Part 4
Dr. Stoney was head of the electrical department in the New Hospital for Women, London. Early in the war she went to Antwerp in Mrs. St. Clair Stobart’s unit as head of the medical staff and in charge of the X-ray department. After the fall of Antwerp, when the hospital staff made their escape in London motor-buses only twenty minutes before the bridge of boats was blown up, the unit was re-established in a hospital at Cherbourg under the French Croix Rouge. The X-ray work was of course invaluable, and in giving an account of it Dr. Stoney wrote:
“Most of our cases were septic fractures, for nearly all were septic by the time they reached us, four to eight days generally after being wounded, and most of the fractures were badly comminuted as well. The X-rays were much in request to show the exact condition of the part and the position of the fragments. In all cases the pieces of the shell had to be accurately located, and were then as a rule easily extracted.”
With constant practice it became possible for Dr. Stoney to tell by X-rays which were the dead pieces of bone in a comminuted fracture, for observation showed that they threw a denser shadow than living bone. “One piece of dead bone three inches long was diagnosed first by X-rays,” Dr. Stoney reports, “and the early removal of these pieces greatly hastens recovery.”
When the hospital was inspected by the consulting surgeon for the district, his first inclination was to regard a hospital staffed by women as hardly worthy of inspection; but after going through the wards he wrote:
“L’hôpital de Tourlaville est très bien organisé, les malades sont très bien soignés, et les chirurgiennes sont de valeur égale aux chirurgiens les meilleurs.”
When the British army took over the northern part of the line in France, hospital arrangements were altered. The need for the Cherbourg hospital was over, as all British movable cases were taken to England; and therefore in the spring of 1915 the hospital was closed. Dr. Stoney returned to England, and offered her services to the War Office, and in April, 1915, she was asked to take over the X-ray department in the Fulham Military Hospital, a hospital of over 1000 beds, where she is still working.
Dr. Stoney took up this work about a fortnight before the opening of the Endell Street Hospital under Dr. Garrett Anderson; she is therefore the first woman doctor to work under the War Office in England. Dr. Stoney not only undertakes the photographic branch of the X-ray work, but she diagnoses and reports on the cases from the photographs. Another branch of her work is to use X-rays actually during operations for those surgeons who prefer to operate in this way. She also started a small department for X-ray treatment, which has proved beneficial in certain nerve and goitre cases.
Dr. Stoney recently reported that considerably over 5000 cases had passed through her hands since she came to this hospital. She has a staff of V.A.D. assistants, two of whom she has trained in the work sufficiently to enable them to take over X-ray installations. One is now working in Rumania, and the other in London. Dr. Stoney’s splendid work has completely overcome any prejudice which may have attached to her as a woman when she first took up her post. Although she is the only woman doctor in the hospital, she works on an equal footing with the men, except that she holds no military rank.
Miss Edith Stoney is a woman of great university distinction, having been wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge. She was an Associate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Lecturer in Physics to the London University. Astronomy is another subject on which she has lectured, and while at Newnham College she had charge of the telescope. She has also done valuable original work in relation to searchlights.
At the beginning of the war Miss Stoney joined the committee of the Women’s Imperial Service League, and helped in the organisation of the hospital unit with which her sister went to Antwerp, fitting up the portable X-ray apparatus, which was subsequently of such great service. After the transfer of the hospital to Cherbourg she continued to assist in the organisation of its supplies. Her real war work, however, may be said to have begun when she retired from her work as Lecturer in Physics in the spring of 1915 and joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.
Miss Stoney first took up work at the tent hospital at Troyes, where she put up and ran the X-ray department, giving invaluable assistance to the surgeons by the accurate localisation of foreign bodies in wounds. The head surgeon, Dr. Louise M’Ilroy, stated that she never failed to find a projectile searched for. This was indeed a tribute to the accurate localisation in the X-ray department. Another valuable branch of Miss Stoney’s work was the taking of stereoscopic skiagrams. Miss Stoney took one of the very early skiagrams of gas bubbles in the tissues, due to gas gangrene, a development which has since come into great prominence.
In the autumn of 1915 Miss Stoney accompanied the hospital unit from Troyes when it was ordered to Serbia by the French authorities. Before leaving for Serbia she had the foresight to equip herself in Paris with a portable engine, as she was determined that her department should be efficient. On the committee refusing to sanction the expense, she bought it herself. Miss Stoney’s action was soon justified, for when the hospital was installed at Gevgheli in Serbia there was no electric supply. Thanks to her engine, not only was this the only British hospital able to work X-rays, but incidentally, as a by-product of the X-ray department, Miss Stoney lighted the entire hospital with electricity. The need of much electric light in the dark winter days meant hard work for Miss Stoney, and the following extract from a letter conjures up a picture of work in no easy conditions:
“The electric light was needed in the pharmacy until the doctors had finished, and it was often late before I could stop the little engine and pack it up warm for the night.... When I creaked up the ladders in stockinged feet to the loft where fifty-four of us slept, there could be no thought of washing, with ice already in the jug; it was often an inch and a half thick by morning. Instead of undressing, one piled on every scrap of extra clothes one had, and put one’s waterproof under the mattress to stop the draught up through it.”
When the French retreated from Gevgheli, a site was found for the hospital just outside Salonika, on a bit of ill-drained, marshy ground. There again the engine proved invaluable. From January, 1916, onwards Miss Stoney has run the X-ray department, doing, besides her own work, many radiograms for British and French doctors from other hospitals, who referred their cases to her for examination.
At Salonika Miss Stoney again lit the hospital with electric light. For several months she was obliged to attend to the engine entirely alone, owing to the illness of the only mechanic. She further set up treatment by high frequency for the patients, and radiant heat baths with vibratory massage. Having previously studied the Zander treatment, Miss Stoney was able to instal an apparatus, which, though she describes it as rough, was very successful in treating stiff joints requiring movement. She also used ionisation for healing wounds with beneficial results.
In all these ways Miss Stoney has been able to bring her knowledge of physics to the service of the wounded. She has been a pioneer in her work in this physical department which she has originated and developed at Salonika. “It is easy to work X-rays,” she writes, “when someone else has installed them; but in a moving hospital, in difficult circumstances, physics is a help in getting the apparatus up and working well. We put in order the X-ray outfits of two British hospital ships calling at Salonika. The doctors and mechanics on board had not just the needed physics, but could work the apparatus perfectly well when it was installed.”
The Serbian Government has decorated Miss Stoney with the Order of St. Sava in recognition of her services. But the reward of her fine work lies in the gratitude of the scores of her patients who owe their renewed health largely to her indomitable energy, and the wonderful ingenuity and resource with which in conditions of abnormal difficulty she has brought so many projects to a successful and practical issue. Writing of her work lately, Miss Stoney says: “There is always sadness, but there is endless variety and interest in the life, and one trusts that the great privilege of easing a drop in the vast ocean of pain, so bravely borne, may have been ours.”
XI
THE BARONESS DE T’SERCLAES AND MISS MAIRI CHISHOLM
Of all the splendid stories of the war there is none that catches the imagination more than that of the work of Baroness de T’Serclaes (Mrs. Knocker, as she was in the early days of the war) and Miss Mairi Chisholm. It is an unparalleled achievement that these two young women should have been living actually up in the firing line ever since the beginning of the war, tending and caring for the Belgian soldiers, dressing and nursing the wounded, and helping the men in the trenches by taking food and hot drinks to them day by day even at the very outposts.
Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm (who was then only eighteen) first went to Belgium in September, 1914, as members of Dr. Munro’s Ambulance Corps, and started ambulance work in Ghent and Furnes. From the first their skill and courage were put to the highest test, and it would be hard to imagine greater bravery and devotion than they showed, for instance, in the fierce fighting at Dixmude in October, 1914. Mrs. Knocker, who is an expert motor-driver, drove an ambulance car to and fro on the road between Dixmude and Furnes under such heavy shell fire that men broke down and were unable to continue driving under the strain of the terrible ordeal. On one occasion the ambulance was required to take some German prisoners as passengers, and, with no other guard but Miss Chisholm, Mrs. Knocker drove her convoy along the shell-torn road. “I think it was the proudest moment of my life,” she wrote in her diary.
But the work for which their names will live began in November, 1914, when the two severed their connection with the Ambulance Corps and started to work together in a little cellar in the ruined village of Pervyse. Mrs. Knocker was led to take this step by her conviction, shared by the Belgian doctors, of the necessity of establishing an advanced dressing-post where the severely wounded men might have time to recover from shock before enduring the jolting journey to hospital, which had already proved fatal to many.
Thus it was that these women--the eldest little more than a girl--took up their work. Through all these long months up to the present day they have been living the lives of the soldiers themselves--their quarters for the most part a tiny cellar, again and again under shell fire, sometimes suffering fierce bombardments, not taking off their clothes literally for weeks on end, eating anything they could get, and enduring the trials of cold, dirt, exhaustion, and danger with a gaiety and a courage which have been at once an inspiration and a source of astonishment to those who have been privileged to see them at Pervyse. When the cellar was demolished they moved to another tumble-down cottage, only to be shelled out twice more. But wherever they established themselves it became “home” to the soldiers--their presence bringing a ray of comfort and brightness into the stern routine of life in the trenches. When in March, 1915, a decree was passed by the commanders of the Allied armies in Paris forbidding the presence of any women in the firing line, at the request of the Belgian authorities an exception was made for these two, mentioned by name, who were then officially attached to the Third Division of the Belgian army in the field.
No honour in the war has been better earned than the decoration which King Albert bestowed on each of them, when he appointed them Chevaliers of the Order of Leopold. As if to crown their wonderful story, romance came to one of them in the midst of that shot-torn village. The young widow, Mrs. Knocker, recently became the wife of a Belgian officer, Baron Harold de T’Serclaes.
XII
LADY MARY HAMILTON, MISS STELLA DRUMMOND, AND THE SKILLED WOMEN MUNITION WORKERS
It is admitted on all sides that the output of munitions achieved by Great Britain since the spring of 1915 has been little less than miraculous, and this result is all the more astonishing when it is recalled that at least 25 per cent. of the men who were engaged in the chemical and engineering trades at the outbreak of hostilities have joined the Army. It was thus essential not only to fill the gaps, but also to augment the supply of available labour, in answer to the increased demand. The women of the Empire at once responded to the appeal for their help. A new and unsuspected reservoir of labour was thus discovered, without which, in the words of Mr. F. G. Kellaway, M.P. (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Munitions), “the Germans would by now have won the war.” The extent of the help rendered by women may perhaps be best realised by the fact that there are over 700,000 women engaged in munition work, employed on processes which cover practically the whole engineering and chemical trades. Under the general term “munition work” are included varied forms of work, both skilled and unskilled, undertaken by women, from the heavy manual labour of loading and unloading trucks of ammunition, to the most intricate and delicate of engineering and electrical operations. To mention only a few of these highly skilled operations, women are building a great part of one of the best high-speed engines in the country, each woman setting her own tools, work which requires considerable technical skill. In the construction of chassis for heavy army lorries and in marine-engine building women are undertaking more and more responsible work. In the delicate work of constructing aero-engines they are turning on centre lathes to a half of a thousandth of an inch. Women are boring and rifling the barrel of the service rifle: they undertake the hydraulic riveting of boilers: they work the electric overhead travelling cranes for moving the enormous boilers of our men-of-war: they are employed extensively on turbine work. “So wide is the scope of women’s capabilities,” Mr. Kellaway stated recently, “that a prominent engineer has expressed his conviction that, given two more years of war, he would undertake to build a battleship from keel to aerial in all its complex detail, entirely by women’s labour.” And again: “To watch young girls hard at work for twelve hours a day, working on shells, lubricating bullets, handling cordite, making, inspecting, and gauging fuses, examining work where the thousandth part of an inch is a vital matter running their machines deftly and easily, and spending their days in the danger buildings among explosives with as little fuss as if they were knitting socks, brings a realisation of that which lies behind the list of operations on which women are engaged to-day.”
Women’s skill on complicated processes has been acquired with a rapidity which has caused astonishment to experts. Before the war an apprenticeship of five or six years was considered necessary amongst Trades Unions for gaining mastery of some of the processes which women have learnt in a few months or even weeks. In measuring their achievement, however, it must never be forgotten what a debt is owed to British organised labour, which surrendered up in the hour of national crisis many of the legal rights and privileges established only after years of effort and controversy.
The women munition workers of to-day have come from all ranks of society, from every corner of the Empire, many of them entirely unaccustomed to industrial life or manual work, and many unacquainted even with life in England. An incident in one munitions works may be recalled as typical of the rest. Working side by side recently on the machines in a certain factory were a soldier’s wife from a city tenement, a vigorous daughter of the Empire from a lonely Rhodesian farm, a graduate from Girton, and a scion of one of the old aristocratic families of England. War has indeed proved a powerful solvent of social barriers, and one of the distinctive features of factory life in munition areas is the excellent leadership of the educated women who have entered the works. Typical of this class of munition workers are Lady Mary Hamilton, daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, and Miss Stella Drummond, daughter of General Drummond. These two friends, girls in years but soldiers in spirit, determined in the early stages of the war to serve their country by making munitions. Accordingly they applied for work as ordinary “hands” in a munition factory, and for some six months were employed on repetition work in a shell factory. Lady Mary Hamilton has stated that she and Miss Drummond mastered the processes on which they were engaged in a few weeks, but admitted that a victory over the prejudices of the factory employees, inclined to resent the introduction of “swells,” was a lengthier task. Soon the skill of the two friends attracted the attention of those in authority, and they were selected for training in more advanced work. They were admitted into the factory school for skilled work, and after five weeks of this training they proceeded to the Government school at Brixton, London. There they followed a nine weeks’ course in such advanced work as tool-making and tool-setting--tasks which would not have been considered possible for women workers in pre-war days.
After successfully completing their training, Lady Mary Hamilton and Miss Drummond were allocated to a factory, where they were eventually placed in charge of eight machines each--Wells Turret Capstan lathes. They were then entirely responsible for the output of their machines, which involved responsibility for the workers employed on them. In this “shop” both boys and girls were employed, and the new charge-hands or tool-setters had to “make good” with the mixed staff. They were entirely successful, not only in the setting of the five or six requisite tools in each machine and in the making and grinding of their own tools, but in producing an output which was accurate to within a 200th part of a millimetre. So popular were they as leaders of their staff, that when Lady Mary Hamilton recently resigned her post before her marriage, and Miss Drummond’s services were transferred to welfare supervision under the Ministry of Munitions, the regret expressed by the employees showed that they were losing comrades as well as officers.
There are also countless instances of uneducated women who have found themselves equal to technical work of considerable responsibility. For example, in one factory a woman driver works a 900-h.p. Willans plant. She starts the engine herself if required, watches the voltmeter and regulates the governor accordingly, wipes the commutators and regulates the brushes. This woman was formerly a kitchen-maid, and had no technical experience whatever. Another working woman recently lost the first finger and thumb of her left hand, owing to a loaded gaigne jamming in the press. After an absence of six weeks she returned to work, and is to-day back on the same work and getting an even greater output than before. Public recognition is due to the great army of women munition workers for their courage and endurance, both in the way in which they are facing the dangers incidental to some of their occupations and the monotony entailed in the regular performance of others.
XIII
MRS. FURSE, G.B.E., R.R.C., LADY PERROTT, R.R.C., AND THE VOLUNTARY AID DETACHMENT
Throughout the war the services of the Joint Societies of the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John have covered a vast area of work for the sick and wounded.
One of the most vital branches of the work has been that of the great army of untrained or part-trained women, who have been supplementing the limited number of trained nurses in the hospitals at home and abroad. Sir Alfred Keogh, the Director General of the Army Medical Service, has explained the scope of their work when describing the organisation of the Territorial Army nursing system. He says: “It was necessary to arrange for the dilution of the nursing services by women who had received some special training, though of elementary character, to afford assistance to the more highly trained nurses. This had been foreseen, for at the time of the formation of the Territorial Army, the training of the civil population to this extent was taken in hand, and voluntary detachments of women in possession of elementary certificates, but receiving continuous training, were formed in the country. Thus at the outbreak of war there were some 60,000 women in England who had received this training.”
For a long period of years the St. John Ambulance Association, under the ancient order of St. John of Jerusalem, had already controlled a large organisation of ambulance and nursing divisions, and may claim to have originated the teaching of first aid, which has now become the basis of all Voluntary Aid Detachment training. When the scheme was started, detachments were formed throughout the country, in answer to Queen Alexandra’s appeal, by the British Red Cross Society, the great new organisation inaugurated by King Edward VII. in July, 1905, and also by the Order of St. John. Many of the old-established St. John Nursing Divisions enrolled at once as Voluntary Aid Detachments, their composition being similar. Shortly after the outbreak of war, the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St. John decided to amalgamate their organisation and finances for the period of the war.
The administration of the Voluntary Aid Detachments throughout the country is largely local. Each county has its own system under the central offices in London, and the work of the women, from the county presidents to the humblest workers, has been one of the proudest records of the war. Some Voluntary Aid Detachments have been mobilised in their entirety for service in the auxiliary military hospitals, many of which have been almost entirely staffed and financed by individual detachments. Others are posting their members separately for hospital work elsewhere.