Twenty Eight Years Ago
A great thrill came to me early in 1916 with an invitation to join the staff of the Military Hospital, Endell St., London, at which the medical staff was composed entirely of women, headed by Dṛ Flora Murray and Dṛ Louisa Garrett Anderson, daughter of the renowned pioneer medical woman, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
The first incident that enlivened the sea trip to England was a strike by the stewards just after we left Ceylon; the strike was for an insurance on their lives, many of their friends havinghad perished a short time previously, when the Persia was torpedoed and sank in the Mediterranean. The company was unwilling to grant their demands and so it was necessary to ship a fresh lot of stewards atto put into Bombay where we spent an interesting day. The stewards who came aboard at Bombay were Goanese, from the old Portuguese settlement of Goa; they knew very little English and for a time waiting at meals was rather comic.
It was wonderful to be hailed by our own boys from the bank of the Suez Canal and they, in turn, were “hailed” by us with cigarettes, oranges, etc. I was most thrilled by my first sight of seaplanes at Port Said, which looked like graceful seabirds alighting round their warship.
Of course the usual steps were taken to observe black-out precautions at night and we steered a zig-zag course through the Mediterranean and spent a whole day crawling along the north coast of Crete and making up for lost time by going full speed ahead during the night. The men passengers took it in turns to help in look-out duties but fortunately the Mediterranean was in a choppy humour and the weather was misty and showery so that conditions were not encouraging for submarines.
On arriving in England we were greeted by an air raid of mild character and the news of the Irish Easter
^ rebellion; the latter came as a bit of a shock as we had rather taken the unity of the Empire for granted and did not expect to find division so near the centre. Later on I met at our hotel a young Irish girl-rebel who had come over to be decorated by the King for her bravery in rushing out to drag to shelter a wounded man who was lying
^ exposed to further
^ risk from gunfire.
The two chiefs of the Endell St. Military Hospital, Dṛs Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson had been responsible for the organisation of the Women's Hospital Corps Voluntary Unit, which went to France in September, 1914 and did outstanding work
