Woman
IN FOREIGN SOIL SHE LAYS
AND IN THAT RICH EARTH
A RICHER DUST CONCEALS
SISTER SOPHIA HILLING
This might not be exactly what Rupert Brooke wrote but when Mrs Sarah Hilling chose this inscription for her daughter she had Brooke's poem, The Soldier, firmly in her mind:
If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam ...
At one time this was the most famous poem in England and Brooke, who died in 1915 on his way to take part in the Gallipoli Campaign, the most famous war poet.
I wish it had been possible to find out more about Sophia Hilling - most records give her name as Sophie, including the War Graves Commission, but the record of her baptism and all the census returns give it as Sophia.
She was born in Deptford, South London. Her father, Samuel Hilling, was a rag cutter, someone who cut up rags for paper making. He died before 1901 when her mother, Sarah Hilling, was supporting herself as a charwoman. Sixteen-year-old Sophia was a general domestic servant. Ten years later she was a sick nurse working at the Birmingham Workhouse Infirmary.
According to the information her mother gave the Commission, Sophia Hilling had had four year's war service before she died. There is no information as to where but in 1917 she was awarded the Royal Red Cross Medal (Second Class) for "bravery, coolness and devotion to duty whilst on active service". At this time she was working at the Welsh Metropolitan War Hospital, Whitchurch, Cardiff where soldiers received both orthopaedic and psychiatric treatment.
By October 1918 Hilling was in France working at one of the general hospitals in Trouville, France when she fell ill. On 12 October E Maud McCarthy, Matron-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders, recorded in her official diary:
"Wired Matron-in-Chief, War Office, and reported to DGMS that Sister S. Hilling, QAIMNS reported on the "Dangerously ill" list with pneumonia."
And then the next day:
"Wired Matron-in-Chief, War Office, and reported to DGMS that Sister S. Hilling, QAIMNS on the "Dangerously ill" list yesterday, died at 10.30 p.m."
[E Maud McCarthy's war diary is a wonderful resource. It has been transcribed by Scarlet Finders and can be read here.]
A NOBLE TYPE OF
GOOD HEROIC WOMANHOOD
STAFF NURSE NELLIE SPINDLER
LEEDS NURSE KILLED BY THE HUNS
Victim of Bombardment in France
Miss Nellie Spindler, who, from 1912 to 1915, was a nurse at the Leeds Township Infirmary, was killed in France on August 21st by a German shell during the bombardment on a stationary hospital where she was engaged.
She was 26 years of age, and was a daughter of the Chief Inspector of Police at Stanley Road, Wakefield. In November 1915, she left Leeds to take up duties as nurse at a military hospital in Staffordshire, where she remained until last June, when she proceeded to France.
[Leeds Mercury Tuesday 28 August 1917]
The Leeds Mercury published further particulars of Nurse Spindler's death in the following day's paper under the headline - THE MURDERED NURSE.
A letter has been received from Miss M. Wood, sister-in-charge of the hospital who states:-
"Your daughter became unconscious immediately she was hit, and she passed away perfectly peacefully at 11.30 a.m. - just 20 minutes afterwards. I was with her at the time; but after the first minute of two she did not know me. It was a great mercy she was oblivious to her surroundings, for the shells continued to fall in for the rest of the day."
The Germans had been systematically shelling the area round the Casualty Clearing Stations at Brandhoek, convincing the British that they were intentionally targeting them and forcing their temporary closure.
Nellie Spindler's mother chose her inscription, which comes from Santa Filomena, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's tribute to Florence Nightingale, which he wrote in 1857:
A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.
DAUGHTER OF
CANON AND MRS DICKSON
OF FAHAN, CO. DONEGAL
IRELAND
NURSE MARY CHARLOTTE DICKSON
Mary Dickson's inscription says almost every thing I have been able to discover about her. She died in hospital in Rouen of an infectious disease, possibly measles.There's a description of <"https://archive.org/stream/vadinfrance00dentrich#page/202/mode/2up">a VAD's funeral in Olive Dent's 'A V.A.D. in France', published in 1917, which could well have been a description of Mary Dickson's. The extract concludes:
"No matter what consolation is proffered, death is always an irreparable loss. But surely it is better to have it come when doing work that counts, work of national and racial weight, than to live on until old and unwanted.
And what a magnificent end to one's life, to lie there among those splendidly brave boys in the little strip of land which the French Government has given over in perpetuity to our dead. Thousands of the children that are to be, will come to such cemeteries, and will be hushed to reverence by the spirits of those who are not, by the spirits of the fallen that will for ever inhabit the scene."
There is a brass plaque to Mary's memory in the church in Fahan - "Erected in her honour by the women of Fahan". Her name also appears on the village war memorial - along with that of her sister Anne Eileen Dickson. Mary's name is followed by the initials V.A.D. - Voluntary Aid Detachment - Anne's by the initials F.R.C., which stands for French Red Cross. It's interesting that Anne doesn't have her own plaque in the way that her sister does.
KILLED IN ACTION
BELOVED DAUGHTER OF
ANGUS & MARY MAUD MACDONALD
BRANTFORD, CANADA
NURSING SISTER KATHERINE MAUDE MARY MACDONALD
Katherine (Christy) Macdonald was killed in a German air raid, which hit No. 1 Canadian General Hospital, Etaples at 10 pm on the night of Sunday 18 May 1918. The hospital war diary gives the complete details of the raid, which resulted in the death of fifty-three medical staff and eight patients, and the wounding of fifty-three staff and thirty-one patients, several of whom later succumbed to their injuries.
The diary records how, "At the close of what had been a peaceful Sunday enemy aircraft came over the camp in large numbers. The hospital was wrapt in slumber when the planes were immediately overhead". The raid had been designed to take place in relays, the flames from the first raid guiding the subsequent raiders. There was no doubt in the British mind that the Germans had deliberately targeted a hospital despite the fact that this was against the rules of warfare and the hospital was clearly displaying a red cross on its roof. The German response was that the British had built their hospital close to an important railway junction and that this had been the target of their raid not the hospital.
Katherine Macdonald was the only nursing sister to be killed outright when her femoral artery was severed. A qualified nurse, she enlisted in March 1917 and had had several postings before she arrived in France in March 1918. Etaples was well behind the front line and just the day before her death Katherine wrote to assure her mother, "Don't worry we are far from harm". The website for 'Legion', Canada's Military History Magazine, hosts a number of digitised letters relating to Katherine, including the one written on the 18 May and one from her fiance, John Ballantyne, to her mother passing on what he had been able to find out about Katherine's death.
WHAT I ASPIRED TO BE
AND WAS NOT, COMFORTS ME
MATRON JESSIE BROWN JAGGARD
This is yet another of those famous quotations that I, and I suspect many other twenty-first-century readers, have never heard of. It comes from the seventh stanza of Robert Browning's thirty-two-stanza poem, 'Rabbi Ben Ezra'. To Browning, death brings the soul's release into the next stage of its journey so we should not concern ourselves too much with what happens to us in this life. Whatever happens is the will of God and he has his reasons. We are not animals so we will have doubts and uncertainties and failures; if our ambitions were so limited that we achieved them all then we would be like animals.
For thence, - a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks, -
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.
Jessie Brown Jaggard died of dysentery on Lemnos barely a month after she had arrived on the island. Dysentery and typhoid were rife among the soldiers on Gallipoli and conditions in the hastily erected hospitals on Lemnos were very difficult - initially no sanitary provision, precarious and inadequate water supply, scarcity of food and the ever present heat, dust and flies - that disease spread among the medical staff too.
Born in Nova Scotia, Jessie Jaggard was a trained nurse, who gave up her career when she married. However, soon after the outbreak of war, she volunteered to join the nursing services - despite the fact that she was married, had a seventeen-year-old son and lived in the United States. She sailed for England in May 1915. On 1 August, she was despatched to Lemnos to set up the 3rd Canadian Stationary Hospital, . The blog Remembering First World War Nurses has more details about her life and death.
Her inscription was chosen by her husband, Herbert Armstrong Jaggard, a director of the Pennsylvania Railway Company.
QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
BEHOLD I COME QUICKLY
STAFF NURSE MYRTLE ELIZABETH WILSON
Myrtle Elizabeth Wilson was born in Australia in 1877 where her parents had been living for ten years. A trained nurse, she joined Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service early in 1915 and was sent to Europe in April. That winter she caught pneumonia. Her decline was noted in the official diary of the Matron-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders, Maud McCarthy.
9 December:
Miss Lowndes dangerously ill. Miss Wilson and Miss Donaldson both very ill also.
19 December:
Miss Wilson, Australian, pneumonia, DI [dangerously ill] list - people in Australia, WO informed, and cousin in England.
23 December
Telephone message from 14 General Hospital saying Miss Wilson, Australian on Q Reserve, condition critical. Informed WO. Later (message) to say she had died 7.30 am.
Myrtle Wilson's funeral was held the next day, Christmas Eve. Maud McCarthy made sure that she attended and was furious to discover that no one had done anything about publicising the funeral so that there were very few nurses present. She felt very keenly that people should have had the opportunity "of paying a last respect to one who had come so far and who was among strangers."
Myrtle's inscription was confirmed by her sister May. The family's address was The Roses, Chelmer, Brisbane, Queensland, hence the first line. The second line, 'Behold I come quickly' is a line, repeated several times, from the New Testament Book of Revelation Chapter 22:
Behold I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.
verse 7
And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.
verse 12
He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
Maud McCarthy's Official Diary as the Matron-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, [WO95/3989 The National Archives], has been transcribed by Sue Light @Scarletfinders. She has created the most wonderful resource for which I am very grateful.