EDITH CAVELL
DIANA SOUHAMI
New York • London
© 2010 by Diana Souhami
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Diana Souhami is the author of many highly praised books: Coconut Chaos, Selkirk’s Island (winner of the Whitbread Biography award), The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and winner of the US Lambda Literary Award), the bestselling Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter (also winner of the Lambda Literary Award and a New York Times ‘Notable Book of the Year’), Wild Girls: the Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, Gertrude and Alice, Greta and Cecil and Gluck: Her Biography.
“Diana Souhami’s wonderful book is a picture of the kind of woman that once made Britain great”
Amanda Foreman, Daily Mail
“Powerfully gripping, elegantly written and astonishingly detailed”
Independent on Sunday
“The tension builds … the resistance network, the arrests, interrogations and trials. This is a moving story, written from the heart”
The Economist
“A work of excellent primary research …. Diana Souhami achieves her apparent aim, of showing how the image of the giving woman was subverted by the patriotic myth, so Cavell became a symbol of outraged innocence.”
Times Literary Supplement
“[A] meticulously researched and sympathetic biography … a moving tribute to a half-forgotten heroine.”
Sunday Times
“Souhami deftly demonstrates the trials of making a living as a nurse and cleaving a career in the expanding world of ‘white blouse labor’ in the late 19th century. Edith Cavell remains an enigma but, thanks to Diana Souhami, she is now an even more fascinating one.”
Financial Times
to nurses
The last photograph of Edith Cavell: with her dog Jack in 1915
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1 Birth
2 The Vicar’s Daughter
3 Growing Up
4 School
5 The English Governess
6 A German Summer
7 The Belgian Governess
PART TWO
8 No Hospital Training
9 The Fever Nurse
10 The Probationer
11 Maidstone
12 Back to The London
13 Mellish Ward
14 The Infirmaries
15 A Holiday
PART THREE
16 Setting Up
17 The School Goes On
18 Family Life
19 Fresh Efforts in the Good Cause
20 War Declared
PART FOUR
21 The Arrival of the Enemy
22 Occupation
23 The Lost Children
24 Yorc
25 My Darling Mother
26 The Men Who Died in Swathes
27 Christmas 1914
28 Organization
29 The Men She Helped
30 Watched
31 Arrest
PART FIVE
32 First Interrogation
33 Between Interrogations
34 The Others
35 The Escape of the Prince de Croÿ
36 The Second Interrogation
37 Solitary Confinement
38 The Efforts of Others
39 The Trial: Thursday 7 October
40 The Trial: Friday 8 October
41 Saturday 9 October
42 Sunday 10 October
43 Monday 11 October: Day
44 Monday 11 October: Evening
45 Monday 11 October: Night
46 What Was Left of the Night
47 Tuesday 12 October: Day
PART SIX
48 The Remains of the Day and the Following Days
49 Propaganda
50 German Reaction
51 No Monuments
52 Endgame
53 Remembered
Notes
Books and electronic sources
Acknowledgments
Index
PART ONE
1
BIRTH
Edith Cavell1 was born in the village of Swardeston on a rainy Monday three weeks before Christmas in 1865. The village—sward and town—was four miles from the city of Norwich and had a population of 350. Most of its 900 acres were owned by the lords of Swardeston Manor and Gowthorpe Hall, the Gurneys and the Stewards, who traced their fortunes, their favors from the Crown, back to the sixteenth century. Villagers owned very little—a cottage, perhaps, and a garden. There were six farmers, three gardeners, two blacksmiths, a cooper, a mole catcher, a butcher, a wheelwright, a carpenter, a bricklayer, a schoolmistress, and the keeper of The Dog inn. Their surnames were Skinner, Miller, Till and Piggin; they handed down their trades and skills father to son, married into each other’s families and on marriage certificates often “left their mark” in lieu of signature, for not many had been taught to write. They looked out for each other, knew the vagaries of the weather, how to stack the hay, shoe the horses, make cider.
It was a way of life that seemed immutable, quintessentially English, governed by the seasons, the long nights of winter, the festivals of harvest and Christmas. War was a distant belligerence: the conflicts of empires—French, Russian, Prussian and British ambitions for hegemony—were irrelevant and remote. The preoccupations of Swardeston were with planting and plowing and the rhythms of village life.
For Edith’s father, the Reverend Frederick Cavell—a stern, bewhiskered man—Christmas was his busiest time. He had been the village’s curate for less than two years. As well as all his pastoral duties he was supervising—and financing—the building of a new vicarage which was to be his family home. He had married the previous year, at the age of forty, and this was only his second Christmas as a family man.
His young bride, Louisa, was twenty-six. She gave birth in the front bedroom of the eighteenth-century farmhouse her husband was renting until the vicarage was finished. The room was quiet and comfortable, aired and clean, with a view over fields of pasture. A fire burned in the grate and all was prepared according to the latest edition of Dr. Fleetwood Churchill’s Manual for Midwives, first published in 1856 and now in its fourteenth edition.
The midwife was a local woman whose only qualification was experience and a willingness to help. It was to be another thirty-seven years before a Midwives Act dictated standards of proficiency. Even so, it was safer to give birth at home and in the country than in hospital or in the city. With home births, whatever the shortcomings of the local helper, five women in every thousand died in childbirth. In hospital it was thirty-four. Florence Nightingale, whose revolutionary nursing methods were to inspire this
particular newborn child, in her Notes on Nursing advised mothers to avoid hospital “even at the risk of the infant being born in a cab or a lift.” Childbirth, she said, which was not an illness, in hospitals had an equivalent fatality rate to the major diseases. The cause was cross-infection from other patients and was part of hospital life. Quite why this contagion happened was not known. She blamed “foul air and putrid miasmas,” expectant mothers crowded in together for weeks at a time, students going from a surgical case in an operating theater to the bedside of a “lying-in” woman.
She made a plea for cleanliness and improved nursing standards and recommended that childbirth units be separate from hospital wards. She wanted no more than four beds to a unit, each bed with its own window and privacy curtain. She wanted polished oak floors, sinks with unlimited hot and cold water, clean linen, renewable mattresses.
Her plea coincided with breakthrough research in antiseptics, research that crossed national boundaries. In 1864 the French Academy of Sciences accepted the hypothesis of Louis Pasteur, a chemist from the Breton town of Dol, that sepsis happened not spontaneously, as was supposed, but through the spread of destructive micro-organisms invisible to the naked eye. There was “something in the air” that was harmful and needed to be destroyed and kept away from a wound.
Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, was receptive to Pasteur’s experiments and in his own operations set out to block the path of these organisms by using carbolic acid as a barrier. It proved revolutionary. It allowed him to sew up an operation wound without it turning septic. By 1867 he was writing in the Lancet on “the antiseptic principle in the practice of surgery” and was struggling to convince the medical profession that his and Pasteur’s findings meant they must change their way of working: they must not go from conducting an autopsy, to a woman in labor, without changing their clothes and washing their hands in carbolic.
But in Swardeston that December 1865 there were the best available conditions for a home birth. The hair mattress was covered with an oiled-silk cloth and sheets folded into four. The midwife had ready scissors, thread, a calico binder. She guided the head of the baby, heard her first cry, made two ligatures in the umbilical cord: one near the navel, the other near the placenta. She twisted out the placenta, wiped the baby’s eyes, washed her gently in warm water, dried her in front of the fire, smeared her with oil, rolled her in flannel, then dressed her in soft warm clothes fastened with strings. She removed the soiled sheets from Louisa’s bed, washed her, changed her nightdress and cap and made sure everything in the room was in its proper place.
Mother and child survived without mishap. But for the vicar downstairs, though the birth of a healthy daughter was cause for thanksgiving, it would have been more convenient had God deemed that this firstborn be a boy. He had a stipend of £300 a year and had spent all his own money on the new house. Sons were breadwinners. It was they who continued the family name, sat at the head of table, wrote the sermons, were lawmakers, soldiers, politicians, doctors. The monarch was a woman who was to reign for sixty-three years until 1901, but that was an oddity of primogeniture. Queen Victoria had nothing much to do with gender. She was there through divine right, the head of the British Empire. Her crown, orb, scepter and throne were imperatives of rule. Women were wives, mothers, helpmates, servants. A daughter must find a husband or be a low-paid governess or nurse. “Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee,” the Bible said. Women had no vote, no public voice; their place was in the home.
This vicar’s daughter, born into Christian piety, English country life and entrenched social values, would make her contribution to new ideas of professionalism in nursing. But for a girl, attempts at professional parity with men were countered by censorious reminders of a woman’s place. Most women conformed to the restraints expected of them. A few hit out. In the same year as Edith Cavell’s birth a young Londoner, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, qualified as the country’s first woman doctor. When she tried to pursue her training at the Middlesex Hospital the male students issued a complaint to the management: “The presence of a young female in the operating theatre is an outrage to our natural instincts and is calculated to destroy the respect and admiration with which the opposite sex is regarded.” None the less she found a loophole in the discriminatory rules against women and took and passed the Society of Apothecaries examinations. The Society immediately changed the rules to prevent other women getting the same idea. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s response was to set up her own clinic for women. And with her suffragist friends Emily Davies, Dorothea Beale and Frances Mary Buss, she formed the Kensington Society and petitioned for women’s right to vote, go to university, be doctors, be lawyers …
Such feminist campaigning, though, was urban. Swardeston was shielded from change. Accident of birth defined lifestyle there. The aristocracy was the ruling class. Socially the vicar was on a par with the squire, but economically he was not much better off than the blacksmith. His status came from his connection to God. Ordained as God’s servant and spokesman, he was the pivotal figure of village life and its moral authority. The 60-foot-high tower of the church of St. Mary the Virgin rose over the Reverend Cavell’s parish. Its five bells pealed out the command of devotion. Images of the twelve apostles were cut into the stained-glass windows. In this church rites of passage for the villagers were conducted by God’s servant: baptism, marriage, burial.
Edith Cavell was born into the Christian ethic and her father’s insistence on it. From the cradle she was imbued with the duty to share what she had, help those in pain, alleviate suffering. Life would take her far from Swardeston, its tranquility and simple ways. Chance would take her into evil times. Through these she would stay true to her roots, her father’s orthodoxy and her mother’s kindness. And from the day of her birth as the vicar’s daughter the Christian command of love was her moral standard.
2
THE VICAR’S DAUGHTER
The new vicarage, built to the Reverend Cavell’s specification, was Victorian Gothic, somber and solid with gabled roof and ornate chimneys. He paid for it with £1500 inherited when his father died. It was to be his gift to the parish, for the Old Rectory nearby was now privately owned. It was where he intended to raise his family and be the village’s minister for as long as God chose. When he retired or died it would pass to the next vicar.
The architecture of the house reflected his expectations from family life. The church and graveyard were visible from most of its windows, reminders of the omnipresence of the Almighty and the transience of worldly life. He had his initials carved above the front door of the house: FC 1865. In anticipation of a large family there were eight bedrooms. The size and aspect of these defined the status of the occupant: the spacious master bedroom had an adjoining dressing room; the back bedrooms were small with a simple grate. The drawing room had a large marble fireplace and opened to lawns, an orchard, and down to a lake. The kitchen had larders, a stillroom, ceiling hooks for hanging hams, a scullery with a pump. A dark, narrow back staircase for the live-in servants led from it to their cramped attic rooms at the top of the house.
Annexed to, but apart from, the rest of the house, and with French windows that opened to his private path to the church, was the Reverend Cavell’s study. It was a room of assumptions about devotion and service. The church loomed and on either side of the fireplace were hand-carved shelves for his theological books.
He was one of five children and had been brought up in London, in Marylebone, in a middle-class home. His father was a law stationer. They were comfortably off and always had a cook and a housemaid. His elder brother John Scott became a professional artist, George was a stockbroker, Edward a solicitor and their sister Ellen, as with most “respectable” women of the time, drew a blank when it came to “rank, profession or occupation.” In his teens, with his brother Edward, Frederick studied theology and philosophy in Heidelberg. He then read theology at King’s College London and was ordained a priest in 1852 whe
n he was twenty-five.
Swardeston Vicarage. Built by the Reverend Frederick Cavell at his own expense in 1865
As a curate at St. Mark’s Church, Islington, he ministered to orphaned street children and families who could not afford adequate food or medical care. He saw his parishioners ravaged by the contagion of typhoid fever and cholera and he was in London for the Big Stink of the summer of 1858, when the stench of sewage from the Thames was so overwhelming that sacking soaked in deodorizing chemicals was hung at the windows of the Houses of Parliament.
He aspired to the life of a country parson away from the city grime. Settled rural life was possible only with a wife and family. To be unmarried was a barrier to preferment. Single, there would be homes it would be awkward for him to enter. His housekeeper, Anne Warming, was widowed and lived in Philpott Street, Whitechapel, close to the Royal London Hospital. Her husband, a mariner, had left no money. Sophia Louisa, the fourth of her six children, was twenty-five when Frederick Cavell met her in 1861. She was devout, meek and compliant, but uneducated. Her unprivileged childhood was an attraction to him. It suited his thinking to rescue her from near-poverty.
He proposed marriage, but delayed the ceremony until his appointment as vicar of Swardeston. In the interim he worked as a curate at St. Mary’s church in East Carlton, a village similar to Swardeston and in the same deanery about five miles from Norwich, and paid for Louisa to attend finishing school to learn housewifery and the social skills appropriate to her role as the vicar’s wife. When his preferment was secured, he went down to London, married her and took her to the village which would be their home for forty-five years. Her mother then moved to Margate with her eldest and unmarried daughter Chris-tianna, and ran a lodging house there.
In the leafy village of Swardeston the Reverend Cavell presided over a peaceful life of tradition and observance, defined by the Christian calendar, the commands of the Bible, and his own orthodox authority. In the cities in the 1860s there was conflict between science and religion. Charles Darwin had published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin’s empirical observations and theory of evolution challenged the claims of the Bible. He and his followers posited that the world was more than six thousand years old and not created in seven days by a communicative God. On June 30, 1860, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley clashed with Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. The Bishop scoffed at the idea of evolution by natural selection: rock pigeons were, he said, what rock pigeons had always been. He asked Huxley whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he claimed descent from a monkey. Huxley, tall, thin and quietly spoken, said he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor but that he would be ashamed to be related to a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. Science, he maintained, sought justification not by faith but by verification. He said he was willing to accept for himself as well as for his friends and enemies all actual truths, even the humiliating truth of a pedigree not registered in the Herald’s College. Lady Brewster fainted and had to be carried out. Wilberforce accused Darwin of raising a hypothesis to the “dignity of a causal theory.” There was no evidence, he said, of any new species developing. Eminent naturalists at the meeting—Professor Richard Owen, President of the Association, and Sir Benjamin Brodie, President of the Royal Society, concurred with Wilberforce.
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