Wartime

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Scottish Women’s Hospitals

Given that Scotland will – or will not – vote for independence from the rest of the UK on Thursday, September 18th, I thought I would focus this week’s blog posts on Scottish history and writing.

With 2014 being the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War One, I was fascinated to read about the Scottish Women’s Hospitals which treated allied soldiers during The Great War.

Formed to provide medical assistance to the injured, the Scottish Women’s Hospitals also worked to promote the cause of women’s rights.

Elsie Inglis, who I talked about in a previous blog, was one of its founders. A doctor, she approached the War Office with the intention of setting up a hospital in Edinburgh to care for injured soldiers, or co-operating with the RAMC to treat soldiers on the Western Front. The War Office’s response? “My good woman, go home and sit still!”

Following this rebuff, the Scottish Women’s Hospital approached the French and by November 1914 they were in business, setting up a hospital in Calais. This was followed in December with a hospital in the Abbey of Royaumont. They went on to set up hospitals in Belgium, Serbia, Malta, Corsica and Russia.

The hospitals were staffed entirely by women. Many, but not all, came from Scotland, with others coming from other countries such as America, England and Ceylon. Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel received a salary, but ancillary staff, including orderlies, drivers and cooks, did not. These jobs were filled by women from the upper classes who could afford to work for free, wanted to help the war effort and had a sense of adventure.

If you are interested in reading more, please check out this wonderful website which not only goes into the history of the hospitals, but contains the biographies of many the women who worked there.

 

 

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Union Cemetery – Calgary: Part Two

With 50,000 people buried in Union Cemetery (not all in marked graves) there are literally thousands of stories to be told. Continuing on from my previous post on Monday, I’m going to look at a couple of memorials which are related to two famous nautical disasters.

STEENROBERT ALEXANDER STEEN.  Forty-seven years of age, a private in the Canadian Army Medical Corps, Steen was one of the 234 personnel murdered by the Germans on the Hospital Ship Llandovery Castle in World War One. The ship was returning to England from Halifax NS, carrying 164 men, 14 nurses, and 80 officers and men of the Canadian Army Medical Corps.

Under the Hague Convention, hospital ships are prohibited from carrying arms, must be clearly marked with the Red Cross, and sail with all lights burning. The enemy are allowed to stop and search the ships, but must not fire on them. However, on June 27th, 1918, a German submarine fired on the Llandovery Castle.

It sank within 10 minutes. Three lifeboats got away. The German captain – Patzig – interrogated those on the boats to find ‘proof’ of misuse of the ship (ie that it was carrying arms). Unable to find any, he then ordered his crew to prepare to dive. With only himself and a few other sailors on board, they attempted to hide their war crime by ramming and machine gunning the boats and survivors in the water. Twenty-four men in one of the lifeboats survived and were rescued 36 hours later. All 14 nurses were murdered. The sinking became a rallying cry for the Canadian forces in the last few months of the war. Captain Patzig was never found or prosecuted for war crimes.

Please click HERE to find a link to a brief report of the tragedy on the front page of The Calgary Daily Herald on July 2nd, 1918.

dickALBERT and VERA DICK were two of the 795 survivors of the sinking of the Titanic on April 10th, 1912 which killed more than 1,500 men, women and children.  Albert, who made his early fortune in Calgary’s land boom,  married his seventeen year-old wife Vera in the fall of 1911. They travelled to Italy, Palestine,  Egypt and France on an extended honeymoon, picking up the Titanic in Cherbourg. Their first-class tickets cost 57 GBP each. They both escaped in lifeboat #3.

In an era when the custom was, ‘Women and children first,’ Albert’s survival caused controversy. He claimed that, while trying to calm his hysterical wife who was clinging to him, he was pushed into the lifeboat. Some speculated that he dressed himself as a woman (not true) to escape. However, it must be remembered that men were needed to row the lifeboats far enough away from the ship to prevent them being drawn down into the vortex  as the ship went down. Whatever the reason, Albert’s survival meant that he carried a stigma for the rest of his life. In some places he was even considered not ‘socially respectable’ for having survived.

 

 

 

 

 

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Women in World War One

I know a fair bit about my grandfathers’ lives during Word War One. It’s always easy to find out about men’s lives in wartime. In the case of servicemen, every posting is recorded in their service records. For those back home, employed in essential services or too old to fight, there are always work records or census details. But what about the women? What about my grandmothers?

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My paternal grandmother, Mary Hendry, holding my father. 1915

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My maternal grandmother, Harriet Davenport

I never met my paternal grandmother – Mary Hendry – but as both she and my maternal grandmother – Harriet Davenport – were young mothers during the 1914/18 conflict, I can only assume they remained at home raising their children while faced with diminishing resources and increasing food shortages. In my paternal grandmother’s case, she raised her family as a single parent under the constant worry that her husband may not return from the front.

But for many single women who found employment it was an exciting time. For the first time in their lives they were earning decent money which allowed them to live independent lives.  I’ve just watched Katie Adie’s Women of World War One which is a fascinating look at how The Great War changed women’s lives and led – eventually – to women finally receiving the vote.  (Women over 30 got the vote in 1918, all women over 21 in 1928.  All men over 21 got the vote in 1918.)

Here’s a clip from Youtube, but please try to catch the whole programme. It’s available on BBC iPlayer until midnight on Tuesday August 19th.

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Percy Frederick Huggins

One week into memories of The Great War and it’s the turn of my Grandfather on my Mum’s side. He died when I was about 3 or 4 so I don’t remember much about him. All the memories below are those of his youngest daughter – my aunt Anne who contributed her wartime memories to my wartime rationing blogs at the beginning of this year. I only have only 2 personal memories of Granddad, and they’re of him lying in bed in what, I suppose, was his sick room. He loved canaries and I do remember the sound of them chattering. I also remember that whenever I walked in the door he started singing, ‘Sugar in the morning, Sugar in the evening, Sugar at suppertime…’

gradadcroppedBorn in London, possibly Clapham, around 1878, he was the youngest son in a family of 6 girls and 4 boys. Anne doesn’t know where he got his education and training but presumes it was something to do with glass because when he couldn’t find a job in London, he found one in Glasgow, with Barr and Stroud.  My grandmother stayed in London to await the arrival of her first child, Percy Alexander Huggins, who was born in November 1912. (I think I remember Uncle Alex saying that Granddad wanted him born in England so he could play cricket for England when he grew up – but that might be a false memory.)

Part of Barr and Stroud’s production included  range finders, torpedo depth recorders, periscope range finders and binoculars, so although working in a reserved occupation, my Grandfather’s work was essential to both First and Second World Wars.

According to Anne, he was just over 6′ tall, and thin. His legs seemed to take up most of his height – a real Daddy-longlegs. They were thin too. My brother at 2 years of age always, and off his own bat, grabbed a cushion before he would sit on his Granddad’s boney thighs!

Anne has nice memories of him taking her to Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow to feed the ducks, to another park Dawesholme, which was also a bird sanctuary – he was fond of birds, especially chaffinches, and of accompanying him on fishing trips to Kilmardinny Loch – as long as she promised to keep quiet! He fished for pike (huge, vicious things) sometimes battling for half-an-hour or more. Sometimes they were too big to take home and he would hand them in to a local nursing home – the fish were big enough to feed both staff and patients.

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Her wartime memories are mostly of his work during World War 2 as she was born long after The Great War ended.  As far as she can remember, during WW2 Barr and Stroud hived off some departments to what were called ‘shadow factories’ – the main building at Anniesland being too obvious a target for bombs. Anne doesn’t know how many shadow places there were, but Granddad was put in to manage one – a very large ex-garage and workshop near Kirklee.  He took her there one Sunday when it was quiet. She was in her early teens and fascinated by the equipment on all the benches and wanted to know what they all did. There were also small cubicles at one end where two people could work on tricky pieces of work.

At the back of the building there was a large area, laid down for wartime as allotments, and he quickly put his name on two of these. At 60/61 he had a garden for the first time – and what a job he made or it. He kept it going for a long time after VE Day too, since food was in short supply (after WW2) until the early 50s.

As always, when reading or listening to Anne’s stories, I wish I’d asked more questions when I was younger. It’s a lesson to us all to ask the questions of our parents and grandparents now!