What role did Surrey women play in WWI?
Photo credit: BBC, The Crimson Field
Emily Horton explores the role of Surrey women in the First World War, inspired by last year's BBC drama The Crimson Field
At Ashley Road cemetery lies a monument which asks that we never forget “the lasting honour of the men of Epsom” who sacrificed their lives for king and country in the First World War, which started one hundred years ago this August.
The suggestion that it was only men who died in the line of duty is misleading. Among the seemingly endless list of local soldiers who perished during the tragic conflict is the lone mention of a woman – Miss Dorothy Maud Chandler. Her inclusion on the memorial bears testament to the fact that women played an extraordinary role in the war – their vital contribution helping their menfolk win at the front.
With tens of thousands of men being slain on the battlefields, a staggering 1,600,000 women joined the workplace to take up jobs that had been left vacant by men going to fight. Women launched themselves into action, rolling up their sleeves and breaking out of the traditional confines of their sex. It is thought that 80% of munitions sent to the front line were produced by women. This freedom and opportunity were just what Emmeline Pankhurst and her suffragettes had been fighting for.
Surrey women in their droves helped the war effort, setting up charitable groups like the Chertsey Women’s War Association and the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment’s POW Relief Fund, which sent supplies to British men taken prisoner overseas.
Elsewhere in the county, private homes welcomed convalescing soldiers. In Surrey alone, over 60 auxiliary hospitals were set up. At Clandon Park, near Guildford, the Earl and Countess of Onslow offered their ancestral home for use as a hospital just three days after the outbreak of war. Between 1915 and 1918, a total of 60,324 patients were cared for in Surrey and most were wounded soldiers.
By 1915 the majority of the country’s male medical staff were stationed in hospitals abroad or fighting, so the government turned to women to make up numbers. Some 90,000 women signed up to become nurses with the British Red Cross's Voluntary Aid Detachment. All VADs had to pay for their own uniform, training, food and accommodation, so it was not surprising that most came from middle- or upper-class families.
The gripping drama, The Crimson Field, which is broadcast on BBC1 this month, explores the war experiences of three such volunteer recruits: Rosalie (Marianne Oldham), Kitty (Oona Chaplin) and Flora (Alice St Clair).
Epsom’s Dorothy Chandler was one of many young women in our area who gave up the comfort of her middle-class upbringing to become a nurse. Like the heroines depicted in The Crimson Field, Dorothy experienced the chaos of hospitals near the front line. In 1917, she went to one of the 16 hospitals in Etaples (where the show’s fictional Hospital 25A is based) to learn about a new wound treatment. Sadly, she died the same year, from a blood clot on the brain.
Caring for injured soldiers and witnessing the trauma that new technological warefare could ravage upon the human body, exposed the nurses to horrors unlike anything they had ever seen. It is at least possible that Dorothy’s untimely death was brought on by the emotional and physical strain of her work.
Maisie Naish, who was 21, described a typical day at a hospital in Guildford: “I got one day off a month and nursed 12 hours a day. I scrubbed toilets and floors, washed patients and occasionally went to the operating theatre as an extra.”
One of the most famous Red Cross recruits was the author Vera Brittain. After finishing school at St Monica's in Kingswood, Vera postponed her studies at Oxford University to serve as a VAD. Her harrowing experiences are described in her memoir, Testament of Youth.
“I have to deal with men who have only half a face left and the other side bashed in out of recognition, or part of their skull torn away, or both feet off, or an arm blown off at the shoulder," she wrote.
Vera became frustrated with the shackles of protocol and red tape and bemoaned the unfriendliness of the more experienced nurses, who had trained prior to the war and appeared to resent the influx of moneyed volunteers. She described one of her superiors whose “holiness was an excuse for exploitation camouflaged as discipline”. The same resentment simmers in The Crimson Field, with actresses Hermione Norris, Suranne Jones and Kerry Fox playing the senior nurses.
In August 1917, Vera found herself in France and in sole charge of 40 desperately wounded men, some of whom were delirious and violent towards her. But there, with the danger of the battlefields in close proximity, she found much closer friendships and respect between the nurses and VAD staff.
Vera never forgot her humanity, even when tending to German patients, and wrote to her mother: "Never, even at the 1st London [General Hospital] during the Somme push, have I seen such dreadful wounds... One forgets that they are the enemy and can only remember that they are suffering human beings."
Vera had to care for men who had been in mustard gas attacks and her observations betray her increasing resentment towards those condoning warfare: “I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the war lasts... could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard coloured suppurating blisters... with blinded eyes... [and] voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”
Upon her return to England, Vera found dealing with the parents of wounded soldiers particularly difficult.
"Today is visiting day, and the parents of a boy of 20 ... are coming all the way from South Wales to see him,” she wrote. “He has lost one eye, had his head trepanned and has fourteen other wounds... He is the most battered little object you ever saw. I dread watching them see him for the first time."
Vera’s time as a VAD had a profound effect on her, as did the loss of her brother and three suitors in the war. She never forgot the horrors that she had witnessed and was a lifelong pacifist. She died in Wimbledon, aged 76.
In 1917 a women’s branch of the army, The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, was established. Over 57,000 women enlisted and many were sent to the battlefields as cooks, waitresses and administrative staff supporting operations.
Woking’s Doris Luker was driven to enlist with the WAAC after the death of her brother James at the Somme. She died from pneumonia in Etaples in 1919 and her name is remembered alongside her brother's on Woking's war memorial in the town centre.
Another Surrey resident, Flora Sandes, played such an extraordinary role in the war that she has a pub named after her in Thornton Heath, where she once lived. The daughter of a vicar, Sandes has the distinction of becoming the only British woman to serve as a soldier in the war.
She went to Serbia as a St John Ambulance volunteer but soon exchanged her bandages for a rifle. She was accepted into the Serbian Army as a private and promoted to Sergeant Major. During the war she was badly injured and awarded a medal.
In a letter home, we glimpse her bravery: “I am sitting in a hole seven feet by four feet… with two officers of my company… We can’t stir out of it from dawn to dark, as it is not healthy, as there are always stray bullets, which though not aimed at you, may prove just as annoying.”
In Surrey there may be many more memorials to the men in the First World War, but there is no doubt that the women in our county more than played their part.
