PAULA HUDD
No information has been discovered about this poet. Her short stories were favourably reviewed during the War.
ELINOR JENKINS (1893-1920)
Born in India, Elinor’s ancestors had a long record of public and military service. Her father was a high-ranking official in the Indian Civil Service, who played a significant role in moving the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi. Her mother’s family had served British interests in India for many generations. By 1901, as was not unusual amongst Anglo-Indian families, Mrs Jenkins was living in Devon with her five children whilst her husband remained overseas.
Elinor was educated at Southlands School in Fairfield, Exmouth, a small boarding-school ‘for young ladies’; she was an able prize-winning scholar. During the War, she was one of several poets who worked for the intelligence services; there was no formal wartime interview process for women. They were simply expected to produce outstanding character references, be well-bred, reticent, ideally speak a foreign language, and be highly-educated – a profile she fitted perfectly.
Elinor’s deeply loved uncle, Harry Spottiswood Trevor (b. 1889, Karachi), served on the Western Front and was killed on 15 August 1915. It is almost certainly her grief for him that permeates Poems (1916). Favourable reviews commented upon the outpouring of deep grief and love throughout the work. In 1917, her beloved elder brother Arthur transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and was killed on patrol duty in Yorkshire on 31 December 1917. Elinor and Arthur are both buried in Surrey. Her younger brother, Evan, became the last British governor of the Punjab and another brother, David, a Lord of Appeal.
MABEL JEFFREY (1884-1958)
Mabel was born in Stockbridge, Yorkshire into a family of steel producers originally making crinoline frames and then, as fashions changed, branching out into umbrella frames. By 1909, she was at Sheffield Union Hospital training as a nurse. The 1911 census gives her occupation as ‘Nurse’, but the fact that the nurses’ relationship to the Head of Institution is ‘Servant’ speaks volumes about how nurses were viewed and treated. Mabel commented that despite paying steep fees trainee nurses were treated as ‘cheap labour’.
She volunteered with the SWH at the Abbaye de Royaumont between March 1915 and March 1916 and latterly in Serbia. She also nursed with the French Flag Nursing Service. A niece inherited ‘Auntie Mabel’s’ wartime memorabilia, which finally reached a wider audience in 1980. Her poem does not appear to have been published during the War but remained in the family’s hands. Mabel went overseas black-haired in 1915 and, like a significant number of nurses, returned grey-haired in 1919, boasting both French and Serbian decorations.
HELEN KEY (1864-1946)
Born in Yorkshire. Her baronet husband was, like her father, a stockbroker. During the War she lived in Cornwall and several of her bellicose poems were published in local papers. She attracted considerable opprobrium from civilians and members of the Devon and Cornwall Light Infantry for her attitude towards Penzance workhouse’s elderly residents, whom she referred to as ‘Pampered Paupers’ for being provided with fresh eggs – a luxury for civilians during the War.
Helen’s jingoistic ‘Hun-bashing’ sentiments appear distasteful to twenty-first century readers but struck a chord during the War. She was quick to point a finger at ‘shirkers’, the term commonly used for men who did not enlist, whom she considered moral and physical cowards. Her work was widely reproduced in a number of local Australian newspapers, (including amongst others the Kerang Observer on Christmas Day 1915) apparently her ‘views will strike a sympathetic note in many Australian women’s hearts.’ The Australian Government’s proposals to introduce conscription never having been approved by the electorate, print and visual media were used to encourage Australian women to put pressure on men to enlist.
WINIFRED LETTS (1882-1972)
Her mother was Irish; her English clergyman father was a member of the Letts diaries publishing ‘dynasty’ (countless serving men and women kept diaries of their war service – frequently these were ‘Letts diaries’). Pre-war, she had published two novels, a poetry collection, Songs from Leinster (1913) and had a play performed at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
In 1915 VAD Letts joined the 2nd West General Hospital, Manchester before moving to Alnwick. An April 1916 edition of the Alnwick Newspaper reported that some ‘123 men are massaged every morning’; each masseuse saw between 30 and 40 patients daily. By January 1917, Letts was one of 3,388 masseurs and masseuses working with the Almeric Paget Military Massage Corps (APMMC), achieving her Medical Electricity Certificate in November 1917. By 1916, the APMMC was running the Massage Departments at all Military Hospitals, Command Depots and Convalescent Camps in the United Kingdom. Letts BRCS VAD record states that both her ‘character’ and her ‘work’ were ‘very good’. Hospital work inspired much of her poetry.
Letts married a 67-year-old widower William Verschoyle in 1926, two of his three sons had been killed during the War. Widowed in 1944, she moved to Kent before returning to Ireland, where she died in 1972, having continued her writing career into the 1930s.
KATHLEEN LINDSAY (1876-1953)
Born in Gibraltar. From August 1915 to July 1918 she was a manageress at the Deptford Supply Reserve Depot, and a superintendent at Woolwich Arsenal, where she was in charge of approximately 1,200 staff. Like so many of her class, she almost certainly worked voluntarily. A Hayacinth Hunter kept a war diary of her time as a driver at the Arsenal and she mentions driving Lindsay around the huge factory complex. After the War, Lindsay returned to ‘County’ activities supporting events such as Girl Guide rallies and teachers’ conferences.
ROSE MACAULEY (1881-1958) [Poem ‘Picnic’ not given]
One of six children, Rose Macauley, known as ‘Emilie’, spent much of her early childhood in Italy. She studied Modern History at Somerville College, Oxford, completing her studies in 1903. By 1906, she had achieved some fame with her first novel. In total, she published twenty-three novels and moved in literary circles which included Rupert Brooke.
Macauley worked initially as a VAD during the War, then on the land – which inspired a series of five poems. She joined the British propaganda Department and also shouldered responsibilities centred upon service exemptions and conscientious objectors. Her novel Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is highly critical of the War. Her flat, library and manuscripts were destroyed in a 1941 air raid. In 1958 she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE).
HELEN MACKAY (1876-1966)
According to the New York Times, Helen Gansevoort Edwards was ‘one of the prettiest girls in society’ when she married wealthy New Yorker, Archibald Mackay in 1897. By 1914, she was living in France, writing prose sketches of French life. She worked throughout the War at the Hôpital St Louis in Paris. Her November 1915 visit to London provided material for her collection
London One November and her prose text Journal of Small Things. Post-war, she was awarded the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française.
A fluent French and Italian speaker, she published poetry and short stories as well as a novel in French. During World War Two, she became involved with social work and wrote two patriotic books about her adopted country.
ELLA FULLER-MAITLAND (1857-1939)
In the 1881 and 1911 censuses she gives her profession as author and indeed wrote extensively during these periods. Ella is absent from the 1891 and 1901 returns; her husband appears on none of them. It is possible that she was a semi-invalid, as an 1899 review of The Etchingham Letters (1895), comments that some of her depicted scenes are remarkable because ‘they were written on an invalid’s sofa in London.’ The English and European Authors Who’s Who in 1933 refers to her as living in Devon.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD [Beauchamp] (1888-1923)
Born in New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield was the daughter of a banker. She came to England in 1903 and studied at Queen’s College, London, until she returned to New Zealand in 1906. When her father forbade her from bec
oming a professional cello player she returned to England in 1909, never re-visiting New Zealand.
The death of her much loved younger brother, Leslie Heron Beauchamp, ‘Chummie’, on 6 October 1915 was ‘the greatest grief’ of her life’ and one from which Katherine never fully recovered. For a while she was unable to pursue her writing career due to her grief. Although it is impossible to be sure whether or not she knew this, Chummie’s death was caused soon after his arrival on the Western Front when a defective grenade blew up in his hand; he and his sergeant were ‘blown to bits’.
Eventually, needing to earn money, Katherine began to imagine that she was writing for ‘Chummie’. However, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917. According to her second husband, John Middleton Murry, (from whom she separated after two weeks of marriage) ‘no single one of Katherine Mansfield’s friends who went to the War returned alive from it’. The couple were friendly with a number of the prominent authors of the day including Bertrand Russell, D H Lawrence, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
She died in France of a pulmonary haemorrhage in January 1923.
‘NINA MARDEL’ (1887-1954)
Although cited in First Word War poetry bibliographies as a VAD, Mary Amelia Jose Mardel-Ferreiro Nina was in fact a professional nurse who had trained at the prestigious London Hospital. Her Portuguese father, an interpreter to the Admiralty, was a hopeless businessman and this may have encouraged Nina to enter nursing in order to gain financial independence.
An ‘exemplary’ nurse, she served (as Mary Ferreira) with the QAIMNS. In 1914, her 18-year-old brother Edmund was killed; another brother had already died of TB in 1910. Her third brother, Frank, survived the War. In 1916, she moved to the ‘Palace of Pain’, the military Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley – then the largest, longest building in England. Many poems in Plain Song reflect her nursing experiences and her religious faith.
In 1918, she married a former patient, John Fleming, who had been wounded and suffered with shrapnel in his lungs. Some of her poems hint at a shadowy romantic attachment, it is possible that, like many of her generation, she had suffered wartime bereavement. Nevertheless, the marriage appears to have been happy. In 1924, the family emigrated to Australia. Two of her three sons were killed in World War Two.
CONSTANCE LOUISA MAYNARD (1849-1935)
The first student from the female Girton College, Cambridge to study the Moral Sciences tripos, Maynard completed her studies in 1875 and taught at the prestigious Cheltenham Ladies’ College. In 1880 she began studying at the London Slade School of Art, where she and a group of friends developed the idea of opening a Christian Women’s College to prepare ladies for a University of London degree. In 1882 she became Mistress of Westfield College, subsequently a constituent college of the University of London. She retired in 1913, having taught some 500 women. Deeply religious, her writings included Divinity lectures as well as four volumes of war poetry, the first of which, according to her diary for 1914, ‘despite many kind verdicts, fell flat’.
Poetry caused Maynard’s first ‘contact with the Law of the Land’. Her 1915 diary (digitised by Queen Mary University Library) recounts how her balanced ‘Reply’ to Ernst Lissauer’s much publicised ‘Hymn of Hate Against England’, in which she expressed admiration of pre-war Germany and the Germans, was quoted out of context. Reprinted in ‘the odious John Bull’, she was mobbed, accused of being a pro-German spy and received hundreds of hate-mail letters. The War Office sent a ‘courteous elderly policeman’ to arrest her. Having read and discussed the poem with her, he left armed with copies of the piece, having agreed she was no spy.
A riot broke out in her village (Gerrard’s Cross) where she sensed a ‘cloud of evil’ enveloping her. Although her lawyer told her to press charges against John Bull’s editor, she let the matter drop. The following year, according to the local paper, she had another brush with authority because she was summoned to the Petty Sessions at Epsom for ‘failing to reduce her drawing-room’s lights.’ She may still have felt unsafe, as some local residents had bayed for her blood. Her diaries show an elderly woman watching the War, lamenting the loss of young lives and aware that the cost in hatred, blood and treasure will be a burden to subsequent generations.
[KATHERINE] BEATRICE MAYOR (1885-1947)
One of ten children, Beatrice Meinertzhagen was a niece of social reformer Beatrice Webb. She was educated in London and Paris; in 1912 she married Robin Mayor, a philosopher who worked for the Board of Education. ‘Spring 1917’ appeared in her 1919 Poems, which started her literary career. She subsequently wrote several plays and two novels and her last poetry collection was published in 1943, making her one of several women to feature in bibliographies of both First and Second World War poetry.
In a letter to Vita Sackville-West, her friend Virginia Woolf describes Mayor as having ‘gipsy blood in her: she’s rather violent and highly coloured, sinuous too with a boneless body and thin hands’. Those hands may have been put to good use, as Mayor cut Woolf’s hair short in February 1927.
ALICE MEYNELL (1847-1922)
Born in 1847 in Barnes, Surrey, the second daughter of Bohemian parents, Alice and her elder sister Elizabeth spent much of their childhood in Italy. Initially it was Elizabeth who, as Lady Butler, achieved considerable fame as a war artist. Queen Victoria purchased her famous painting ‘The Roll Call’, depicting the horrors of the Crimean War. Alice meanwhile had converted to Roman Catholicism and married impoverished Catholic journalist Wilfred Meynell in 1877.
She began to eclipse her artist sister, writing prolific columns for both middle-brow and religious publications and poetry praised by, amongst others, George Eliot. In 1892, following the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson’s death, her name was put forward for the laureateship; this re-occurred in 1913. Perhaps on this occasion her commitment to women’s suffrage, as well as her gender, damned her in the nominating committee’s eyes.
The War brought tragedy to the Meynells: one son-in-law, Percy Lucas, was killed on the Somme and her youngest son, Francis, was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in Hounslow Barracks. He collapsed, close to death, after ten days’ hunger strike. The Sunday Mirror considered her a ‘gentle poetess’ and her work was read at ‘Patriotic Poetry Readings’, where proceeds were donated to various war charities.
E M MURRAY
No information has been found on Murray, other than her membership of the WAAC.
CAROLA OMAN CBE (1897-1978)
Born in Oxford, the second and younger daughter of military historian Sir Charles Oman; Carola aspired to being a writer from an early age. Denied the opportunity to attend boarding school and feeling that her education had been inadequate, she was determined to rise above its limitations.
She left school in the summer of 1914 and became a probationary VAD nurse at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary, subsequently working in London and Dorset before being sent to France in September 1918. She remained there until April 1919, working at rest stations in Boulogne, Wimereux and Terlingham. Carola was an acute poetic observer of the events following the Armistice and her service overseas provided her with material for The Menin Road and other poems, which she dedicated to four fellow VADs including her childhood friend May Wedderburn Cannan (q.v).
In a long writing career, she published fiction, history and biographies but it was for the latter for which she was renowned, winning The Sunday Times annual British literature prize for Nelson and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Sir John Moore. She married a war veteran in 1922.
[CATHERINE] EMILY ORR (1860-1937)
Daughter of a solicitor and later a vicar’s wife, Emily had seven children. In the 1880s, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge published a number of her morally uplifting texts, including Our Working Men and how to reach them. In 1911, her family lived in Leicestershire.
EMILY PARKER (1863-1937)
Emily married a West Malling (Kent) ‘jobbing gardener’. Like many young men, her youngest son, J
ohn had, at the age of seventeen, joined the Army Special Reserve of The Buffs, (East Kent Regiment). Still living at home, in February 1913, the idea of becoming a ‘Saturday night soldier’ must have seemed exciting, a welcome break from his job as a ‘farm labourer’. A small lad, despite his medical history stating that he had ‘slightly flat feet’ and was ‘slightly knock-kneed’, he was mobilised on 8 August 1914 and killed on 3 August 1915. He is buried in Wulverghem-Lindenhoek Road Military Cemetery, Belgium, with sweeping views over the Messines Ridge – now a garden of tranquillity very different from its 1915 location as one of the most deadly positions on the Western Front.
JESSIE POPE (1868-1941)
Leicester-born, the daughter of a commercial traveller and hop merchant, Pope attended the North London Collegiate School for Girls where the school curriculum would have exposed her to significant amounts of poetry. An able scholar, she won a number of school prizes. From 1902 Jessie contributed prolifically to numerous periodicals and was recognised as both a writer of humorous verse and as a children’s author. In 1911, she was living in Finchley.
From August 1914, she concentrated her writing efforts on patriotic, possibly jingoistic verses, which struck a chord with many of her readers. Her poetry was widely published, often to benefit causes and war charities, including St Dunstan’s (for blind servicemen) where she volunteered and Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. A number of her poems provide greater food for thought than titles such as Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times would suggest. In 1929, she married a retired bank manager and moved to Great Yarmouth.
DOROTHY UNA RATCLIFFE (‘DUR’) (1887-1967)
Sussex-born Dorothy spent her life in Yorkshire, following her 1909 marriage to Charles Ratcliffe, the nephew of Edward Brotherton, chemical millionaire and ultimately the benefactor of the Leeds University Brotherton Library. As Mayor of Leeds 1913-1914, the widowed Edward nominated Dorothy his Lady Mayoress – the youngest ever at the time.
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