Tumult and Tears

by Vivien Newman

Born in Woolwich, Madeline’s civil engineer father undoubtedly worked at the Royal Arsenal. In 1911, the family was living in Erith close to Woolwich Arsenal, an important wartime munitions making area.

  It is possible that she too worked at the Arsenal, perhaps as a ‘lady volunteer’, as the middle-class women who worked for free in the factories were called. Either way, living so close to the Arsenal meant that she would have seen and heard workers thronging through the factory gates at the beginning and end of shifts and heard their ‘devil-may-care’ talk. Factory black humour was similar to that of the trenches.

  Madeline dedicated her poetry collection, The Young Captain, ‘To the radiant and beautiful memory of my beloved and only brother Terence KIA France May 28th 1917’.

  MARGERY RUTH BETTS (1892-1981)

  Born in England, Margery was the daughter of a Congregational Minister. By 1914 she was living in Victoria, Australia and her wartime poems appeared in Australian newspapers. After spending time in England in 1920 as a student, she returned to Australia.

  One poem from her collection, Remembering (1917), was used in Australian schools at the end of the War. Her poetry was also published in local English papers and it appealed sufficiently to one officer for him to send a selection to his local newspaper The Cornishman. The reviewer felt that her poetry would ‘live in memory when peace returned to the world’.

  ESTHER BIGNOLD (1855-1921)

  The daughter of a grocer and pork butcher, in 1876 Esther married umbrella manufacturer Alfred Bignold. This poem was written for the youngest of her twelve children, Grace, who joined the Red Cross in May 1915.

  By April 1919, 21-year-old Grace had clocked up some 5,000 hours as a VAD in several hospitals, before transferring to Streatham Auxiliary Red Cross [Convalescent] Hospital. In 1916 the hospital had thirty-three beds, three trained nurses (subsequently reduced to two), three full-time, and fourteen part-time local VADs. Impressively, only one patient of the total 930 admissions died. Grace’s ‘own soldier’, farrier Frederick Francke, enlisted in 1914 and rose to the rank of Acting Warrant Officer, ending his military career as a cyclist with the Royal Fusiliers. They married in 1921; Grace died in 1983.

  MARY BORDEN (1886-1968)

  One of the War’s finest poets, Vassar-educated Mary Borden was the daughter of a Chicago millionaire father and Christian fundamentalist mother. Pregnant when war was declared, she gave her name to the London Committee of the French Red Cross, declaring her willingness to become a volunteer nurse, despite having no nursing skills and only a basic knowledge of French.

  In January 1915, recently delivered of her third daughter, Mary went to Malo-les-Bains, where she became an excellent nurse. Fired up with enthusiasm, in July 1915 she financed her own Unit, Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No 1, yet she came to learn from bitter experience that, despite personnels’ best efforts, medical ministrations were often futile, nurses were unable to cope with what she referred to as the ‘effluvia of mud, dirt, blood’. Her war service led to the break-up of her already faltering first marriage and her subsequent marriage to Captain Edward Louis Spears – whose first glimpse of her was, as her sonnet declares, in her ‘mud-splattered and blood-stained apron’ in summer 1916.

  Borden’s masterpiece, The Forbidden Zone, graphically recounts in prose and poetry the conditions in which she and her volunteer nurses worked when stationed near Bray-sur-Somme – an important supply dump for munitions and other army equipment during the build-up to and throughout the Battle of the Somme. They were frequently within earshot of the guns and saw men staggering back from the battlefields as well as, in September 1916, the very first tanks to be used in battle trundling down the road.

  Considered too graphic by the censors, The Forbidden Zone was not published until 1929, although her poetry appeared in periodicals, particularly The English Review, from 1917. In her writing, Borden doubts whether the blood spilled with such profligacy could redeem the world. In her view a man’s life-blood was oozing away, not a convenient poetic symbol to mask reality and elevate dying soldiers into modern Lambs of God.

  MARY E BOYLE (1882-1951)

  Daughter of Rear-Admiral Robert Boyle, Mary was born in Renfrewshire, Scotland. She was very close to her youngest brother, David, eight years her junior, who became a career soldier and served with the 2nd Battalion, the Lancashire Fusiliers. One of the War’s earliest casualties, David was killed on 26 August 1914 at Le Cateau – his body was never found.

  Each of the thirty sonnets (the poetic form chosen because this was apparently David’s favourite) Mary composed for him and published in Aftermath, focuses on some aspect of their shared past, although she recognises that as he grew to manhood their paths diverged. Her other brother, Archibald, survived the War, having won two Military Crosses. As Air-Commodore Boyle, he became the SOE’s Director of Security in World War Two. Mary and her sister do not appear in the 1901 census. Her sister married in India so it is possible that Mary spent some time there. In 1926, when travelling to the USA, Mary gave her occupation as ‘lecturer’ and she crossed the Atlantic extensively.

  Scottish poet and critic Hugh McDiarmid considered her 1922 children’s collection, Daisies and Apple Trees, ‘delightful’. Mary Boyle also translated works from French and wrote widely on pre-history. In 1937, she was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

  KATHLEEN BRAIMBRIDGE (1884-1949)

  A native of Kidderminster, Kathleen was educated at Milton Mount College, Gravesend, a school that catered primarily for girls who were Congregational ministers’ daughters. According to research carried out by North Kent Archaeological Society, on 4 June 1915 a bomb dropped near this school, shattering several windows. The girls subsequently slept on the ground floor with respirators and necessary clothes nearby. Three weeks later, the school was closed (reopening the following term in Cirencester).

  In 1918, the Admiralty briefly requisitioned the impressive College buildings to serve as a venereal disease hospital. At the time this was considered to besmirch the school’s reputation, making it impossible for the girls and their female teachers to return there. Hospitals for sexually transmitted diseases were essential nonetheless – just under 417,000 men were hospitalised for this reason – exceeding the numbers admitted with trench foot.

  The 24 August 1917, the Royal Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Gazette poetry reviewer praised Kathleen’s ‘Khaki Magic’, feeling it struck a chord with Kidderminster residents due to the number of weaving factories in the town.

  SYBIL BRISTOWE (1871-1954)

  One of ten children born to a physician, Sybil’s younger brother, 42-year-old Vivian, served with the South Africa Medical Corps, dying of dysentery in Tanzania in 1917. It is hard to know what led Vivian, a member of the Stock Exchange, to serve and die so far from home, although there are poetic hints in Provocations that Sybil and perhaps her brother had spent time in South Africa. Some of her war poems appeared in the Johannesburg Star.

  Sybil was an enthusiastic gardener, whilst acknowledging that a garden in London’s Maida Vale was not the easiest place in which to grow flowers – or vegetables.

  VERA BRITTAIN (1893-1970)

  Perhaps the best known female poet of the First World War, Vera Brittain was the daughter of a paper mill owner. In 1911, the Brittain family were living in Buxton, Derbyshire. Vera’s brother, Edward enlisted against his father’s wishes in September 1914 and by October 1914, she too had overcome parental opposition and entered Somerville College, Oxford, to read English Literature.

  Before the War, Vera had formed an attachment to her brother’s friend Roland Leighton. In 1915, she left Oxford, determined to assist the war effort. Arguably the War’s most famous VAD, Testament of Youth (1933) is based on her war diaries and her experiences in England and overseas. The loss of Roland, her closest friends and her brother epitomised many women’s traumatic war losses and remains a well-loved text to this day, having been made into a film released in 2015.

  Vera
returned to Somerville in 1918 to study History, in an attempt to understand what had catapulted the world into a war of such magnitude and devastating consequences. She struggled to re-adapt to university life, surrounded by undergraduates too young to have experienced or even to empathise with the full horrors and grief she had undergon. Verses of a VAD (1918) is based on her experiences in the wards.

  AMELIA BURR (1878-1968)

  Born and educated in New York, Amelia worked for the American Red Cross in 1917-18. After the War, she married a clergyman. Her patriotic, jingoistic poetry found great favour with the Vigilantes, an American organisation formed in March 1917 and designated as an auxiliary to the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice. Their pamphlets and newspapers were distributed with the intention of inspiring patriotism and Allied involvement in the War.

  One of the Vigilantes’ aims was to distribute patriotic poetry to newspapers – American papers being as eager to publish poetry as British ones. As well as featuring in Vigilantes’ anthologies, Burr published four volumes of war poetry and numerous newspaper poems. Childless herself, she frequently blames women, especially mothers, for men’s failure to enlist. She was equally quick to chastise those who, with no son to give, were slow to invest in War Bonds.

  MAY WEDDERBURN CANNAN (1893-1973)

  May was the second daughter of an Oxford dean, who was in charge of the Oxford University Press between 1895 and 1919. Before the War she had taken Red Cross nursing certificates and she became VAD Quartermaster in Oxford.

  May’s autobiography, Grey Ghosts and Voices (1976), gives a moving account of her war culminating in her anguish at the death of her fiancé, Bevil Quiller-Couch, from Spanish ’flu in early 1919. He had refrained from proposing to her until the end of the War, when he felt that there was a strong possibility that he would survive long enough for them to marry – which they planned to do in June 1919. The intensely personal poetry she wrote following his death gives an intimate glimpse into female bereavement. She did eventually marry and her husband, Percival James Slater, a balloonist in the First World War, became a brigadier in the Second. Her work is frequently anthologised.

  CAROLINE A L TRAVERS (CALT) (1873-1958)

  Caroline Travers was the wife of an employee of the London Colonial Service, who served as a much loved and respected doctor and surgeon for many years in Kuala Lumpur – having been a ship’s surgeon by the age of twenty-two. She consistently gives her occupation as ‘housewife’. The couple returned to Malaysia after the War. Caroline appears to have travelled extensively post-war. She had poems published in The Englishwoman and this allows us to assume that she was well-educated and had at least an interest in women’s suffrage.

  MISS CHARTON

  No information located apart from the suggestion in her published volumes that she had a London home near Chelsea Barracks and also spent time in Sussex. Her two book-length poems, Hackleplume and My Lady’s Garden, are amongst the War’s most unusual works.

  ‘BEATRICE CHASE’ (1874-1955)

  ‘Beatrice Chase’ was the pen name of Olive Katherine Parr. Henry VIII’s sixth and final queen was her many times great-aunt. She lived from the turn of the century in Dartmoor and this location informed much of her fiction. Highly eccentric, Olive fought vigorously to protect Dartmoor from developers as well as against its use by the British Army.

  A devout Catholic, she also campaigned for both male and female purity. According to her Who’s Who entry, she was Foundress of the Crusade of White Knights and Ladies and ‘sole organiser of the Crusade for Chastity, which numbers among its members some of the most distinguished civilians, clergy, and officers in the Empire’. Whether she kept her promise to write letters to all who signed her purity charter is unknown, as is the number of signatories. Shortly before her death Olive was considered by her local health authority to be a person ‘in need of care and attention’. It would appear that she disagreed with this verdict, as, according to local gossip, she was taken to hospital in a straitjacket, but only after the loaded revolver she kept by her bed had been removed. As she lived in a remote part of Dartmoor, she may have felt that the revolver provided her with some protection.

  FLORENCE VAN CLEVE (1867-1946)

  An American schoolmaster’s wife, Florence may also have been a member of the Vigilantes group. She had many poems published in American newspapers throughout the war years showing sympathy with America’s entry into the War and she also wrote lyrics for patriotic songs. According to the US census of 1930, Florence’s husband and one of her twin sons served with the US forces, but no further information about their military records has been found. Post-war she wrote some political poetry, including poems on the issue of unemployment.

  MARY GABRIELLE COLLINS (1874-1945)

  The eldest of eight children, Mary was born in Penderyn, Wales. In 1911, she was living in Golders Green, where she was employed as a journalist and acting as News Editor on a now unidentifiable ‘Religious Weekly Newspaper’. ‘Women at Munition Making’ is the best known and most widely quoted poem from her collection Branches Unto the Sea (1916). Religious faith and despair at the horrors of war vie for poetic space in this volume. By 1927, the now Reverend Mary Collins was, most unusually for the time, a minister at the North Bow Congregational Church, 522 Old Ford Road, E8.

  CELIA CONGREVE (1867-1952)

  Celia was born in India to a regular officer in the Indian Army, whose name was put forward for the Victoria Cross (VC) for gallantry during the Indian Mutiny. In 1890, she married Lieutenant Walter Congreve, who won the VC at the 1899 Battle of Colenso. His recently discovered Christmas 1914 letter to Celia provides insight into the famous Christmas Truce, which he witnessed at Neuve-Chapelle.

  Her eldest son, 25-year-old Brevet Major William, already gazetted MC and DSO, French Légion d’Honneur, gained a posthumous VC following his death on 20 July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. He had been married some six weeks at the time.

  Celia served with the Red Cross as a driver and nurse in Belgium and France from 1914. As well as War and Victory medals, she was awarded the Mons Star, the Medal of Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians, the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française and, unusually for a woman, the French Croix de Guerre. Her younger son Geoffrey won the DSO in 1940 and was killed in 1941.

  THEODORA CORRIN

  No information has been found.

  JANE (CLISH) COXFORD 1872-1941

  Her coal miner husband died when she was in her early 20s. She re-married a coal mine hewer 8 years her junior in 1897. Her son, Harry, served with the Yorkshire Hussars (Alexandra, Princess of Wales’s Own); 19-year-old Harry died of wounds in November 1915. He is buried in Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, the second largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Belgium, which served many of the CCS. A career soldier, Harry was on the Western Front by November 1914.

  ELSIE PATERSON CRANMER (1896-1978)

  By 1911, architect’s daughter Elsie was a ‘musical student’. She experienced multiple bereavements during the First World War. In September 1916 her brother, Rifleman Arthur Brede, was killed in France and in December 1916, another brother, Charles, died of wounds in England.

  On 17 September 1917, Elsie Brede and Guy Paterson Cranmer ‘former schoolmaster now serving with HM Forces’, obtained a ‘Special Licence’ allowing them to marry on 23 September – there was insufficient time before Guy’s return to the Front to call the banns. Guy was killed on 9 October. In late November 1917, her sister’s fiancé, Machine Gunner Lieutenant Harold Rowbotham, a 25-year-old artist, was killed.

  Elsie did not re-marry and may have earned her living, or supplemented her Army widow’s pension, by writing and composing songs.

  MARTHA FOOTE CROW (1854-1924)

  Born in New York State to a clergyman father, Martha played a key role in developing higher education for women, at one point co-ordinating a survey of women’s international higher education. Educated at Syracuse University, she was awarded
a PhD in English literature in 1886. Married to the Principal of Iowa College, she became ‘Lady Principal’ of that establishment. As well as furthering the cause of women’s university education, she was active in a number of literary and poetry societies.

  EDITH MARY CRUTTWELL (1886-1968)

  Daughter of a Norfolk clergyman, Edith published one volume of war poetry, New Poems (1920), and was also anthologised in Charles Forshaw’s One Hundred Best Poems of the European War by Women Poets of the Empire (1916). Living in Bath in 1930, she gave her profession as ‘artist’ and her marital status as ‘single’ on a passenger list of travellers sailing to Gibraltar.

  HELEN DIRCKS (1897-?)

  Helen’s father worked in publishing. As there were several munitions factories near her home in Middlesex, ‘Munitions’ may be based upon her own or at least observed experiences. She married novelist Frank Swinnerton in 1920, divorcing in 1924.

  From the tone of a number of her poems in Finding (1918) and Passenger (1920), writing poetry was probably a form of grief work for a dead boyfriend or fiancé. In its 23 June 1920 edition, the Spectator considered Helen’s work ‘worthy of consideration’. She also wrote lyrics used in productions by Fred Karno, the famous Music Hall impresario. In 1935, she shocked fellow diners in a restaurant when she called for, lit, and smoked a cigar.

  EVA DOBELL (1876-1963)

  The daughter of a wine merchant, Eva was also the niece of Victorian poet Sydney Dobell. She served as a Nursing VAD at the Priory VA Hospital, Cheltenham from its opening day, 5 November 1914 to 11 November 1917. She nursed for thirty-six hours a week on a fully voluntary basis and also wrote to prisoners of war. This auxiliary hospital, which was unusual as it had both officers’ and other ranks’ wards, moved twice in order to accommodate increasing patient numbers. By the time it closed on 9 January 1919 there had been 1,603 admissions and 20 deaths; the average length of stay exceeded six weeks.

  One poem from Eva’s series ‘In a Soldier’s Hospital’ was set to music. After the War she continued to write and also edited Lady Margaret Sackville’s poetry.