Dr. Jessamy Carlson, Team Leader, Community and Transport, November 2024
In this blog, Dr. Jessamy Carlson blog discusses the latest developments in the cataloguing of WO 399, nursing service records, detailing the expanded coverage of the collection, and provides a case study of Matron Mabel Whiffen RRC.
Dr. Carlson is head of the Community & Transport team in the Collections Expertise & Engagement department at The National Archives. She ran the First World War programme at The National Archives between 2015 and 2019, and is broadly interested in a range of 20th century social history topics.
Since 2022, a dedicated team of volunteers has been working their way through the 17,000 or so individual service files of women who served in two of the largest units of military nurses during the First World War, and it transpires, some way beyond.
A watercolour painting of a hospital on the Western Front, 1916. Image © QARANC Association
WO 399 has now had over half of its files re-catalogued, and we are very grateful to the group who have continued to offer their time and skills to this project. I wrote in 2022 about the early findings of the project, from groups of sisters who served in the same unit but in different hospitals, through to the realities of nursing as a married woman.
Since then we’ve come to realise that the scope of these records is actually far beyond the First World War, and it has gradually become clear that these files also include service records for women who enlisted in the reserve during the 1920s, for example, and who did not resign their commissions until the outbreak of the Second World War.
This has allowed us to re-write the series level description for the records, to show a more accurate picture of what the series contains. We have also uncovered a handful of Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing members (VAD) who have service records within the series, and details of women who began nursing as VADs and went on to study nursing before qualifying as professional nurses, sometimes all while war was raging all around them.
The release of the 1921 Census has also allowed us to start to unpick some of the lives of the women whose service files we hold, and determine through life course tracing that many of the women who nursed during the First World War continued to nurse for the rest of their working lives.
The geographical spread of the nurses continues to throw up interesting information – we have addresses which range from lighthouses to castles and every type of home in between. The data we are capturing should allow us to map the landscape of nursing during this period, in terms of where nurses grew up, went to school, trained and served once the project is completed.
We have also been to trace women who continued their nursing work even beyond enforced retirement. Matron Mabel Whiffen, late of Twickenham, came to my attention because she wrote particularly pithy references for the nurses in her charge. She served as a Matron in the 2nd Northern General Hospital (TFNS) from July 1915 onwards and was awarded the Royal Red Cross (1st Class), as well as being mentioned in dispatches by Sir Douglas Haig. She was demobilised on February 23rd 1920, and continued to serve in the Reserve until she was obliged to retire on grounds of her age.
In retirement, Mabel became the Secretary to the General Nursing Council, and was actually staying at Cowdrey House, the site of the Royal College of Nursing, on the night she died. When she died suddenly in November 1928, her files shows that condolences were sent to her family in Twickenham from many quarters, and most notably a personal letter of sympathy from Her Majesty Queen Mary.
Mabel was clearly well known and respected in the extended military nursing community. Her records show that she was considered “a matron of exceptional ability” by the Assistant Director of Medical Services in Marseilles in 1919, and upon her transfer to 57 General Hospital in 1918, the officer in charge, Col. F.H. Westmacott RAMC record that she ‘possesses the highest professional ability… is invariably bright and cheerful. Her tact and judgement together with her broadmindedness have the best possible influence on all her staff…’
There is now capacity to take on more volunteers if anyone is interested. We’ve had people volunteer for lots of reasons, from Duke of Edinburgh Award volunteering, to pre-professional training, to wanting a project to keep active with during the early days of retirement.
You will need to be a confident user of Excel, and be willing to download digital images from our website to participate. If anyone is interested, please get in touch via the Volunteers page on our website.