Rare nursing pictures reveal Britain’s first angels of mercy

Nursing at the beginning of the First World War was still unregulated – any woman could call herself a nurse and many offered their services. A photographer around 1914 witnessed Mary, Princess Royal and later Countess of Harewood, doing exactly that.

But while the celebrities in their ranks were useful for wartime propaganda and to help promote the notion that suffering bestrode the classes, the reality was that most nurses were working-class women with no right even to vote.

In the first years of the last century, there had been thousands of untrained women working as civilian midwives and nurses, with no more status in society than that of domestic servants.

The war transformed all that. The sudden requirement to treat large numbers of wounded soldiers at the front and again back home created an army of “white angels” in spotless tunics.

Some became medical assistants and were given basic training; others were volunteers.

The only corps of military nurses to be recognised by the British Army was the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. Those volunteers who not part of it had to serve instead with the French and Belgian forces.

The casualties were not confined to the battlefields. Immediately after the hostilities, Spanish flu – a pandemic not unlike the one today – killed millions, including many nurses who came into contact with it.

Rules on probity, meanwhile, were strictly enforced, with the sack awaiting any nurse who became engaged to a patient, let alone embarked on an affair.

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