The Nightingale Shore Murder (16 page)

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 ‘QAs' 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 ‘
very contented and has a good influence'
. Cryptically, the report notes that she is ‘
considered especially suitable for duties on barges
.' (Barges were used to transport cases that would suffer most from the jolting of road transport, including ‘wounds of lung and abdomen.') Under ‘Remarks', it notes that ‘
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 ‘Unknown 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:

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:

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:

During another of Florence's visits on leave, Caroline wrote to her father:

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
:

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 – the day peace was declared – says:

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:

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:

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

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:
‘I could not allow the poor fellows to be left alone'
or ‘
I could not desert the boys in a moment of danger
' – 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:

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 ‘
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
‘more wearing than anything on earth... in the end there seems nothing definite to show for it – 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 ‘fully 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 ‘nurse' 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 – 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 – such as VADs – 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: