Although women who had served in Salonika – in whatever capacity – were eligible to join the SRA from the very start, they didn’t gain their own specific section in The Mosquito until September 1931 (issue 15), with Eileen Moore’s ‘Woman’s Page’. Later, this was expanded to ‘Women’s Pages’ and continued for the rest of The Mosquito’s long existence. So it was only right and proper that the final issue in May 1969 – a longer, glossier souvenir album, entitled Salonika Memories 1915-1919 – included it’s own ‘Women’s Pages’. By now this was edited by Miss N. M. Simcox. In her final editorial, she had this to say:
Though this is the end of Women’s Pages, I do hope I shall hear from many of you from time to time. It has been a difficult task for me taking over from Miss Aileen Moore, who was a born writer, but I have kept my promise to her of 14 year ago.
There then follows an inevitable list of members who had died, a reason for the winding-up of the SRA, some memories from the campaign and then a generous tribute to the Scottish Women’s Hospitals who were in Serbia, long before the BSF was a twinkle in anyone’s eye!
In this final issue of our magazine we would like to pay a special tribute to the Scottish Women’s Hospitals who did early pioneer work with the Serbian Army under most difficult conditions. But the greatest hardship fell to the Unit which, overtaken by Bulgar guns, had to abandon tents and instruments, and trekked 390 miles, mostly on foot, through mountain fastnesses of Montenegro and over the Albanian Alps and the Adriatic coast. They tramped for seven days through a blizzard with only bread for food, sleeping in barns, huts and on earth and cobbles. Soles of boots were tied on with rags.
This episode was captured in an atmospheric – if probably sanitised – illustration in The Great War: the Standard History of the All-Europe Conflict, Volume V, Chapter XCIX, page 422:
Scottish nurses retreating with the Serbian Army over a dangerous mountain road.
Salonika Campaign Society, 1915-1918 