A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  His was one of several newspaper interviews to appear in the popular press in Flora’s later years. She was even more forthright in others. “Give me a cigarette first – never could talk without a smoke,” she demanded of another reporter who had come to interview her on behalf of the Woman’s Sunday Mirror. “BORED” declared one of the paragraph headings when the article was published. “I hate old age and retirement,” she bemoaned forcefully. “I’m bored to tears. I miss soldiering. I loved it.” She looks straight at the camera in the accompanying photograph, with only the smallest hint of a smile to soften her challenging stare, her revolver firmly clenched in her hand. “The police allow me to keep it as a souvenir, but they won’t let me have any ammunition,” she added miserably. Later that week an enormous bouquet arrived for her, which allowed the paper to end the article on a particularly patronizing note. “To a gallant old soldier, who remains charming and feminine even with the light of battle still burning in her eye, Woman’s Sunday Mirror presents this week’s bouquet of two dozen red roses.”26

  As the years passed she became increasingly nostalgic for army life and sought out, in particular, the company of her wartime friends. In late 1949 she received a Christmas card out of the blue from Colonel Lloyd Smellie, whom she had known briefly in 1918 when, as a young officer of a British Motor Transport company, he had been stationed in Macedonia. He was now living with his wife in the Lake District. “I was indeed astonished and very pleased to receive the Christmas card from you and your wife, it was a breath of the past from the old days of war which I still think of so often,” she wrote back enthusiastically. “I am now living alone in the country near nephews and nieces,” she told him. “Very safe but not very exciting!”27 In the brisk correspondence between them that month, he mentioned his membership of the Salonika Reunion Association and the Mosquito, their journal. Flora’s eyes lit on the references and she took out a year’s subscription to the latter forthwith. “I did not even know there was a Salonika Reunion Association, and should so much like to become a member but I suppose I should not be eligible as I was not serving in HM Forces,” she replied sadly to one of his letters. “If you think I could join the Association I would be very grateful if you would tell me how to do it.”28

  Smellie set to work convincing the Association to accept Flora into their ranks. By September, with their annual “muster” only a month away, they had passed a resolution making her an honorary member.29 For thirty-one years its members had gathered at Horse Guards Parade for a service of remembrance, before parading the short distance to the Cenotaph to lay wreaths. Such was the importance to her of attending the thirty-second ceremony on Sunday 1st October that she became increasingly nervous as the date neared. “Also I’m wondering where I’ll stand, as I can’t of course go with the men, and don’t belong to the nursing sisters, and don’t know anybody, but I suppose someone will tell me there,” she wrote worriedly to Smellie. “Hoping we shall meet somehow, don’t forget that I am now a very old lady, not a bit like the sergeant you know.”30 As soon as she joined the ranks of the twelve hundred other veterans, all her concerns fell away as she stood proudly behind the President and Honorary Secretary of the Association, dressed in a smart dark suit, a dark hat with a pale feather, her long row of medals pinned across her chest.31 At the luncheon that followed she was “besieged” by autograph hunters and veteran nursing sisters who pressed forward to shake her hand. She was the “the Joan of Arc of our campaign and one of the finest women that ever lived”, declared the Honorary Secretary grandiosely as he led a toast in her honour. “Thank you very much, indeed, all my friends here,” replied Flora shyly.32

  The Association opened up a new world for her. She began attending the meetings of her local Suffolk branch and she met old friends at the summer reunion held at the start of July by the veterans of the Serbian units.33 The annual parade, she once said, was “the one bright spot” in her life and she avidly read every word of the Mosquito.34 In turn, the Association took great pride in her public appearances alongside them, and littered its pages with references to her. In the following years, when she joined them again at their autumn muster, her presence among them was reported in the press and journalists would muscle in to try to meet her.35 “Miss Sandes has a simple technique that I like [to get rid of them],” commented one of her friends. “She tells all inquisitive papers that she is ninety, and they doubtfully report her words.”36 Duly, seventy-six-year-old Flora’s words reached the pages of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express in 1952. “I’m aged round about ninety,” they recorded her saying, no doubt to her considerable amusement.37

  Not only did Flora keep in touch with British veterans via the Salonika Reunion Association, she also maintained links with its Serbian equivalent. In 1954 she received and accepted an invitation to join them as their guest at a reunion in Belgrade. On arrival she was fêted as their guest of honour. “The Savez Boraca (Soldiers’ Association) took me round by car to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier which is an enormous monument by Mestrovic [Ivan Meštrović, sculptor], and to many other places, and welcomed me most warmly… I think any small thing one can do to help good relations is all for the good, and we never mentioned politics,” she wrote on her return, sensitive to the still-delicate political situation.38

  By a remarkable coincidence Katherine was in Yugoslavia at the same time. In a rush to make amends to those whom they had treated badly, the Yugoslav medical authorities had invited her to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the opening of her Anglo-Yugoslav Hospital in Kamenica. In the company once again of Alice Murphy, on 22nd September Katherine was ushered through the hospital – noticing with amusement that her photograph was sandwiched between ones of Lenin and Tito in the office – out into the sunny courtyard, where she was welcomed by more than one hundred guests. Among them was Flora.39 Katherine took great pride not only in the reception she received, but also in that extended to her old friend. “People from far and near came to see her,” she recalled later. “Her name was known and honoured all over Serbia.”40 On 2nd October, regretful only that she had had to miss the muster that had taken place the day before, Flora arrived back at Wickham Market brimming with enthusiasm about her visit. “I had a wonderful month’s holiday and met more friends than I could have thought possible,” she wrote to the Association on her return.41

  Two years later, on 30th September 1956, walking stick in hand, she paraded proudly once again within the Association’s ranks on their march to the Cenotaph and joined them afterwards for their luncheon, apparently as hale and hearty as ever. It was Flora’s last muster. “‘If I be spared’, as the village people here say,” she commented once, as she promised to attend in future years.42 1956 did not spare her. After a brief and sudden illness, she died at Ipswich and East Suffolk Hospital on 24th November of “obstructive jaundice”.43 She was cremated at Ipswich Crematorium three days later and her ashes buried in the Garden of Remembrance. She had renewed her passport shortly before she died, still dreaming of places to see and trips to take.

  Afterword

  Nearly one hundred years since the start of the First World War, interest remains centred on the fighting along the Western Front, from which women were barred. Thus the prevailing view of the contribution of women to the war effort is that they dutifully “kept the home fires burning” while waiting for their men to return home, cheerfully stuffed shells full of explosives at munitions factories and worked devotedly as “ministering angels” in hospitals safely behind the frontlines. This view, however, overlooks the fact that when women were able to seize the freedom to work as they wished their contribution to the war effort was as important and competent as that of their male equivalents. They ran hospitals, worked as army and ambulance drivers, survived untold hardship and carried out acts of staggering courage – and, of course, in one exceptional case, fought bravely throughout the duration of the war.

  Flora did not view her actions as political. It was the “love of a
dventure” instead that motivated her, she once stated.1 But her actions had political consequences. In an age when women were denied the right to vote, she pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable behaviour – and work – for women. In so doing she became symbol of what could be achieved and an inspiration to many. Hundreds of women eagerly bought her books and stuck newspaper clippings about her in between the well-thumbed pages. Others collected the postcard issued by Raphael Tuck showing her in full military regalia. Even more listened eagerly to her speak about her adventures among the Serbs when she took the stage.

  On a personal level, she met with remarkably little prejudice. There were of course people who disapproved of her pursuit of what was seen as an exclusively male profession, but by and large she was widely admired. “I am convinced that she earned promotion not because she happened to be a woman but because she displayed qualities which would have deserved recognition in a man,” commented a reviewer from Punch on reading her 1916 book, An English Woman Sergeant in the Serbian Army.2 “She has solved the riddle often put, ‘Should women be soldiers?’ and has answered it so far as she is personally concerned,” wrote another in the pages of the Liverpool Weekly Post.3 Not only was she widely celebrated in the British press, she was accepted as a comrade by British officers and ordinary soldiers. Even the crusty old officials of the British War Office gave her the permits she needed to lecture to their men at camps across northern France.

  Nonetheless the widespread acceptance that Flora received was to a great extent the exception that proved the rule. Only in April 1915 was the War Office forced by a shortage of male doctors to recruit women, but they refused to allow them to work near the front and, by denying them officer status, they were also able to withhold the privileges of rank that were given to their male counterparts.4 One of the most disgraceful forms the discrimination took was in the government’s refusal to recognize the foreign awards bestowed on British women by publishing them in the Gazette, a journal which publishes official British Government information. Only those granted to men were “gazetted”. Even Flora’s receipt of the Karađorđe Star with Swords – the highest award in Serbia for bravery under fire – received the same official slight.

  Snubbed at home, the British women who worked in Serbia during the First World War were treated there as equals. Although few in Britain today have heard of their achievements, they are still remembered widely in the country they came to love. The fervent nationalism of the Serbs, which lay at the heart of the appalling atrocities committed in their name in recent years, has also had a remarkable and honourable counterpart. Not only did it permit them to win some of the most extraordinary victories of the First World War, it drove them to oppose the Nazis in the Second. Today it helps keep alive the memory of the British women who worked and so often died in their service. There are streets and buildings named after Katherine MacPhail, Elsie Inglis, Lady Leila Paget and Elizabeth Ross. Towns abound with plaques and memorials, while heavily attended commemorations are held annually in Kragujevac and Mladenovac. In 2006 a Serbian film was released about the retreat, Where the Lemon Blossoms Bloom, that featured Flora Sandes. Every schoolchild was sent to see it.

  Epilogue

  Ada Barlow

  Hardly had the “fat and plain, elderly and rather pasty” nurse returned to England with the Paget Unit following their release from captivity in the spring of 1916 before she left again to work for the Serbs. She demonstrated the same extraordinary dedication to her patients in her work with Serbian refugees in Corsica for the Serbian Relief Fund.1 By the end of the war she was living in Manchester, where she played a leading role in the committee that ran the Lord Mayor of Manchester Fund, which aimed to raise money for her beloved Serbs.2 In 1937, she is identifiable one final time in the newspaper archives that are currently accessible online. In March of that year, sixty-six-year-old Slavko Grouitch, the then Yugoslav Ambassador, died in London of heart failure. The funeral brought together many of the men and women who had worked devotedly for Serbia in one of the largest gatherings of its kind. Mrs Barlow was listed as being among them.3

  Barton Cookingham

  The young doctor discovered by Flora and Emily lying next to a coffin gravely ill with typhus in Valjevo arrived home to Red Hook, New York, in June 1915.4 He returned to his pre-war work as a physician and surgeon in Poughkeepsie, New York, and, in April 1919 married Edna.5 Two years later they had a son, Harris.

  Shortly thereafter, pursued by personal demons, his life slowly began to unravel. In 1926 the courts awarded a divorce to his wife on the grounds that he had been “intimate with women in cities near his home”. In 1930, aged forty-one, he married a teacher seventeen years his junior. They divorced in 1933. In February 1934, a month before he married for the third time, he spent five days in the county jail for contempt of court over his failure to pay alimony. In 1938 he testified for the defence in the case of a woman who was found guilty of killing a twenty-four-year-old man while drink-driving. When asked how long he had been drinking in the same bar as her on the day in question, he was evasive. “You do drink rather extensively, don’t you doctor?” the prosecution alleged, while observing that he had been suspended that summer from the staff of the Northern Dutchess Health Service centre in Rhinebeck, New York.6

  In 1944 he stood trial for carrying out an elective abortion, a criminal offence. In 1946 he was arrested by agents of the US Narcotics Division, accused of issuing prescriptions to drug addicts without the necessary licence.7 Four years later his medical licence was revoked after he was charged with carrying out another termination. He turned his hand instead to real estate, all the while continuing to run a sideline in abortions. In 1955 he divorced for the third time.8 In 1962, following a tip-off, he was arrested and found guilty of carrying out an abortion on a twenty-six-year-old unmarried woman. Only his counsel’s argument that prison would almost certainly mean death at his “advanced age” of seventy-three saved him from a custodial term.9 This brave man, fallen from grace, died on 8th February 1968.

  Mabel Grouitch

  The American woman who led the first volunteer medical unit from British shores during the First World War worked tirelessly for the rest of her life on behalf of Serbia. After seeing the Anglo-American Unit to Kragujevac she returned to New York in early 1915 to raise funds. That summer she sent a second unit to Serbia, to open the “Grouitch Baby Hospital” in Niš.10 When Serbia was invaded by Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria that autumn, she turned her hospital into a frontline field ambulance – the First American Field Hospital in Serbia. Once it became clear that Serbia was on the verge of defeat, she was forced to leave her staff in Niš by virtue of the fact that she could not, as the wife of a Serbian government official, afford to be taken prisoner. She survived a punishing twenty-day trek south to Monastir.11

  After the war Mabel opened an orphanage, the American Home for Yugoslav Children, in Selce on the Dalmatian coast. In 1937, following the death of her husband, she returned to the Home. As the threat of war loomed in 1941 she hurried to Belgrade to seek advice, where she was caught up in the bombing by the Nazis.12 She survived but was forced to retreat once again before the Germans. To escape capture, she fled through Croatia towards the Adriatic coast, at times disguising herself as a Hungarian peasant. She later credited her survival to the Croatian people who fed and hid her.13 At the end of June, she finally reached New York, where she spent her retirement. In August 1956, aged eighty-four, she died of leukaemia.14

  Katherine MacPhail

  Katherine’s visit to Serbia in 1954 was her last. She greatly missed her “second homeland” and listened to Belgrade on the radio until her loss of hearing made it impossible. Her deafness also made it increasingly difficult for her to make new friendships and she “lived for” meetings with her old friends. “When one of them died she was deeply sad and dejected for several days,” remembered her niece. She suffered keenly when her sister Isabel – who had worked alongside her in M
acedonia in the First World War and who had introduced her to Flora – died in 1955, and she became increasingly lonely when Annie, the sister with whom she shared her house in St Andrews, died in 1966.15

  But there were also happy moments. In 1969 she was delighted to be reunited with Anna Christitch, Dorothy Newhall and Francesca Wilson, all veterans of work in Serbia, for a BBC documentary, Yesterday’s Witness.16 The researcher for the programme, Jean Bray, spent time with her over the next couple of years recording her memories. Her deafness had come to isolate her to such an extent that she revealed that she had grown to regret that her work had come before marriage and children.17 In 1973, the now eighty-six-year-old Katherine received the news that she had been elected an honorary member of the Serbian Medical Association. “You have given me the greatest possible pleasure,” she wrote back in a strong hand. “I am glad my work among your people is still remembered and that friends and colleagues in Belgrade still remember me… This gesture on your part has given me great happiness especially after so many years.” By then her health was beginning to fail. She had chronic bronchitis and, in the summer of 1974, suffered two disabling strokes. She died on 21st September, missing by a few hours a letter from the Yugoslav ambassador in London letting her know that her name had been put forward to receive the Order of the Yugoslav Flag with Gold Star in honour of her work.18

  Her hospital remained open as an orthopaedic ward of the Novi Sad School of Medicine until 1992, when the building was used to house destitute Serbian refugees from the former territories of Yugoslavia. Katherine’s building – the greatest memorial to the work of the British women in Serbia during the First World War – is now sadly abandoned and a plaque in her honour stolen, but her red-lion-rampant design is perfectly preserved. A retired Serbian orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Želimir Mikić, is spearheading an attempt to raise sufficient funds for the “English Hospital” to be renovated and returned to its medical purpose, as a memorial to her work.