This is Robert Graves’ own dispassionate account of the deterioration of young officers at the front.
Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line; he did not know his way about, had not learned the rules of health and safety, or grown accustomed to recognising degrees of danger.
Young Officer 1914
Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or 10 months, unless he had been given a few weeks’ rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or 15 months he was often worse than useless.
Dr WHR Rivers [the famous psychiatrist at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh who was both doctor and mentor to Siegfried Sassoon] told me later that the action of one of the ductless glands – I think the thyroid – caused this slow general decline in military usefulness by failing at a certain point to pump its sedative chemical into the blood. Without its continued assistance the man went about his tasks in an apathetic and doped condition, cheated into further endurance. It has taken my blood 10 years to recover.
Patient suffering from shell shock
Officers had a less laborious but a more nervous time than the men. There were proportionately twice as many neurasthenic cases among officers as among men, though a man’s average expectancy of trench service before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an officer’s. Officers between the ages of 23 and 33 could count on a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young. Men over 40, though not suffering from want of sleep so much as those under 20, had less resistance to sudden alarms and shocks.
The unfortunates were officers who had endured two years or more of continuous trench service. In many cases they became dipsomaniacs. I knew three or four who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before being lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way. A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions is still alive who, in three shows running, got his company needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear decisions.
• Extracted from Robert Graves’s autobiography, Good-bye to All That (first published by Carcanet in 1929).
By the end of World War One , according to the BBC History site, the British Army had dealt with 80,000 official cases of shell shock, including those of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
It is difficult for us to imagine how anyone exposed to trench warfare came back entirely sane; how many silent victims were there, sheltered by their families, who never sought treatment?
My grandfather served in the trenches. When I was a young teenager, I asked him to tell me what it had been like. He would say hardly anything at all about it; the only detail I remember was that he told me they had to use their own urine to shave in. Looking back as an adult, I now realise how impossible it must have been for him to begin to tell me what it had been like. If I had only known it, the real evidence was right in front of me. I just didn’t connect the dots.
It was well-known in the family that Granddad had ‘black moods’. We were all used to them. Every now and then Granddad would sit, yellow-stained fingers clutching an inevitable cigarette, and stare into space, refusing to talk to anyone, hardly moving; not just for hours; for days on end. And we just worked round him. I don’t think anyone thought that that might have been something to do with the war..
He was an architect and builder, so in the second world war, when he was too old to fight, he had the enviable task of going into bombed buildings and figuring out the safest way to get victims, dead or alive, out. He never spoke about any of that either. Except once, my mother told me, when he came home and sat at the kitchen table and cried. He had been keeping a special eye on the young wife and baby of a lad he knew at the front. He found them in their house crushed behind the front door as they tried to get out.
On 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He had been taken from the battlefields and deposited in the East Suffolk and Ipswich Hospital suffering from ‘shell shock’. In his words, his breakdown was related to witnessing ‘a terrible sight that I shall never forget as long as I live’. He told his mother:
‘We had strict orders not to take prisoners, no matter if wounded my first job was when I had finished cutting some of their wire away, to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came out of one of their deep dugouts. bleeding badly, and put them out of misery. They cried for mercy, but I had my orders, they had no feeling whatever for us poor chaps… it makes my head jump to think about it.’
Hubbard had ‘gone over the top’ at the Battle of the Somme. While he managed to fight as far as the fourth line of trenches, by 3.30pm practically his whole battalion had been wiped out by German artillery. He was buried, dug himself out, and during the subsequent retreat was almost killed by machine gun fire. Within this landscape of horror, he collapsed.
Arthur Hubbard was one of millions of men who suffered psychological trauma as a result of their war experiences. Symptoms ranged from uncontrollable diarrhoea to unrelenting anxiety. Soldiers who had bayoneted men in the face developed hysterical tics of their own facial muscles. Stomach cramps seized men who knifed their foes in the abdomen. Snipers lost their sight. Terrifying nightmares of being unable to withdraw bayonets from the enemies’ bodies persisted long after the slaughter.
The dreams might occur ‘right in the middle of an ordinary conversation’ when ‘the face of a Boche that I have bayoneted, with its horrible gurgle and grimace, comes sharply into view’, an infantry captain complained. An inability to eat or sleep after the slaughter was common. Nightmares did not always occur during the war. World War One soldiers like Rowland Luther did not suffer until after the armistice when (he admitted) he ‘cracked up’ and found himself unable to eat, deliriously re-living his experiences of combat.
These were not exceptional cases. It was clear to everyone that large numbers of combatants could not cope with the strain of warfare. By the end of World War One, the army had dealt with 80,000 cases of ‘shell shock’. As early as 1917, it was recognised that war neuroses accounted for one-seventh of all personnel discharged for disabilities from the British Army. Once wounds were excluded, emotional disorders were responsible for one-third of all discharges. Even more worrying was the fact that a higher proportion of officers were suffering in this way. According to one survey published in 1917, while the ratio of officers to men at the front was 1:30, among patients in hospitals specialising in war neuroses, the ratio of officers to men was 1:6. What medical officers quickly realised was that everyone had a ‘breaking point’:
weak or strong, courageous or cowardly
– war frightened everyone witless.
In the early years of World War One, shell shock was believed to be the result of a physical injury to the nerves. In other words, shell shock was the result of being buried alive or exposed to heavy bombardment. The term itself had been coined, in 1917, by a medical officer called Charles Myers. But Myers rapidly became unhappy with the term, recognising that many men suffered the symptoms of shell shock without having even been in the front lines. As a consequence, medical officers increasingly began emphasising psychological factors as providing sufficient cause for breakdown. As the president of the British Psycho-Analytic Association, Ernest Jones, explained: war constituted ‘an official abrogation of civilised standards’ in which men were not only allowed, but encouraged:
‘…to indulge in behaviour of a kind that is throughout abhorrent to the civilised mind…. All sorts of previously forbidden and hidden impulses, cruel, sadistic, murderous and so on, are stirred to greater activity, and the old intrapsychical conflicts which, according to Freud, are the essential cause of all neurotic disorders, and which had been dealt with before by means of ‘repression’ of one side of the conflict are now reinforced, and the person is compelled to deal with them afresh under totally different circumstances.’
Consequently, the ‘return to the mental attitude of civilian life’ could spark off severe psychological trauma. The authors of one of the standard books on shell shock went so far as to point out that a soldier who suffered a neurosis had not lost his reason but was labouring under the weight of too much reason: his senses were ‘functioning with painful efficiency’.
How were these men to be cured of their painful afflictions? From the start, the purpose of treatment was to restore the maximum number of men to duty as quickly as possible. During World War One, four-fifths of men who had entered hospital suffering shell shock were never able to return to military duty: it was imperative that such high levels of ‘permanent ineffectives’ were reduced. However, the shift from regarding breakdown as ‘organic’ (that is, an injury to the nerves) to viewing it as psychological had inevitable consequences in terms of treatment. If breakdown was a ‘paralysis of the nerves’, then massage, rest, dietary regimes and electric shock treatment were invoked. If a psychological source was indicated, the ‘talking cure’, hypnosis, and rest would speed recovery. In all instances, occupational training and the inculcation of ‘masculinity’ were highly recommended. As the medical superintendent at one military hospital in York put it, although the medical officer must show sympathy, the patient ‘must be induced to face his illness in a manly way’.
Sympathy was only rarely forthcoming. Men arriving at Netley Hospital (for servicemen suffering shell shock) were greeted with silence: people were described as hanging their heads in ‘inexplicable shame’. No-one better described the mix of shame and anger experienced by the war-damaged than the poet, Siegfried Sassoon. In October 1917, while he was at Craiglockhart, one of the most famous hospitals for curing officers with war neuroses, he wrote a poem, simply called ‘Survivors’:
No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again’, –
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, –
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter’d their pride…
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
The hot scent of the summer rose; sensual delight seen by Robert Graves in this first verse of The Cool Web as a sensation as overwhelming in its intensity as heat or terror.
The black sky, the drums, the soldiers, the dread, recur so often in the imagery of Graves’ youthful poetry that they have woven themselves into the narrative of the oratorio, and it is easy to see how they relate to the terror of the war, but the rose is different.
In classical and popular culture, the rose is the symbol of romantic love, both the longing for, and the object of it.
But it also appears in many religions – particularly in Sufi mysticism – as a symbol of the longing for divine love, and also of the beauty of a human soul grown to perfection.
For these reasons, the cultivation of geometrical rose gardens has a long history in Iran and surrounding lands. In the lyric ghazal, it is the beauty of the rose that provokes the longing song of the nightingale.
Hazrat Inayat, in Volume 10 of The Sufi message, expresses it thus:
“Just as the rose consists of many petals held together, so the person who attains to the unfoldment of the soul begins to show many different qualities.
The qualities emit fragrance in the form of a spiritual personality.
The rose has a beautiful structure, and the personality which proves the unfoldment of the soul has also a fine structure, in manner, in dealing with others, in speech, in action.
The atmosphere of a spiritual being pervades the air like the perfume of a rose.”
Mandalas, which express the human aspiration towards wholeness and coherence – i.e. a spiritually complete soul, have existed in Eastern religion and philosophy for centuries, and are echoed in Christianity by the medieval rose window.
In much the same way the centre of Eastern mandalas depict the “godhead” or divine aspect of the world, so do rose windows; typically Christ or the Virgin and Christ are found in the central rosette.
In eastern philosophy, there are many paths to reach the divine, and these are represented by “gates” at the cardinal points of the mandala. By the same token, saints depicted in the petals of a rose window can be seen as intermediaries (or paths) to Christ.
The basis of many churches is geometry and proportion. Numbers had a metaphysical significance, and were thought to have occult power.
In a rose window every space is defined by another smaller geometric figure – a trefoil, a quatrefoil, rosette, or spherical triangle. Even the glasswork itself adds to this hidden geometry which defines the exact placement of every major feature of the rose window – relating to the radial elements, concentric divisions, and all to the centre.
Circles, squares, triangles, stars, and, of course, the 12 major divisions typically found in rose windows all point to the finite and infinite, earth and heaven, or matter and spirit.
In Christian iconography the rose has a common association with the Virgin Mary,
and is also associated with sacrifice and death; it is a direct symbol of the five wounds of Christ; the red rose was eventually adopted as a symbol of the blood of the Christian martyrs.
Here the rose is associated with St Valentine – later ironically to be responsible for the giving of countless thousands of red roses – as a martyr.
Graves picks up on this association in The Dying Knight and the Faunsas the blood of the fallen hero soaks into the woodland ground, turning the innocent daisies into roses.
The idea of a rose as a symbol of the completed soul is an abstract one for most ordinary mortals to hang on to; much more poignant for most of us is the rose as redolent of the power and fragility of earthly beauty, earthly love, and the heat and glory of life itself, to be longed for and feared in equal measure.
Feared especially for a soldier; for the stronger your passion for a lover, or for the beauty of the world, the more agonising it is to die.
The roses in Graves’ Garden in The Morning before the Battle are withered by the chill wind of death; they contain all these meanings.
I knew it walking yesterday at noon Down a deserted garden full of flowers. …Carelessly sang, pinned roses on my breast, Reached for a cherry-bunch—and then, then, Death Blew through the garden from the North and East And blighted every beauty with chill breath.
So perhaps the rose of The Cool Web, with its cruel scent, contains them all too.
“Roses of Picardy” was one of the most famous songs of the First World War and is still frequently recorded today. Picardy was a historical province of France; the area which contained the Somme battlefields.
Hayden Wood related that as he was going home one night on the top of a London bus the melody came to him. He jumped off and wrote down the refrain on an old envelope while standing under a street lamp.
British soldiers sang his song as they enlisted for the Front in France and Flanders. During the war itself, the song sold at a rate of 50,000 copies of the sheet music per month; after the war, the singing of it helped soldiers who were suffering from shell-shock to regain their powers of speech.
If it is true that we unconsciously retain a collective knowledge of the past and its symbolism, no wonder Roses of Picardy held such meaning for the young men on the Western Front, and their anxious sweethearts at home.
She was rescued from the Titanic; caught up in the Russian Revolution; demonstrated with the suffragettes, drove ambulances during WW1, became the first woman barrister ever to speak at the Old Bailey, and almost in passing, founded the WVS.
Even though she has never to my knowledge appeared on I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of here one feels she would have acquitted herself well.
The facts in this blog are taken from the article by Helena Wojtczak published on Thursday 18th July 2002 on the Titanic Research site, where the whole text can be found.
The sections in italics are Elsie’s own words in letters and diary entries.
Elsie Bowerman
Elsie Bowerman’s father, William, died in 1895, leaving his wife, Edith, and his daughter, Elsie, very wealthy women. It was this money which gave Elsie the freedom to do what she did, and she could not be accused of wasting it.
She left school in April 1907 and stayed a while in Paris before beginning her studies in Mediaeval and Modern Languages at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1908.
By 1910 there were six societies in Hastings campaigning for women to have the parliamentary vote. By 1908 Elsie’s mother Edith had joined the most militant – the WSPU – which Elsie joined at Girton in 1909. She wore suffragette badges in lectures, shared and sold copies of Votes for Women, and organised debates. Edith was an official of the Women’s Tax Resistance League in Hastings and ran the WSPU shop at 5 Grand Parade during the 1910 election. During the university holidays, Elsie was an Organiser for the Hastings Branch of the WSPU.
Edith was involved in the London activities of the WSPU. She gave a banner to be carried on a mass demonstration in Hyde Park. Designed by Sylvia Pankhurst, it bore the words Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. Edith was one of ten women chosen to accompany Mrs. Pankhurst on a now-famous deputation to Parliament in 1910, which the police obstructed and which turned violent, resulting in 119 arrests and many injuries.
Using notepaper and envelopes blindstamped Votes for Women, Elsie wrote to Edith:
… Needless to say I have been simply wild with excitement these last two days… I am awfully glad you got on so well on Friday … What a pity it seems that you have to go through it all again tomorrow… I shall be frightfully anxious to hear how you fare.
Edith was, in fact, injured on her second deputation.
Dearest Mother, Thank you for your letter received this morning. I am so sorry you have had such a bad time. It is sickening that this endless fighting has to go on. I am frightfully sorry Mrs. Pankhurst & Mrs. Haverfield were arrested.
In April 1912, Elsie and Edith, now aged 22 and 48, travelled from Warrior Square station to Southampton. They were to visit William Bowerman’s relations, and a friend, Mr Guthrie, in Ohio, and would afterwards travel across the USA and Canada. They occupied Cabin 33 on Deck E of the RMS Titanic, which set off on 12th April.
The world knows what happened next.
Elsie wrote:
The silence when the engines stopped was followed by a steward knocking on our door and telling us to go on deck. This we did and were lowered into life-boats, where we were told to get away from the liner as soon as we could in case of suction. This we did, and to pull an oar in the midst of the Atlantic in April with ice-bergs floating about, is a strange experience.
Lifeboat from the Titanic
The two women were in Lifeboat 6 with about 22 others including Frederick Fleet, the lookout who had first spotted the iceberg. The 1997 film Titanic featured several scenes in this lifeboat because it accommodated two of the main characters, Molly Brown and the fictional Ruth Dewit Bukater, mother of the heroine Rose. The boat was the third to be lowered, at 0055hrs. Lifeboat 6 was under the command of Quartermaster Robert Hitchens, who would later come under intense attack for not saving more passengers. Captain Smith, through a megaphone, ordered the lifeboats to come back to pick up more passengers, but they did not respond. Robert Hitchens refused to go back because he feared that, when the Titanic sank, she would produce a suction force and the boilers would explode, killing everyone on the lifeboats. One source claims that Molly demanded that the women be allowed to row to keep warm. Hitchens, protested, but Molly told him he would be thrown overboard if he attempted to stop her. Both men eventually gave in and Molly took control. She ordered the women to row and distributed her furs and other clothing to the freezing passengers.
The boat floated in the middle of the Atlantic all night before being rescued at 0600 and taken to New York by the Carpathia. They were reported safe by Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Hastings & St Leonards Observer.
Undeterred, Elsie and her mother continued with their itinerary, stayed at a ranch in British Columbia and visited the Klondyke and Alaska.
During the trip Elsie wrote an article for the Wycombe Abbey Gazette entitled ‘The Magnetic North’. The pair returned to Hastings as minor celebrities: they were the only Titanic passengers from the town.
Edith and Elsie resumed their suffrage activities, publicising meetings and selling ice-cream for the cause.
Their nightmare voyage to New York did not deter either from travelling: they visited Arundel and Loch Lomond in 1913, Betts-y-Coed, Winchester and Rome in 1914, and Dartmoor in 1915.
In contrast to many photographs of middle-class women of that era, Elsie and her young friends were not at all ladylike or dainty; they happily lolled about on the grass with their pets and Edith is seen gardening. Elsie was a sturdy woman of average build: 5’ 5’, with thick brown wavy hair with a centre parting, blue eyes, a low forehead, square chin, straight nose, round face, full mouth and fair complexion. She appears open and sincere, almost tomboyish, with a zest for life, and completely without airs, graces or coquetry.
In July 1916 the Honourable Mrs. Haverfield, now a leading light in the pro-war movement, invited Elsie to go to Serbia as a motor driver. Although 26 years old, Elsie begged her mother’s permission:
Mrs Haverfield has just asked me to go out to Serbia at the beginning of August, to drive a car -May I go? … It is what I’ve been dying to do & drive a car ever since the war started. I should have to spend the week after the procession learning to drive – the cars are Fords … It is really like a chance to go to the front. They want drivers so badly. So do say yes – It is too thrilling for words.
Ford: 1915 latest model
When Edith consented Elsie thanked her, adding, ‘It is good of you always to be so splendidly unselfish – everyone I have met is fearfully envious of me having the chance to go.’ However, a different job was found for Elsie: in September, she became an orderly in the London Unit of the now-famous Scottish Women’s Hospitals, run by Dr. Elsie Inglis.
The all-female unit had to travel by a most circuitous route – via Scandinavia, Archangel, Moscow and Odessa -to serve the Serbian and Russian armies in Romania. Unfortunately it arrived just as the allies had been defeated. English newspapers carried reports about the women’s units, which, Elsie wrote, ‘make us afraid you will all think we are starving or dead or something whereas we are really having the time of our lives.’
In November 1916 they set up a hospital near the Danube, then had to dismantle it and join the retreat to the Russian frontier. It was bitterly cold and Elsie asked in her almost daily letters home for gloves, scarves and thick stockings, as well as a dozen Kodak Brownie films, Suchard chocolate, and a book of Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories. However, she begged her mother not to send Christmas puddings. In addition to her many letters, Elsie sent telegrams at every opportunity. Despite this, Edith wrote several frantic letters to the headquarters of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals from whom she received repeated reassurance that Elsie’s unit was safe.
Russian Frontier 1915
Elsie found the experience wonderful. In her detailed pencil-written diary she described pitching tents for the field hospital and serving meals to 250 people with the help of only one Russian, who could not speak English. She told of sleeping in the open just twenty miles from the firing line, of having singing parties with soldiers around camp fires and of cross-country rides with Russian officers.
She was in charge of wagon-loads of equipment which frequently got lost and had to be recovered, and all this in the midst of a war. Although Elsie was an orderly, she sometimes helped with the wounded. However, on 1st March she wrote in her diary ‘Life is one long chuckle at present’ and described her shopping sprees, and commented that she sometimes deliberately left her purse behind to stop herself spending too much.
She was in St Petersburg in 1917 – of course! – and her diary not only contains eyewitness testimony of living in the midst of the Russian Revolution, but reveals something of her.
March 13th, 1917.
Great excitement in street – armoured cars rushing up and down – soldiers and civilians marching up and down armed – attention suddenly focussed on our hotel & house next door – rain of shots directed on to both buildings as police supposed to be shooting from top storeys – most exciting. Several shots went through windows. Presently our hotel searched by rebels – came into each room searching for police spy -very nice to us -most polite – several civilians as well as soldiers. One ‘revolutionary’ came into our room to dress -didn’t know how to wear his sword – we had to assist with the strapping up. Much to our disgust all hotel servants also the manager disappeared – nothing to eat picnicked in our rooms.
Shooting & shouting continuously all day in the street -several search parties through the hotel at intervals. V. difficult to settle down to anything – sat at hotel window in afternoon, watched crowds in streets, lorries crowded with armed men.
Youths left in charge of the hotel kitchen – armed with ferocious carving knives & muskets. Managed to loot some glasses of milk – all other food locked up. Fresh alarm in hotel in evening when rifle shot suddenly heard in the building. Merely one of the revolutionary sentries. Banged rifle on floor in his excitement & shot went through the ceiling. Rumour that hotel will be fired during the night so we packed our haversacks carefully in case we had to make hurried departure in the night. Retired to bed. Great luck to share such comfortable quarters. [Hotel] Astoria has been sacked & guests turned out. [Female colleagues] went to Embassy in afternoon in case there were any orders for British people
– didn’t get any enlightenment. They ‘wished us luck’ – no other suggestions to offer. At intervals during the day motors rush by – scattered news-sheets & declarations to the people. [Nurses] Brown & Hedges ran into street affray – had to take cover in a canal.
March 14th
Crowds in streets but much quieter than yesterday. Soldiers maintaining order. Passed houses which had been occupied by police etc where papers in piles burning in the streets – still being thrown on by soldiers. Headquarters of police & detective force burnt to the ground & still burning – people firing at a police stronghold in house above us … rushed across to take refuge in a church doorway – found the shots were being sent in that direction – presently soldiers came rushing into the building with pistols so we decided to move into doorway of a house in the courtyard – but soldiers came pouring in so we decided to get out while we could. Got out before things became any warmer.
Throughout we have met with the utmost politeness & consideration from everyone. Revolutions carried out in such a peaceful manner really deserve to succeed. Today weapons only seem to be in the hands of responsible people – not as yesterday, carried in many cases by excited youths. Heard that the ministers have now surrendered. Some have been shot, or shot themselves.
March 15th
[Visited] Anglo-Russian hospital – thankful we are not staying there. They have been under orders to stay indoors all through the revolution – Hotel now quite organised again. Meals etc as usual. Reported that 3600 people have been killed & wounded in street affrays. People have decided to ask the Tsar to abdicate in favour of his son.
March 17th
In afternoon went down Nevski [Prospect]. Huge crowds in every direction. Presently motor came along – people flocked around – officer & also man in civilian dress made two announcements from the car – viz., that the Tsar had abdicated in favour of his brother Michael & Michael had placed the power in the hands of the people, therefore to all intents & purposes Russia is now a republic. 2.30pm Mar 16th 1917. People cheered and cheered – wildest excitement. Rushed off & fetched ladders to take down the eagles off various public buildings. Rumour that there is a sanguinary revolution in Berlin & that the Kaiser is dead! Seems too good to be true. We spent the evening in wild speculation.
March 17th – 23rd
Went with Walker to be manicured – Went to Russian church in station square. Very full -so came away to another – also crowded. Railway through Finland reopened so we may possibly return home via Norway-We are told we shall have utmost discomfort – no accommodation food or water. Don’t mind if we can only get off home – Eagles on Winter Palace all draped with Red.
March 24th – 25th
Got up 5 am. To station. People at that hour already standing in long queues outside bread shops. Train left 7.40. Very comfy. Travelled through Finland. Sat outside train on step for a long way. Delightful restaurant car and sleeping berths. [25th] Arrived at Tornea Finnish frontier 12 noon. Drove in sleigh over river to Customs House.
On by sleigh to Haparanda in Sweden – Drive in sleigh over snow through woods. Most comfy sleighs could lie right back – 1st class sleeping berths most delightful train – spotlessly clean – nice women attendants.
On her return to England, Elsie divided her time between her country house at East Lavington and London, where she was a member of the University Club for Ladies. She received the Certificate of the Russian Medal for Meritorious Service. Never one to rest on her laurels, she soon became involved in another round of public work.
When the war broke out, the suffrage movement had placed its demands on the back-burner. The WSPU became The Women’s Party and encouraged women to volunteer for war work and men to sign up; it opposed pacifism and socialism and tried to halt strikes. Elsie joined the Women’s Party and soon became a paid Organiser. For several months she toured nation-wide with the famous WSPU leaders Flora Drummond and Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. At each town, Elsie took lodgings and set about organising and advertising mass-meetings: one at Manchester drew 10,000 people. In some places, including Sheffield, she stood on chairs and addressed meetings outside factory gates. Her sphere of responsibility eventually extended as far as Devon, where she organised meetings right until the end of the war.
Emmeline Pankhurst addressing a sea of boaters
She often shared the platform with Christabel Pankhurst.
More than once while on tour Elsie was mistaken for a Pankhurst. She found the events ‘thrilling’ and felt passionate about her endeavours. She wrote to Edith: ‘It makes one so angry to think that people should need to be urged to patriotism at a time like this.’
In 1918 Elsie became one of the first women Election Agents when she acted in that capacity for Christabel Pankhurst, who stood unsuccessfully for the Women’s Party at Smethwick, in the first General Election in which women were permitted to stand as candidates.8 In 1919 Elsie was Honorary Secretary of Deeds Not Words, a committee formed to collect money to present to Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel, in recognition of their great financial and personal sacrifice for the suffrage movement.
Aspects of Elsie’s personality are revealed in her letters to Edith during her nationwide tour. Examples of her snobbery, intolerance, faultfinding and complaint include: ‘how tired one gets of the Yorkshire accent – it IS hideous. I do hope I shan’t catch it.’ Elsie sent all her laundry home during her nation-wide tour and complained in 1918 that her laundress ‘is hopeless! Has sent no clean combinations to wear and no stockings.’
Elsie felt driven to educate people in (conservative) politics and economics, to encourage individual responsibility and enterprise, and to oppose socialism and communism. With these ends in view in 1920 she co-founded the newly-formed ‘Women’s Guild of Empire’, which was eventually to boast 40,000 members in 30 branches. Elsie was honorary secretary for nine years and edited the Guild’s journal The Bulletin (whose slogan was: ‘Women Unite to save the Nation’). The Guild believed that strikes caused misery and unemployment and that unions should keep out of politics. The Guild came to an end in the 1930s.
Having been so involved in political campaigns and war work, and with her large private income obviating the need to earn a wage, it was not until the age of 31 that Elsie turned her attention to a profession. She decided to become a lawyer. She could not have done this very much earlier, in any case, because until the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act women were barred from entering most professions. It took a lot of cash, too: initially, £50 deposit and over £50 in fees was demanded. Elsie was accepted as a student by the Middle Temple in 1921 and in 1924 was one of the first women called to the Bar.
Elsie, based in Pump Court, practised on the South Eastern Circuit. She was the first woman barrister to appear at the Old Bailey when she won a libel action brought by the National Union of Seamen against a communist.
In the mid-20s Elsie published a book, The Law of Child Protection and in 1928 the London Evening Standard printed her essay, Why women do not write Utopias .
In 1938 she felt another vocation calling, so she gave up law and co-founded the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS), which went on to provide essential services during WW2, in England and occupied Germany.
She then worked briefly for the Ministry of Information before spending three years in the USA as a liaison officer in the BBC Overseas Services. She resigned about 1943-45 to become Chief of General Services to the London office, responsible for conferences.
In 1946 she returned to the USA to help set up the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York. Elsie was a representative of the Secretary-General, and was Chief of the Division for the Advancement of Women.
In Elsie’s letters and other documents there is no hint of a liaison or intimate relationship with anyone. One day she told her ground floor tenants that she was having her flat refurbished because a ‘close lady friend’ was coming to live with her. Soon afterwards, they were shocked to find her sobbing on the stairs: her friend had died suddenly. Elsie, a woman not given to displays of emotion or weakness, was inconsolable.
During the sixties she wrote articles for Wycombe Abbey’s magazine, and in 1965 produced a 95-page book about its founder Dame Frances Dove, entitled Stands There a School. She was interviewed by suffrage historian David Mitchell on 11 November 1964, and by historian Antonia Raeburn in the late sixties. She and suffragette Grace Roe were featured in the February 1975 edition of Calling All Women. She is also acknowledged in Raeburn’s book, ‘Militant Suffragettes’, as ‘Miss Elsie Bowerman M. A. Barrister-at-Law’ for relating her mother’s experience in a suffragette riot.
Elsie suffered a stroke in 1972 and died suddenly on 18th October 1973, aged 83, leaving over £143,000 – the equivalent of over a million pounds today.
Miss K. A. Walpole, headmistress of Wycombe Abbey, described Elsie as:
… not just an able, strong-minded woman. Determined? Yes. Impatient? Yes – with injustice and narrow-minded foolishness. But essentially she was modest, friendly, relaxed. She loved the good things of life – music above all, art, her garden; she enjoyed good food, good wine, fun, sociability. Many of us will remember her generous hospitality, a smaller number the joy of her close friendship. Her concern also reached out to all those who lived about her – her daily help, her taxi-driver, the people of the village, those with whom she worshipped in the village church.
Let the last words be hers:
“As one approaches the end of life an unaccountable feeling of melancholy creeps over one. This is not because of any fear of the life to come, rather a joyful anticipation. Life has been so full of surprises that one cannot believe that there are not even greater joys and adventures in store. Here’s Au Revoir to all my friends and countless thanks for all their love and kindness which has given me such a happy life in this world – Here’s to our next happy meeting in the next one.
In my last blog I wrote about the Scottish women who ran the hospital at Royaumont Abbey.
They were an amazing collection of women; and that hospital was only one of many organised by the Scottish Women’s Hospital. The following extracts are from the very informative Woman’s History Network Blog.
The 4th of August 1914 saw Europe submerged in the darkness of war leading people to be occupied with the thoughts of all the horrors and cruelty that war would bring. In a small room in Edinburgh, Elsie Inglis sat in the offices of the Scottish Federation of Woman’s Suffrage Societies where she hatched a plan to supply a woman’s hospital to the battlefields. So began the SWH. Modestly enough with a goal of £1000 to launch one hospital, by the end of WW1 nearly £500,000 had been raised. With 14 fully equipped field hospitals in Serbia, Belgium, France, Russia, Romania, Corsica, Corfu, and Greece.
Between 1914-1918 it was estimated that some 1000 women served in the SWH. The women worked in terrible conditions, often working themselves to exhaustion and going without food, sleep and regard to their own safety. In the hospitals every inch of space was occupied, sick and wounded lay crowded together, men who had just undergone the amputation of limbs, men in the grip of typhoid, dysentery or frostbite. Men waiting to die and men already dead. Many of the women themselves were struck down by typhus, too exhausted to combat the fever.
Dr Elisabeth Ross
In Serbia, Dr Elizabeth Ross, who knew the hospital had a typhus outbreak and despite only being in Serbia for 3 weeks, demanded to be posted there.
She died of the disease in February 1915 and in the weeks that followed sisters Louisa Jordan, Miss A Mingull and Miss Madge Neil Fraser also succumbed to typhus. Despite all this, the SWH went on to save the lives and bring back to health some 300,000 men, woman and children.
Olive Kelso King was an Australian who joined the SWH as an ambulance driver in Belgium and went onto serve in France and Salonica. Leaving the SWH in 1916, she joined the Serbian army as a driver and was awarded the Serbian silver medal for bravery after saving the lives of the patients during the great fire of Thessaloniki, during which she drove non stop for 24 hours.
Elsie Bowerman and friends
Elsie Bowerman from Tunbridge Wells, who in 1912 had been rescued from the Titanic, joined the SWH in 1916 and served in Serbia, Romania, and Russia. There she witnessed the overthrow of the Tsar, Nicolas II in St Petersburg and in 1924 she became the first woman barrister to practice at the Old Bailey in London .
Flora Sandes in her Serbian officer’s uniform
Flora Sandes joined and became the first woman to be commissioned as an officer in the Serbian Army and the only British woman to officially enroll as a soldier during WW1. She moved up the ranks to Sgt Major after she pursued an extraordinary adventure going on the great Serbian retreat and at one point was shot on a mountain during combat. After the war she settled in Belgrade and married a fellow soldier. During WW2 she and her husband were both imprisoned by the Gestapo in Belgrade but thankfully she survived the war and later returned to the UK where she spent the rest of her days in Suffolk.
What on earth did she find to do in Suffolk!
The Scotsman has more information which forms part of an appeal to have these women recognised in their home country:
Dr Elsie Dalyell
Dr Elsie Dalyell Dr Elsie Dalyell was one of the most respected and experienced doctors who worked at Royaumont during the war. Although brought up in Sydney, she and her family were originally from West Lothian and had emigrated to Australia during the late 19th century – where she trained as a doctor after leaving school. When war broke out she was quick to offer her services as a medic to the army and ended up travelling to Gallipoli with the Anzac forces during the first year of the conflict before joining the Scottish Women’s Hospital Service in Serbia in early 1915. At 34, she was one of the oldest doctors in the unit based at the ruined Abbey. But alongside her comrades, she was able to help transform the crumbling church – which hadn’t been inhabited for more than 50 years – into one of the best field hospitals in France. She led a team of doctors and nurses who treated many of the badly wounded soldiers from the battlefields. With 600 beds and a fully equipped laboratory, the hospital became a vital place for front-line treatment and prided itself on its low mortality rate – less than two per cent of the total 11,000 patients treated there died. By the time it closed in 1919, it was the longest continuously-operated voluntary hospital in France and Dr Elsie Dalyell had come to be regarded as one of the most distinguished of its “doctoresses”. “These girls who went out to treat the wounded were all absolutely heroic,” says former Linlithgow MP and Father of the House Tam Dalyell, who is Dr Elsie’s nephew. “And Elsie was no different. She was a formidable lady – a real toughie who was keen to do as much as she could and go wherever she was needed. “After the war, she continued to work as a doctor and by 1920 was practising in Vienna, where she became a world expert on rickets.” The 73-year-old adds: “Then, when she returned to Australia, she became a firm friend of my mother who managed to keep in contact with her and found out about the work she’d done with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. But all of the women who went out there did such a tremendous job. They had the barest of equipment and used converted cars as makeshift ambulances, but the work they did helped to save so many lives. “When you think that they must have seen the true horrors of warfare but just got on with what they felt they had to do, it’s an amazing achievement.”
Ariadne Mavis Dunderdale
Ariadne Dunderdale was in her early 20s when she left her home in the affluent outskirts of Edinburgh to sign up with the SWH. After telling her parents that she wanted to become a nurse – much to the family’s disappointment, since her father didn’t believe it was a fitting occupation for a well-to-do young woman – she left Scotland and travelled to London in 1913. But it was while she was working as a fully-qualified Sister, that she joined Inglis in travelling to France when war broke out. “She always spoke very fondly of her experience there and enjoyed it very much,” explains Ariadne’s daughter Margaret Oddy, who is in her mid-80s and lives in Newington “She didn’t really have many daring anecdotes or heroic tales. I don’t suppose many of the women who went out there did, as being on the front line became a normal part of their everyday lives rather than an exciting adventure. “She and the other nurses helped a lot of men who had been wounded and I’m sure they saved an awful lot of lives. “However, she did say that it could be quite difficult at times. Not just because of the horrific injuries or death that they saw every day, but more because there were a lot of Algerian and Moroccan men fighting in the war and they didn’t speak any English.
“Because the nurses and those soldiers couldn’t understand or speak to each other, the men were a little distrusting about what the women were doing. When they were brought to the hospital, they seemed to be very afraid that the nurses were going to cut them up or leave them to die when, in fact, they were there to do everything they could to help.”
Dorothy Littlejohn Dorothy Littlejohn was a trained cook who had graduated from the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science when she decided to offer her services to the war effort. The daughter of medical pioneer Sir Henry Littlejohn, the first Medical Officer for Health in Edinburgh, she didn’t share her father’s views on the value of women doctors and didn’t even approve of the suffragette movement – instead deciding to perform the more “womanly” duties of cooking for the hospital. At 38, she was one of the oldest volunteers at the Abbey when she headed to Royaumont in 1915. “She was one of the first women to go out there,” says her daughter, 85-year-old Rachel Hedderwick. “And at that time, the Abbey hadn’t been occupied for many, many years. There were no lights or facilities, so they were really starting completely from scratch. “There was no running water there and only the most basic of cooking equipment, so it must have made life very difficult. “And because the hospital was staffed by women, they all had to help carry stretchers up the steep stone steps and drag equipment into the wards. It was really a very heroic team effort.” Dorothy was only at Royaumont for six months before she returned to Scotland to get married, and on her departure she was presented with a travelling clock by her orderlies – inscribed simply, but touchingly, “to the hand that fed us”. Rachel, who now lives in Bridge of Allan, adds: “She kept a diary and wrote letters to my father which mention some of the things that she saw in France but she didn’t talk about it to us. It was only much later on that I discovered about the kind of work she’d done. All I can remember her saying were a few recollections about going out into the countryside with the other women there and how much she liked it when the soldiers went out into the forest and picked wild flowers for her. “But it must have also been terrifying at times. They weren’t very far from the battlefields and could hear the guns firing in the distance, so it was a dangerous place for them. “
THERE are numerous statues and monuments erected in France and Serbia to commemorate Dr Elsie Inglis and the work of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals Service in the First World War, but there is barely anything to mark their achievements on home soil. And while in Serbia Inglis was awarded the Order of the White Eagle – the country’s highest honour – in Edinburgh there is just a small plaque honouring her fixed to St Giles’ on the Royal Mile where she lay in state after dying from cancer in 1917 and before her full military funeral.
There is her grave in Dean Cemetery, and the hospital she established near Abbeyhill is now a nursing home which still bears her name, but a new campaign is aiming to remember her with something more prominent. So far, 60 MSPs have backed a campaign by the Scottish Women’s Hospitals Committee, which they hope will lead to the Scottish Executive funding a £150,000 statue on the Royal Mile. The plans have also been backed by doctors at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary and Princess Anne – although the city council has said that it cannot contribute to the cost of the monument. To show your support for the campaign, please contact Ian McFarlane on 0131-668 1421, or e-mail i.mcfarlane@virgin.net source-Scotsman
There are so many other stories..
Nurse Nellie Spindler
Nurse Nellie Spindler
She was one of a handful of brave women to experience the hell of World War I’s bloodiest battlefield. Based deep inside the danger zone, nurse Nellie Spindler saw her field hospital flooded with Allied troops injured from day one of the Battle of Passchendale. The Leeds Infirmary sister was part of the small band of Queen Alexander Imperial Military Nurses sent close to the Western Front. Casualty Clearing Stations (CCS) were situated a safe distance away. But Nellie, treating abdominal wounds, needed to be closer to the action to prevent infection. But after just 3 weeks she joined the massive list of fallen heroes.
The Military Medal was awarded to nurse Kate Carruthers for showing bravery in the face of the enemy during the First World War. Miss Carruthers was one of only a few women to receive the award for her heroic efforts in treating the wounded on the frontline. The 30-year-old nurse was stationed on the Western Front in 1917 when her field hospital came under attack. She was injured in the fighting but battled bravely through the pain barrier to continue treating the wounded. In 1917 she became one of only a few women to be awarded the prestigious Military Medal, which was created by King George V in 1916.
At least 23 British women perished in Serbia during WW1, and ceremonies are still held all over Serbia in their memory.
These are wonderful women, all of them – and we should be celebrating them as loudly as we can. They give our daughters and granddaughters role models of rather more use than the empty celebrities they are encouraged to adore.
Human beings have always thoroughly enjoyed watching other human beings fighting and dying. The excitement over gladiatorial combat in the Roman Arena lived on long after Rome fell.
Tourist companies arranged package tours to the Crimea during the Crimean War for the upper classes who got up before dawn, settled themselves comfortably with their cushions, telescopes and picnic baskets, dodged the stray bullets from the Russians, and allowed themselves to be diverted by the ensuing slaughter.
A large crowd watched the third bombardment of Sebastopol, resulting in the massacre of 6,000 British and Allied troops, with evident satisfaction.
Another bombardment took place on 18 June at Cathcart’s Hill. Tourists hauling picnic baskets arrived just before dawn and sat all day long in the heat to watch 3,500 French soldiers killed and 1,500 British cut to shreds in a hail of grapeshot and bullets, and ‘the ladies thoroughly enjoyed the fun’, wrote Captain Portal.
Wish You Were Here
In America, The Civil War likewise provided plenty of innocent entertainment for civilians. Hundreds of tourists watched the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Roared on by the crowd, the soldiers fought and died; 4,700 lives were lost. It makes the World Cup feel a little tame.
Picnic at the first battle of Bull Run.
Against this background, the young men recently noticed in the television news carrying a sofa up a hill to watch a bombardment in comfort were simply following a long tradition.
It has long disturbed me that it is possible to be – in fact, difficult to avoid being – that same tourist in modern battles, with a grandstand view of the horror and misery of war dished up on the television screen in the comfort of your own home; no longer only for the well-heeled; for everyone. You don’t have to carry your sofa anywhere; you just sit on it and war comes to you.
How are we meant to respond? There is so little we can do to help; pledging money to UNICEF is not the same human action as being able to pick up a screaming child and comfort it, soothe its pain.
Watching a child suffer, however moved you might feel, cannot help the child; sometimes it feels as if our very compassion is itself dangerous and obscene, as Margaret Atwood felt in the 1960s; liable to cause more bloodshed.
We feel guilty if we watch and guilty if we don’t. Complicit, whatever we do. Miserable, appalled, helpless.. but, unlike the people who are actually having to endure it, not just for the second they are caught on camera, but for the rest of their lives, able to wander off and make ourselves a nice cup of tea, to feel better. Which makes us feel worse.
I suppose, though, that we have inched on a little. At least we don’t call it ”Fun”.
It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers (1968)
Margaret Atwood.
While I was building neat castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were filling with bulldozed corpses
and as I walked to the school washed and combed,
my feet stepping on the cracks in the cement detonated red bombs.
Now I am grownup and literate,
and I sit in my chair as quietly as a fuse
and the jungles are flaming, the under- brush is charged with soldiers,
This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest poems ever written. Published in 1867, it speaks of and to all times, all generations. And always seems particularly aimed at us; whoever we are.
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, –
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
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She was in charge of wagon-loads of equipment which frequently got lost and had to be recovered, and all this in the midst of a war. Although Elsie was an orderly, she sometimes helped with the wounded. However, on 1st March she wrote in her diary ‘Life is one long chuckle at present’ and described her shopping sprees, and commented that she sometimes deliberately left her purse behind to stop herself spending too much.
ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH
