Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  The matron of the Infirmary, Miss Inglis, had trained under Eva Lückes. No particular affinity developed between her and Edith Cavell. “I knew her,” Miss Inglis said, “almost as well after our first meeting as I did at the end of the two years when she left Shoreditch. I liked her, I admired her unswerving sense of duty, but I never felt close to her. Kindliness and a charming personality made her loved by her nurses and patients, but I never knew anyone who felt that she really understood Edith Cavell.” Kindness and an unswerving sense of duty might have been enough in an assistant matron without the need to be really understood.

  There were 120 nurses at the Infirmary. As assistant matron, Edith Cavell had her own sitting room as well as bedroom. She taught practical nursing to probationers and she supervised ward sisters. She took care over the nurses’ careers, arranged seaside holidays for sick children, visited patients after they were discharged, and was a pioneer of “follow-up” work.

  None the less she viewed the job as a stepping stone in her career. On November 7, 1904 she wrote to her London Hospital friend Fanny Edgecombe—no longer Sister Victor, but married to a surgeon, Robert Going, and mother to a newborn baby. She asked about the child and told of her own plans: “What is she like? Eveline and I have been speculating and hoping she had hair and eyes like you—write to me and give a full description a little later on when you are up again—also what you are going to call her. I am beginning to think of a new appointment and am putting in for the Matronship of the Consumption Hospital at Ventnor—but again with little hope of success—so many are always in for these posts.”

  Mothers and babies in London’s East End, c. 1902

  Again Edith Cavell asked Eva Lückes for a “fresh and more suitable testimonial—all the others I possess having been written under the Poor-Law and so not being so desirable in the view of a Hospital Committee,” but she did not get that post, nor others she applied for, and when, after more than two years at the Shoreditch, Eveline Dickinson suggested to her that they take not just a holiday but a real break, and travel together for the summer of 1906, the opportunity seemed too appealing to miss. She wrote to Eva Lückes on January 12 about her hopes and fears: “Will you forgive me for troubling you about my private concerns, but I am anxious to ask your advice in a difficulty? I have now been nursing for ten consecutive years without a break and feel very much in need of a long rest. The chance of one has just come, through the proposal of a friend that I should accompany her to the south of England and possibly abroad for three months from April or May. I am very anxious to accept, but fear it may be difficult to find another suitable post when I get back. I have been here over two years and feel that I have learned all there is to learn in our branch of the poor law. Would you very kindly help me in August—when I should be ready to return to work—if I wrote to you then? I know well how busy you are, and how little time you have to spare, but I feel I ought not to give up without some prospect of again getting a post.” Eva Lückes gave her an assurance that yes, she would “certainly help her to get fresh work.” Edith Cavell packed her watercolors and her walking boots and went, not just for the usual allotted two weeks’ summer holiday but for a much-needed break.

  15

  A HOLIDAY

  In all, Edith took about six months off work. She left with no real security that she would get a job when she returned, but she was worn out. A photograph of her at the time showed her a stone lighter than in her governess days, her hands swollen from hard work. “Ten consecutive years without a break,” she told the matron she admired. In those ten years she had learned much about almost every aspect of nursing. She had worked as a fever nurse in Tooting; in the typhoid epidemic in Maidstone; in the relative privilege of the London Hospital; as a private nurse in the homes of the well-to-do who could afford to pay; in the Poor Law infirmaries.

  Time after time she had assisted recovery and consoled the dying. She had done her best and more. Despite ten years of such service neither her religious faith nor her belief in individual sanctity had diminished. The icon of Christ and the message of love remained the guide to her compassion. She worshipped in church, prayed, read from the Book of Common Prayer and Thomas à Kempis, and highlighted in pen such texts as “he is truly learned that doeth the will of God and forsaketh his own will.” She gave practical application to the Christian message and took to it an aspiration of heaven on earth where disease, poverty and suffering would be overcome. She had seen enough to know such paradise would not be reached soon. In ten years her character had evolved and her ambition hardened. Though as ever she asked little for herself, she wanted a matron’s job because she wanted to make a difference to people’s lives.

  Eveline Dickinson, Sister George at the London Hospital, was the friend who, in the spring of 1906, suggested the holiday. Eva Lückes was put out when, soon after she received Edith Cavell’s letter, Sister George handed in her notice. She did not know the two nurses were going away together. Eveline Dickinson was thirty-nine and intended to marry that September. Her husband-to-be, Alaster McDonnell, was headmaster of Portora Royal School in Enniskillen in northern Ireland where Oscar Wilde had been a pupil from 1864 until 1871. (His name was rubbed off the honors list after his imprisonment in 1895.) She wanted a burst of freedom before settling as the headmaster’s wife.

  She had already resigned from the London once before in May 1902 “though it was right at the beginning of the holiday season and inconvenient, but Miss Dickinson always thought of herself,” Matron wrote in her Register of Nurses. She returned to the London as a “holiday sister,” then went, at Sydney Holland’s recommendation, to Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, to nurse the young men at the new naval college. She did not like the job and returned to the London, but had only been back a year as Sister George when she again told Eva Lückes that she wanted to leave, at the end of March 1906. “She was very apologetic and said if she had known that would happen she would not have taken up a permanent appointment … She behaved quite well about it, but of course it is not good for the ward to have such frequent changing.” Eva Lückes described Eveline Dickinson as “most grasping as to the off duty time.” Though “emphatically smart,” “very methodical,” “an excellent manager,” “keenly interested in the intellectual side of the work” and with her ward always well kept, she was “very self-opinionated and her influence on the probationers not good.”

  Eveline Dickinson had overseen pioneer treatment of the skin disease lupus at the London. Her fault was to want a life of her own outside the hospital. She might have wanted to balance the two, but hospital rules precluded this. Total commitment was demanded of nurses, on a par with convent life and vows of chastity. Those who married gave up their jobs.

  And so, before becoming a headmaster’s wife, Eveline Dickinson had a summer with Edith Cavell. The two women were similar in age and independence of spirit and in their regard for “the great East End Hospital,” as Eveline called the London. They spent most of the time in north Cornwall with Eveline’s family. Her father, who came from Ireland, had been the vicar of Bodmin, her mother had died when she was three and she was the youngest of six children. They stayed near Rocky Valley between Boscastle and Tintagel. There was woodland and waterfalls, cliff walks, views of Lundy Island. Edith painted water-colors of the coastal landscape: the basalt cliffs and the sea. She did a painting of the corn mill in the valley, Trevillet Mill, painted by Thomas Creswick in 1850.

  It was a summer of outdoor living and of time with family and friends. It was restorative after the urban poverty of the East End infirmaries, the demanding hospital routine. She said she “felt refreshed after a long and pleasant holiday.” She went to see the house where Eveline would live when married—“in a very beautiful part of Ireland near Enniskillen and just above Loch Erne.” In London they spent “a busy week” buying clothes for Eveline’s trousseau and meeting up with mutual friends from the Hospital: “What a great bond life together and training in the old hospital is, and
what good and lasting friendships result to many of us from them,” Edith Cavell wrote to her matron. At some point Eveline gave her a long gold chain.

  In September Edith stayed in Henley in Oxfordshire where her sister Lilian, now married, lived with her husband William Longworth Wainwright. He was a surgeon at St. Thomas’ Hospital and they had met when she trained as a nurse there. His father was the hospital treasurer. Another surgeon, a Mr. Wallace, visited and spoke flatteringly of nurses trained at the London: “Some from other places suffered much in comparison,” Edith wrote to Eva Lückes: “I was asked to account for the difference and was very glad to have the opportunity of telling them of your lectures and personal influence and of the tone prevailing at our hospital …”

  Back in Swardeston after a six-month gap she looked hard for another job as a matron, or superintendent, with a salary of no less than £60 or £70 a year. Her premium for the Royal Nurses Pension was £30 a year. She applied to be matron at the Leeds Workpeople’s Convalescent Home, but though her testimonials from Miss Inglis at the St. Pancras and Dr. Froggett, the medical superintendent of the Shoreditch Infirmary, were paeans of praise, she did not get the job.

  In September she was offered a temporary post as a “Queen’s District Nurse in the Sick Poor Nursing Branch of the Manchester and Salford Sick Poor and Private Nursing Institution.” (The Victorians were not given to subtlety when it came to describing provision for those with no money.) There was a great deal of poverty in Manchester. The Institution was financed with public money at the time of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887, and involved free home visits by nurses. Edith Cavell’s appointment was supposed to be for six weeks only, but then the matron, Miss Hall, became seriously ill which meant she would be off work for several months. The Manchester Committee asked Edith Cavell to take charge. “The Matronship is in my hands for the time being,” she wrote to Eva Lückes on March 12, 1907. “I feel it rather a heavy responsibility as I know so very little of the Queen’s work or the etiquette of this branch of the work. I feel I must try to fill the gap to the best of my ability.” As well as not knowing quite what to do, her branch of the Institution was understaffed. She asked Eva Lückes to send any trained nurses willing to fill a three-month post for a pro rata salary of £30 a year.

  She supervised the nurses, assigned cases to them, learned how to deal with mining accidents and illnesses related to mining, sorted the administrative work and the budget for the Home. There was more administration than in her work in the large infirmaries but she was left in no doubt that this was a temporary job. The committee made it clear that Miss Hall would return in July to resume her role as matron.

  So Edith Cavell was again on the watch for suitable work. She was forty-one, and though each new appointment widened her experience and was a challenge, it was dispiriting time after time to apply for jobs she did not get. She had experience in most aspects of nursing, but the senior posts were hugely sought after, her reserve and age meant she was often overlooked, and no one spoke up for her in a particularly ebullient way.

  But then in May an offer came from Brussels. She was asked by Brussels’ leading surgeon, Dr. Antoine Depage, if she would become matron of the first training school for nurses to be set up there, to be opened in October. Depage was impressed by the English model of secular trained nurses, as described by Florence Nightingale. He wanted to work with such nurses. They were not to be found in Belgium. He was an innovator and reformer, and wanted, as matron of his pioneering School, an English nurse, with fluent French, familiar with the Belgian way of life, but who had trained at a leading London hospital. Mme. Graux, mother-in-law of Marguerite François—to whom Edith Cavell had been governess twelve years previously, was President of the Ladies’ Committee which was helping him set up the School. On the recommendation of the François family and with communication facilitated by Mme. Graux, Dr. Depage asked Edith Cavell to agree to take on the challenge and become the matron.

  She hesitated. It would be a huge task. Nursing and medical standards and provision, structures of care, the application of research, had all advanced and were advancing in England in a systematic way. To nurse in Belgium would be like going back in time. “Until the present they have only had nuns to nurse the sick and they are sometimes dirty and always ignorant,” she wrote. She would be unsupported and separated from friends, colleagues, and family. And yet this was perhaps truly the challenge for which she had been waiting and to which she was ideally suited. It combined her wide nursing expertise, her pioneering zeal, her desire to make a real contribution, her ambition to be a matron, her love of travel, her knowledge of French.

  And so she said yes to Dr. Depage. “My work here is over,” she wrote to Eva Lückes in June 1907. “I am going over to Brussels in August to get everything in readiness.”

  PART THREE

  16

  SETTING UP

  École Belge D’Infirmières Diplomées

  Bruxelles

  19th September 1907

  Dear Matron,

  Will it weary you very much if I give you a little account of the new School which is about to be opened here? I arrived two days ago and found the four houses which have been made to communicate only partly finished and in much confusion—the Committee absent on holiday except the secretary and the president, who returned for a day or two to welcome me—no servants—only a porteress and nothing furnished but my sitting room, and we have to open on October the 1st!

  Four probationers are engaged already—all well educated and full of enthusiasm—I shall see them next week—and one patient has asked to come! There are many difficulties in the way—the Committee think night nurses are not necessary and that if a nurse sleeps on the same floor with the patients that is sufficient; just now there is no one to refer to and no money and many necessaries are wanting. Everyone is very keen but very indefinite, they make notes on paper of the things needed and there it ends—but I hope to pull through by and bye and have a model training school. The nurses sign on for five years, three for training and two to be passed in private or institution nursing in the service of the School—at the end of that time they will receive their diploma and be able to leave.

  There are to be numerous lectures and in the 2nd year the nurses will go to the Surgical Institute opposite for their surgical training (here we shall have only medical work). For this Institute, which belongs to the 1st Surgeon in Belgium, M. Depage, a Matron is wanted and he wishes me to write and ask you if you could send him one. It is a fine new building with two beautiful theatres and eleven rooms for patients thoroughly adapted and designed by him to fit the needs of modern surgery. He wants a nurse who will be able to arrange all his operations and be present to assist him—who will act as Matron, train the nurses and keep certain books. He will give her £50 a year and I think it will be an excellent post—she must speak French fairly well of course. Also he wants three trained nurses to work under him—he offers only £24 the 1st year and they need not have very much knowledge of French. The Institute opens in November. Perhaps from the point of view of money it does not seem worth having but I do think it is work that greatly needs doing and that those who come out should do so with the object of helping on this new movement which if started on the right lines should be of the greatest possible benefit to this country. It is pioneer work here and needs much enthusiasm and courage and intelligence—and as there are many still looking askance at it, it will require great tact also.

  M. Depage desires that there should exist a cordial feeling and intercourse between these two Institutions and that I should be regarded as the Head Matron and that other branches should be opened in course of time to which my probationers should go to learn fever work, midwifery etc. Thus we might eventually have a colony of English women here as heads of the branches if we who come first can make a success of it.

  I shall be glad to hear from you soon, if possible, as M. Depage is naturally anxious to be settled with a Matron and we fee
l sure you will know just the woman we want. They were all pleased here to know I had been trained under you as your fame has spread to Belgium and your books are sold in their shops. I have a copy in French and shall use it as the textbook for the 1st year.

  Hoping you are very well dear Matron and have enjoyed your annual holiday,

  I remain,

  Yours affectionately,

  Edith Cavell

  The Training School for Nurses at 143–149 rue de la Culture, Brussels

  Edith Cavell had arrived in Brussels with high hopes. The “difficulties in the way” might have seemed insurmountable to someone less determined. She viewed herself as an ambassador for best English practice and wanted no less than to pioneer a reformation in Belgian nursing.

  The premises for the new School were hardly ideal. M. Depage had acquired four domestic terraced houses, numbers 143, 145, 147 and 149, in rue de la Culture8 in the leafy suburb of Ixelles, 2.5 kilometers south of the city center. These had been roughly adapted and renovated with interconnecting doors cut through at ground floor and basement levels. Edith Cavell’s office, sitting room and bedroom were on the ground floor of 143 with rooms for the probationer nurses on the floors above. Next door at 145 were the nurses’ sitting room and dining room on the ground floor, rooms for patients on the floor above, and at the top of the house an operating theater and sterilizing room. The other two houses were equipped as patients’ bedrooms, a waiting room and a consulting room for doctors.