I met Marsali Taylor at last year's delightful Icelandic Noir conference, where she moderated the panel on historical mysteries. Marsali grew up near Edinburgh, and eventually moved to Shetland as a newly-qualified teacher. She now lives on Shetland’s scenic west side with her husband, three cats and two Shetland ponies. Marsali is a qualified STGA tourist-guide. She is fascinated by history, and has published plays in Shetland’s distinctive dialect, as well as a history of women's suffrage in Shetland. She's a keen sailor who enjoys exploring in her own 8m yacht.
Her five Shetland-set crime novels star live-aboard sailor Cass Lynch and Inverness DI Gavin Macrae. The first two--Death on a Longship and The Trowie Mound Murders--have just been published in German by Aufbau Verslag, and the third and fourth have been commissioned. She brings us today a fabulous tale of heroic, often unsung women, and one in particular whom she knew personally.
For more information, please visit www.marsalitaylor.co.uk
or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Marsali-Taylor/264232770329242?ref=hl
When
WWI began, Dr Elsie Inglis, one of Scotland’s first women doctors, offered the
War Office two front-line units staffed entirely by women. ‘Go home and sit
still,’ she was told. Her reply was to create the Scottish Women’s Hospital for
Foreign Service, funded through the National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies. They established the first hospital outside Paris, attached to the
French Army, and Dr Inglis herself went to Serbia. She and two others remained
there even under German occupation, while the equally intrepid women with her
marched over the Serbian mountains to safety. When Serbia was relieved, Dr Inglis returned
to Britain. She was already ill with the stomach cancer which was to kill her a
year later, but she once more led a unit of 75 women to go with the Serbian
army to the Romanian front.
I came to the story of the indomitable
Dr Inglis through my equally indomitable Aunt Ysabel. She wasn’t actually my
aunt; we spent my childhood summers on her brother’s estate in the Highlands,
and she lived in the next cottage along, six miles by boat from the road end.
She had a head of snow-white curls, and wore the faded blue tunic and wide
trousers of a Chinese peasant, a dress she’d adopted as a teenager when
visiting her missionary brother-in-law. She bathed in the burn, read by Tilley
lamp and cooked on an ancient gas stove, using provisions sent by post from the
Army and Navy stores in London. Chaffinches flew in and out of her kitchen, and
she’d take you round the back of the cottage to show you the story of the
night’s wildlife in the muddy patch there: ‘That’s the dog fox’s pawprint –
that’s an otter cub.’
Aunt Y at the helm of Mine.
What I hadn’t known, as I’d helped
carry buckets of stones to make a new jetty for Mine, her dinghy, or forced down her tar-black tea on picnic
expeditions, was that Ysabel Birkbeck had driven an ambulance on the Russian
Front in 1917. I learned this when we bought her house after her death, and I found her
diaries, two black-bound books bulging with tiny photographs and watercolour
sketches.
Reading the diaries made me really see
how World War I was the turning-point in Edwardian women’s emancipation. The Buffs, as the drivers called themselves, to
distinguish themselves from the ‘Greys’ or medical staff, were mostly ‘surplus’
county daughters who’d resigned themselves to a life of good works and flower
arranging. This was the most interesting
time they’d ever been offered, and they were determined to make the most of it.
The women sailed from Liverpool in
August 1916. They learnt Russian and mechanics on the journey out, and met
Serbian officers who were to become friends (characteristically, in this photo,
Aunt Y is the one talking to the cat).
On board ship
They had a fancy dress party to celebrate arriving in
Archangel (Aunt Ysabel went as Puss in Boots ‘with wire whiskers stuck through
a soft Balaclava helmet and wearing my jacket and field boots and at the
beginning of the evening a rope tail.’)
Their two days in Archangel included a visit to the house of Peter the
Great, and tea at the Cafe de Paris. They left by train, singing It’s a long way to Tipperary behind the
Ship’s Band – ‘formed of firemen and stokers – till roars of cheers drowned out
our song. Hundreds of Russian soldiers, which we had not seen because of the
dark, were massed on either side of our way. They cheered as I have never heard
men cheer ...’ From being surplus daughters, they’d become heroines.
Ambulances
When their train arrived at Odessa,
they were treated as the guests of the city, and invited to the Opera, where
the Grand Duchess Mary Pavlova asked to meet them, and accidentally coined a
phrase which the drivers gleefully used to describe themselves thereafter: ‘Are
you a chouveur?‘ she asked one of them, and ‘shovers’ they all became, an
appropriate designation given the time they were to spend shoving their cars
out of mud holes. From the train, they went on a barge for three days – with
food only for one day.
With cars
on barge
They arrived at last on the ‘road’ to
Medjidea, where the hospital was to be set up: ‘a worse road than I had dreamed
one would ever drive a car over. Water filled the holes and it was impossible
to guess a puddle from a pit.’ The heavy
kitchen car got stuck, and had to be hauled up by hand.
Kitchen car drawing
They got to work almost straight away. This
watercolour is labelled ‘Road to the Front – shelling ahead.’
Road to front
Ysabel wrote in her diary, ‘My car was
the first to be loaded, two stretcher cases, one head case – delirious – and
another with a fractured thigh. It was for them the horror, and I, to lessen it
as far as possible, and so I drove them back and the memory of it will always
be there till I die... the plain, and all those tracks, and not to know the
shortest way home, with the wounded screaming at every jolt.’
They had less than a month at Medjidia
before they had to retreat, some by road, some by rail, among chaos and
brutality – ‘One saw on every face what we have since called “the mark of the
Exodus”. We have all agreed not to talk about it ... we have all seen things we
are trying to forget. No, we never, never shall.’
With wounded on railway truck
The entire unit was awarded the Serbian
gallantry medal (the same medal as the men, to their satisfaction) and some,
like Aunt Ysabel, were given an extra medal for courage under fire – in her
case, changing a car tyre while under aeroplane fire.
Safely over the Danube, Ysabel was laid
low by a severe case of jaundice, but she was determined to stay, and soon they
were back at work, attached to the Russian cavalry near Constanta. Skirts over
their breeches were forgotten; they wore layers of greatcoats, and were reproved by Dr Inglis herself for swearing.
In this photo, Aunt Ysabel is on the left; the lively woman by the sentry was
‘Jack’ Holmes, Mrs Pankhurst’s driver.
Dressed for Russia.
By now they’d learnt to flirt in French, German and Russian,
and their time here included a magnificent ball, given by the General, with a
display of Cossack dancing and singing – ‘Long coats, tiny waists and shaggy black hats
made them fierce and wild-looking ... they stamped and leapt with amazing
agility and lightness ... they sang in harsh, rather thrilling, voices of love
and war. When they paused, and I went to
the door, I heard guns and it – was it like the night before Waterloo?’
Rain turned the roads to mud: ‘mud that
works its way into ones boots, one’s pockets and one’s hair, mud through which
one has to struggle a foot deep at every step.’
It was not a retreat this time, but ‘the retreat. Romania is to
be abandoned...’ They spent the night surrounded by soldiers, singing, and were
proud to be the last cars across the Danube before the pontoon bridge was
destroyed.
They ended up back in Odessa. Their
Model T Fords had survived three months of the roughest treatment, and were due
for a rest and overhaul. For the first time the women were bored, as they
worked under two male mechanics sent out from Britain: ‘Truly we worked as
British workmen should, and do, the whole world over. Slackness has entered our
bones. Punctually, at 1, we knocked off for the full dinner-hour...’
Mechanics
They still managed to have fun at the Opera, and Birkbeck
persuaded a sledge owner to let her drive his horse. She and her friend Teddy
were sent off to Remi with a ‘bolshoi pacquet’, and were taken under the
magnificent wing of a Georgian officer, Alexandre, who was bound for the
front. They returned in a hospital train
owned by a Grand Duke.
Sledge ride
They couldn’t drive during the winter
months, because the roads were snowed up, so Birkbeck and others applied for
leave. The plan was to go home via St
Petersburg, but they arrived there in March 1917 – just in time for the
Revolution. They had another narrow escape when someone fired on the new
regime’s police from their hotel. English sang-froid coped even with that:
‘Such a mob as poured into our room – soldiers, factory hands, old men and
young – all carrying firearms or knives. We cordially welcomed our visitors
(never anger a man with a gun) – and gave them cigarettes ... ‘ After that, they
showed one new officer how to wear his sword-belt, and cleaned the rooms of
three officials.
They finally escaped via Finland, and
weren’t allowed back; the British Government was desperately trying to get Dr
Inglis and her women out of revolutionary Russia. Dr Inglis refused to go until
the Serbian regiments, the last Serbian men, were recalled with her. She
arrived in Newcastle in November 1917, and died there two days later. A service
was held for her in Westminster Abbey, and she was buried in her native Edinburgh.
Birkbeck
and her friends headed for France instead, joining FANY. She was awarded the Belgian
Croix de Guerre with Bronze star for her coolness and courage ‘in continuing to
transport wounded under violent bombardment’ at Verdun. When WWII came, she
returned to London, and drove an ambulance once more in the explosive nights of
the Blitz. This photo shows her celebrating VE day.
Celebrating victory
She was an amazing lady. I feel
privileged to have known her.
What a remarkable story, Marsali. A pleasure to hear it -- and what a thriller novel it would make!
ReplyDeleteWow, great story, Marsali, thanks very much for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteWow! What a story! It would make for a fascinating movie with lots of close calls, emergencies and traveling.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'd love to be in Shetland with cats and ponies, tea and mysteries.
Hi Marsali, great to see you again...if only in print and over the Internet this time. :) It appears that though you and Aunt Y are not related by blood, you certainly are in your storytelling skills. Terrific post, thanks for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteThank you for all the lovely comments, and to Annamaria for letting me share the blog to tell you about these forgotten heroines. I'd love to think I could have been one of them, if I'd been born then ... This is my fourth try of adding a comment, so I hope it works! Another quick Aunt Y story ... she found an otter in a trap, and as there was no vet nearby, she got the local doctor to come and set its broken leg - 'After all, you set bones in people...' The otter recovered, went back to the wild, and later brought a large sea-trout to her bathing pool, while she was there, and left it for her ... best wishes Marsali
ReplyDeleteHurrah! It worked! Kathy D, a movie is in process about the Scottish Women's Hospital - it's being worked on by one of Dr Inglis's great-great nieces. I'm working on a novel, but I keep getting distracted by my sailing heroine, Cass.
ReplyDelete