Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  One of her lectures was “La Mort.” She taught of the special needs of the dying and of those close to them and of how a true nurse would help a patient die in a state of grace, in peace and free from pain.

  Her own father, the Reverend Cavell, died in June 1910 at the age of eighty-five. He had worked as a minister until a year before his death. His last entry in the Swardeston parish register was for a marriage service on January 2, 1909. When he retired, because of the terms under which he had built the vicarage for the parish, he and his wife Louisa moved to a modest terraced house in Norwich at 24 College Road. They relinquished the vicarage he had built, their family home for forty-five years. Edith went over for his funeral service and burial in Swardeston churchyard. In the summer she took her mother on holiday to the seaside village of West Runton, near Cromer. They stayed at Cumberland Cottage with a Mrs. Harrison and her son Freddy. Grace Jemmett made the arrangements.

  “We shall be with you on the 6th of next month,” she wrote to Mrs. Harrison in late June from rue de la Culture:

  and will stay till the 31st. We shall be three as Miss Cavell’s mother will be with us—you will find us no trouble and of course for rooms it is alright as we have taken the two bedrooms and sitting room as before—Mrs. Cavell will have the front bedroom and Miss Cavell and myself the back one. There is only one thing extra Mrs. Cavell will want, and that is a hipbath every morning and one nice can of hot water, otherwise it will be just the same as last year. We shall be out nearly all day. If you cannot get hold of a hipbath we will see about hiring one when we come down. We shall come on the 6th and Mrs. Cavell on the 8th or 9th. I know you will be sorry to hear Miss Cavell has lost her father just lately. We think the change at W. Runton will do Mrs. Cavell good, after a very trying and sad time, and I know you will help us to make her comfortable. I hope you are well, and Freddy.

  Yours sincerely

  Grace E. Jemmett

  The Harrisons’ house was in the village center and looked out over a duck pond. Next door lived a Mrs. Tapscott, a schoolteacher, with whom Edith Cavell became friendly. A neighbor, Jack Thetford, met them from Sheringham Station in a pony and trap. Edith Cavell had bought this for summer holidays, and he made use of it for the rest of the year.

  It was similar to Swardeston village life only by the sea: the church, the wheelwright, the publican, shopkeeper and corn miller … All that connected her to her tranquil childhood. It was a five-minute walk to the seaside. Cromer, a fashionable bathing town, was a mile away with its long stretch of sandy beach and tremendous cliffs “much resorted to by sea fowls.” They went there in the pony and trap and to Sheringham with its ravine and wide bay and to the harbor at East Runton where the fishing boats came in. All along the Norfolk coast great quantities of fish were caught and cured or sent by train to London: cod, skate, whiting, crabs and lobsters.

  After her father’s death Edith worried about her mother living alone and without much money. She sent her a monthly sum and tried to persuade her to move to Brussels and live with her at the School. Mrs. Cavell visited in December 1910 but could not feel at home. She did not speak French, and Edith worked intensely hard and could not spend much time with her. Nor was she at ease in the ménage of her daughter’s acquired family: the doting Sister Wilkins; Grace Jemmett who seldom got out of her night clothes and searched the cupboards for morphine and tranquilizers; Jack, who bit everybody who tried to get close to Edith. Her daughter was a true Christian—of that she was proud. The sick at heart who came to her door found comfort and a home. But for herself she felt at home in Norwich and Norfolk, not in the middle of Europe. Her son Jack worked close by at the Norwich Union, she felt she could manage in her little house, she had a maid who cleaned and cooked, she stayed often with Lilian and her family in their large house in Henley. After Christmas at the School she went home to Norwich in January 1911. It was arranged that as usual Edith would come over in the summer. She always tried to be home for her mother’s birthday on July 6.

  19

  FRESH EFFORTS IN THE GOOD CAUSE

  In 1912 Antoine Depage gave the opening address to the International Congress of Nurses in Cologne. “The new Belgian School of Nursing has been an entire success,” he told them:

  Founded in 1907 it now provides nurses for three hospitals, three private nursing homes, twenty-four communal schools and thirteen kindergartens in Brussels. It also sends out private nurses. Our School is the benchmark for nursing standards in Belgium. But we do not have enough nurses. Demand on the School to provide and train them has grown greater and greater.

  “The new Belgian School of Nursing has been an entire success.” Group photograph of Edith Cavell and her nurses in the School garden, 1913

  A new, purpose-built nurses’ training school was needed. The four terraced houses in rue de la Culture, with their steep stairs and small rooms, had never been fit for purpose. A committee was appointed to advise, fundraise and find a new site. On it were representatives of medicine, the law, science and business from Brussels, Liège and Bruges. Ernest Solvay, a chemist and philanthropist, gave 300,000 francs. The committee worked to double that sum.

  The new school had to be near the St. Gilles hospital. Its chosen site was the corner of rue de Bruxelles and rue de l’École in the suburb of Uccle. A Monsieur Dewin was commissioned as architect. Antoine and Marie Depage and Edith Cavell advised him. There was to be a central block with lecture halls, treatment rooms and operating theaters, from which two wings would stretch out, with between them a triangular garden. One of the wings would provide rooms for fifty nurses, the other beds for thirty patients. Jacqueline van Til recalled how happy Edith Cavell seemed on the evening when she showed her the plans.

  In April 1913 Edith Cavell wrote to Eva Lückes thanking her for sending her—as she did every year—a copy of her annual lecture to nurses at the London Hospital:

  It is pleasant to hear about the dear old hospital and to know oneself not quite forgotten. Your letter braces me to fresh efforts in the good cause. And one needs that bracing here! The work is still very arduous and uphill. The spirit of the people is so opposed to the spirit of nursing … But we enlarge our borders and the “trained nurse” is making progress. All the new nursing homes and hospitals are engaging lay nurses now, and we have more demands than we can supply. The girls of this country come in very slowly and at present the School is cosmopolitan as at least half the pupils are still foreigners.

  We have all the board schools under our supervision, with 12 nurses at work in them, and also a staff of 20 private nurses and our hospital, which I am thankful to say has made progress, will, I hope, be a model in point of view of good order, cleanliness and good nursing for the other hospitals in Belgium.

  My Committee are very good and kind, and I always feel I have their support in any difficulty. They have the work very much at heart and have raised the necessary funds to build us a new school which will be worthy of the object. We hope to be installed in about 2 years.

  With many thanks and most grateful remembrances of happy days under your care.

  Yours sincerely,

  E. Cavell

  It was a letter of confidence and achievement. A far cry from her anxious appeals of 1907 when nothing was in place, not even the furniture, in rue de la Culture. In six years she had set a standard and “all the new nursing homes and hospitals are engaging lay nurses now.” St. Gilles was the model hospital for Belgium, she was honored by the committee, the new School “worthy of the object” was under way. She looked back to Eva Lückes, the inspiration of her own training, and forward to all she still needed to do.

  That summer, in July, she went to Norfolk on holiday, after a successful and busy year, leaving Sister Wilkins in charge. She took Grace Jemmett with her. They stayed at her mother’s house, then all went to West Runton. Sister Wilkins kept her posted about the School and sent her a photo of Jack which she was pleased to receive, though she thought he looked “sad and mopy thin.”r />
  I don’t think he can be eating enough or perhaps he frets poor old chap—I am feeling very rested and quite ready to begin work again. The bathing always does me good. Unfortunately our tent with many others was swept away by a high tide and fierce waves last night and cannot be put up till it is calm again. Last year dozens were lost altogether at the time of the floods. It is still rough and stormy but looks brighter this afternoon. Miss Jemmett who sends you her love is looking very well and brown and amuses herself so well she does not want to return at all. We shall be back on Thursday or Friday week. I will write definitely when I know. My mother who is with us, is very well and does long walks up the beach. We often wish we had Jackie with us.

  I suppose all the patients I knew have gone and that you have a number of new people. Is Mrs. Stanton in yet?11 It surely is time. And did not Sister Burt mention another Baby case for us soon now?

  Have you any friends who would like to join the private staff? We always need a great many for the winter and I would rather have people we know.

  With kindest remembrances my dear Sister,

  Matron

  All was going so well. The hard work showed rewards. Nothing on the horizon suggested her hopes would be dashed. Her workload was huge: overseeing the new building, supervising at the St. Gilles and Buyssingham hospitals and at the Berkendael Institute, assigning nurses to private patients and schools, teaching probationers. She had every reason to suppose she would see her plans through. By the summer of 1914 the new School building was well advanced. She had cause to be proud. In seven years she had achieved so much. But her dream would not stop with one new nurses’ school and one new hospital. From this beginning she wanted an army of well-trained nurses to spiral out from Brussels to the whole of Belgium and beyond.

  Nursing, she told her probationers in her evening lectures, was “a great and honourable profession.” Through it could be found “the widest social reform, the purest philanthropy, the truest humanity.” Good nurses were “the handmaids of that science which not only assuages and heals the suffering of today, but reaches on through ever-widening circles to the dawn of perfect manhood when disease shall be unknown, because the laws which scientists discover, and which they help to teach, shall have banished it and taught the world how to live.” She had taken the baton from Florence Nightingale and Eva Lückes. She wanted to hand it on to a dozen matrons like herself in a dozen more towns and cities.

  The following July she left Brussels as usual for the same summer holiday in Norfolk. It was her mother’s seventy-eighth birthday on the 6th. On June 28 there had been a murder in Bosnia. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was inspecting imperial troops in Sarajevo—Bosnia had been annexed by Austria a few years previously. He was with his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek. Fourteen years previously they had married for love to the dismay of Franz Ferdinand’s father, the Emperor Franz Joséf, who refused to attend their wedding and made clear their children would not succeed to the throne. The couple were driven from Sarajevo town hall in an open car. Their driver turned by mistake into a narrow street—Franz Joséf Street. As he tried to reverse out, a young man, Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist, a member of Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), ran out of a café and fired two shots into the car at point-blank range. The bodyguard standing on the running board of the car told afterward how the Countess slid to the floor, how the Archduke appealed to her to stay alive for their children, how he choked on the blood that poured from his mouth … Princip swallowed cyanide but it did not kill him. He was arrested and beaten and died of tuberculosis in prison.

  Edith Cavell, Matron, 1914

  The news alarmed the monarchies of Europe. They feared for their thrones. The Austrian Emperor was eighty-four. A Serb nationalist had assassinated his heir. The Archduke’s children were barred from succession by the circumstances of their birth. But for most of Europe this was just the Balkans. Their feuds were endless and dynastic and as tiresome and confusing as Irish enmities.

  Edith Cavell went to her mother’s little terraced house at 24 College Road in Norwich. There was a heatwave and Mrs. Cavell found it enervating. She was arthritic and disinclined to travel, though she managed well enough. Her maid helped with her hip bath and prepared her food. Her best present was for Edith to come and stay.

  Edith had traveled to England with Pauline Randall that year, leaving Sister Wilkins and Sister White in charge at the School. They had instructions to send a telegram if anything untoward occurred. Grace Jemmett chose to stay in Brussels with friends.

  20

  WAR DECLARED

  On July 4, there were two paragraphs in the Eastern Daily Press about the funeral service in Vienna for the Archduke and Countess, the anti-Serb demonstrations there and the burning of the Serbian flag, but most of the coverage was of the heatwave at home, the strains on the summer train service to coastal resorts and the seemingly endless internecine conflict in Ireland.

  Edith spent a week at College Road with her mother, then as usual went to Cumberland Cottage at West Runton, to stay with the Harrisons. She rented the same two bedrooms and sitting room as the previous year. She and Pauline were out all day. They went to Cromer and Yarmouth. Year on year there was change: looser clothes, smaller hats, cyclists in bloomers, cars and motorised buses among the horse-drawn carriages. Twentieth-century freedoms filtered into provincial life, but in essence England stayed the same. It was the hottest of summers. There had been hardly any rain since March.

  For three weeks after the murders in Sarajevo Europe remained calm. But the old Emperor of Austria, Franz Joséf, had agreed with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, grandson of Queen Victoria, that there would be no negotiating with Serbia. On July 23 Austria gave a five-point ultimatum to the Serbian government:

  1. They must officially condemn anti-Austrian propaganda, publish an apology and a warning to all Serbs that all anti-Austrian machinations would be punished.

  2. They must ban all anti-Austrian publications and the pan-Serb organization Narodna Odbrana—Defense of the People.

  3. They must dismiss all officers and functionaries unacceptable to the Austro-Hungarian government and accept the guidance of Austrian agents in these dismissals.

  4. They must charge all those involved in the Sarajevo murder plot and any Serbian officials who made anti-Austrian utterances.

  5. They must notify the Austro-Hungarian government of the immediate carrying out of these orders.

  Serbia was given forty-eight hours to accept these terms. They were told to reply by 6 p.m. on the evening of July 25 and that there could be no extension of the time frame and no mediation from any quarter.

  Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, reported to King George, the Kaiser’s cousin, that he thought this the gravest event for many years in European politics. Sir Edward Gray, the Foreign Secretary, said the ultimatum was “harsher in tone and more humiliating in its terms than any, of which he had recollection, addressed by one independent Government to another.” But on the streets there was no particular panic. The Eastern Daily on July 25 had a paragraph about the shortness of the timescale of Austria’s demands. It voiced concern about how Russia would respond, because of its rivalry with Austria, for control of the Balkans, but this was viewed as a dispute between Austria and Serbia, not as one that could open the door to a conflagration that would engulf the world.

  After two weeks in West Runton Edith Cavell went back to 24 College Road in Norwich and weeded and watered her mother’s small garden, parched from the heatwave. She sorted things her mother could not manage. She planned to return again before Christmas; in the meantime she would send money and write often, and Lil and Flor and Jack were there to visit. For Edith Cavell news about hegemony and war were remote from her concerns. She lived in an all-female environment, her ambitions focused on her work as a nurse.

  She visited her Swardeston friends Susannah and Mary Blewitt at the Old Rectory—the house they had lived in for
over thirty years. After their father died they stayed on there together and gardened, managed the house, and grew vegetables. In seemingly unthreatened rural life they all had tea in the shade of the old wide cedar tree on the lawn by the lake. The scene was a quintessence of peacetime. The mood of late summer and the calm of an English garden. There was no sense of it being a last summer and that Balkan politics might bludgeon into this time-honored, civilized, courteous life. In view for Edith Cavell was all that had informed her childhood: the church where she had endured her father’s dull sermons but found her own piety; the vicarage which it had taken all his money to build and which he could never quite afford to heat or to maintain; the path to the graveyard where he was now buried and where she supposed she too would take her place; the lake where she swam in summer and skated in winter; the orchard where she and her sisters picked fruit for jam making. And all around were the lanes and fields of the England whose seasons she knew, the oak trees and hedgerows, the snowdrops of winter, the primroses of spring, the nettles and cobnuts of autumn; the landscape to which she had to return each year because it was part of her, because it was home, the place to which she would retire when old and her life’s hard work done.

  On July 25 Serbia responded to Austria’s ultimatum by mobilizing 200,000 men. Germany urged Austria to declare war on Serbia.