the response from Queen's Nurses that the Jubilee Institute soon felt the need to send a circular to all the nurses, reining in their enthusiasm for war work:
âSo many of the Queen's Nurses have written to the Central Office expressing a wish to volunteer for some service in connection with the War, that the Committee think it well to point out that, in the near future, there is sure to be a great need for trained nurses in the various districts ... It is felt that the majority of Queen's Nurses will be doing a far more useful service to the Nation by devoting themselves to this large and important sphere of work than by taking small individual posts under some Military Authority, where they would in all probability only be filling up the blanks left by those who have been sent abroad or drafted to coast hospitals.'
In spite of this admonition, many QNs did respond to the War Office's call, and were dispatched to Europe to nurse in field hospitals, casualty stations and ambulance trains. Amongst them were Florence Shore and Mabel Rogers, who both joined the French Red Cross in 1914. The sense of adventure and excitement at the opportunity to put their nursing skills to work in such a patriotic cause is captured by another nursing sister who shared their time in France in that first year of the war. Her anonymous diary records, on 18 August 1914:
âWe had va great send-off in Sackville Street in our motor-bus, and went on board [ship] about 2pm. From then till 7 we watched the embarkation going on, on our own ship and another. We have a lot of R.E. and R.F.A. and A.S.C. and a great many horses and pontoons and ambulance waggons: the horses were very difficult to embark, poor dears. It was an exciting scene all the time. I don't remember anything quite so thrilling as our start off from Irelandâ¦
We and the officers and the men, severally, had the King's proclamation read out to us about doing our duty for our country, and God blessing us, and how the King is following our every movement â¦.
At midday we passed a French cruiser, going the opposite way. They waved and yelled, and we waved and yelled. We are out of sight of English and French coast now. I believe we are to be in early tomorrow morning, and will have a long train journey probably, but nobody knows anything for certain except where we land â Havre.'
In keeping with their collegiate and organised nature, Queen's Nurses immediately began writing back to the Institute with stories of their experiences. How had these women, trained by the Institute in Victorian and Edwardian England, taught never to bring up religion or politics in conversation, and to make friends with everyone, coped with the experience of a bitter and bloody war? The Queen's Nurses' magazine, which in April 1914 had featured an article telling nurses how to make their own knickerbockers to wear when cycling round the district, was soon publishing stories from its readers about nursing wounded soldiers under shell fire.
Mabel Rogers spent the early part of the War in France, before being sent to work at a hospital at La Panne in Belgium. With the customary QN spirit of adventure, she wrote that she was â
much pleased when I was sent for the remainder of my time to work in Dr Depage's Ambulance at La Panne for ... the hospitals at La Panne lie nearer to the firing line than any institutions of a similar character
.' She also wrote a description of the hospital and her work for the Queen's Nurses' magazine:
âIn times of peace a favourite Belgian sea-side resort, built like Ostend amongst the sand dunes, La Panne has now become the centre of all Belgian activities, and the little sea-side villas swarm with Belgian soldiers back from the trenches for a brief respite, or recruits who are daily drilled on the wide far-stretching sands. A number of French aeroplanes are daily scouting overhead, and from time to time English battleships bombard the German batteries at Nieuport and are responded to by German shells which burst in the sea round the ships. Each time the guns are fired the hospital's windows rattle and the beds shake. At night time on land the firing is often continuous and the whole horizon can be seen from the hospital windows a brilliant blaze of light from Ypres to the sea coast.
The largest of the hotels forms the chief hospital building, containing nearly 200 beds, but in addition three large pavilions have been erected round the hospital capable of accommodating another 700 patients. Unfortunately the largest containing 350 beds, its own theatre, offices etc, was burnt down a fortnight after it was opened through an explosion in the department where it produced its own gas...
Every night the ambulances go out and bring in the wounded straight from the front. Some nights, when the fighting has been unusually heavy in that part, so many arrived that it was difficult to find room to lay them in the large corridors and waiting rooms, and the crowd of suffering and maimed humanity was a sight to excite pity and almost unnerve even the strongest-minded...
The nursing staff consisted of sisters and Red Cross helpers of various nationalities, Belgians trained by Dr Depage in his institute in Brussels, and Danes, English, Americans and Canadians, many sent by the different Red Cross societies as the money belonging to the Belgian Red Cross having been seized by the Germans, the Belgians themselves could not afford to pay their staff.'
Mabel Rogers returned from Belgium in May 1915, with regret for the end of her work there:
âIt was with some reluctance that I quitted this interesting sphere of work, but my leave had expired and I was obliged to return to the equally necessary though perhaps not as exciting work of nursing the sick poor in their own homes.'
Her appetite for war work must have prevailed, however. By July 1916, she was back in a military hospital. She wrote again to the Queen's Nurses' magazine from the Hopital Temporaire, Arc en Barrois, Haute Marne, in France:
âI have been meaning to write ever since I came out, but get very little time to write at all and am on duty every day from 7am till 9pm, and often do not get off at all. When I do I feel I must get out. The country is lovely and the woods and wild flowers most enchanting. This is my eighth week here and until today I have never had a half or whole day off, but today I am having a whole dayâ¦
I am in charge of the Hospice, a building about five minutes' walk from the Chateau. They started it for Convalescents, but none are now allowed within the war zone, so it is used as a sort of overflow from the Chateau. We have seventy patients and have from sixty to eighty dressings to do every morning. I have all the meals to serve for the seventy, as I am the only trained nurse up here and have four pros [probationers] to work under me. The work is not heavy but pretty constant, with continual evaluations and intakes which all mean extra work.'
Another of the QNs who wrote for the magazine had been sent to Belgium in September 1915 to nurse in an infectious diseases hospital there. The hospital stood between the sand dunes and the sea, four miles from the first line of trenches. Her description, published in October 1916, paints a remarkable picture of English nursing culture meeting Belgian health care for the first time. Her interest in the arrangements of the hospital and the nursing undertaken there by nuns captures most of her attention. The dangers faced by the staff and patients are almost an afterthought.
âWe were agreeably surprised' she wrote, âto find all requisites necessary for the comfort and proper nursing of infectious diseases were already fully installed, and our duties were to see that the patients were well cared for and nursed... In Belgium the sick are nursed by Nuns and there are very few âtrained' nurses. But the Nuns make very good nurses especially when they understand why they are told to do things which are strange to them, such as: putting away utensils which have been used for typhoid patients â clean â instead of leaving them under the beds, or, taking precautions when going from one infectious case to another, e.g. from diphtheria to typhoid wards, etc, or cleaning hands thoroughly before going to their midnight meal, and a score of other probationary instructions which we did our best to instil into them in our best broken Flemish. The Nuns would say, âOh Sister â you are so difficile!' but always with a merry laugh kept us friends, and the desired result was accomplished.
The Lazarets (or wards) were made of wood, and portable, and held twenty-four beds in each. At the entrance a small room on one side, about eight feet by six feet, was set aside for the Sisters, and held our special requisites, drugs, lotions, and Doctors' washstand and towels. Just opposite this room on the other side was the little ward kitchen, the same size, where crockery, etc, for patients was kept, and also our famous âPrimus' stove on which we did our sterilising. The ward has beds on either side and a division through the centre of the doors with two glass windows (high up over the beds) connecting male and female wards; the doors are kept open, except at special times. At the end of the lazaret are two isolation rooms where we usually nursed our cerebro-spinal meningitis or other serious single cases.
Lastly came the sink room on one side with shelves all round, and stand with bucket under and two other buckets, one with lime and one with Jeyes' disinfectant and their respective mops, and on the other side the WC â bucket and stand completes the lazaret, which was raised on blocks to keep the dampness of the sand from the floors. But I must not forget to mention the lovely white bath with which each lazaret was provided, and a zinc one with fire attached; also the stove in the centre of each lazaret from which we all found much comfort during the trying winter weather.
We also had a dressing wagon beautifully fitted with douche apparatus, jars for sterile water and lotion and necessary articles for aseptic dressings with basin and bucket underneath for scrubbing up. As far as possible each infection was nursed separately; two trained sisters and two or three Nuns by day to each lazaret, and by night two sisters in charge, and generally two Nuns to each lazaret. We wore separate gowns for each lazaret and, of course, scrupulously disinfected our hands when leaving a ward, and in that way we were able to nurse diphtheria, cerebro-spinal meningitis, scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, erysipelas, and even midwifery and general diseases without any complications.
The treatment is very different to ours in many instances, but one quickly gets used to typhoid and diphtheria patients sitting up from the first day of admission and given drugs in doses which would make one shiver to think of in England. The recoveries were truly wonderful, especially with enteric and cerebro-spinal meningitis, but we were fortunate in having the laboratory and bacteriologists at work all day in a specially equipped department.
During the day when there was any sun at all you would see beds taken out on the Dunes, and the tuberculosis patients having the sun cure; this combined with tuberculin injections produced rapid improvement.
Our patients were all refugees from the surrounding towns and villages from beyond Ypres to Newport. The Nuns working for us were all from bombarded Convents quite near.
Sometimes the poor refugees were frightened to come to the hospital and hid themselves in trenches and among trees and had to be found by the Military and their faithful dogs. The dogs have played a great part in this war and are very intelligent and successful. They search out a missing patient after being given an article from their room, tearing away with their noses down and the Military police at their heels. In this way we have saved many of the very sick patients and also prevented infectious disease spreading amongst the soldiers.
The terrible racket of almost unceasing gun-fire in Belgium by land, sea and air has tried the people very much, but in spite of the terror of it all, not knowing how long they could stay in each place or how soon their houses or their bodies might be destroyed by shell or bombs, they were very bright and cheerful, and always more grateful for the cheerful aspect of the hospital and the kindness shewn to them by all the Sisters ... It is wonderful how used we all grew to the guns and bombs, going on with one's work only looking up to see where the shells are landing, murmuring the truly beautiful prayers which the Nuns kept repeating again and again until the danger was over.
We were surrounded by sand hills and when bombs were dropped, they nearly always buried themselves in the sand, leaving big holes and scattered shrapnel, and we were thankful to find we had escaped damage (except for a few windows) every time. Once when eight bombs were dropped in our hospital area they quite encircled us and we did feel we had been wonderfully preserved, for we had about 100 small children in with diphtheria and measles etc.'