With family members heading off to tropical climes, I was quick to share my ‘specialist knowledge’ of anti-mosquito precautions – based entirely on reading about the BSF – and shared this splendid photo with the travellers:
I’m not sure how impressed they were, but I thought it gave an excellent impression of the precautions to take. So I was especially pleased to see anti-mosquito face veils at a reasonable price in a well-known hiking and outdoors shop and promptly bought one for each member of the party. I have seen them in use, although this was in the UK and – I suspect – more to humour me than a serious indication of an intention to wear them in foreign parts.
Just think how chuffed members of the BSF would have been to have these – they even look great with a slouch hat …
(of course, in proper use the veil should be tucked in at the neck!)
Well, they are on their travels and I don’t like to ask if they’ve used them yet, but I will be looking out for traces of mosquito bites on their faces when they return!
If you are travelling this summer, I hope you manage to avoid mosquitoes and midges. If not, maybe you should invest in one of these veils as a practical tribute to the BSF!
The ‘Ninth Annual Memorial Service for Women in Foreign Medical Missions in the Great War’ takes place on Saturday 18th February 2023.
The event takes from 11:00 -14:30 at the Serbian Orthodox Church of St Sava 89 Lancaster Rd, London W11 1QQ with speakers Colonel Nick Ilic, the former British Defence Attaché in the Embassy in Belgrade, and Zvezdana Popovic.
11.00 – Memorial Service in The Serbian Orthodox Church of St Sava
13.00 -14.30 – Refreshments and Talk in the Bishop Nikolaj Community Centre
The occasion will also feature a talk about the legacy of Dr Elsie Inglis, Scottish Women’s Hospitals and women in other foreign medical missions in Serbia, Corfu, Vido and the Salonika Front after the death of Dr Inglis.
If you would like to attend, RSVP via: info@serbiancouncil.org.uk
According to one contemporary writer, Malta “…assumed the role of nurse, and her breakwaters seem like arms stretched out to receive her burden of suffering. Once the hospital ship has passed within their shelter the rolling ceases, and the wounded feel that they have reached a haven of rest.” So wrote the Rev. Albert MacKinnon in 1916 in “Malta: The Nurse of the Mediterranean” – an early reference to the soubriquet by which the island came to be known during the First World War.
As the war in France began to grind into stalemate, other fronts opened in the Dardenelles and Gallipoli, with disastrous consequences for the allied forces. The scale of casualties was unprecedented and required an urgent response,
“That Malta should become the home of one of the British Empire’s largest systems of war hospitals was not anticipated in the early months of the war. It was not until May 1915 that the first badly wounded casualties from the Gallipoli campaign started to pour into Malta. The first convoy of 600 patients arrived on May 4, followed by a further 400 a day later, and on May 6 another 600 cases were brought ashore. Before the end of May, upward of 4,000 casualties from the Gallipoli campaign had reached Malta…The end of May saw the number of hospital beds catering for the sick and injured rise to over 6,000 in 14 hospitals spread all over the island.” Source: Times of Malta
In Salonika, a hostile climate and serious illness – mainly malaria – were the principle cause of casualties. Malta again provided an immediate solution,
“After January 1916, the number of sick and wounded fell very considerably with the scaling down of the Gallipoli campaign, only to rise again with a vengeance in the summer of 1916, as the Salonika campaign proceeded. However, the number of hospital beds remained in the region of 25,000, and reached a maximum of 25,522 housed in 27 hospitals by April 1917. The number of sick patients, suffering mainly from “dysentery and enteric group of diseases”, always exceeded the number admitted with war wounds. With the end of the Gallipoli campaign and the start of the Salonika campaign in October 1915, this trend in admissions became even more marked as a result of a rush of malaria cases from Salonika. Up until April 30, 1917, Cottonera, a mixed hospital catering for both the sick and injured, received 2,867 sick but only 308 wounded.” Source: Times of Malta
Malta’s strategic location in the Mediterranean – and its history as a British Protectorate – made it an important naval base for the British and, together with its climate, also an important place of rest and healing. But it was also hundreds of miles from Salonika and by April 1917, increasing submarine attacks on hospital ships made it unsafe to continue evacuating casualties to Malta from Salonica. Five General Hospitals, Nos 61, 62, 63, 64 and 65 were therefore mobilized at Malta for duty in Salonica, arriving on 11 July 1917. Malta’s role as the ‘nurse of the Mediterranean’ had, effectively, ended. Source: MaltaRAMC
We all know that malaria was a terrible scourge of the BSF during the Macedonian campaign. It says something for the tricksy nature of the disease that it has taken over one hundred years for a reliable vaccine to be developed – and it still needs to be approved and manufactured:
Today, Redwings Adoption Star (Ret’d) Muffin celebrates his 34th birthday. Muffin has been an Honorary member of the SCS – with the special membership number ‘Salonika 4’ – since the centenary, so we send him very best wishes for his special day.
… is Sandham Memorial Chapel! That’s the opinion of Rachel Morley, Director of Friends of Friendless Churches. She was a guest of the podcast series, The Rest Is History, presented by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on 13 September. Rachel’s task was to list her top ten British churches, which is quite a task given that there are more than 16,000 in England alone!
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.
I was listening a while ago to an oral history on the Imperial War Museum’s site from an unnamed British stretcher bearer on the Struma Front. He may have been forgotten but he lives alongside more remembered company in the form of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and artist Stanley Spencer, both of whom served as stretcher-bearers in the campaign.
The Great War Stories: Luton’s Greatest has an account by Private Robinson who in Gallipoli, faced challenges that stretcher-bearers in Salonika would have found very similar, “People have no idea what difficulties and dangers have to be overcome in evacuating wounded. The hilly nature of the country does away with the idea of mechanical transport, and every case has to be carried to other hospitals on the beach on stretchers.”
Perhaps it’s because many conscientious objectors signed up for medical, rather than military service, that many accounts of the lives and work of stretcher-bearers have not survived. Maybe, but that’s just speculation on my part… However, one set of diaries has not only survived but been re-discovered by author Sara Woodall, great-niece of the author of the diaries.
Sara discovered her great-uncle’s diaries while at home in Cambridge and was astounded to find both written accounts and accomplished illustrations. The author of these diaries was Bernard Eyre Walker, a stretcher-bearer for the British Expeditionary Force and later one of Cumbria’s leading painters.
The existence of the diaries is something of a miracle in itself. Forced to retreat by a German attack, Bernard had to abandon the diaries in a field hospital. The diaries were later picked up by a German soldier and taken to Belgium, before eventually making their way home to Bernard in Keswick.
Illustrations by Bernard Eyre Walker from his war-time diaries.
Sara has edited and published the diaries, complete with 140 of Bernard’s illustrations from the trenches. I haven’t read the diaries myself, and it’s not an account of stretcher- bearers in Salonika, but it’s a primary source of a largely unrecorded aspect of the time and likely to have a wide appeal. There’s more about the book here.
A Voice From the Trenches 1914-1918 From the Diaries and Sketchbooks of Bernard Eyre Walker. Edited by Sara Woodall. Price £19.95 (+ £3.10 p&p) from Sara Woodall, 17 High Street, Great Eversden, Cambridge, CB23 1HN
The latest video offering from the excellent Great War Huts seems particularly relevant to the Salonika campaign – Hospital Blues: The British Hospital Uniforms of the First World War. Given the high sickness rates in the BSF, not to mention wounds and accidents, many men would have found themselves in hospital blues.
Salonika Campaign Society, 1915-1918 