The Society has received an enquiry about two sisters who served with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in the Balkans. If you can help with this, please either add a comment to this post or use the ‘Contact Us’ form.
The sisters are Margaret and Jessie Munro Kerr from Lenzie, near Glasgow. It is known that Margaret was captured during the retreat from Serbia and, indeed, lectured about her experiences on her return home and left a published diary; however, nothing is known about Jessie, other than that she worked in Salonika.
Any information you can provide will be much appreciated. You can read more about the SWH on this Wikipedia page, which lists Margaret.
A challenging query. I have checked the appendices and indexes of the books (obviously only a few of the many), that I have acquired regarding the SWH with no success so far. I’ll try to revisit a couple of chapters to see if I can find anymentions of them. Also I have sent a message to Natasha Stoyce, author of the article about them that was published in 2018 https://bit.ly/3Fflzp9 and am hoping that her related doctoral thesis will be published soon. In her article she mentions that Margaret Kerr’s diary was published, and I have struggled to find the details.
I’m grateful for a quick response from Natasha Stoyce. However the diary details are truly rare. M. H. Munro Kerr, Scottish Women’s Hospital Work in Serbia: Diary of M. H. Munro Kerr Member of Dr Alice Hutchison’s Unit (Glasgow: Alex Macdougall, 1917). Natasha’sthesis on the Scottish Women’s Hospitals will probably be made available via leicester University, sometime in 2022.
So far I have failed to trace the diary in Worldcat, Jisc, and the online search options for the British Library and the Bodleian. The copy that Natasha accessed was in the Glasgow Archives, some distance from my Portsmouth home.