Atkinson - Elsie and Mairi Go to War

Elsie and Mairi Go to War

DIANE ATKINSON

ELSIE AND

MAIRI

GO TO WAR

Two Extraordinary Women

on the Western Front

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK

For Holly and Daisy

Contents

Prologue

Leaving the Palace of Tears

What a scramble. All the preparing to go off with Dr Hector Munros Field Ambulance buying clothes rushing through Selfridges with the help of one of the assistants. Mrs Knocker had her work cut out. In the evening Dr Munro gave us our tickets which were presented gratis by the Red Cross In the evening we packed up our clothes at length we tumbled into bed about 11 p.m. and went to sleep for the last time in Merrie England.

Up at 6 a.m. to finish packing its a wonderful feeling knowing that one is leaving England, the Island of Peace, and going straight into the most awful horror. I look round and try to stamp everything on my memory in case I never see it again, and I wonder what my fate will be in these next few months.

Mairi Chisholm

What a rush and muddle everything seems to have been for the past few weeks, arranging and getting up this big scheme to send out nurses and men not only to help the soldiers but to find them in the outlying cottages and on the ground. At last this is the eve of departure and everything is ready.

It is now 11 p.m. of the 24th September and I have everything packed and ready labels on and in a desolate lodging room I am now prepared to go to bed, my last night in England for how long nobody can tell. It seems funny to think that this time tomorrow night I shall be in Belgium in the midst of all the terrors of war.

Elsie Knocker

E lsie Knocker and Mairi Gooden-Chisholm left for Belgium on 25 September 1914; they had gone to London when war was declared on 4 August. The past six weeks had been giddy; they were swept up in the drama of khaki jingoism. Their days were framed by red, white and blue bunting, surrounded by men and boys signing up to give the Germans a damned good thrashing, and thousands of women determined to do their bit.

Eighteen-year-old Mairi and thirty-year-old Elsie Knocker, divorce and mother of a young son, were madcap motorbikers who had met while roaring round the Hampshire and Dorset lanes, and had competed in motorbike and sidecar trials for the last year. Elsie was nicknamed Gypsy because of her love of the open road and membership of the Gypsy Motor Cycle Club. She was a passionate biker who wore a dark green leather skirt and a long leather coat buttoned all the way down with a belt to keep it all together designed for her by Messrs. Dunhill of London. She rode two motorbikes, a Chater Lea with sidecar and a Scott.

Mairi Chisholms elder brother Uailean had an Enfield motorbike and was competing on it in rallies and the Bournemouth Speed Trials in September 1913 when their father, Captain Roderick Gooden-Chisholm, bought Mairi a Douglas motorbike, despite her mothers shrillest disapproval. Instead of the usual round of tennis parties and dances, Mairi spent her spare time in the stables wearing her brothers overalls, stripping down motorbikes and repairing them, and riding hard.

Because of the looming war Elsie Knocker had to cancel the ladies stiff reliability trial over 120 miles of hilly Hampshire and Dorset countryside with plenty of hairpin bends she had arranged for the middle of August. When war was declared Elsie wrote to Mairi that there was work to be done, and suggested they go to London to join the Womens Emergency Corps. Mairi, during a ferocious family row her father was keen to let her go but her mother was absolutely opposed to the idea, and refused to lend her a box to put her clothes in crept up to her bedroom, tied a change of underclothes and her dress allowance of ten pounds (equivalent to 800 pounds today) into a headscarf, slipped out of the house and sped off on her motorbike to meet Elsie Knocker.

Elsie and Mairi rode straight to the Little Theatre in John Adam Street, off the Strand, the headquarters of the Womens Emergency Corps. The place bustled with suffragettes, fashionable actresses, a couple of duchesses and a marchioness, and a handful of lady novelists. The Honourable Mrs Evelina Haverfield (who had accompanied her husband when he was serving in South Africa during the Boer War), splendidly got up in a short khaki skirt worn over riding breeches, had launched the corps to provide waged women workers to help the country in its hour of need. Living in lodgings in Baker Street, Elsie and Mairi were hired as dispatch riders and spent their first month whizzing about London carrying messages. One day Mairi was spotted by Dr Hector Munro (socialist, vegetarian, suffragette and nudist), who was impressed with the way she rode crouched over her dropped-handlebar racing motorbike. He tracked her down to the Womens Emergency Corps and asked her to join his Flying Ambulance Corps to help wounded Belgian soldiers. She agreed immediately and recommended her friend Elsie, who was a trained nurse, to Munro. Keen to show that women were as brave and capable as men, Hector Munro selected Elsie and Mairi out of 200 applicants, and also took on Lady Dorothie Feilding, well connected and fluent in French; the novelist May Sinclair, a generous donor to his favourite causes, including the corps; and Helen Gleason, a glamorous American whose journalist husband was touring the Western Front and filing copy for a number of British and American newspapers. Doctors, drivers, cooks and medical orderlies made up the rest of the Flying Ambulance Corps.

Arriving at Victoria Station, the Palace of Tears as Elsie called it, on the morning of 25 September, Elsie and Mairi were tut-tutted at by ladies scandalised by their breeches, leather boots and overcoats: they were the only women in trousers. One of their colleagues in the corps called them Valkyries in knickerbockers. At first Elsie and Mairi were larky girls in khaki, but six weeks later they were the only women to live and work on the fighting front in any of the theatres of that global war.

Poor little Belgium was a condescending catchphrase that came up a lot in conversation, was repeated in parliament and the press, and was used as a fund-raising tool. Sometimes plucky replaced little as if a child who had been bullied was fighting back. However, Belgium was not poor or of little significance in 1914; it was ranked sixth in the worlds industrialised powers. It had a population of seven and a half million but its geography made it vulnerable to the ambitions of its potentially greedy neighbours France and Germany. The Treaty of London, signed in 1839 by Britain, France, Russia, Prussia (later to become enlarged and unified as Germany) and Austria-Hungary, had guaranteed Belgiums independence.

On 2 August 1914 the German government had asked the King of the Belgians if he would waive the terms of the treaty, calling it a scrap of paper, and allow its troops to march through Belgium to reach France, on whom they declared war the next day, 3 August. In return for Belgian cooperation the Germans promised to honour Belgian neutrality when the conflict was over, but if they refused, would treat Belgium as an enemy. The Belgians knew the offer was not worth much and declined. On 4 August the German cavalry galloped across the border into Belgium. At eleven oclock that night Britain honoured its promise to guarantee Belgian neutrality, upheld its alliance with France, and declared war on Germany. The streets of London were packed with people waiting for news of the reaction to the British demand that Germany honour Belgian neutrality. Crowds gathered outside 10 Downing Street; toffs in evening dress were driven into Whitehall by their chauffeurs through a blizzard of Union Jacks. The populace was drawn to Buckingham Palace, faces were pressed against the gates, singing for hours and calling for the royal family to come out onto the balcony. Which they did three times, their ears ringing with the national anthem and For Hes a Jolly Good Fellow. Plucky little Belgium had been invaded by the brutish German bully and the terms of the Treaty of London and the system of alliances and ententes that had been in place for many years was about to be tested.