Hello. Welcome to the June edition. This edition has an article by Keith on Sir John French’s sister who is something of a Serbian heroine. We have a short item on Salonika with a few photos and another WWI medical extract from the British Medical Journal.
Trevor
The Programme for 2015
June 6th: Nigel Crompton – the 1915 Gretna Railway Disaster – a state secret
July 4th: Chris John – German Tanks at Villers Brettoneux
Aug 1st: Harbinder Singh – Sikhs in the Great War
Sept 5th: Michael Steadman – Manchester Pals
Oct 3rd: Andrew Tonge – 1914 Race to the Sea
Nov 7th: Marietta Crichton-Stuart – Alice in Wonderland and her Lost Boys
Dec 5th: Branch Social
Last month’s speaker
Last month’s speaker was Steve Binks talking about the progress so far of the pilgrimage he and Nancy are doing to WWI graves and memorials, starting (!) with France and Belgium. The following week, he and Nancy made the trip to Dublin to talk to the Dublin branch, and even survived the ferry trip.
The Scottish Women’s Hospital in The Great War
Keith Walker
On a recent visit to Shrewsbury to look at a memorial book in St Chads Church, which commemorates one of our local soldiers, I noticed something that caught my eye. I looked at the Parade shopping centre which in 1914 was the Shropshire Royal Infirmary. At the entrance I saw a brass plaque. It said “In Honoured Memory of Katharine Mary Harley” who was killed on the 7th March 1917 “while tending the distressed Serbians”. I thought at the time she must be one of the nurses who served in the First World War. My interest of that hospital was the nurse Mary Hughes SRN, ARRC who served in the TFNS in Portsmouth. How wrong I was!
Katharine Mary Harley
She was born on the 3rd May 1855 at Ripple in Kent to Captain John Tracy William French (b1808-d1855) and his wife Margaret (d1867). Katharine had five sisters. They were: Mary who married John Hawthorn Lydall, a solicitor; Eleanora married Wykeham Lydall, John’s brother; Margaret married Gavin Siddald Jones an industrialist; Caroline married Augustine Whiteway; and Charlotte who married Maximilian Despard a business man. Katharine had one brother John(b1852-d1925) none other than Field Marshall John French FP, GCB, OM, GC,VO, KCMG, ADC, PC, Commander in Chief of the BEF (from August 1914 to December1915). All of John French’s brothers in law would help in some way over his career.
Katharine was married to Colonel George Ernest Harley (b 1844-d 1907). They had three children Florence (b1878), Julian E.F (b1881-d1943) and Edith Joyce ( b189?). Colonel Harley was in The Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) now the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment (Queens and Royal Hampshires). Colonel Harley fought in the Second Boer War. They lived at Condover Hall near Shrewsbury. Condover Hall is now a residential activity centre. Katharine was known to her family and friends as Katie.
I have found no evidence that Katharine was trained as a nurse. She seems to have been an administrator. Before the First World War, she was active in the campaign for the registration of nurses, as at that time there was no formal registration of nurses. The Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service required that a nurse had to be 25 years old, and to have 3 years training in a hospital, and be of good character.
Katharine was also active in the National Union of Suffrage Society which she joined in 1910. Another organisation she was part of was the Church League of Women’s Suffrage. In 1913 she was involved in the pilgrimage to parliament demanding the vote. By this time the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies had over 100,000 members. Katharine was certainly using her administration skills. There is some evidence that Shrewsbury was quite a hot bed of women’s suffrage. Meetings were held with the nurses from the Shropshire Royal Infirmary demanding registration and there were other meetings where women demanded the vote.
Katharine’s sister Charlotte was a member of the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union.
Scottish Women’s Hospital
In 1914, Ms Evelina Haverfield (1867-1920) founded the Women’s Emergency Corps, an organisation to help women become doctors, nurses and motorcycle messengers. As part of this organisation, Dr Elsie Inglis (1864-1917) one of the founders of the Scottish Women’s Suffrage Federation suggested that a Women’s Medical Unit should be allowed to serve on the Western Front. With financial help of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, Dr Inglis formed the Scottish Women’s Hospital Committee. The British Government and the Army where opposed to any civilian force entering the war zone. With the financial help of the American Red Cross, the first unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospital left for France in November 1914. Katharine Mary Harley was part of that unit. By January 1915, the Scottish Women’s Hospital had established an auxiliary hospital with 200 beds at Royoumont Abbey.
Royoumont Abbey Auxiliary Hospital was situated 30km North of Paris, and was run by the Scottish Women’s Hospital under the direction of the French Red Cross. It is said that when Dr Elsie Inglis approached the Royal Army Medical Corps to offer a readymade Medical Unit staffed by qualified women, the War Office told her “My good lady, go home and sit still”. However, the French took up her offer.
On arrival at Royoumont Abbey, the women found that the buildings were in a bad state. They were dirty, and there was a shortage of everything the women would need. There was no running water, so they had to carry it from the well, but by dint of their hard work the hospital was given its certificate by the Service de Sante by the French Red Cross. The hospital was quite successful. It grew over the period of the war to a hospital of over 600 beds. As part of the running of the hospital, they set up a canteen at Soissons and a casualty clearing station at Villers Cotteret in 1917. The abbey was ideal for the recuperation of the soldiers, as the grounds were quiet and serene with lakes and large parkland. For her work in France, Katharine Harley was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
In late 1915, Katharine went with Dr Elsie Inglis to Macedonia to establish a hospital. The hospital was set up in a disused tobacco warehouse in the town of Gevghelija. The hospital did not last long as the Bulgarians advanced and the staff moved to Salonika in Greece. After the arrival of British and French troops in the winter of 1915, the line stabilised [Ed – as the German High Command forbade the Bulgarians from entering Greece].
Katharine who was quite headstrong clashed with Dr Louise Mcllroy (1874-1968) who was the chief medical officer. The matter was resolved when in early 1916 Katharine resigned and returned to the UK.
She soon returned to Macedonia, having persuaded the committee of the Scottish Women’s Hospital to set up a motorised ambulance unit. This unit operated with her in charge, its job being to collect Serbian casualties from near the front line. One of her famous casualties was Flora Sandes (1876-1956) the British woman who enlisted as a soldier in the Serbian army. She was wounded by a Bulgarian grenade in November 1916. Katharine took personal charge of her evacuation. After this incident, Flora Sandes was promoted to the rank of sergeant-major and by the end of the war she was a captain. Flora Sandes received the highest decoration of the Serbian Military, the Order of the Karadorde’s Star, and was demobilised in October 1922.
There was severe fighting at this time in the Moglena Mountain range and the ambulance unit did sterling work evacuating the wounded and working non-stop to keep their vehicles going. But despite their good work, the unit came under suspicion of lack of discipline, insubordination, drinking, late nights and short haircuts. Katharine was criticised for poor control of the unit. An enquiry team was set up by the committee of the Scottish Women’s Hospital. The enquiry team did not like what they found and encouraged Katharine to resign. In December 1916 after an acrimonious exchange of letters, she agreed to go.
With her daughter, she went to the recently liberated town of Monastir (now Bitola) and acting quite independently provided assistance to the townspeople, who were suffering terribly from disease and illness. Katharine took a house in the town and lived there to be close to the people she was trying to help. On the 7th March 1917, while sitting at the window taking tea with her daughter, Monastir came under shellfire from the Bulgarians. Katharine was killed by a shell splinter. Her death came as a great shock to all who knew her. Her funeral in Salonica was attended by Prince George of Serbia, and General Milne the commander of the British forces. She was buried with military honours at Lembet Road Military Cemetery in Thessaloniki Greece. Although Katharine was a civilian, her grave is looked after by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Katharine is held in high regard by the Serbian people.
Kate’s Memorial Plaque at the Parade Shopping Centre (Shrewsbury)
She is commemorated as follows:
- a plaque at Shropshire Royal Infirmary (now the Parade shopping centre) (see above)
- a plaque at Condover Hall (now a residential activity centre)
- her name is on the memorial at St Mary’s Church Shrewsbury, and
- a road is named after her, Harley Road in the village of Condover.
She also left a legacy for a medal to be struck in her name, which was awarded annually to an outstanding nurse on the completion of their training at Shropshire Royal Infirmary.
Some brief notes on Katharine Mary Harley contemporaries:-
Her sister Charlotte Despard (1844-1939) was a socialist, pacifist, Irish nationalist and a leading figure in the women’s suffrage. Charlotte formed the Women’s Freedom League which was much more militant than the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society. In 1907, Charlotte led a march into Parliament Square demanding votes for women. She was arrested and jailed, spending 21 days in solitary confinement. During the battle of Loos, Charlotte formed the Women’s Peace Crusade and addressed anti-war rallies. In 1919, when Sir John French was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Charlotte was active on behalf of the Irish Nationalists and at one point she was addressing a rally in Cork with Maud Gonne (1866-1953) when French drove past the crowd and was amazed to find out that the speaker was his sister. It would have been very interesting to have been a fly on the wall when John and Charlotte had dinner together.
Evelina Haverfield (1867-1920)
She joined the Women’s Social and Political Union where she took part in many protests. She was arrested several times.
In 1914, she formed the Women’s Emergency Corps. In 1915, she went with the Scottish Women’s Hospital to Serbia. At the end of the war, she worked to help the orphaned Serbian children. She died in 1920 in an orphanage in Serbia. She was suffering with pneumonia.
Dr Elsie Inglis (1864-1917)
Elsie Inglis qualified as a physician and surgeon in 1892 in Scotland. She worked in London and Dublin before setting up a medical practice in Edinburgh where she also set up a maternity hospital for poor women.
She was secretary from 1906 until 1914 of the Scottish Federation of women’s suffrage.
In 1914 she set up the Scottish Women’s Hospital. She worked for them in France and Serbia. In 1915, she was captured in Serbia and repatriated. In 1916, she and a team of the Scottish Women’s Hospital left for Odessa in Russia. She was there for a year before she was forced to return to the U.K suffering from cancer. She died on the 26th November 1917. Her funeral was held at St Giles Cathedral Edinburgh. She is buried in Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh. She was awarded by the Serbians the Order of Saint Sava and the Order of the White Eagle.
Dr Louise Mcllroy (1874-1968)
This is the doctor that Katharine clashed with over who was in charge [Ed. – and remember Katharine Harley had no medical qualifications!].
Louise Mcllroy graduated as a doctor in 1900.
In 1914, she and other women offered their services to the War Office. It declined their offer saying “the battlefield is no place for women”, so in 1914 she helped form the Scottish Women’s Hospital.
She worked in France before being posted to Serbia.
She ended her war service as a surgeon with the Royal Army Medical Corps hospital in Constantinople.
She was awarded the French Medaille des Epidemies, the Croix de Guerre avec Palme, and the Serbian Order of St Sava. In 1920, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire and in 1929 she was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died in Glasgow on the 8th February 1968 at the age of 93 years old.
In conclusion
In 1914, the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service did not want people like Katharine Harley. They considered them “lime lighters” who, when they saw the realities of war, would disappear. However, Katharine and her contemporaries did not“go home and sit still”. As far as the “battlefield was no place for women” we have Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm working on the front line at Pervyse with the Belgians, Sister Kate Luard and Staff Nurse Nellie Spindler at Brandhoek, and Katharine Harley with Elsie Inglis in Serbia, all quite close to the front line.
On the other battles Katharine fought, in 1918 the Representation of the Peoples Act was passed allowing women over 30 years old to vote, and in 1928 the Equal Franchise Act was passed allowing all women to vote. In 1919, the Nurses Act was passed establishing a register of qualified nurses.
My own local nurse Mary Hughes of the TFNS is remembered as an independent, upright, straight taking woman. Maybe her experience of the suffering and the realities of the war explain her attitude.
Katharine Harley’s grave at Lembit Road CWGC cemetery.
The inscription reads:
“The generous English Lady and
great benefactress of the Serbian people
Madame Harley
A great lady
On your tomb instead of flowers
The gratitude of the Serbs
Shall blossom there
For your wonderful acts your name shall
Be known from generation to generation”
At the five-nations commemoration ceremony at Lembit Road cemetery every October, the Serbs ALWAYS have a commemoration at her grave.
Reference and acknowledgments:
- “Royoumont Abbey – the Scottish Women’s Hospital.”
Antonio de Navarro, 1917
- “The women of Royoumont Abbey.”
Eileen Crofton Tuckwell press 1999
- “Shropshire War Memorials Sites of Remembrance.”
Peter Francis, 2013
- “To end all wars a story of loyalty and rebellion”
Adam Hockschild, Pan 2011
- CWGC
A little bit about Salonika May 2015
or, how it all started with 2nd Lt Idwal Ben Humphrey Jones, and we found him!
Trevor Adams
I hope to have the opportunity to give some more information in person on Salonika and the campaign there, but in the interim I thought you might be interested in some thoughts on our trip.
North Western Greece and the Republic of Macedonia are well worth visiting of themselves. Southern Macedonia is one of the most striking landscapes I have seen. It is a land of mountains and lakes, especially Lake Dojran. But let’s get back to Greece to start off.
As my awareness of the Salonika campaign had been fired by the inscription on a headstone in Glan Conwy’s St Ffraid’s churchyard of the Jones family, one of our aims was to find 2nd Lt Idwal Ben Humphrey (who did not serve under the family name of Jones). Well, find him we certainly did. We had gone out to Greece a few days in advance of the main group, partly as they would not be visiting Karasouli CWGC cemetery on this trip. A wonderful Greek chap called Apostolis took us out to Karasouli cemetery, and we found Idwal Ben Humphrey without difficulty. The cemetery is one of the CWGC designs where recumbent tablets are used rather than erect headstones, and the cross is a small one on a cairn. In 1916, the town would have been Turkish (Muslim) but after the Asia Minor War of the early 1920s the Turkish civilians were pushed out of Greece and vice versa. Goodness knows how many people died. So, today the town is known by the Greek name of Polycastro. This mass renaming of villages and towns in Greece (and to some extent in Macedonia) causes some problems in relating to the events of WWI.
Apostolis took us to the Mikra CWGC cemetery and memorial in Thessaloniki (and it is perfectly in order to call it Salonika) to find two of the other Glan Conwy casualties. TJ Williams was drowned on the SS Arcadian when it was torpedoed and is commemorated on the memorial. Hugh Evans is buried in the cemetery itself (died of pneumonia on 22nd November 1918). Virtually all the casualties buried in Thessaloniki are from the hospitals that were located there, as the town was the main base for the British Salonika Force (BSF). More than half the fatalities of the BSF were due to disease, mostly malaria and the 1918-1919 flu epidemic. Unusually, many of the entries in the cemetery registers mention the cause of death, so you can see that a lot of them were due to disease.
After the main party arrived on the first Saturday, we toured Thessaloniki town and visited the CWGC cemeteries at Lembit Road and Mikra. Keith’s article above deals with Katharine Harley who is buried at Lembit Road, and you can see the photo of her grave. Lembit Road has British, French, Russian and Serbian sections with some monuments and chapels. Bizarrely, the Serbian chapel has bottles of slivovitz and glasses for the visitors! There is a five nations’ commemoration there every autumn and the Greeks put on a reception in the local officers’ mess. There is also an Indian CWGC cemetery at Monastir Road, resulting from the deployment of Indian troops there mostly from October 1918 when they got hit by the cold winter conditions and the flu epidemic. Mikra cemetery has civilian, Bulgarian, Turkish and Russian graves going up to 1921. Incidentally, the armistice here was 30th September 1918.
Some of the smaller cemeteries up country do not have a register at the cemetery and indeed there was no box in the wall to keep one in such cases. However, some of the registers that do exist now mention “shot at dawn” casualties, including one at Mikra.
On the following days, we visited the “birdcage” defensive line constructed north of Salonika and held by the British and French in early 1915 and early 1916, and which was never attacked. It was called the “birdcage” because of the extensive use of barbed wire, to make up for a lack of troops.
The first troops into Salonika were the 10th Irish Division who were sent there from Gallipoli in October 1915 to help the three French divisions that were trying to bolster the Serbians. In truth, all the Entente forces were a bit late in the day. The 10th Irish Division held a position at Kosturino in what is today Macedonia (FYROM – Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) and what was then Serbia. On 7th and 8th December 1915, they were attacked by a vastly superior Bulgarian force and forced off Rocky Peak and Kosturino ridge. They ended up covering one flank of the French retreat through Dedeli Pass. They lost about 1,500 men. The Entente forces were quickly all pushed out of Serbia into Greece and down to Thessaloniki. Our May 2015 trip was partly to commemorate the centenary of these events. The Bulgarians stopped at the Greek border, on orders from the German high command as Greece was neutral at that stage of the war.
The next day, we headed for the Struma valley which in WWI was such an awful hotbed of malaria that both sides evacuated the valley each summer and returned in the autumn. The BSF attacks here were in autumn 1916, involving the 10th Irish and 27th Divisions. We went on from the Struma valley to see the Dojran BSF memorial to the missing, and Dojran cemetery. The memorial is on a crest above the beautiful Dojran lake and is surrounded by the Krusha Balkan hills, and the Beles mountains, with snow-capped peaks. It is an incredible location. The memorial is to the 10,282 other ranks and 418 officers who died in the Salonika campaign, and lists the 1,797 who have no known grave.
Moving into FYROM, the next day we “visited” Rocky Peak at Kosturino. This is an understatement for a 6-hour hike in temperatures in the 30s, including a half-hour ride in an unsprung trailer behind a tractor. The BSF were up there in the winter in freezing conditions. It is pretty remote even today and has a commanding view of the surrounding countryside.
For our time in FYROM, we were based in the small town of Dojran, described to me by a fellow WFA member as a one-horse town without the horse. It is, however, in a very pretty location with the Lake Dojran, complete with pelicans, and mountains across the lake, and hills behind the town. The town is right on the Greek-Macedonian (FYROM) border today and was also in 1916. The BSF pushed up here from Salonika to face the Bulgarian defensive positions and to keep the Bulgarians tied down here so that they could not strip forces out of the area to fight the French further west on the Vardar River.
From the top:
Left: Bulgarian bunker on the way up on Grand Couronne, Dojran; Ian Lowe laying a wreath at 10th Irish Divn cross at Rabrovo
Left: View from Rocky Peak at Kosturino with Crete Simonet in foreground – note the snow on the mountains in the background!
Right: Some of the group at Rocky Peak
So, over the next few days we hiked up from Dojran village to the top of Grand Couronne to see the Devil’s Eye observation post and the Bulgarian fortifications, up La Tortue, down through Jumeaux Ravine and up to Petit Couronne. The hikes ranged from 6 to 8 hours in warm temperatures. We also had a boat ride on Lake Dojran, which was a lot less strenuous.
We saw the restored 22nd Division memorial at Grand Couronne, and the restored Bulgarian memorial there as well, complete with very welcome water supply. Until very recently, these memorials were in poor shape and hidden in dense brush. The Salonika Campaign Society has done much to restore various aspects of the battlefield. Incidentally, as far as the Bulgarians are concerned WWI is a continuation of the Second Balkan War, as their memorial is dated 1913to 1918.
One of the highlights of the trip for us, and for the other members of the Irish contingent, including our own Ian Lowe, was the visit to the memorial cross to the 10th Irish Division. It is located on a hillside behind a Greek military cemetery at Rabrovo, south of Kosturino and on the line of the retreat. The cross has been restored through the efforts of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and Leinster Regiment associations. Poppy wreaths and crosses were laid, and some short speeches made before we had a drink in the Macedonian warm, sunny evening to the honour of those men (a significant number of whom were not, in fact, Irish by this stage of the war). It was one WWI memorial that we thought we would never see.
The Macedonian sites are only accessible with local guides. The trails are not marked, and on more than one instance we ended up beating our way through the vegetation to find our goal. The local contact in Macedonia organised all this for us. Without him, it would not have been possible. He is very interested in this aspect of their history and, being a local, is able to converse with the inhabitants about what remains in the area and what they have been told about the battles by previous generations. I would add that the local people both there and in Greece are an absolute delight. If you speak some German, that will often work where the locals do not speak English, as many people have worked in Germany.
Do I want to go back to Salonika? No – I think I want to move there!
Left: Dojran memorial, looking over Lake Dojran to Grand Couronne, Petit Couronne and La Tortue
Right: The group at Dojran memorial to the British Salonika Force, with our Greek friends
Left: 5th Btn Connaught Rangers HQ, November 1915, and yes that is snow
Right: the same location today, in a Turkish village which was complete with bar and mosque
Left: Lake Dojran and Dojran village from Grand Couronne – the “Devil’s Eye” Bulgarian OP
Right: our intrepid leader: Alan Wakefield of the Salonika Campaign Society on a Birdcage Line gun emplacement
Tailpiece: from the annals of the British Medical Journal, 23rd May 2015
Trevor Adams trevormcmadams@gmail.com