Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  Edith Cavell kept her vision, her aspiration for excellence, and by hard graft made the project work. At the end of the year she wrote to tell her mentor that things were going fairly well. Her five probationers “should make good nurses in the end.” They had been taught anatomy, physiology, hygiene and medicine by Professor Héger, the elderly physician who headed the committee overseeing organization of the School, and by Dr. Le Boeuf, and she herself gave lectures on the art of nursing. She and they had looked after fifty-seven patients according to the principles of nursing set out at the London Hospital.

  The following year, 1909, twenty-three probationers signed on for the training course. The number of patients doubled and more doctors sent patients to Edith Cavell for medical and nursing care, and themselves wanted to work at the School. “Among the things that a nurse must learn,” wrote a doctor on the committee, “is that there is much that cannot be taught by a professor. Even constant practice at the bedside is not enough. Character has to be shaped. A sense of responsibility has to be inculcated. This is achieved by the intimate evening talks which our Directress has with all her pupils. It is quality rather than quantity in the production of nurses for which we will always aim.” Edith Cavell aimed for both. Two new Brussels schools, modeled on hers, were opened that year at the hospitals of Sainte-Camille and St. Jean.

  Her reputation spread. In the summer she attended the International Congress of Nurses in London as part of the Belgian delegation and gave a lecture on the School’s hopes and ambitions. In Brussels, too, she gave public lectures. The city council asked her to provide visiting nurses for all the children in the twelve state schools. She was asked to find nurses for provincial hospitals, private clinics, general practitioners, a tuberculosis hospital in the village of Buys-singham. Her abiding problem remained where to get them. Back home, when seeking work for herself, she had lamented that there were more applicants than posts to be filled. Now it was the reverse. She advertised in the Nursing Mirror, sent endless requests to Eva Lückes and even resorted to posters on walls: Young Girls Wanted, these read, in large red letters. She took such nurses as she could find, and gave them tuition until her own probationers qualified. An extra house was taken on as an additional nurses’ hostel in rue de la Culture.

  Within three years the dream of transformation became a reality. In 1910 a new hospital opened in the suburb of St. Gilles, half an hour’s walk from the School. Financed with government money, and with its upkeep paid for out of the rates, it provided medical care at the point of need. Depage was its leading surgeon and he and the committee asked Edith Cavell to provide its nursing staff and become its head matron. Her nurses took their second- and third-year training at the new hospital, rotating between wards. Dr. Pechere lectured them in pediatrics; Dr. Godart on diseases of the digestive tract; Dr. de Meyer in ophthalmology; Dr. Buys on diseases of ear, nose and throat and Dr. Weymersch in obstetrics. At the end of their third year these highly trained nurses were sent to the clinics, schools, hospitals and private homes in Edith Cavell’s care.

  Compared to the School and the Berkendael Surgical Institute in rue de la Culture, the St. Gilles hospital was a model of modernity. It was all on one floor, light and airy, with sliding windows, long wide corridors and well-kept gardens. It had 250 beds, a maternity ward, an isolation block, a large outpatients’ unit, a children’s ward with cots, bright colors and toys. There was a huge linen room, a kitchen with a gas geyser, a sluice room with a bath. For the nurses who transferred there from the cramped dark rooms and steep stairs of rue de la Culture, it eased their work and raised their morale. Maids polished the floors with mechanical polishers. Edith Cavell appointed a Miss Mann as acting matron, visited every day herself, and gave particular attention to the children’s wards which were decorated in bright colors.

  That same year she was on the editorial board for the launching of L’Infi rmière, which became Belgium’s professional journal for nurses, equivalent to England’s Nursing Mirror. She called her introductory article “Le Devoir d’une Infirmière”: the duty of a nurse—toward her patients, their family and friends, toward the doctors, herself and her School. In accord with Florence Nightingale and Eva Lückes was the central idea that no effort was too great for patients in a nurse’s care.

  After their probationary year, nurses were sent by Edith Cavell to work on the wards at St. Gilles and attend lectures there, or to work in the other hospitals she staffed. Jacqueline van Til, a Belgian probationer, joined the School the year the St. Gilles hospital opened:

  When I came in 1910 she was already at the head of several hospitals in Brussels, together with the Tuberculosis Hospital at Buyssingham, a little village in Wallonie, Belgium. We nurses were all obliged to be trained in different hospitals because the School was too small. For the first year we were under Matron’s special care and received lectures from the physicians. During our second we went to the different hospitals which she staffed. There were few Belgian girls in the clinic … Some came from Germany, some from France, some from England. But we all had to speak French on duty. In 1910 we numbered sixty … Miss Cavell never objected to mixed nationalities, but she required obedience to her orders. Her remarks were often severe and laconic and we never dared to be late for meals … Three times a day she would walk to the various places where she sent nurses, and every night we were required to attend a class in her room. She was indefatigable in her teaching and never spared herself anything that demanded hard work … We would often be called to her office to be admonished for laughing too loud or to be warned to be more careful about our manners.

  18

  FAMILY LIFE

  At heart Edith Cavell was not a martinet. She was, though, a Victorian, with a frosty way of enforcing discipline and rules. This came partly from her orthodox upbringing, partly from working and living in a closed female society, but mostly from her determination to train good nurses and make the School succeed. Her probationers were of disparate nationality—Dutch, English, German, Russian, Belgian. They were also of a different generation. Queen Victoria had died in 1901. (Kaiser Wilhelm II, her grandson, had been at her bedside.) Throughout Europe times were more free. The probationer nurses were separated from their families and would have liked some fun. “The young girls are brought up with no idea of duty and are selfish and too fond of pleasure,” Edith Cavell complained to Eva Lückes.

  She imposed the same rules of chastity as at the London Hospital: no married nurses, no going out with the doctors or medical students, lights out and the front door locked by ten. There was no mention of lesbian love: “morbid relationship” as Eva Lückes called it.

  She meted out reprimands for a dusty ward, a badly made bed, talking in corridors, lateness at meals, a cap askew. She wanted every detail of compliant practice observed. Only the best was good enough, and the best meant discipline and constant vigilance. But she was mindful too of the need for love in the School into which she had moved. The poor and hungry called at the door knowing they would be given food and money. Payment terms were arranged for patients who had difficulty with the fees. At Christmas she always arranged a party for the children in her care.

  The School was her home and she created an oddball family there. One day in 1910 a dog showed up at the garden door in need of a meal. He was gray on his back with fawn-colored legs and a foxy tail. He had German shepherd and other species in him. Edith Cavell fed him, so he did not go away. Fiercely protective of her, he was always with her and barked and snapped at anyone who came too near. She called him Jack, walked the streets of Brussels with him, and cared for him according to the principles she had written out some fifteen years back for the François children on how to treat a dog. Mindful of her mugging at King’s Cross on a dark wet night in 1901, she felt protected by him. He was top dog and walked ahead, but when he heard approaching footsteps would go to her side until the person had passed by.

  The nurses were chary of him. He viewed them as sheep to be rounded u
p. He sat at Edith Cavell’s feet at mealtimes. When the meal was over the nurses bowed to her then filed out. Jack liked to herd them up the stairs and nipped their ankles if they did not hurry or seemed to veer in the wrong direction. They came to dread it, what with the rule about not talking in the hallways.

  Edith Cavell with Jack and Don, two strays who arrived at the School in 1910. Don, left, disappeared in 1911

  Jack landed lucky when he chanced on Edith Cavell’s care. It was the manner of her care: to find out what a creature needed in order to function well and to provide it if she could. Another dog, Don, came to the door at about the same time as Jack. He was given a welcome and a home, but he disappeared in 1911 amid a rumor he had been stolen.

  Edith Cavell’s personal rooms at the School were small and sparsely furnished. She had an austere view of what constituted enough, in material terms. An inventory of her things showed that by middle age she had not acquired much: an armchair, a walnut rocking chair, a tea set, family photographs, a few ornaments, a hundred books, a camera, a drawing block and paints, a silk tablecloth, a rose linen cushion, a muff, a fur, a clock, a few bits of jewelry, four vases, a few clothes, a bathing dress … Such were her possessions. She ate modestly and seemed not to concentrate on her food. “Maybe that was why the food was always so awful,” Nurse Moore said.

  She was abstemious and self-denying and maintained, as religious people do, a dialogue with God: “Give me instead of all the comforts of the world, the most sweet unction of Thy Spirit,” was one of the exhortations highlighted by her in Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. And yet she created an unorthodox worldly family in Brussels. José, a young Rumanian, the porter and handyman, became a loyal member of her household. He lit the fires, helped carry surgery patients up and down the stairs and willingly did whatever she asked of him.

  In 1911 Edith Cavell acquired a god-daughter. The chaplain at the Church of the Resurrection where she worshipped, the Reverend Philip Stocks, contacted her about a thirteen-year-old English girl, Pauline Randall, who had run away from her father—a showman with a traveling circus. She and her younger sister had no memory of their mother. A parishioner of the vicar, a Miss Butcher, had asked him to help. Edith Cavell gave Pauline a room at the School, became her godmother, arranged her education, put money into an account for her, gave her work as her personal maid and took her with her on summer holidays to the seaside in Norfolk. Some of the nurses were resentful and thought Pauline used her closeness to the matron to criticize them.

  Grace Jemmett was another of her surrogate daughters. She arrived to live at the School early in 1909, sent out by Edith Cavell’s brother-in-law, Dr. Longworth Wainwright. The youngest of four children, she had become addicted to morphine after an illness. There was friction with her family, particularly her mother. Dr. Wainwright advised a complete break. He knew the School was in constant need of money and thought that, as the Jemmetts were bankers and landed gentry, the monthly fee for Grace’s care and lodging would be useful income. Grace’s grandfather, George Elwick Jemmett, was lord of the manor in Ashford. In 1856 he had leased a field so the Ashford Cattle Market could be founded. It became the biggest cattle market in England.

  Grace took up long-term residency at the School. She had bouts of debilitating depression when she stayed in bed for weeks on end. She called Edith Cavell mother and she too went on holidays to England with her. Edith Cavell accepted that her illness responded to management, not cure, controlled her morphine intake and cigarette smoking, was patient with her, and mediated with her unsympathetic family. She felt the Jemmetts did not care for Grace and that their indifference contributed to her problems.

  Sister Wilkins, who worked at the School with Edith Cavell from 1912–15

  It was a relationship that went beyond the boundaries of ordinary patient care. But, as with Pauline, Grace’s place in the School was problematic. She chain-smoked, had extreme mood swings and would search for the morphine supply Edith Cavell hid from her.

  Sister Wilkins became another abiding member of this family. She replied to one of Edith Cavell’s frequently placed advertisements for nurses. It was in the Nursing Mirror in the summer of 1912 and asked for a ward sister who could speak French. “I was a Sister at the Royal Seamen’s Hospital Cardiff,” Elisabeth Wilkins wrote in an unpublished memoir. “There, we naturally got to know a smattering of many languages. I was specially interested in French and was a member of the Anglo-French Society.”

  Edith Cavell offered her the job without interview, then wrote to her from West Runton, near Cromer in Norfolk, where she was on holiday with Grace:

  My dear Sister,

  I am very pleased that you will be able to take up your duties soon. I shall not be in Brussels myself until Wednesday August 7th, but the Sister in charge during my absence will put you in the way of things. The work is good, there is plenty of variety and we have some of the best doctors for whom to work. I hope you will be very happy with us and take a special interest in training the probationers.

  Yours very truly

  E. Cavell

  Sister Wilkins arrived in Brussels on a Sunday and all seemed strange: “even the thermometers different.” She was twenty-nine. She was put in charge of all the patients in the third house in rue de la Culture, number 147. At that time the house was divided into two wards of five beds, six private rooms, her sitting room and an outpatients’ surgery. Her patients were a mix of surgical, medical and maternity cases, works accidents and children. She also had five probationer nurses to teach and a senior nurse to supervise for night duty.

  Her first impression of the matron was of a slightly built woman with dark hair turning gray, rather withdrawn, uninterested in superficial friendships but thoughtful, pleasant and sympathetic to all her patients. She became Edith Cavell’s deputy in work, her ally and friend, and so devoted to her and the School that she abandoned her plan to travel the world nursing in different countries.

  For Edith Cavell nursing was her world; there was no cut-off between work and private life. She was, at center, reserved and solitary, but to or for someone she wrote lines of doggerel, found among her papers after her death, that suggested a kind of desire:

  Storms may gather, O love, my love,

  But here shall thy shelter be

  And in my arms, my dear, my dear

  The sun shall come back to thee.

  The winter of age, O love, my love,

  For us no shade shall bring

  But in thine eyes divine, my dear, my dear

  For me, ’twill always be spring.

  Perhaps it was just the gush in which Victorian maiden ladies expressed loving friendship for each other, but it held a whisper of romance.

  If her nurses were ill, she did all she could for them. Jacqueline van Til in a memoir recalled being nursed personally by Edith Cavell who then arranged for her to convalesce at her sister Lilian’s home, Upton Lodge in Henley-on-Thames. There, Jacqueline met her mother and her sister Florence, who was matron of Withernsea Convalescent Hospital. Florence Cavell too was fearless and devoted, strict but kind. She was matron there until she was eighty, liked cliff walks and gardening, kept a dog and cats.

  Nor was Edith Cavell unremittingly stern. “Did the patient suffer?” she asked Nurse Buck who complained when a drunk patient lunged at her and forced her to escape through a ground-floor window. “A nurse’s duty is to save life, not to take it,” she told Nurse van de Velde as she restrained her from stamping on a spider on the lecture room floor. If she chanced on a clandestine night-duty party for a birthday or as a leaving tribute, she let it pass, or made some mildly caustic comment about bringing a touch of home to the duty room. She seldom fired a nurse. She was not double-edged like Eva Lückes. She inspired devotion in patients and respect from the doctors. Nurse Moore heard a doctor say that Edith Cavell’s nurses were as knowledgeable as his medical students.

  At her evening lectures she showed another side of her character from the fo
rmidable matron who was a stickler for rules. In them she spoke of her belief in the sanctity of life, of the vocation of doing good, and of how devotion brought its own reward. Devotion, loyalty, steadiness and good management were the qualities she said a good nurse needed. The goals of nursing, she told her probationers, were to safeguard life, attend the wounded, allay suffering, help the doctors.

  The content of her lectures ranged wide. She could draw well and illustrated many of them. She taught about the history of nursing, the “renaissance” in English nursing, the duties of the nurse, the qualities of character needed, the various paths of opportunity: among the sick in the poorest quarters, as a “missionary” of hygiene, as an academic, as a hospital superintendent.

  She taught about the line of communication from patient to doctor; of the need for attention to the smallest detail and for constant vigilance; of crucial points to note in each type of illness. On practical matters she told her students how to administer drugs, give baths and wash patients, give injections, use probes, apply leeches and the cupping glass, how to clean the patient’s room, make a bed, ventilate and disinfect a room. Every aspect of care, she taught, should be imbued with compassion. She told of how she tried to get the committee to finance supplies of talcum powder and methylated spirits to prevent bedsores. “Madame,” one of the committee members told her, “a bedsore is always a complication of a long illness like typhoid.” Not so, she told her nurses. It was a sign of neglectful nursing. They should rub the backs, heels and elbows of patients enduring long spells in bed.