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Endell Street

Name: Endell Street
Author: Wendy Moore

The Women Who Ran Britain's Trailblazing Military Hospital

Wendy Moore

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Endell Street

The Women Who Ran Britain's Trailblazing Military Hospital

Wendy Moore

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A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK When the First World War broke out, the suffragettes suspended their campaigning and joined the war effort. For pioneering suffragette doctors (and life partners) Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson that meant moving to France, where they set up two small military hospitals amidst fierce opposition. Yet their medical and organisational skills were so impressive that in 1915 Flora and Louisa were asked by the War Ministry to return to London and establish a new military hospital in a vast and derelict old workhouse in Covent Garden's Endell Street. That they did, creating a 573-bed hospital staffed from top to bottom by female surgeons, doctors and nurses, and developing entirely new techniques to deal with the horrific mortar and gas injuries suffered by British soldiers. Receiving 26, 000 wounded men over the next four years, Flora and Louisa created such a caring atmosphere that soldiers begged to be sent to Endell Street. And then, following the end of the war and the Spanish Flu outbreak, the hospital was closed and Flora, Louisa and their staff were once again sidelined in the medical profession.The story of Endell Street provides both a keyhole view into the horrors and thrills of wartime London and a long-overdue tribute to the brilliance and bravery of an extraordinary group of women.

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Publisher

Atlantic Books

Year

2020

ISBN

9781786495860

Topic

Historia

Subtopic

Mujeres en la historia

CHAPTER 1 A Good Feeling

Victoria Station, London, 15 September 1914

LOUISA GARRETT ANDERSON and Flora Murray waited impatiently to board their train. Tall, slim and erect in the midst of the fourteen younger women who were going with them, they exuded calm authority. Everyone had come to see them leave – family, friends and comrades from the suffragette movement – and to ply them with gifts. One well-wisher had arrived with three boxes packed with provisions for the journey while others brought fruit, chocolates and flowers. Surrounded by their hand luggage, the women looked awkward in their stiff new greyish-brown uniforms, their ‘short’ skirts just covering the tops of their ankle boots, their belted tunics buttoned firmly up to their necks. Their main luggage had already been stowed and would be waiting for them on arrival – or so they thought.

Victoria Station was bustling. In the six weeks since war had been declared, the railway terminus had been transformed. Among the commuters pouring off the trains for their daily drudgery in the city, there were Belgian refugees who had fled from the invading German Army with their pitiful bundles of belongings and frightened children in tow. Traumatized and bewildered, they were met by women volunteers who had set up emergency canteens on the concourse. There were British travellers too, who had found themselves stranded in Europe and further afield when war broke out, and were only now straggling home.

Departures were relatively few. Thousands of soldiers had already passed through Victoria on their way to France and Flanders. Weighed down by kitbags and buoyed up by patriotic songs, they had exchanged farewells with families and sweethearts before boarding their trains. One traveller, aware that many who said their goodbyes would never see each other again, called Victoria the ‘Palace of Tears’. Many more would follow. While the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, made up of the regular army and reservists, were already mired in the thick of battle on the Western Front, hundreds of thousands more men had since enlisted in response to the ‘call to arms’ declared by the new Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. So far, at least, the casualties that had already begun to stream back from the first battles had been arriving at London stations under cover of night. Many, indeed, had never arrived back at all since the army’s medical services had been so overwhelmed by the sheer scale and severity of injuries with which they were dealing that thousands had perished before they could be treated.

Yet for all the fearful arrivals and sorrowful departures the atmosphere at Victoria Station that morning was predominantly cheerful – especially among the party of women waiting to board their train for France. For them one war had ended as another had begun.

JUST AS POLITICIANS of all colours had buried their differences to fight the common enemy on the outbreak of war, so a truce had been declared between women and men. After years of escalating militancy in the battle for votes for women, the leaders of the suffragists and suffragettes had put aside their demands immediately war began. Millicent Fawcett, president of the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), had led the way by calling on her supporters to offer their services to their country within days of war being declared. ‘Women, your country needs you,’ she exhorted her members, even before Kitchener’s iconic poster made the same appeal to men. Emmeline Pankhurst, the steely matriarch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), had followed her example a few days later, urging her militant suffragettes to suspend all activism and divert their energies and organizational skills into supporting the war effort. In return the government had announced an amnesty and released all suffragettes from prison – some several hundred women – within a week of declaring war.

Although some stalwarts of the women’s movement had joined pacifist campaigns, most women threw themselves into the new cause in a rush of patriotic fervour. One group of suffragettes had already launched the Women’s Emergency Corps to recruit women into jobs left vacant by men who were now enlisting. Women had flocked to its headquarters to sign up as drivers and motorcycle despatch riders or to run soup kitchens and refugee shelters. Aristocratic women and society ladies, until recently some of the loudest voices demanding the vote, were now offering their grand townhouses as convalescent hospitals for the wounded and raising funds to send medical units to France. And women everywhere, whether they identified themselves as suffragists or not, were signing up to play their part as volunteers at home and overseas.

Waiting to board their train at Victoria that morning, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray had been among the first to recognize the unique opportunity that war presented to women. They knew that as well as posing a terrifying threat to the nation, war with Germany offered women a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Both qualified doctors, they were no longer in the first flush of youth. Louisa, forty-one, was a surgeon and Flora, four years older, a physician and anaesthetist. Yet despite more than ten years’ experience apiece, neither had enjoyed a significant spell of work in a major general hospital. Since hospital appointment boards were almost entirely controlled by men, women doctors were effectively excluded from training or working in mainstream hospitals or attaining high-status medical positions. Women were likewise barred from becoming army doctors regardless of the current pressing need. Although their medical qualifications were exactly equivalent to their male colleagues, Flora and Louisa had been restricted to treating women and children. Through necessity as much as desire, therefore, they worked in hospitals run by women for the treatment of women and children alone.

War had changed everything. Despite their complete lack of experience in treating men, or dealing with war injuries, the two women had decided to set up their own emergency hospital to treat wounded soldiers plucked from the battlefields in France. Gathering together a team of young recruits, including three more women doctors, eight nurses, three women orderlies and four male helpers, they were bound for Paris. It was a gamble. They were not only heading for unknown dangers in a war zone with eighteen young people under their command but their medical inexperience meant they were seriously unprepared for the challenges ahead. As committed to the women’s cause as they were to each other, Murray and Anderson saw the unfolding drama in France as their first chance to prove that women doctors were equal to men.

FOR LOUISA, ENTERING medicine had always seemed a foregone conclusion. Born in 1873, the eldest child of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify in Britain as a doctor, and James Skelton Anderson, a Scottish shipping owner from a family of medics, Louisa had grown up in a world suffused by medicine. Although she had been looked after by a nanny for much of her childhood, Louisa had vivid memories of riding in her mother’s carriage – holding out her hand to catch raindrops – when her mother made her doctor’s rounds from their house in London’s West End. On occasions she had even accompanied her mother to the New Hospital for Women, which her mother had founded in a poor part of Marylebone, where Louisa had romped on the beds. A younger sister had died from meningitis when Louisa was a toddler, then a brother, Alan, arrived when she was nearly four. A lively and imaginative child, Louisa was described by her mother as a ‘bright, skipping little creature, full of character and intelligence’.

Growing up with all the comforts of middle-class Victorian life, Louisa had enjoyed an idyllic childhood. While their parents worked long hours in London, Louisa and Alan ran wild in the sprawling grounds of their family home near the seaside town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, albeit with Nanny keeping a close eye on the pair. In summer they bathed in the sea and sailed paper boats in the rock pools and in winter they skated on frozen ponds. From the age of eight Louisa wrote fond letters to her parents, nicknamed ‘Moodle’ and ‘Poodle’, relating tales of derring-do and make-believe while lamenting how much she missed them. The carefree childhood nurtured a rebellious streak so that ‘Louie’, as she was known, became quietly determined to get her own way in stubborn opposition to her mother, who fussed and worried over her children’s health.

After being tutored at home and briefly attending a girls’ day school in London, Louisa had been sent to a girls’ boarding school, St Leonard’s in St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland, at fourteen. One of the first public schools for girls, St Leonard’s modelled itself on the country’s top boys’ schools. Although the girls wore demure long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, they learned Greek, Latin, French and mathematics, and played cricket and tennis, just as their brothers might do at Eton or Rugby. Clever and bookish with a pretty face, pale complexion and long auburn hair, Louisa made friends easily and chafed at her mother’s fretting. ‘I must really expostulate against these sudden outbursts of excitement,’ she replied pompously when her mother feared she was ill. At first Louisa had been drawn to the arts: she edited the school magazine and took lead roles in school plays. Yet despite her displays of independence, by the age of seventeen she had decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps and embark on a career in medicine. This, even for the daughter of Britain’s most famous medical woman, was no small feat.

LOUISA’S MOTHER, ELIZABETH Garrett Anderson, had succeeded in becoming the first woman qualified in Britain to join the Medical

Register through a combination of iron will and stealth. In the mid-1800s, when Elizabeth was growing up, the daughters of middle-class families were raised with one ambition: to marry well. Since women were regarded as physically, intellectually and emotionally inferior to men, a serious education was seen as not only unnecessary but decidedly unfeminine. Most girls from well-to-do families were allowed only rudimentary tuition at home, followed by a few years at boarding school if they were lucky, to prepare them for married life. If they remained single over thirty, women were written off as ‘old maids’ and regarded as a financial burden on their fathers or brothers. The only routes to paid employment for middle-class women were becoming a governess or a lady’s companion – both widely despised as scarcely above the rank of a servant. It was understandable perhaps, as Louisa would remark when writing her mother’s biography, that Florence Nightingale ‘longed to die’ before she reached thirty.

Louisa was well aware of the obstacles her mother had battled. Born in 1836 into the prosperous Garrett family in Suffolk, Elizabeth had enjoyed just two years of formal education at a girls’ school in London from the age of thirteen. Condemned to remain at home until marriage, she had become bored and frustrated. So in her early twenties she fixed on the idea of becoming a doctor after meeting Elizabeth Blackwell, an Englishwoman brought up in America who had obtained a medical degree in 1849 at Geneva Medical College in the state of New York. When she returned briefly to England in 1858, Blackwell had become the first woman to enter her name on the newly established UK Medical Register. In a pattern that would become wearily familiar to women who dared to follow in her footsteps, this door was immediately closed as the General Medical Council (GMC) ruled that doctors who qualified overseas were ineligible for the register. When Elizabeth Garrett announced her ambition, her mother shut herself in her room crying. Her father, initially repulsed by the idea, became one of her strongest allies.

Over the next six years Elizabeth had battled every possible medical organization and educational institution in her mission to achieve her aim. Initially she trained as a nurse for six months at London’s Middlesex Hospital, where she persuaded the hospital apothecary to accept her as a pupil and even attended medical lectures until she angered the male students by answering a question nobody else could answer, at which point she was barred from future classes. One by one, every medical school and university in England and Scotland refused to admit her. But after completing her five-year apothecary apprenticeship, in 1865 she passed the examination of the Society of Apothecaries and in that way added her name to the Medical Register, thus becoming the first woman qualified in Britain to do so. Needless to say, the society amended its rules to prevent other women following her example.

Having qualified to practise as a doctor in Great Britain, Elizabeth had also obtained a medical degree in Paris – the first woman to do this – then slowly built up a viable practice in London. She even managed to join her local branch of the British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors’ professional organization, in 1873. Two years later shockwaves ran through the BMA’s annual conference when delegates realized to their horror that one of their members was wearing a crinoline and – in typical form – barred women from future membership. Elizabeth would remain the only female member of the BMA for the next nineteen years.

When Elizabeth had married Louisa’s father, James Skelton Anderson, a partner in the Orient Steamship Line, friends assumed she would give up her career. Far from surrendering her independence, Elizabeth not only continued her private practice but opened ten beds above the dispensary she had founded in Marylebone, creating the New Hospital for Women, to treat poor women in the district as well as providing clinical experience for other would-be female doctors. Yet since every door that Elizabeth had levered open had been just as quickly slammed shut by the male medical establishment, other women who aspired to study medicine had been barred from following her – despite determined efforts.

Seven women who had initially been permitted to enrol as medical students at Edinburgh University in 1869 were pelted with mud and bombarded with sexual abuse by male students when they arrived for an anatomy exam the following year. The attack may well have been incited by some of the university’s professors. A legal ruling then declared that the women should never have been admitted to the university in the first place and they were therefore refused their degrees. Some women, meanwhile, obtained medical degrees at universities on the Continent which were gradually opening their doors to female students, though this did not permit them to practise in Britain. Refusing to be defeated, one of the Edinburgh women, Sophia Jex-Blake, founded a medical school exclusively for women, the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW), in 1874. Despite personal differences, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson joined the teaching staff, which was otherwise entirely male. Still none of the nineteen medical examining bodies would accredit the school for teaching. A debate at the GMC the following year on the ‘special difficulties’ of allowing women to become doctors raised concerns about the smaller size of the female brain and the indelicacy of allowing male and female students to mix in the dissecting room.

Hostility to the idea of women becoming doctors intensified during the 1870s. One prominent doctor declared that he would rather follow his only daughter to the grave than allow her to study medicine. The British Medical Journal feared the ‘Temple of Medicine’ was ‘besieged by fair invaders’ while The Lancet warned of a potential ‘invasion of Amazons’. Finally the barriers were breached when Parliament passed the Medical Act of 1876 which enabled – though it did not compel – universities to admit women. That same year the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland agreed to recognize the LSMW and examine its students, providing them with a route to qualify for the Medical Register. A year later the LSMW struck a deal with the cash-strapped Royal Free Hospital to provide its students with clinical experience on the wards in return for handsome fees. Soon after, the school was incorporated as a college of the University of London. Other British universities slowly followed suit in admitting women as medical students, although Oxford and Cambridge would continue to bar women from studying medicine even in 1914.

The battle for women’s entry into medicine had been won. By the time Louisa Garrett Anderson set her sights on becoming a doctor in 1890, women were theoretically permitted to study medicine and qualify to practise – albeit chiefly through the LSMW. Some one hundred women doctors had added their names to the Medical Register by 1891. Obtaining postgraduate training and hospital experience was another matter. The route for men who wished to climb the medical career ladder was generally ...