Classic Audiobook Collection - Dr. Elsie Inglis by Frances Balfour ~ Full Audiobook [biography]
Episode Date: March 26, 2024Dr. Elsie Inglis by Frances Balfour audiobook. Genre: biography Dr. Elsie Inglis is one of the unsung heroes of the late 19th and early 20th century. She became a physician in 1894, and shortly after... opened a Women's Hospice in Edinburgh for impoverished women and children. She was a key figure in the women's suffrage movement in Scotland. During World War I Inglis, despite opposition and cynicism, created the Scottish Women's Hospitals and eventually sent 14 teams to provide field hospitals in Belgium, France, Serbia, and Russia. She was captured in Serbia when she remained behind with the wounded, but was later repatriated. This biography was written shortly after her death in 1917. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:21:40) Chapter 02 (00:35:08) Chapter 03 (00:52:18) Chapter 04 (01:19:59) Chapter 05 (01:42:45) Chapter 06 (01:55:45) Chapter 07 (02:19:40) Chapter 08 (02:37:45) Chapter 09 (02:55:31) Chapter 10 (03:12:52) Chapter 11 (03:36:17) Chapter 12 (03:50:00) Chapter 13 (04:10:53) Chapter 14 (04:33:51) Chapter 15 (05:09:43) Chapter 16 (05:43:06) Chapter 17 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour
Chapter 1
Ingalls of Kingsmill, Invernesshire
Part 1, America
Their graves are scattered far and wide,
or mountains, stream, and sea.
God of our fathers,
be the god of their succeeding race.
Among the records of the family
from whom Elsie Ingalls was descended,
there are letters which date back to 1740.
In that year, the property of Kingsmills,
Invernesshire,
was in the hands of Hugh Ingalls. He had three sons, George, Alexander, and William.
George inherited Kings Mills, and the Ingalls now in Inverness are descended from him.
Alexander, the great-grandfather of Elsie, married Mary Dees, and about 1780 emigrated to
Carolina, leaving his four children to be educated in Scotland, in charge of his brother, William Ingalls.
The portrait of Alexander, in the dress of the period, has the characteristic features of the
race descended from him. The face is stamped with the impress of a resolute, fearless character,
one who was likely to leave his mark on any country in which he took up his abode. There is an
account of the property and estates of Alexander Ingalls of Charleston, merchant in his own right.
The account sets forth how the estates are confiscated on account of the loyalty of the said
Alexander, and his adherence to, and support of the British government and constitution.
In the schedule of property, there occur, in close relation, these items.
125 head of black cattle, 125 pounds, 69 slaves at 60 pounds ahead, 4,140 pounds,
a pew, number 31 in St. Michael's Church, Charleston, 150 pounds,
11 house negroes, 700 pounds, and a library of well-chosen books, at a much lower figure.
Alexander never lost sight of the four children left in his native land. In 1784, he congratulates his son David
on being ducks of his class and says that he prays constantly for him. Mary Dee's, Alexander Engel's
wife, through her ancestor, Sir David Dundas, was a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce. All that
is known of her life is contained in the undated obituary notice of the American newspaper of the day.
several duties of her station in life, she discharged as became the good Christian, supporting
with exemplary fortitude, the late trying separation from her family.
Alexander's restless and adventurous life was soon to have a violent end.
After their mother's death, the three daughters must have joined their father in America.
One of them, Catherine, whose face has been immortalized by Rayburn, writes to her brother
David, who had been left in Scotland, to inform him of the death of the death of
their father in a duel. The letter which Alexander Ingalls wrote to be given to his children,
should he fall in the duel, is as fresh and clear as on the day when it was written.
My dear, dear children, if ever you receive this letter, it will be after my death.
You were present this morning when I received the grossest insult that could be offered me,
and such as I little expected from the young man who dared to offer it.
could the epithets which in his passion he ventured to make use of be properly applied to me i would not wish to live another hour but as a man of honour and the natural guardian and protector of everything that is dear and valuable to myself and to you i have no alternative left but that of demanding reparation for the injury i have received if i fall i do so in defence of that honour which is dearer to me than life may that great gracious
and good being, who is the protector of innocence, and the sure rewarder of goodness, bless,
preserve, and keep you. I am, my dear, dear children, your affectionate father, Alexander Ingalls,
Charleston, Tuesday evening, 29th March, 1791. The letter is addressed by name to the four children.
Catherine writes to her brother David in the following May,
In what manner, my dearest brother, shall I relate to you the melancholy.
uncally event that has befallen us. Our dear parent, the best of fathers, is no more. How shall I go on?
Alas, you will hear too soon by whose hand he fell. Therefore, I will not distress you with the
particulars of his death. The second day of our dear father's illness he called us to his bedside,
when he told us he had left a letter for us three and his dear boy which would explain all things.
judge, if you are able, my dear brother, what must have been our thoughts on this sad occasion
to see our only dear parent, tortured with the most excruciating pains and breathing his last.
We were all of us too young, my brother, to experience the heavy loss we met with when our dear
mother died. We had then a good father to supply our wants. I have always thought the almighty
kind to all his creatures, but more so in this particular.
that he seldom deprives us of one friend without raising another to comfort us my dear sisters and self are at present staying with good mrs jameson who is indeed a truly amiable woman
i am sure you will regard her for your sister's sakes you are happily placed my brother under the care of kind uncles and aunts who will no doubt as they have ever done prove all you have lost
how happy would it make me in my present situation to be among my friends in scotland but as that is impossible for some time i must endeavour to be happy as i can my kind duty to uncle and aunts i am my dearest brother your truly affectionate sister catherine ingles
thus closes the chapter of alexander ingles and mary d's his wife both long long ago at rest in the land of their exile both bearing the separation with fortitude and the one rendering his children fatherless rather than live insulted by some nameless and graceless youth
david ingles grew up in charge of the kind uncle william and endeared himself to his adopted father he also was to fare to dominions beyond the sea and he was to fare to dominions beyond the sea and he was to far to dominions beyond the sea and he was to the sea and he was to the
the sea, and he carried the name of Ingalls to India, where he went in 1798 as writer to the East
India Company. Uncle William followed him with the usual good advice. In a letter, he tells David
he expects him to make a fortune in India that will give him £3,000 a year, that being the lowest
sum on which it is possible to live in comfort. David's life was a more adventurous one than
usually falls to a rider. He went through the Marauder war in 1803.
He left India in 1812. On applying for a six certificate, the resolution of counsel, dated 1811,
draws the attention of the Honorable Company to his services, most particularly when selected
to receive charge of the territorial sessions of the Peshaw under the Treaty of Basin in the year
1803, displaying, in the execution of that delicate and difficult mission, proofs of judgment and
talents with moderation and firmness combined, which averted the necessity of having recourse to
coercive measures, accomplished the peaceful transfer of a valuable territory, and conciliated those
whose power and consequence were annihilated or abridged by the important change he so happily
affected. David Ingle seems to have roamed through India, always seeking new worlds to conquer,
and confident in his own powers to achieve. One of the depotables,
Olionic invasion scares alarmed the company, and David, with two companions, was sent out on a cruising
expedition to see if they could cite the enemy's fleet. As long as he wrote from India, his letters
bear the stamp of a man full of vital energy and resource. The only thing he did not accomplish
while in the service of the company was the fortune of three thousand pounds a year. He entered
a business firm in Bombay, and there made enough to be able to keep a wife. In 1806,
he married Martha Money, whose father was a partner in the firm. They came home in 1812, and all their
younger children were born in England at Walthamstow, the home of the Money family. One of the
descendants, who has read the letters of these three brothers and their families, makes this comment on
them. The letters are pervaded with a sense of activity and of wandering, each one entering into
any pursuit that came to hand. All the family were travelers. There are letters from
ants in Gibraltar and many other erts. The extraordinary thing in all the letters, whether they were
written by an Ingalls, a Dees, or a money, is the pervading note of strong religious faith.
They not only refer to religion, but often, in truly Scottish fashion, they enter on long theological
dissertations. David Ingalls, Elsie's grandfather, when he was settled in England, gave missionary
addresses. Two of these exist, and must have taken fully an hour to read.
read. Even the restless Alexander in Carolina and the Hurlwyn David in India scarcely ever
write a letter without reference to some religious topic. You get the impression of strong,
breezy men sure of themselves and finding the world a great playground.
Part 2. India
God of our fathers, known of old, beneath whose awful hand we hold dominion over palm and pine.
John, the second youngest son of David and Martha Ingalls, was born in 1820.
His mother, being English, there entered with her some of the deuce Saxon disposition in ways.
Though the call of the blood was to cast his lot in India, John, or, as he was generally called, David, appears first as a student.
His tutor, the Reverend Dr. Niblock, wrote a report of him as he was passing out of his hands to Haleybury.
Mrs. Ingalls notes on the letter.
Dr. Niblock is esteemed one of the best Greek scholars in England,
and his Greek grammar is the one in use in Eaton.
Of Master David Ingalls,
I can speak with pleasure and pride almost unmixed.
I can only loudly express how I regret that I have not the finishing of such a boy,
for I feel, and shall ever feel, that he is mine.
He has long begun to do what few boys do till they are leaving,
or have left school.
this to think. I shall long cherish the hope that as I laid the foundation, so shall I have the
power and pleasure of crowning my own and others' labors. He will make a fine fellow, and be a
comfort to his parents and an honor to his tutor. John Ingalls received a nomination for
Haleybury College from one of the directors of the East India Company, and went there as a student
in 1839. There he was noted as a cricketer and a good horseman,
and also for his reading. He knew Shakespeare almost by heart, and could tell where to find any quotation
from his works. On leaving Haleybury, he sailed for Calcutta, and was there for two years learning the
language. He went as assistant magistrate to Agra. He married in 1846, and in 1847 he was transferred to the
newly acquired province of the Punjab. He was sent as a magistrate to sealcoat, remaining there till 1856.
He then brought his family home on three years furlough. With the outbreak of the mutiny, all civilians were recalled, and he returned to India in 1858. He was sent to Borreli to take part in the suppression of the mutiny and was attached to the force under General Jones. He was present at the action of Najibabad, with the recapture of Borreli and the pacification of the province of Rohilcund. He remained in the province 10 years, till 1868, and during those years he rose to the
to be commissioner of Rohilcund. In 1868, he was made a member of the Board of Revenue in the
Northwest Provinces. As a member of the Legislative Council of India, he moved in 1873 to Calcutta.
From 1875 to 1877, he was Chief Commissioner of Ode. The position Engels made for himself in India,
in yet early life, is to be gauged by a letter written in 1846 by Sir Frederick Curry,
who was then Commissioner of Lahore.
He had married Mrs. Ingle's sister, Catherine.
We have applied to Mr. Thomason, Lieutenant Governor of the NWP, for young civilians for the work
which is now before us, and we must take several with us into the Punjab.
One whom he strongly recommends is Ingle's at Agra.
I will copy what he says about him.
Sir Henry Hardinge, the Governor General, has not seen the letter yet.
Another man who might suit you is Ingle Zadagra, an assistant on 400 pounds,
acting as joint magistrate, which gives him 100 more.
Active, energetic, conciliating to natives, fine-tempered, and thoroughly honest in all his works.
I am not sure that he is not as good a man as you can have.
I should be glad to hear that you sent for him.
The letter was addressed to Ingle's 18-year-old bride, and Sir Frederick goes on,
Shall I send for him or not?
I am almost sure I should have done so had I not heard of your getting hold of his heart,
We don't want heartless men, but really you have no right to keep such a man from us.
At the present moment, however, for your sake, little darling, I won't take him from his present work,
but if, after the honeymoon, he would prefer active and stirring employment,
with the prospect of distinction to the light-wing toys of feathered Cupid,
I dare say I shall be able to find an opening for him.
Mr. Ingle's wife was Harriet Lewis Thompson, one of nine daughters. Her father was one of the first
Indian civilians in the old company's days. All of the nine sisters married men in the Indian civil,
with the exception of one who married an army officer. Harriet came out to her parents in India when
she was 17, and she married in her 18th year. She must have been a girl of marked character
and ability. She met her future husband at a dance in her father's house.
and she appears to have been the first to introduce the waltz into India.
She was a fine rider and often drove tandem in India.
She must have had a steady nerve,
for her letters are full of various adventures in camp and tiger-haunted jungles,
and most of them narrate the presence of one of her infants
who was accompanying the parents on their routine of Indian official life.
Her daughter says of her, she was deeply religious.
Some years after their marriage,
when she must have been a little over 30 and was a little over,
alone in England with the six elder children, she started and ran most successfully a large
working men's club in Southampton. Such a thing was not as common as it is today. There she lectured
on Sunday evenings on religious subjects to the crowded hall of men. In the perfectly happy home of the
Ingalls family in India, the Indian Ayah was one of the household in love and service to those she
served. Mrs. Simpson has supplied some memories of this faithful retainer.
the early days the nursery days in the life of a family are always looked back upon with loving interest and many of us can trace to them many sweet and helpful influences so it was with our early days though the nursery was in india and the dear nurse who lives in our memories was an indian
her name was sona gold she came into our family when the eldest of us was born and remained one of the household for more than thirty years her husband came with her
and in later years three of her sons were table servants. Sona came home with us in 1857 and remained in England
until the beginning of 1858. It was a sign of great attachment to us, for she left her own family
away up in the Punjab and fared out in the long sea voyage into a strange country and among new peoples.
She made friends wherever she was, and her stay in England was a great help to her in afterlife.
When I returned to India after my school life at home, I found the dear nurse of my childhood days
installed again as nurse to the little sisters and brother I found there. She was a sweet,
gentle woman, and we never learned anything but kind, gentle ways from her. By the time I returned,
she was recognized by the whole compound of servants as one to be looked up to and respected.
She became a Christian and was baptized in 1877, but long before she made perfect,
profession of her faith by baptism, she lived a consistent Christian life. My dear mother's influence was
strong with her, and she was a reader of the Bible. One of my earliest recollections is our reading
together the 14th chapter of St. John. She died some years after we had all settled in Scotland.
My parents left her with a small pension for life, in charge of the missionaries at Lucknow.
When she died, they wrote to us saying that Old Sana had been one of the pillars of the Indian
Christian Church in Lucknow. We look forward with a sure and certain hope to our reunion in the home
of many mansions with her, around whom our hearts still cling with love and affection.
In 1856, Mr. Ingalls resolved to come home on furlough, accompanied by Mrs. Ingalls and what was
called the first family, namely, the six boys and one girl born to them in India. It was a formidable
journey to accomplish even without children, and one writes,
How mother stood at all I cannot imagine. They came down from the Punjab to Calcutta,
trekking in Dakgaris. It took four months to reach Calcutta by this means of
progression, and another four months to come home by the Cape. The wonderful Ayah,
Sona, was a great help in the toilsome journey when they brought the children back to England.
Mrs. Ingalls was soon to have her first partying with her husband. When they landed,
in England, news of the outbreak of the mutiny met them, and Mr. Ingalls returned almost at once
to take his place beside John Lawrence. Together they fought through the mutiny, and then he worked under
him. Inglis was one of John Lawrence's men in the great settling of the Punjab, which followed on
that period of stress and strain in the empire of India. His own district was Borrelli, and the house
where he lived in seal coat is still known as Ingalls Sahib Kekoti. Ingalls'Ill's.
Sahib's house. His children remember the thrilling stories he used to tell them of these great days
and of the great men who made their history. His admiration was unbounded for those northern
races of India. He loved and respected them, and they, in their turn, gave him unbounded confidence
and affection. Every bit as good as an Englishman was a phrase often on his lips when speaking of
the fine Sikhs and Punjabi's and Rajputs. English women were not. English women were not
not allowed in India during this period, and Mrs. Ingalls had to remain in Southampton with her
six children and their Iya. It was then that she found work in her leisure time for the work she did
in the men's club. In 1863, when life in India had resumed its normal course, Mrs. Ingalls rejoined
her husband, leaving the children she had brought back at home. It must have taken all the fortitude
that Mary Dees had shown long before in Carolina to face this separation.
there was no prospect of the running backwards and forwards which steam was so soon to develop and to draw the dominions into closer bonds letters took months to pass and no cable carried the messages of life and death across the white-lipped seas
again one of the survivors says i always felt even as a child and am sure of it now she left her heart behind with the six elder children what it must have meant to a woman of her deep nature
I cannot imagine. The decision was made, and Mr. Ingalls was to have the great reward of her return to him,
after his seven years of strenuous and anxious loneliness. The boys were sent, three of them,
to Eaton, and two more to Uppingham and to rugby. Amy Ingalls, the daughter, was left with friends.
Relatives were not lacking in this large clan in its branches, and the children were looked after by them.
We owe much of our knowledge of the second little family, which were to comfort the parents in India,
by the correspondence concerning them with the dearly loved children left in the homelands.
Section 1
2 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
The Sleeper-Fox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 2. Elsie Maud Ingalls
1864 to 1917.
Lowe, Children are in heritage of the Lord.
and the fruit of the womb is his reward as arrows are in the hand of the mighty man so are children of the youth happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them they shall not be ashamed but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate
nanny tall august sixteenth eighteen sixty four my darling amy thank god i am able to tell you that your dearest mother and your little sister who was born this morning are well
aunt ellen thinks that baby is very like your dearest mother but i do not see the resemblance at present i hope i may by and by we could not form a better wish for her than that she may grow up like her dear mother in every respect old sona is quite delighted to her very
to have another baby to look after again.
She took possession of her the moment she was born,
as she is done with all of you.
The nurse says she is a very strong and healthy baby.
I wish to tell you as early as possible
the good news of God's great mercy and goodness towards us
in having brought your dearest mother safely through this trial.
Mrs. Ingalls writes a long account of Elsie at a month old
and says she is supposed to have a temper,
as she makes herself heard all over the house,
and strongly objects to being brought indoors and put into her cradle.
In October, she writes how the two babies, her own and Aunt Ellen's little boy,
have been taken to church to be baptized,
the one by the name of Elsie Maude, the other Cyril Powney.
Both children were thriving, and no one would know that there were two babies in the house.
Elsie always stares very hard at Papa when he comes to speak to her,
as if she did not quite know what to make of his black beard,
something different to what she's accustomed to see,
but she generally ends by laughing at him.
The first notice of that radiant friendship
in which father and daughter were to journey together
in a happy pilgrimage through life.
Elsie had early to make long driving expeditions with her parents,
and her mother reports her as accommodating herself to circumstances,
watching the trees, sleeping under them,
and the jolliest little traveler I ever saw.
In December 1864, Mrs. Ingalls reports their return from camp.
It has been most extraordinarily warm for the time of year,
and there has been very little rain during the whole 12-month.
People attribute it to the wonderful comet which has been visible in the southern hemisphere.
Elsie is very well, but she has a very little thing with a very wee face.
She has a famous pair of large blue eyes,
and it is quite remarkable how she looks about her and seems,
to observe everything. She lies in her bed at night in the dark and talks away out loud in her
own little language and little voice, and she is always ready for a laugh. Later on Mrs. Ingalls
writes, I think she is one of the most intelligent babies I ever met with. Every letter descriptive
of the dark, blue-eyed baby with the fast-growing light hair speaks of the smile, ready for everyone
who speaks to her, and the hearty laughs which seemed to have been one of her earliest characteristics.
One journey tried Elsie's philosophy of taking life as she found it. Mrs. Engels writes to her daughter,
Nanitaul 1865. We came in Palkies from Beharin to a place called Jessli, halfway up the hill to
Nani Tal, and we were about ten hours in the Palkys. I had arranged to have Elsie with me and my
But the little monkey did not like being away from Sona, and then the strangeness of the whole
proceedings bewildered her, and the noise of the bearers seemed to frighten her. So I was obliged to make
her over to Sona. She went to sleep after a little while. As we came near the hills, it became cold,
and a wind got up, and then Papa brought her back to me, for we did not quite like her being in
Sonas duly, which was not so well protected as mine. She had become more reconciled to the
disagreeables of dock traveling by that time. We reached our house about nine o'clock yesterday morning.
The change from the dried-up hot plains is very pleasant. You may imagine how often I longed for
the railroad and our civilized English way of traveling. Mrs. Shaw McLaren, the companion
sister of Elsie, and to whom her correspondence always refers, has written down some memories
of the happy childhood days in India. The year was divided between the place, and the place. The year was divided between the
plains and the hills of India. Elsie was born in August, 1864, at Nanyital, one of the most
beautiful hill stations in the Himalayas. From the veranda, where much of the day was spent,
the view was across the masses of huddled hills to the ranges crowned by the everlasting
snows, an outlook of silent and majestic stillness, and one which could not fail to influence
such a spirit as shown out in the always wonderful eyes of Elsie.
She grew up with the vision of the glory of the earthly dominion,
and it gave a new meaning to the kingdom of the things of the spirit.
All our childhood is full of remembrance of father.
He never forgot our birthdays.
However hot it was down in the scorched plains,
when the day came round, if we were up in the hills,
a large parcel would arrive from him.
His very presence was joy and strength when he came,
came to visit us at Nanital. What a remembrance there is of early walks and early breakfasts
with him and the three of us. The table was spread in the veranda between six and seven.
Father made three cups of cocoa, one for each of us, and then the glorious walk. Three ponies
followed behind, each with their attendant grooms, and two or three red-coated chaperassies.
Father stopping all along the road to talk to every native who wished to speak to him.
him, while we three ran about, laughing and interested in everything. Then, at night, the shouting for him
after we were in bed, and father's step bounding up the stair in Calcutta, or coming along the matted
floor of our hill home. All order and quietness flung to the winds while he said goodnight to us.
It was always understood that Elsie and he were special chums, but that never made any jealousy.
Father was always just. The three cups of cocoa were exempt. The three cups of cocoa were exesalmers.
the same in quality and quantity. We got equal shares of his right and left hand in our walks,
but Elsie and he were comrades, inseparable from the day of her birth. In the background of our
lives there was always the quiet, strong mother, whose eyes and smile live on through the years.
Every morning before the breakfast and walk, there were five minutes when we sat in front of her in a row
on little chairs in her room and read the scripture verses in turn, and then,
and knelt in a straight, quiet row and repeated the prayers after her. Only once can I remember
father being angry with any of us, and that was when one of us ventured to hesitate in instant
obedience to some wish of hers. I still see the room in which it happened, and the thunder
in his voice is with me still. Both Mr. and Mrs. Engels belonged to the Anglican Church,
though they never hesitated to go to any denomination where they found the best spiritual life.
In later life in Edinburgh, they were connected with the Free Church of Scotland.
To again quote from his daughter,
His religious outlook was magnificently broad and beautiful,
and his belief in God's simple and profound.
His devotion to our mother is a thing impossible to speak about,
but we all feel that in some intangible way it influenced and beautified our childhood.
In 1870, Mrs. Ingalls writes of the lessons of Elsie and her sister Eva,
The governess, Mrs. Marwood, is successful as a teacher. It comes easy enough to Elsie to learn,
and she delights in stories being told her. Every morning after their early morning walk,
and while their baths are being got ready, their mother says they come to her to say their prayers
and learn their Bible lesson. There are two letters, more or less composed by Elsie and written by
her father. In as far as they were dictated by herself, they take stock of independent ways,
and the spirit of the Pharisee is early developed in the courts of the Lord's house,
as she manages not to fall asleep all the time,
while the weaker little sister slumbers and sleeps.
Eva, the sleepy sister, has some further reminiscences of these nursery days.
We had forty dolls.
Elsie decreed once that they should all have measles,
so days were spent by us three painting little red dots all over the forty faces
and the 40 pairs of arms and legs.
She was the doctor and prescribed gruesome drugs which we had to administer.
Then it was decreed that they should slowly recover,
so each day so many spots were washed off until the epidemic was wiped out.
Another time one of the 40 dolls was lost.
Maria was small and ugly, but much loved,
and the search for her was tremendous but unsuccessful.
The younger sister gave it up.
After all, there were plenty other dolls.
Never mind Maria.
But Elsie stuck to it.
Maria must be found.
Father would find her when he came home from cutchery in the evening, if nobody else could.
So Father was told with many tears of Maria's disappearance.
He agreed.
Maria must be found.
The next day, all the enormous staff of Indian servants, numbering all told about 30 or so,
were had up in a row and told that unless Maria was found, sixpence would be cut from each servant's pay for interminable months.
What a search ensued, and Maria came to light within half an hour, in the pocket of one of the dresses of her little mistress, found by one of the Ayahs.
Her mistress declared at the time, and always maintained with undiminished certainty, that she had first been put there and then found by the Ayah in question during that half a half a half a half a year, and then found by the Ayah in question, during that half a half a half of her.
hour's search. These reminiscences have more of interest than just the picture of the little
child who was to carry on the early manifestations of a keen interest in life. A smile, surely one of
the clouds of glory she trailed from heaven, and carried back untarnished by the tragedies of a
stricken earth. They are chiefly valuable in the signs of a steadfast, independent will.
The interest of all Elsie's early development lay in the comrades'
with a father whose wide benevolence and understanding love was to be the guide and helper in his
daughter's career. Not for the first time in the history of outstanding lives, the daughter has been
the friend and not the subjugated child of a selfish and dominant parent. The date of Elsie's
birth was in the dawn of the movement, which believed it possible that women could have a mind and a
brain of their own, and that the freedom of the one and the cultivation of the other was not a menace
to the possessive rights of the family or the ruin of society at large. Thousands of women
born at the same date were instructed that the aim of their lives must be to see to the creature
comforts of their male parent, and when he was taken from them, to believe it right that he had
neither educated them nor made provision for the certain old age in spinsterdom which lay before the majority.
There have been many parents who gave their daughters no reason to call them blessed,
when they were left alone, unprovided with gear or education. In all periods of family history,
such instances as Mr. Ingle's outlook for his daughters is uncommon. He desired for them equal
opportunities and the best and highest education. He gave them the best of his mind, not its dregs,
and a comradeship which made a rare and happy entrance for them into life's daily toil and struggle.
The father asked for nothing but their love, and he had his own unselfish devotion returned to him
a hundredfold. It must have been a great joy to him to watch the unfolding of talent and great
gifts in this daughter who was always his comrade. He could not live to see the end of a career so blessed,
so rich in womanly grace and sustaining service, but he knew he had spared no good thing he could bring
into her life, and when her mission was fulfilled, then those who read and inwardly digest these pages
will feel that she first learnt the secret of service to mankind in the home of her father.
End of Section 2
Section 3 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
The Sleeper-Fox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 3. The Ladder of Learning, 1876 to 1885.
Hast thou come with the heart of thy childhood back?
The free, the pure, the kind?
So murmured the trees in my homeward track, as they play to the mountain wind.
Has thy soul been true to its early love?
whispered my native streams,
hath the spirit nursed amid hill and grove,
still revered its first high dream.
After Mr. Ingalls had been chief commissioner of Ode,
he decided to retire from his long and arduous service.
Had he been given the lieutenant governorship of the Northwest,
as was expected by some in the service,
he probably would have accepted it and remained longer in India.
He was not in sympathy with Lord Lytton's Afghan policy,
and that would naturally alter his desire for further employment.
As with his father before him, his work was highly appreciated by those he served.
Lord Lytton, the viceroy, in a letter to Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State for India,
writes, February 1876,
During the short period of my own official tenure,
I have met with much valuable assistance for Mr. Ingalls,
both as a member of my legislative council and also as officiating commissioner in Africa.
more especially as regards the amalgamation of oud with the northwest provinces of his character and abilities i have formed so high an opinion that had there been an available vacancy i should have been glad to secure to my government his continued services
two of mr ingle's sons had settled in tasmania and it was decided to go there before bringing home the younger members of his family the eldest daughter mrs simpson was now married and settled in edinburgh and the ingle's
decided to make their home in that city. Two years were spent in Hobart settling the two sons on the
land. Mrs. McLaren says, when in Tasmania, Elsie and I went to a very good school. Miss Nott, the head
mistress, had come out from Cheltenham College for girls. Here, in the days when such things were
practically unknown, Elsie, backed by Miss Not, instituted school colors. They were very primitive,
not beautiful hat-bands, but two inches of blue and white ribbon sewn onto a safety pin,
and worn on the lapel of our coats. How proud we were of them. Mr. Ingalls, writing to his
daughter in Edinburgh, says of their school life, Elsie has done very well. She is in the second
class, and last week got up to second in the class. We are all in a whirl having to sort
and send off our boxes, some round the Cape, some to Melbourne, and some to go with us.
Mrs. Ingalls, on board the Durham, Homeward Bound, writes,
Elsie has found occupation for herself in helping to nurse sick children,
and look after turbulent boys who trouble everybody on board, and a baby of seven months old
is in a special favorite with her. Eva has met with a bosom friend in a little girl named
Purley McMillan, without whom she would have collapsed altogether.
our vessel is not a fast one but we have been only five instead of six weeks getting to suez the family took a house at seven brunsfield place and the two girls were soon at school mrs mclaren says
Elsie and I used to go daily to the Charlotte Square Institution, which used in those days to be the Edinburgh School for Girls.
Mr. Oliphant was headmaster.
Father never approved of the Scotch custom of children walking long distances to school, and we used to be sent every morning in a cab.
The other day, when telling the story of the Scottish women's hospitals to a large audience of working women in Edinburgh,
one woman said to me,
my husband is a prude man the day. He tells everybody how he used to drive Dr. Ingalls to school
every morning when she was a girl. Of her school life in Edinburgh, Miss Wright gives these memories.
I remember quite distinctly when the girls of 23 Charlotte Square were told that two girls from
Tasmania were coming to the school and a certain feeling of surprise that the said girls
were just like ordinary mortals. Though the big, earning.
brows and the quaint hair parted in the middle and done up in plates fastened up at the back of the head were certainly not ordinary elsie was put in a higher english class than i was in and though i knew her i did not know her very well a friend has a story of a question going round the class she thinks clive or warren hastings was the subject of the lesson and the question was what one would do if a calumny were spread about one
deny it one girl answered fight it another still the teacher went on asking live it down said elsie right miss ingalls my friend writes the question i cannot remember it was the bright confident smile with the answer and mr hossack's delighted wave to the top of the class that abides in my memory
I always think a very characteristic story of Elsie is her asking that the school might have permission to play in Charlotte Square Gardens.
In those days, no one thought of providing fresh air exercise for girls except by walks, and tennis was just coming in.
Elsie had the courage. To us schoolgirls, it seemed the extraordinary courage, to confront the three directors of the school and ask if we might be allowed to play in the gardens of the square.
The three directors together were, to us, the most formidable and awe-inspiring body,
though separately they were amiable and estimable men. The answer was that we might play in the gardens
if the neighboring proprietors would give their consent, and the heroic Elsie, with I think
one other girl, actually went round to each house in the square and asked consent of the owner.
In those days, the inhabitants of Charlotte Square were very select and exclusive.
indeed, and we all felt it was a brave thing to do. Elsie gained her point, and the girls played at
certain hours in the square till a regular playing field was arranged. Her sister Eva reports that the
first answer of the directors was enough for the rest of the school, but Elsie, undaunted,
interviewed each of the three directors herself. After every bell in Charlotte Square had been
rung and all interviewed, she returned from this great expedition triumphant. All had consented.
So the damsels, interned, from nine to three, were given the gardens, and the grim, dull,
palisaded square must have suddenly been made to blossom like the rose.
Would that some follower of Elsie Ingalls even now might ring the doorbells and get the gates
unlocked to the rising generation. Elsie's companion or companions in this
first attempt to influence those in authority have been spoken of as her first unit.
Elsie was, for a time, joint editor of the Edina, a school magazine of the ordinary type.
Her great achievement was in making it pay, which, it is recorded, no other editor was able to do.
There are various editorial anxieties alluded to in her correspondence with her father.
The memories quoted take us further than school days, but they find a fitting place here.
Our more intimate acquaintance came after Mrs. Engle's death, and when Elsie was thinking of and
beginning her medical work. In 1888, six of us girls who had been at the same school started
the Six Sincere Student Society, which met in one house. The first year we read and discussed
Emerson's essays on self-reliance and heroism. I am pretty sure it was Elsie who suggested
those essays. Also, Helps and Matthew Arnold's culture and anarchy. I have a note on this.
Two very hot discussions as to what culture means and if it is sufficiently powerful to regenerate
the world. Culture of the masses and also of women largely gone into. This very friendly and happy
society lasted on till 1891 when it was enlarged and became a debating society. I find Elsie taking up such
subjects as, that our modern civilization is a development, not a degeneration, that character is
formed in a busy life rather than in solitude. Papers on Henry Drummond's Ascent of Man and on the
ethics of war. Always associated with Elsie in those days, I think of her father, and no biography of her
will be true, which does not emphasize the beautiful and deep love and sympathy between Elsie and
Mr. Ingalls. He used to meet us, girls, as if we were his intellectual equals, and would discuss
problems and answer our questions with the utmost cordiality and appreciation of our point of view,
and always there was the feeling of the entire understanding and fellowship between father and
daughter. She was a keen croquet player, and tolerated no frivolity when a stroke either at croquet
or golf were in the balance. She was fond of long walks with Mr. Ingalls,
and then by herself, and time never hung on her hands in holiday time. She was always serene and happy.
It was decided that Elsie should go to school in Paris in September 1882, a decision not lightly made,
and Mr. Engels writes after her departure,
I do not think I could have borne to part with you, my darling, did I not feel the assurance that,
in doing so we are following the Lord's guidance. Your dear mother and I both made it the subject of earnest
prayer, and I feel we have been guided to do what was best for you, and we shall see this when
the weary time is over, and we have got you back again with us. When I return to Edinburgh, I feel
I shall have no one to find out my psalms for me, or to cut my spectator, that we shall have no more
discussions regarding the essays of Mr. Fraser, and no more anxieties about the forthcoming number
of the Edina. The nine months will pass quickly. Elsie's letters from Paris have not been preserved,
but the ones from her father show the alert intelligence and interest in all she was reporting.
Of the events at home and abroad, Mr. Ingalls writes to her of the Suez Canal,
the bringing to justice of the Phoenix Park murderers, the great snowstorm at home, and the Channel
Tunnel. Mrs. Engels writes with maternal skepticism on some passing events,
I cannot imagine you making the body of your dress. I think there would not be many carnivals if you had to make the
dresses yourselves. Mr. Ingalls, equally skeptical, has a more satisfactory solution for dressmaking.
I hope you have more than one dinner frock, two or three, and let them be pretty ones.
Mrs. Ingalls, commenting on Elsie's description of Gambetta's funeral, says,
He is a loss to France. Poor France, she always seems to me like a vessel without a helm,
driven about just where the winds take it. She has no sound Christian priest. She has no sound Christian
to guide her so different from our highly favored england mr ingle's letters are full of the courteous consideration for elsie and for others which marked all the way of his life and made him the man greatly beloved in whatever sphere he moved
punch and the spectator went from him every week and he writes i hope there was nothing in that number of punch you gave to m servelle to study while he were finishing your breakfast to hurt his feelings as a frenchman
punch has not been very complimentary to them of late and when elsie's sense of humour had been moved by a saying of her guvernant mr engels writes desirous of a very free correspondence with home but
i fear if i send your letter to eva at school that your remark about miss blank's proposal to go down to the lower flat of your house because the earl of anglesey once lived there may be repeated and ultimately reach her with exaggerations as those things always do
and may cause unpleasant feelings. There must have been some exhibition of British independence,
and in dealing with it, Mr. Ingalls reminds Elsie of a day in India, when you went off for a walk
by yourself, and we all thought you were lost, and all the Thampanis and Chapprasis and everybody
were searching for you all over the hill. One later episode was not on a hillside,
and except for Les Demoiselles in Paris, equally harmless.
January 1833.
I can quite sympathize with you, my darling, in the annoyance you feel at not having told
Miss Brown of your having walked home part of the way from Madame M. last Wednesday.
It would have been far better if you had told her, as you wished to do, what had happened.
Concealment is always wrong, and very often turns what was originally only a trifle into a
serious matter. In this case, I don't suppose Miss B could have said much if you had told her,
though she may be seriously angry if it comes to her knowledge hereafter. If she does hear of it,
you had better tell her that you told me all about it, and that I advised you, under the
circumstances, as you had not told her at the time, and that as by doing so now you could only
get the others into trouble, not to say anything about it. But keep clear of these things for the
future, my darling. When the end came here in this life, one of her school fellows wrote,
Elsie has been and is such a worldwide inspiration to all who knew her. One more can testify to the
blessedness of her friendship. Ever since the Paris days of 83, her strong, loving help was ready
in difficult times, and such wonderfully strengthening comfort and sorrow. The Paris education ended in the
summer of 1883, and Miss Brown, who conducted and lived with the seven girls who went out with her
from England, writes after their departure, I cannot tell you how much I felt when you all disappeared,
and how sad it was to go back to look at your deserted places. I cannot at all realize that you are now
all separated, and that we may never meet again on this earth. May we meet often at the throne of
grace, and remember each other there. It is nice to have a French maid to keep up the
conversations, and if you will read French aloud, even to yourself, it is of use.
Paris was no doubt an education in itself, but the perennial hope of fond parents that language and
music are in the air of the continent were once again disappointed in Elsie. She was timber-tuned
in ear and tongue, and though she would always say her mind in any vehicle for thought,
the accent and the grammar strayed along truly British lines. Her eldest, her eldest, her eldest
Nees applies a note on her music. She was still a schoolgirl when they returned from Tasmania.
At that time, she was learning music at school. I thought her a wonderful performer on the piano,
but afterwards her musical capabilities became a family joke, which no one enjoyed more than
herself. She had two pieces which she could play by heart, of the regular arpeggio drawing room
style, and these always had to be performed in any family function as one of the standing entertainments.
Elsie returned from Paris the days of schoolgirlhood left behind. Her character was formed,
and she had the sense of latent powers. She had not been long at home when her mother died
of a virulent attack of scarlet fever, and Mr. Ingalls lost the lodestar of his loving nature.
From that day, Elsie shouldered all her father's burdens, and they too went on together until his death.
In her desk, when it was opened, these resolutions were found. They are written in pencil,
and belonged to the date when she became the stay and comfort of her father's remaining years.
I must give up dreaming, making stories. I must give up getting cross. I must devote my mind more to the housekeeping.
I must be more thorough in everything. I must be truthful. The bottom of the whole evil is the habit of
dreaming, which must be given up. So help me God. Elsie Ingalls.
End of Section 3. Section 4 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour. The Sliber Fox
Recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4. The Student Days, 1885 to 1892.
Edinburgh, Glasgow. Let knowledge grow from more to more, but more of reverence in us dwell,
that mind and soul, according well, may make one music as before, but vaster. I remember well the
day Elsie came in and sitting down beside father divulged her plan of going in for medicine.
I still see and hear him, taking it all so perfectly calmly and naturally, and setting to work at once
to overcome the difficulties which were in the way, for even then all was not plain sailing for the
woman who desired to study medicine. So writes Mrs. McLaren, looking back on the days when the future
doctor recognized her vocation and ministry. If it had been a profession of plain sailing,
the adventurous spirit would probably not have embarked in that particular vessel. The seas had
only just been charted, and not every shoal had been marked. In the midst of them, Elis
Seas bark was to have its hairbreadth escapes. The University Commission decided that women should
not be excluded any longer from receiving degrees owing to their sex. The writer recollects the
description given of the discussion by the late Sir Arthur Mitchell, KCB, one of the most enlightened
minds of the age in which he lived and achieved so much. He, and one or more of his colleagues,
presented the commissioners with the following problem. Why not? On what things? On what
theory or doctrine, was it just or beneficent to exclude women from university degrees? There came no
answer, for logic cannot be altogether ignored by a university commission. So, without opposition
or blare of trumpets, the Scottish universities opened their degrees to all students. It was of good
omen that the commission sat in High Dunedin, under that rock bastion where Margaret,
saint and queen, was the most learned member of the Scottish nation in the age in which she reigned.
Dr. Jax Blake had founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, and it was there that Elsie
received her first medical teaching. Everything was still in its initial stages, and every step in the
higher education of women had to be fought and won against the forces of obscurantism and
professional jealousy. University commissions might issue reports, but the working-out-eastern out of
of them was left in the hands of men who were determined to exclude women from the medical profession.
Clinical teaching could only be carried on in a few hospitals. Anatomy was learned under the
most discouraging circumstances. Mixed classes were, and still are, refused. Extramural teaching
became complicated, on the one hand, by the extra fees which were rung from women's students,
and by the careless and perfunctory teaching accorded by the twice-paid profession.
professors gave the off-scowrings of their minds, the least valuable of their subjects,
and their unpunctual attendance to all that stood for female students.
It will hardly be believed that the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh
refused to admit women to clinical teaching in the wards
until they had raised 700 pounds to furnish two wards,
in which, and in which alone, they might work.
To these two wards, with their selected cases, they are still confined,
with the exception of one or two other less important subjects.
Medicals rarely belong to the moneyed classes,
and very few women can command the money demanded of the medical course,
and that women should have raised at once the tax thus put upon them by the royal infirmary
is an illustration of how keenly and bravely they fought through all the disabilities laid upon them.
Women had always staunch friends among the doctors.
The names of many of them are written in gold.
in the story of the opening of the profession to women. It has been observed that St. Paul had the
note of all great minds, a passion to share his knowledge of a great salvation with both Jews and Gentiles.
That test of greatness was not conspicuous in the majority of the medical profession at the time when
Elsie Ingalls came as a learner to the gates of medical science. That kingdom, like most others,
had to suffer violence, ere she was to be known as the good,
good physician in her native city and in those of the Allied nations. There are no letters extant from
Elsie concerning her time with Dr. Jax Blake. After Mrs. Ingalls's death, Mr. Ingalls decided to
leave their home at Brunsfield and the family moved to rooms in Melville Street. Here Elsie was with
her father and carried on her studies from his house. It was not an altogether happy start,
and very soon she had occasion to differ profoundly with Dr. Jek's Blake in her management of the school.
Two of the students failed to observe the discipline imposed by Dr. Jax Blake, and she expelled them from the school.
Any high-handed act of injustice always roused Elsie to keen and concentrated resistance.
A lawsuit was brought against Dr. Jax Blake, and it was successful,
proving in its course that the treatment of the students had been without justification.
looking back on this period of the difficult task of opening the higher education to women it is easy to see the defects of many of those engaged in the struggle
the attitude towards women was so intolerably unjust that many of the pioneers became embittered in soul and had in their bearings to friends or opponents an air which was often provocative of misunderstanding
They did not always receive from the younger generation for whom they had fought,
that forbearance that must be always extended to the old guard,
whose scars and defects are but the blemishes of a hardly contested battle.
Success often makes people autocratic,
and those who benefit from the success,
and suffer under the overbearing spirit engendered,
forget their great gains in the galling sensation of being ridden over Ruffshod.
It is an episode on which it is now unnecessary to dwell, and Dr. Ingalls would always have been the first to render homage to the great pioneer work of Dr. Jax Blake. Through it all, Elsie was living in the presence chamber of her father's chivalrous, high-minded outlook. Whatever action she took then must have had his approval, and it was from him that she received that keen sense of equal justice for all.
These student ears threw them more than ever together.
On Sundays they worshipped in the morning in Free St. George's Church
and in the evening in the Episcopal Cathedral.
Mr. Ingalls was a great walker, and Elsie said,
I learnt to walk when I used to take those long walks with father after mother died.
Then she would explain how you should walk.
Your whole body should go into it, and not just your feet.
Of these student days, her niece, Evelyn Simpson,
says, when she was about 18, she began to wear a bonnet on Sunday. She was the last girl in our
connection to wear one. My aunt Eva, who was two years younger, never did, so I think the fashion
must have changed just then. I remember thinking how very grown up she must be. Another niece
writes, at the time when it became the fashion for girls to wear their hair short, when she went out
one day, and came home with a closely cropped head, I bitterly resented the loss of Aunt Elsie's
beautiful shining fair hair, which had been a real glory to her face. She herself was most delighted
with the new style, especially with the saving of trouble in hairdressing. She only allowed her hair
to grow long again because she thought it was better for a woman doctor to dress well and as
becomingly as possible. This opinion only grew as she became older, and had been longer in the
profession. In her student days, she rather prided herself on not caring about personal appearance,
and she dressed very badly. Her sense of fair play was very strong. Once in college, there was an
opposition aroused to the student Christian Union, and a report was spread that the students
belonging to it were neglecting their college work. It happened to be the time for the class
examinations, and the lists were posted on the college notice board. The next morning, the initial
C.U. were found printed opposite the names of all the students who belonged to the Christian Union,
and, as these happened to head the list in most instances, the unfair report was effectually silenced.
No one knew who had initialed the list. It was sometime afterwards, I discovered it had been Aunt Elsie.
She was a beautiful needlewoman. She embroidered and made entirely herself two lovely little flannel garments for her first grand-nephew,
in the midst of her busy life, then filled to overflowing with the work of her growing practice
and of her suffrage activities. The babies, as they arrived in the families, met with her special love.
In her short summer holidays with any of us, the children were her great delight.
She was a great believer in an open-air life. One summer, she took three of us a short walking tour
from Callender, and we did enjoy it. We tramped over the hills and finally arrived at
Creanlark, only to find the hotel crammed and no sleeping accommodation. She would take no refusal,
and persuaded the manager to let us sleep on mattresses in the drawing room, which added to the
adventures of our trip. On the way, she entertained us with tales of her college life, and imbued
us with our first enthusiasm for the women's cause. When I myself began to study medicine,
no one could have been more enthusiastically encouraging, and even through the stormy and
somewhat depressing times of the early career of the medical college for women,
Edinburgh, her faith and vision never faltered, and she helped us all to hold on courageously.
In 1891, Elsie went to Glasgow to take the examination for the triple qualification at the medical
school there. She could not then take surgery in Edinburgh, and the facilities for clinical teaching
were all more favorable in Glasgow. It was probably better for her to be away from all the
difficulties connected with the opening of the second school of medicine for women in
Edinburgh. The one founded by Dr. Jax Blake was the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women,
and the one promoted by Elsie Ingalls and the other women students was known as the Medical
College for Women. It was with the fortunes of this school that she was more closely associated,
writes Dr. Beatrice Russell. In Glasgow, she resided at the YWCA Hostel. Her father did not wish her to live
alone in lodgings, and she accommodated herself very willingly to the conditions under which she had to live.
Miss Grant, the superintendent, became her warm friend. Elsie's absence from home
enabled her to give a vivid picture of her life in her daily letters to her father.
Glasgow, February 4, 1891. It was not nice seeing you go off and being left all alone.
After I have finished this letter, I am going to set to work. It seems there are a to
twelve or fourteen girls boarding here, and there are regular rules. Miss Grant told me if I did not
like some of them to speak to her, but I am not going to be such a goose as that. One rule is you are
to make your own bed, which she did not think I could do, but I said I could make it beautifully.
I would much rather do what all the others do. Well, I arranged my room, and it is as neat as a new
pin. Then we walked up to the hospital, to the dispensary. We were there till 4.30,
as there were 36 patients and 31 of them knew.
I am most comfortable here, and I am going to work like anything.
I told Miss Barclay so, and she said,
Oh, goodness, we shall all have to look out for our laurels.
February 7, 91.
Mary Sinclair says it is no good going to the dispensaries on Saturday,
as there are no students there,
and the doctors don't take the trouble to teach.
I went to Dr. McEwan's wards this morning.
I was the first there, so he let me help him with an operation.
Then I went over to Dr. Anderson's.
February 9th.
This morning I spent the whole time in Dr. McEwen's wards.
He put me through my facings.
I could not think what he meant, he asked me so many questions.
It seems it is his way of greeting a new student.
Some of them cannot bear him, but I think he is really nice,
though he can be abominably sarcastic,
and he is a first-rate surgeon and capital teacher.
Today it was the medical jurists and the police officers he was down on,
and he told story after story of how they work by red tape,
according to the textbooks.
He said that when he was casualty surgeon,
one police officer said to him that it was no good having him there,
for he would never try to make the medical evidence fit in with the evidence they had collected.
Once they brought in a woman stabbed in her wrist,
and said,
they had caught the man who had done it running away, and he had a knife. Dr. McEwen said the cut had been
done by glass and not by a knife, so they could not convict the man, and there was an awful row over it.
Some of them went down to the alley where it had happened, and sure enough, there was a pane of glass
smashed right through the center. When the woman knew she was found out, she confessed she had done it
herself. The moral he impressed on us was to examine your patient before you hear the story.
A. is beginning to get headaches and not sleep at night. I am thankful to say that is not one of my
tricks. Miss G. is getting unhappy about her and is going to send up beef tea every evening.
She offered me some, but I like my glass of milk much better. I am taking my tonic and my
tramp regularly, so I ought to sleep well. I am quite disgusted when girls break
down through working too hard. They must remember they are not as strong as men, and then they do
idiotic things, such as taking no exercise into the bargain. Dr. McEwen asked us today to get the first
stray 20,000 pounds we could for him, as he wants to build a proper private hospital. So I said
he should have the second 20,000 pounds I came across, as I wanted the first to build an endow
a woman's college in Edinburgh. He said he thought that would be great waste. There should not be
separate colleges. If women are going to be doctors equal with the men, they should go to the same
school. I said, I quite agreed with him, but when they won't admit you, what are you to do?
Leave them alone, he said. They will admit you in time. And he thought outside colleges would only
delay that. This morning in Dr. McEwan's wards, a very curious case came in.
Some of us tried to draw it, never thinking he would see us,
and suddenly he swooped round and insisted on seeing every one of the scribbles.
He has eyes, I believe, in the back of his head, and ears everywhere.
He forgot, I thought, to have the ligature taken off a legion he was operating on,
and I said so in the lowest whisper to MS.
About five minutes afterwards, he calmly looked straight over to us and said,
now we'll take off the ligature.
I went round this morning and saw a few of my patients.
I found one woman up who ought to have been in bed.
I discovered she had been up all night
because her husband came in tipsy about 11 o'clock.
He was lying there asleep on the bed.
I think he ought to have been horsewipped,
and when I have the vote,
I shall vote that all men who turn their wives and families
out of door at 11 o'clock at night,
especially when the wife is ill, shall be horsewipped.
And, if they make the excuse that they were tipsy, I should give them double.
They would very soon learn to behave themselves.
As to the father of the cherubs you ask about,
his family does not seem to lie very heavily on his mind.
He is not in work just now, and apparently is very often out of work.
One cannot take things seriously in that house.
In the house over the Clyde I saw the funniest sight.
it is an irish house as dirty as a pigsty and there are about ten children when i got there at least six of the children were in the room and half of them without a particle of clothing they were sitting about on the table and on the floor like little cherubs with black faces
i burst out laughing when i saw them and they all joined in most heartily including the mother though not one of them saw the joke for they came and stood just as they were round me in a ring to see the baby washed
suddenly the cherubs began to disappear and ragged children to appear instead i looked round to see who was dressing them but there was no one there they just slipped on their little black frocks without a thing on underneath and departed to the street as soon as the baby was washed
Three women with broken legs have come in. I don't believe so many women have ever broken their legs together in one day before.
One of them is a shirt finisher. She sews on the buttons and puts in the gores at the rate of four and a half pence a dozen shirts.
We know the shop, and they sell the shirts at four shillings sixpence each.
Of course, political economy is quite true,
but I hope that shopkeeper, if he ever comes back to this earth,
will be a woman and have to finish shirts at four and a half pence a dozen,
and then he'll see the other side of the question.
I told the woman it was her own fault for taking such small wages,
at which she seemed amused.
It is funny the stimulating effect a big,
school has on a hospital. The royal here is nearly as big and quite as rich as the
Edinburgh Royal, but there is no pretense that they really are in their teaching and
arrangements the third hospital in the kingdom, as they are in size. The London
Hospital is the biggest, and then comes Edinburgh, and this is the third. Guys and
Barts that one hears so much about are quite small in comparison, but they
have big medical schools attached. The doctors seem to
lie on their oars if they don't have to teach.
February 1892.
I thought the Emperor of Germany's speech the most impertinent piece of self-glorification
I ever met with. Steed's egotism is perfect humility beside it.
He and his house are the chosen instruments of our supreme Lord, and anybody who does not
approve of what he does had better clear out of Germany. As you say, McCommet and Luther
and all the great epic makers
had a great belief in themselves
and their mission. But the German
Emperor will have to give some further
proof of his divine commission,
beyond a supreme belief
in himself, before I,
for one, will give in my submission.
I never read such a speech.
I think it was perfectly blasphemous.
The Herald has an article
about wild women. It evidently
thinks St. Andrews has opened the floodgates,
and now there is the deluge.
St. Andrews has done very well,
degrees and mixed classes from next October.
Don't you think our court
might send a memorial to the university court
about medical degrees?
It is splendid having Sir William Muir on our side,
and I believe the bulk of the senators are all right.
They only want a little shove.
In Glasgow, the women students had to encounter
the opposition to mixed classes
and the fight centered in the infirmary.
It would have been more honest to have promulgated the decision of the managers
before the women students had paid their fees for the full course of medical tuition.
Elsie, in her letters, describes the toughly fought contest,
and the final victory won by the help of the just and enlightened leaders in the medical world.
So here is another fight, writes the student, with a sigh of only a half regret.
It was too good a fight, and the same.
the backers were too strong for the women's students not to win their undoubted rights. Through all
the chaffing and laughter, one perceives the threat of a resolute purpose, and Elsie's great gift,
the unconquerable facing of the hill difficulty. True, the baffled and puzzled enemy often played into
their hands, as when Dr. T, driven to extremity in a weak moment, threatened to prevent their attendance by
physical force. The threat armed the students with yet another legal grievance.
Elsie describes on one occasion, in her haste, going into a ward where Dr. Gemmell,
one of the mixed objectors, was demonstrating. She perceived her mistake and retreated,
not before receiving a smile from her enemy. The now Sir William McEwen enjoyed the fight
quite as much as his women's students, and if today he notes the achievements of the
Scottish women's hospitals, he may count as his own some of their success in the profession
in which he has achieved so worthy a name. The dispute went on until, at length, an exhausted foe
laid down its weapons, and the redoubtable Mr. T conveyed the intimation that the women's
students might go to any of the classes and a benison on them. The faction fight, like many another
in the brave days of old, roared and clattered down the paved causeways of
Glasgow. Dr. T. in his gatehouse must have wished his petticoat foes many times away and above the pass.
If he, or any of the obstructionists of that day, survive, we know that they belong to a sect that
needs no repentance. They may, however, note with self-complacency that their action trained on a
generation skilled in the contest of fighting for democratic rights in the realm of knowledge. It is a
birthright to enter into that gateway, and the keys are given to all who possess the
understanding mind and reverent attitude towards all truth.
November 1891. Those old wretches, the infirmary managers, have reared their heads again,
and now have decided that we are not to go to mixed classes, and we have been tearing all over
the ward seeing all sorts of people about it. I went to Dr. Kay's this morning. All right. Crossing the
quadrangle, a porter rushed at me and said,
Dr. T wants to see all the lady students at the gatehouse.
I remarked to Miss M, I am certainly not going to trot after Dr. T for casual messages like
that. He can put up a notice if he wants me.
We were going upstairs to Dr. R when another porter ran up and said,
Dr. T is in his office. He would be much obliged if he would speak to him.
So we laughed and said, that was more polite, anyhow, and went into the
the office. So he hummed and hawed, looked everywhere except at us, and then said the infirmary
manager said we were not to go to mixed classes. So I promptly said,
Then I shall come for my fees tomorrow, and walked out of the room. I was angry. I went straight
back to Dr. Kay, who said he was awfully sorry and angry, and he would see Dr. T, but he was
afraid he could do nothing. So here is another fight. But you see, we cannot be
beat here, for the same reason that we cannot beat them in Edinburgh. Were the managers
managers a hundred times over, they cannot turn Mr. McEwen off? The Glasgow Herald had an article the
other day, saying there was a radical change in the country, and that no one was taking any notice of
it, and no one knew where it was to land us. This was the draft ordinance of the commissioners,
which actually put the education of women on the same footing as that of men, and worse still,
to countenance mixed classes. The G.H. seems to think this is the beginning of the end,
and will necessarily lead to woman suffrage, and it will probably land them in the pulpit,
because if they are ordinary university students, they may compete for any of the bursaries,
and many bursaries can only be held on condition that the holder means to enter the church.
You never read such an article, and it was not the least a joke, but sober earnest.
I saw Dr. P. about my surgery. The chief reason I tried to get that prize was to pay for those things and not worry you about them. I want to pass awfully well, as it tells all one's life through, and I mean to be very successful.
Dr. B. has the most absurd way of agreeing with everything you say. He asked me what I would do with a finger. I thought it was past all mending and said, amputate it.
quite so quite so he said solemnly but we'll dress it to-day with such and such a thing there were two or three other cases in which i recommended desperate measures in which he agreed but did not follow finally he asked mr b what he would do with the swelling mr b hesitated i said open it whereupon he went off into fits of laughter and proclaimed to the whole room my prescriptions and said i would make a first-rate surgeon
for I was afraid of nothing.
It is one thing to recommend treatment
to another person and another to do it yourself.
Queen Margaret has to be taken into the university,
not affiliated, but made an integral part of the university
and the lecturers appointed again by the senators.
This means that the Glasgow degrees
in everything are to be given from October,
arts, medicine, science, and theology.
The decrees of the primordial protoplasm
that Sir James Crichton Brown knows all about, are being reversed right and left,
and not only by the Senatees Academicus of St. Andrews.
The remaining letters are filled with all the hopes and fears of the examined.
Mr. McEwen tells her she will pass with one hand,
and Elsie has the usual moan over a defective memory
and the certainties that she will be asked all the questions to which she has no answering key.
The evidence of hard and conscientious study abound, and after she had counted the days and rejoined her father,
she found she had passed through the heavy ordeal with great success, and having thus qualified,
could pass on to yet unconquered realms of experience and service.
End of Section 4.
Section 5 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
This Liebervox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 5.
London, the New Hospital for Women, Dublin, the Rotunda, 1892 to 1894, Part 1
We take up the task eternal and the burden and the lesson pioneers, O pioneers, Walt Whitman.
After completing her clinical work in Glasgow and passing the examination for the triple qualification in 1892,
it was decided that Elsie should go to London and work as house surgeon in the new hospital
for women in the Houston Road.
In 1916, that hospital kept its Jubilee year,
and when Elsie went to work there,
it had been established for nearly 30 years.
Its story contains the record of the leading names
among women doctors.
In the commemorative prayer of Bishop Padgett,
and a special Thanksgiving was made
for the good example of those now at rest,
Elizabeth Blackwell and Sophia Jax Blake,
of good work done by women doctors
throughout the whole world, and now especially, of the high trust and great responsibility committed
to women doctors in this hour of need. The hearts of many present went over the washing seas,
to the lands wasted by fire and sword, and to the leader of the Scottish women's hospitals,
who had gained her earliest surgical experience in the wards of the first hospital, founded by the
first woman doctor, and standing for the new principle that women can practice the healing art.
Elsie Ingalls took up her work with keen energy and a happy power of combining work with varied
interests. In the active months of her residence, she resolutely tramped London, attended most of the
outstanding churches, and was a great sermon-taster of ministers ranging from Boyd Carpenter to Father
Matarine. Inumerable relatives and friends tempted her to lawn tennis and the theaters.
She had a keen eye to all the humors of the staff, and formed her own opinions on patients and
doctors with her usual independence of judgment. Elsie's letters to her father were
detailed and written daily. Only a very small selection can be quoted, but every one of them
is instinct with a buoyant outlook, and they are full of the joy of service. It is interesting
to read in these letters her descriptions of the work of Dr. Garrett Anderson, and then to read
Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson's speech on her mother at the Jubilee of the Hospital. I shall never
forget her at Victoria Station on the day when the Women's Hospital Corps was leaving England for
France, early in September 1914. She was quite an old woman, her life's work done, but the light of
battle was in her eyes, and she said, had I been 20 years younger, I would have been taking you
myself. Just 21 years before the war broke down the last of the barriers against women's work as
doctors, Elsie Ingalls entered the new hospital for women, to learn with that staff of women
doctors who had achieved so much, under conditions so full of difficulties and discouragements.
New Hospital for Women, Houston Road, 1892, 3. My own dearest Papa. Here we begin another long
series of letters. The people in the carriage were very quiet, so I slept all right. Of course,
they shut up all the windows, so I opened all the ventilators, and I also opened the window two or
three times. I had breakfast at once, and then a bath, and then came in for a big operation by
Mrs. Boyd. Her husband came up to help her. Mrs. Charlebe and Mrs. de la Choira were up too,
both of them visiting doctors. I have been all round the wards and got a sort of
idea of the cases in my head, but I shall have to get them all up properly. The visiting physicians
seem to call over the day from 9 o'clock in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. Some of the
students from the School of Medicine are dressers and clerks. I believe I have to drill them,
but of course they are only very senior students because their real hospital is the Royal Free.
There are four wards, two of them round, with two fireplaces back to back in the middle. The other
two wards are oblong, and they are all prettily painted and bright. Then there are two small wards
for serious cases. I have not arranged my room yet, as I have not had a minute. I am going out to
post this and get a stethoscope. Mrs. Dela Chorwa has been here. She is a nice old lady and awfully
particular. I would much rather work with people like that than people who are anyhow.
Mrs. Charlieb is about 40, very dark and solemn. The nurse has seemed nice,
but they don't have any special uniform, which I think is a pity.
So they are pinks and grays and blues and twenty different patterns of caps.
I think I shall like being here very much.
I only hope I shall get on with all my mistresses.
And I hope I shall always remember what to do.
The last big operation case died.
It was very sad and very provoking, for she really was doing well,
but she had not vitality enough to stand the shock.
That was the case whose doctor told her and her husband that she was suffering from hysteria.
And that man, you know, can be a fellow of the colleges and a member of any society he likes to apply to,
while Mrs. G. Anderson and Mrs. Charleap cannot. Is it not ridiculous?
Mrs. G. Anderson said she was going to speak to Mrs. McCall about my having one of her maternity posts.
I shall come home first, however, my dearest Papa.
Mrs. G. A. said she thought I should have a good deal more of that kind of work if I was going to set up in a lonely place like Edinburgh, as I ought never to have to call in a man to help me out of a hole.
Mrs. G. Anderson is going to take me to a Cinderella dance tonight in eight of the hospital. I am to meet her at St. James's Hall.
We had an awful morning of it. Mrs. G. A. is taking Mrs. M.'s ward, and turned up 9.30, Mrs. S.'s' hour.
then Miss C came in on the top to consult about two of her cases. Into the bargain, A slept late and did not arrive till near ten, so, by the time they had all left, I had a lovely medley of treatment in my head. My fan has arrived and will come in for tonight. I hope Mrs. G. Anderson will be a nice chaperone and introduce one properly. I am to go early, and her son is to look out for me, and begin the introducing until she comes. Miss Garrett has been,
today painting the hall for the Chicago exhibition. She is going to the dance tonight. She says
Mrs. Fawcett got some more money out of the English commissioners in a lovely way. These commissioners
have spent 17,000 pounds in building themselves a kiosk in the ground, and they allowed Mrs. Fawcett
500 pounds to represent women's work in England. Everyone is furious about it. Well, Mrs. Fawcett
has managed to get an extra 500 pounds. She wrote,
said that if she did not get any more, she could not mount all the photographs and drawings,
but would put up a notice that the English commission was too poor to allow for mounting and framing.
This with the kiosk in the ground. One of the patients here was, once upon a time, a servant
at the Baroness Burdette Coutts. She certainly was most awfully kind to her, sent her ten pounds
to pay her rent, and has now paid to send her to the cottage. Miss B is in hopes she may get her
interested in the hospital now, but it seems she does not approve of women doctors and such things.
Perhaps, as the old housemaid did so well here, she may change her mind.
The report is out now. I shall send them to some of the doctors in Edinburgh.
I see in it that Mr. Robertson left £1,000 in memory of his wife to the hospital,
and that is how that bed comes to be called the Caroline Crum-Robertson bed.
We had two big operations today. We had the usual rome,
in the morning, and then we had to prepare. I did one lovely thing. This morning, I pointed out to
Mrs. Charlie with indignation that our galvanic battery had run out. I said that it really was disgraceful
of C, for it had only been used once for a quarter of an hour since the last time he had charged it.
Mrs. S agreed, and said she would go in and speak to him and tell him to send her battery, which was
with him being charged. We wanted a battery for the galvanic cottery.
Well, Mrs. Sharlebe's battery arrived.
I tried it and found it would not heat the cottery properly,
so I was very angry, and I sat down and wrote C a peppery letter.
I told him to send some competent person at once to look at the battery,
and to be prepared to lend us one if this competent person saw it was necessary.
M flew off, and in 20 minutes a man from C arrived, very humble.
I turned on the batteries and showed him that they would not heat up properly.
sister said I talked to him like a mother. He departed very humbly to bring another battery.
In about half an hour, sister whistled up. C's man would like to see me. Down I went.
He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. You had not taken the resistance off, Miss,
and held one of the cottery red-hot attached to our own battery. Was not I sold? I had
humbly to apologize. And the amount of nervous energy I had wasted on that battery.
We began today with a big operation. It went perfectly splendidly. The chloroform was given by a Dr. B,
some special friend of the patient, so I hope there would be no hitch, and there was none.
He had the cheek afterwards to say to Dr. S that no one could have done it better. Mrs. S seemed
rather pleased, but I thought it awfully patronizing, was it not?
did i tell you that mrs s and miss walker were talking the other morning of the time when they would make this a qualifying hospital miss c said it would certainly come some day and of course to make it a qualifying hospital they must have men's beds and that will mean a mixed staff
however all that is in the future then we will show the old-fashioned hospitals with their retrograde managers etc how a mixed staff can work i wonder if they will have mixed classes too
I enjoyed King Lear very much. The scenery was magnificent. King Lear was not a bit kingly,
but just a weak old man. I suppose that was what he was meant to be. Ellen Terry was splendid.
The storm on the heath awful. I shivered in my seat when the wind whistled. The last scene,
the French camp on the cliffs on Dover, was really beautiful. Yesterday I did a lovely thing,
slept like a top till almost nine. I suppose I was tired after the exciting cases. Janet burst into my room with
Mrs. S. will be here in a very few minutes, miss. So out I tumbled and tore downstairs to meet Mrs. S in the hall.
I tried to look as if I had had breakfast hours before, and I don't think she suspected that was my first appearance.
She did her visit and then I went to breakfast. As luck would have it, Mrs. G. Anderson chose that
morning of all others to show a friend of hers round the hospital. She marched calmly into the
boardroom to find me grubbing. I saw the only thing to do was to be quite cool, so I got up and shook
hands and remarked, I am rather late this morning, and she only laughed. It was about 10.30, a nice time
for a house surgeon to be having breakfast. I did not go to her father Maderan after all yesterday.
I have been very busy. We have had another big operation.
doing all right so far.
She is an artist's wife.
She has had an unhappy time for four years,
because she has been very ill,
and their doctor said it was hysteria,
and told her husband not to give in to the nonsense.
Really, some of these general practitioners are grand.
They send some of the patients in
with the most outrageous diagnoses you can imagine.
One woman was told her life was not worth a year's purchase,
and she must have a big operation.
so she came in. We pummeled her all over and could not find the grounds of his diagnosis,
and finally treated for something quite different, and she went out well in six weeks. Her doctor
came to see her and said, well, madam, I could not have believed it. It is better they should
err in that direction than in the direction of calling real illness hysteria. I mean to have a
hospital of my own in Edinburgh someday. A patient with a well-balanced nervous system will
get well in just half the time that one of these hysterical women will. There is one plucky little
woman in just now. She has had a bad operation, but nothing has ever disturbed her equilibrium.
She smiles away in the pluckiest way, and gets well more quickly than anybody. I agree with Kingsley.
One of the necessities of the world is to teach girls to be brave and not whine over everything,
and the first step for that is to teach them to play games. Fancy, who has been here this,
evening, Bailey Walcott. He has come up to London on parliamentary business. He investigated every
hole and corner of the hospital. He says our girls are going to Dr. Littlejohn's class with
Jex's girls at Surgery Hall. It is wonderful how these men who would do nothing at first are
beginning to see it pays to be neutral now. We have a lot to be grateful to J.B.4. Bailey W. told me
the Leith managers have approached the Edinburgh managers saying,
undertake no more women students, we will undertake to take both schools and to build immediately.
Bailey Walcott said he and Mr. Scott of St. George's were the only two who opposed this.
If they send us down to Leith, we must make the best of it, and really try to make it a good school,
but it will be a great pity. The dance was awfully nice. Mrs. G. Anderson is a capital chaperone.
I managed to go off without my ticket, and the damsel at the door was very severe.
and said, I must wait till Mrs. Garrett Anderson came. I waited quietly a minute or two,
and was just going to ask her to send in to see if Mrs. Anderson had come, then a man marched in and
said, in a lovely manner, I have forgotten my ticket, and she merely said, you must give me your name, sir,
and let him pass. After that I gave my name and passed too. I found I might have waited till
doomsday, for Mrs. G.A. was inside. I danced every dance. It was. I danced every dance. It was
was a lovely floor and lovely music, and you may make up your mind, Papa dear, that I go to
all the balls in Edinburgh after this. They had two odd dances called Barn Door. I thought it would be
a kind of Sir Roger, but it was the oddest kind of hop, skip, and dance I ever saw. I said to
Mrs. G.A. it was something like a shotish, only not a quarter so pretty. She said it was pretty
when nicely danced, but people have not learned it yet. I rashly said to Mrs. GA that I could get some
tea from the night nurse when I got home, because I wanted to dance the extras. But she was horrified
at tea just before going to sleep, and swept me into the refreshment room and made me drink soup by
the gallon. I came home with Miss Garrett. We had an operation this morning, so, you see,
dances don't interfere with the serious business of life. Mrs. Sharlebe came to, and
in here the other day and declared I was qualifying for acute bronchitis, but I told her nobody could
have acute bronchitis who had a cold bath every morning and had been brought up to open windows.
This is the third sit-down to your letter. Talk of women at home never being able to do anything
without being interrupted every few minutes. I think you only have to be house surgeon to know what being
interrupted means. They not only knock and march in at the door, but they also whistle up the tube.
Most frightfully startling it used to be at first to hear a sort of shrill foghorn in the room.
There are three high temperatures, and the results are sent to me whenever they are taken.
We are sponging them, and they may have to put them into cold baths, but I hope not.
Mrs. G.A. told me to do it without waiting for the chief, if I thought it necessary,
whereupon Mrs. B. remarked, I think Miss Ingalls ought to be warned the patient may die.
Lovely weather here. I have been prescribing sunshunding,
sunshine, sunshine, sunshine for all the patients. There are only two balconies on each floor,
and Nurse Rose is reported to have said that she suppose I wanted the patients hung out over the
railings, for otherwise there would not be room. Miss W. came this morning to Sister's indignation.
Does she not think she can trust me for one day? So I said it was only that she was so delighted
at having a ward, and that I was sure I would do the same. Oh, said Sister, I am thankful you
have not a ward, you would bring a box with sandwiches and sit there all day. I am always having
former house surgeons thrown at my head who came round exactly to the minute, twice a day, whereas
they say, I am never out of the wards. At least they never know when I am coming. I tell them I don't
want them to trot round after me with an ink bottle. Miss R says I have no idea of discipline. I make one
grand round a day with the ink bottle, and then I don't want the nurses to take any
more notice of me. I think that is far more sensible than having fixed times. I quite agree the
ink bottle round ought to be at a fixed time, but I cannot help other things turning up to be done.
I had to toddle off and ask for Mrs. Kay. She is the one who is appointed to give anesthetics in the
hospital. They are all most frightfully nervous about anesthetics here, in all the hospitals,
and have regular anesthetists. In Edinburgh and Glasgow, the students give it, under the
surgeons, of course. I never saw any death or anything that was very frightening. One real reason is,
I believe, that they watch the wrong organ, viz the heart. In Scotland they hardly think of the heart
and simply watch the breathing. The Hyderabad commission settled conclusively that it was the
breathing gave out first, but having made up their minds that it does not, all the commissions in the
world won't convince them to the contrary. In the meantime, they do their operations in
fear and trembling, continually asking if the patient is all right. You never saw such a splendid
outpatient department as they have here, a perfectly lovely, comfortable waiting room, and pretty
receiving waiting room. The patients have to pay a small sum, yet they had over 20,000 visits
this year up to November. That is about half the size of the Glasgow Royal, one of the biggest
outpatients in the kingdom and general. This is paying, and for women. Who's set?
women doctors are not wanted. This morning I started off, meaning to go to Dr. Vaughn in the
Temple Church. Dr. C told me I ought to be early, and of course I was as late as I could be.
As I was running downstairs, Nurse Helen asked me if I had ever heard Stopford Brook. I had
heard his name, but I could not remember anything about him. Nurse H. said he was an awful
heretic and had got into trouble for his opinions. As a general rule, men who get into trouble for
their opinions are worth listening to. At least they have opinions. So I left Dr. Vaughn and went off to
Mr. S. Brooke. He gave a capital sermon with nothing heterodox in it about loving our fellow men.
I liked him, and would go tonight to hear his lecture on In Memorium, but Sister C is going out.
You know you must not aim at a separate but at a mixed school in Edinburgh. I am sure this is
best, and all the women here think so, too. I wonder when the university.
means to succumb. Mrs. Chi Anderson asked me to come and help her with a small operation in a hotel.
She gave me a half-guinea fee for so doing. We drove there in a handsome and drove back in her carriage.
She was most jovial and talkative. We went into the deanery, Westminster Abbey, on our way back,
to leave cards on somebody. You suddenly seemed to get out of the noise and rush of London when you
turn in there. It is quite quiet and green. All sorts of
men were wandering about in red gowns and black gowns. We were told it was convocation.
Mrs. Charlebe was awfully nice and kind. She said she hoped I would get on always as well as I had
here. Was it not nice of her? I said, I hoped I would do much better, for I thought I had made an
awful lot of mistakes since I came here. She said everybody has to make mistakes. The worst of
being a doctor is that one's mistakes matter so much. In everything else, you
You just throw away what you have messed and begin again, but you cannot do that as a doctor.
She said she expects to be called in as my consultant when I am a surgeon.
Won't my patients have to pay fees to get her up from London?
Miss C. has been trying to get on to some of the medical societies and has failed.
I shall not demean myself by asking to get on.
She'll wait till they beseech the honor of adding my name.
As to women doctors here having an assured position, I rather like the pioneer.
work, I think. I mean to make friends with all the nice doctors and vanquish all the horrid, selfish ones,
and end by being a missionary professor. If I don't get into the infirmary in Edinburgh, I mean to
build a hospital for myself like this one. Indeed, I don't know that I should not like the hospital
to myself better. I'll build it where the cattle market is, at the head of Lady Lawson Street. That would
be convenient for all the women in Fountainbridge and the grass market and Calgate, and it would
be comparatively high. To begin with, I mean to rent Eva's Hall from her for a dispensary.
You see, it is all arranged. End of Section 5. Section 6 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis
Balfour. The Slibervox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 5, London and Dublin, Part 2. The next course Elsie decided on taking was
one of three months in midwifery in the rotunda, Dublin. There was a greater equality of teaching
there in mixed classes, and also she thought the position of the whole hospital staff was on lines
which would enable her to gain the most experience in this branch, where she ultimately achieved so
much for her fellow citizens in Edinburgh. Costigan's Hotel, Upper Sackville Street, Dublin,
November 18, 1893. I went over to the Rotunda and saw D'Otendon, and saw
Dr. Glenn, the assistant master. I am clerk on Mondays and Thursdays. The only other person here is a native
from the Nizam's dominions. At breakfast this morning, he told me about his children, who are quite fair,
like their mother. How fond he was of London, and how he would not live in India now for anything.
He finds the climate enervating. I told him I thought India a first-rate place to live in,
and that I should like to go back. By the way,
fancy the franchise for the parish councils being carried.
The first thing I saw when I landed was defeat of the government.
The independent here is jubilant,
partly because the point of woman's suffrage is carried,
partly because the government is beaten.
So the strike has ended,
and the men go back to work on their old wages till February.
I expect both sides are sick of it,
but I am glad the men have carried it so far.
Lord Roseberry is a clever man.
mrs c evidently thinks i am quite mad for i have asked for a cold bath in my room good gracious me miss it's not cold entirely you'll be meanin
i went to see the dees the first thing i was told was that a miss d sat in their church an m b of the royal infirmary a very clever girl she has just taken a travelling bursary and is going to vienna but we don't know her they are home rulers mrs d
went on to say both she and her father were home rulers, but that she, for one, would not mind if they
did not obtrude their politics. So I thought, well, I won't obtrude mine. Then Mrs. Dee said,
You must take a side, you know, and say distinctly what side you are on when you are asked.
So I thought, well, I'll wait till I am asked, and I have got through today without being asked.
But positively, they used the word boycott about those.
D's. They have been boycotted by the congregation. It must be rather hard to be a home ruler and a
Presbyterian just now in Ireland. Positively, they frightened me so. I nearly squirmed under the table.
However, when I looked around the congregation, I thought, I should not mind much being boycotted
by them. The sermon was one about forgiving your enemies. Mrs. D. has given me a standing invitation to
come to dinner on Sunday. What will happen when I am suddenly asked to take my side? I don't know.
In the meantime, I will let things slide. Mrs. D. asked me if the Costagans were Catholics,
and said, she thought Mrs. C looked so nice she could not be one. December 1893.
I have done nothing but race after cases today. One old woman was killing. She came for Dr. B., whom she
said she had known before he was born. Dr. B could not go, so I went.
Heck, she said, I came for a doctor. Well, I'm the doctor. Come along.
Deed no, she said, you're no a doctor, you're just a woman. I did laugh and marched her off.
She was grandly tipsy when I left the home, so I'm going back now to see how the patient has got on,
in spite of the nursing. I had a second polite speech made to me last night. I was in
introduced into a house by the person who came to me as the doctor. When I had been in about two minutes,
a small man of four years old said suddenly in a clear voice, that is not a doctor, it's a girl.
I told him he was behind the age not to know that one could be both. We had a chloroform scare
this morning. I admired Dr. S's coolness immensely. He finished tying his stitches quietly,
while two doctors were skipping round like a pair of frightened girls.
It ended all right.
They don't know how to give chloroform anywhere out of Scotland.
It is very odd.
Mrs. Dee declared she was going to write to you
that she had found I had gone out without my breakfast.
So, here are the facts.
I was out late last night.
It was not up when they rang over for me.
So, before having my breakfast,
I just ran over to see what they wanted me for,
and finding it would keep I came back for my breakfast to find Mrs. D. there.
I am not such an idiot as to miss my meals, Papa dearest. My temper won't stand it.
I always have a glass of milk and a biscuit when I go out at night. I am as sensible as I can be.
I know you cannot do work with blunt instruments, and this instrument blunts very easily without food and exercise.
January 1, 1894. I have been round all
my patients today and had to drink glasses of very questionable wine in each house. It is really very
trying to be a practical teetotaler like me. Literally, I could hardly see them when I left the last house.
There was simply no getting off it, and I did not want to hurt their feelings. When they catch
hold of your hand and say, now, Dr. Deer, or Dr. Jewell, you'll just be taken a wee glass,
deed and you will. What are you going to do? Do you have? Do you have a little? Do you have a little? Do you
think this famasha with the French in Africa is going to be the beginning of the big war?
That is an awful idea. England's singled-handed against Europe. But it would be the English-speaking
peoples, Australia, the States, and Canada. I have made a convert to the ranks of women's
rights. Did I tell you that Dr. B. and I had an awful argument. I never mentioned the subject
again, for it is no good arguing with a man who has made up his mind, and is a north of
Ireland man who will die in the last ditch into the bargain. However, in the middle of the
operation, he suddenly said, By the way, you are right about the suffrage, Miss Ingalls.
Then I found he had come over about the whole question. As a comfort is always the most violent
supporter, I hope he'll do some good. February 5, 1894. After three months, you have learned all
the rotunda can teach. If you were a man, it would be worthwhile to stay. It would be worthwhile to
stay, because senior students, if they are men, get a lot of the CC's work to do, but they never
think of letting you do it if you are a woman. It is not deliberate unfairness, but they would never
think of it. If one stays six months, they examine one and give a degree, L.M., licentiate of midwifery.
If I could, I would rather spend three months in Paris with Potsie. I have learned a tremendous
lot here and feel very happy about my work in this special line.
It is their methods which are so good.
If you can really afford to give me another three months,
it would be wiser to go to Paris.
There are three men who are quite in the front rank there,
Potzi, Apostoli, and Peon.
Corrigan's, Upper Sackville Street, Dublin, February 10, 1894.
I got your letter at 11 when I came down to breakfast.
I shall never get into regular order for home again.
no one blames one for lying in bed here or being late, for no one knows how late you have been up the
night before, or how many cases you have been at before you get to the lecture. It is partly that,
and partly their casual Irish ways. I have had a letter from Miss McGregor this morning,
asking what I should say to our starting together in Edinburgh. It is a thing to be thought about.
It is quite true, as she says, that two women are much more comfortable working together.
they can give chloroform for one another and so on and consult together on the other hand we could do that just as well if we simply started separately and were friends
miss mcgregor was one of the j b lot and she and i had awful rouse over that question but we certainly got on very well before that and as she says that was not a personal question i am quite sure miss mcgregor is scotch enough not to propose any arrangement which won't be to her own advantage
Probably I know a good many more people than she does.
The question for me is whether it will be for my advantage.
I am rather inclined to think it will.
Miss McGregor is a splendid pathologist.
Nowadays one ought to do a lot of that work with one's cases,
and I have been puzzling over how one could and yet keep a septic.
If we could make some arrangement by which we could work into one another's hands in that way,
I think it would be for both our advantages.
There is one thing in favor of it.
If Miss McGregor and I are definitely working together,
no one can be astonished at are not calling in other people.
Miss McGregor, apart from everything else,
is distinctly one of our best women,
and it would be nice working with her.
What do you think of it, Papa dear?
Of course I should live at home in any case.
My consulting rooms anyhow would have to be outside,
for the old ladies would not climb up the stair.
Dublin, February 1894.
I do thank you so much for having let me come here.
I have learnt such a lot.
The money has certainly not been wasted,
but it was awfully good of you to let me come.
I am sure it will make a difference all my life.
I really feel on my feet in this subject now.
The more I think of it, the more I think it would be wise to start with Miss McGregor.
Apart altogether from Eva's instincts,
we will start the dispensary, and will end by having a hospital like the rotunda,
where students shall live on the premises, female students only.
Not that these boys are not very nice and good-natured, only they are out of place in the rotunda.
This was nearly the last letter written by Elsie to her father.
In most of her letters during the preceding months,
it was obvious Mr. Ingle's health was causing her anxiety,
and the inquiries and suggestions for his well-being grew more urgent,
as the shadow of death fell increasingly dark on the written pages. Elsie returned to receive his
eager welcome, but even her eyes were blinded to the rapidly approaching parting. On the 15th of
March, 1894, she wrote to her brother Ernest in India, telling all the story of Mr. Ingle's passing
on the 13th of that month. There was much suffering born with quiet patience. He never once complained,
I never saw such a patient. At the end, he turned towards the window, and then a bright look came
into his eyes. He said, pull down the blind. Then the chivalrous nightly soul passed into the light
that never was on sea or land. It was a splendid life he led, writes Elsie to her brother.
His old Indian friends write now, and say how the name of John Ingalls always represented
everything that was upright and straightforward and high principled in the character of a Christian
gentleman. He always said that he did not believe that death was the stopping place, but that one would go on
growing and learning through all eternity. God bless him in his onward journey. I simply cannot imagine
life without him. We had made such plans, and now it does not seem worthwhile to go on working at all.
I wish he could have seen me begin. He was so pleased about my beginning. He was so pleased about my
beginning. I said it would be such a joke to see Dr. Ingalls up. Saturday afternoons were to be his,
and he was to come over in my trap. He never thought of himself at all. Even when he was very ill at the end,
he always looked up when one went in and said, well, my darling, I am glad I knew about nursing,
for we did not need to have any stranger about him. He would have hated that.
End of Section 6
Section 7 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
The Sleeper Vox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 6. Political Enfranchisement and National Politics
Part 1
Well done, New Zealand. I expect I shall live to have a vote.
E.M.I. 1891.
I envy not in any mood the captive void of noble rage,
the linnet born within the cage that never knew the summer woods.
So the vote has come, and for our work.
Fancy it's having taken the war to show them how ready we were to work,
or even to show that that work was necessary.
Where do they think the world would have been without women's work all these ages?
E.M.I. Rennie, Russia, June 1917.
Mr. David Ingalls, writing to his son on his marriage in
1845 says, I cannot express the deep interest or the ardent hopes with which my bosom is filled on the
occasion, or the earnest, though humble prayer to the giver of all good, which it has uttered that he may
shed abundantly upon you both the rich mercies of his grace. With those feelings I take each of you
to my heart and give you my parental love and blessing. You have told me enough of the object of your
fond choice to make her henceforth dear to me, to all of us, on her own account, as well as yours.
And here, my beloved David, I would turn for a moment more immediately to yourself, as being now
in a situation very different from that in which you have hitherto been placed. As a husband,
then, it will now behoove you to remember that you are not your own exclusive property,
that for a single moment you must never forget. The tender love and affectionate respect,
and consideration which are due from you to the amiable individual who has bestowed on you her
hand and heart, it will, I assure myself, be your pleasing duty to prove. By unceasing attention to,
and solicitude for, her every wish how dearly you appreciate her worth, as well as gift,
and that her future comfort and happiness will invariably possess an estimation in your
view paramount to every feeling that can more immediately or personally affect yourself.
Let such be manifest in your every act, as connected with every object in which she is concerned.
Her love and affection for you will then be reciprocal and pure and lasting,
and thus will you become to each other what, under God's blessing, you are meant to be,
a mutual comfort and an abiding stay.
make her the confidential friend of your bosom, to whom its every thought must unreservedly be imparted,
the soother of all its cares, its anxieties, and disappointments when they chance to arise,
the fond participator in all your happiness and joys, from whatever source they may spring.
You will thus be discharging a duty which your sacred obligations at the altar have entailed upon you.
This letter has been quoted, with its phrasing of 70 years ago, because it shows an advanced
outlook on the position of husband and wife, and the setting forth of their equality and the respect
paid to their several positions. It may have influenced Mr. Ingle's views, both in his perfect
relations with his wife, and the sympathetic liberty of thought and action which he encouraged
in his own family. This chapter is devoted to the political and public life of L.C.
Ingl's. It can be written in a fortunate hour. The common cause to which she gave so much of her life
has now been one. The tumult and the turmoil are now hushed in peace and security. The age which
began in John Stuart Mill's subjection of women has ended in the representation of the people's
bill. It is possible to review the political period of the generation which produced Elsie Ingalls
and her comrades in the struggle against the disqualification.
of sex without raising any fresh controversy. We may safely say that Dr. Ingalls was one of the finest
types of women produced by the ideals and inspiring purposes of the generation to which she belonged.
She was born when a woman was the reigning sovereign, and when her influence and power were at
its height. Four years after her birth, the Reform Bill of 1868 was to make the first claim for women
as citizens in the British Parliament.
The Married Woman's Property Act, and the laws affecting divorce,
had recognized them as something else than the goods and chattels
or the playthings and bond women of the predominant partner.
Mary Somerville had convinced the world that a woman could have a brain.
Timidly, and yet resolutely, women were claiming a higher education,
and universities were slamming to their doors,
with a petty horde of maxim's claim to be based on divine authority.
Women pioneers mounted platforms and asserted rights
and qualified for jealously closed professions,
always from the first upheld and accompanied by great hearts.
Men few but chosen, who, like John Ingalls,
recognized that no community was the stronger for keeping its people,
be they black or white, male or female,
in any form of ignorance or bonded serfdom.
As Elsie grew up, she found herself walking in the new age.
Doors were set, ajar, if not fully opened.
The first wave of ridicule and of conscientious objections had spent its force.
A girl's school might play games decorously and not lose all genteel deportment.
Girls might show a love of knowledge and no longer be hooted as blue stockings.
The use of the globes and cross-stitch gave place to learning which might fit them to be educated and useful members of the community.
Ill health ceased to be considered part of the Curse of Eve to be born with swooning resignation on the wide sofas of the early Victorian age.
Ignorance and innocence were not recognized as twin sisters, and women, having eaten of the tree of knowledge,
looked round a world which prided itself on giving equal justice to all.
men, and considered that very often that axiom covered a multitude of sins of injustice against
all womankind. It was through Elsie's professional life that she learnt to know how often the
law was against the woman's best interests, and it was always in connection with some reform that
she longed to initiate that she expressed a desire for the vote. To her father, Glasgow, 1891. Many thanks for your
letter about women's rights. You are ahead of all the world in everything, and they gradually come up
into line with you, the Westminster Confession and everything, except Home Rule. The amusing thing about
women preaching is that they do it, but as it is not in the churches, it is not supposed to be in
opposition to Paul. They are having lots of meetings in the hall downstairs. Every single one of them
is addressed by a woman, but of course, they could not give the same address in a church,
and with men listening.
At Queen Margaret's here,
they are having a course of lectures
on the Old Testament
from the lecturer on that subject
in the university,
but then, of course,
it is not divinity.
The opponents to women's franchise
admittedly occupied an illogical position,
and Elsie's abounding sense of humor
never failed to make use
of all the opportunities of laughter
which the many absurdities of the long fight evoked.
No one with that sense
is highly developed could ever turn cynical or bitter. It was only when cruelty and injustice
came under her ken that a fine scorn dominated her thought and speech. She gives to her father
some of these instances. I got a paper to sign to thank the MPs who voted for Sir A. Rollett's
woman suffrage bill. I got it filled up in half a minute. I wish she had sent half a dozen.
There is no question among women who have to work for themselves about wanting
the suffrage. It is the women who are safe and sound in their own drawing rooms who don't see
what on earth they want it for. I have just been so angry. A woman came in yesterday, very ill. A, took down
her case and thought she would have to have an operation. Then her husband arrived and calmly said
she was to go home, because he could not look after the children. So I said that if she went,
she went on her own responsibility, for I would not give my consent. He said the baby was ill.
I said, well, take it to a hospital. Then it turned out it was not ill, but had cried last night.
I said, I saw very well what it was, that he had had a bad night and had just determined that his
wife should have the bad night tonight, even though she was ill, instead of him. He did look ashamed
of himself, selfish cad. Helpless creature, he could not even
arrange for someone to come in and take charge of those children unless his wife went home to do it.
She had got someone yesterday, but he had had a row with her. I gave him my mind pretty clearly,
but I went in just now to find she had gone. I said she was stupid, so one woman said,
it was not her fault, miss, he would have it. I wonder when married women will learn they have
any other duty in the world than to obey their husbands. They were not even her children,
they were stepchildren.
You don't know what trouble we have here with the husbands.
They will come in the day before the operation,
after the woman has been screwed up to it,
and worry them with all sorts of outside things,
and want them home when they are half dying.
Any idea that anybody is to be thought of but themselves
never enters their lordly minds,
and the worst of it is these stupid idiots of women
don't seem to think so either.
E wants it, miss,
settles the question. I always say, it does not matter one fig what he wants. The question is what you want.
They don't seem to think they have any right to any individual existence. Well, I feel better now,
but I wish I could have scragged that beast. I have to go to the wards now. We had another row with a
tyrannical husband. I did not know whether to be most angry with him or his fool of a wife. She had
one of the most painful things anybody can have, an abscess in her breast. It was so bad,
Miss Webb would not do anything for it in the outpatients, but said she was to come in at once.
The woman said she would go and arrange for somebody to look after her baby and come back at six.
At six appeared her lord and master. I cannot let my wife come in, as the baby is not old enough
to be left with anybody else. Did you ever hear anything so monse?
that one human being is to settle for another human being whether she is to be cured or not.
I asked him whether he knew how painful it was, and if he had to bear the pain.
Miss Webb appealed to him that he was responsible for his wife's health, for he seemed to assume he was
not. Both grounds were far above his intellect, either his responsibility or his wife's rights.
He just stood there like an obstinate mule. We told him it was positively
brutal, and that he was to go at once and get a good doctor home with her if he would not let her in.
Of course he did not.
What a fool the woman must have been to have educated him up to that.
There really was no necessity for her to stay out because he said she was to, poor thing.
Miss Webb and I have struck up a great friendship as the result.
After we had both fumed about for some time, I said,
Well, the only way to educate that kind of man or that kind of woman,
is to get the franchise. Ms. Webb said,
Bravo, Bravo. And then I found she was a great franchise woman
and has been having terrible difficulties with her LWA here.
The writer may add one more to these instances.
Suffrage meetings were of a necessity much alike,
and the round of argument was much the same.
Spade work had to be done among men and women
who had the mental outlook of these patients
and the overlords of their destiny.
Meetings were rarely enthusiastic or crowded, and it was often like speaking into the heart of a pincushion.
To one of these meetings, Dr. In Ingalls came by train straight from her practice.
In Memories Halls, all meetings are alike, but one stands out, where Dr. Ingalls illustrated
her argument by a fact in her day's experience. The law does not permit an operation on a married
woman without her husband's consent. That day the consent had been refused, and the
the woman was left to lingering suffering from which only death could release her. The voice and the thrill
which pervaded speaker and audience, as Dr. Engels told the tale and pointed the moral, remains an
abiding memory. Her politics were liberal, and what was more remarkable, she was a convinced
home ruler. Those who believe that women in politics naturally take the line of the home
may find here a very strong instance of the independent mind, producing no rift within the
lute that sounded such a perfect note of unison between her and the prevailing influence of her youth.
Mr. Ingalls had done his work in India, and his politics were of an imperialist rather than that of a
home ruler all round. When Mr. Gladstone introduced his home rule bill of 1893,
Elsie complains of the obstructive talk in Parliament.
Mr. Ingalls gently says she seems to wish it passed without discussion.
Elsie replies on the points she thinks salient and likely to work,
and wonders why they should not commend themselves to sense and not words.
The family have recollections of long and not acrimonious debates,
well sustained on either side.
She was a member of the WLF,
and was always impatient of the way party was placed before the franchise.
I was sorry to see how the suffrage question was pushed into the background by Lady Aberdeen.
However, I shall stick to the Federation and bring them to their senses on that point as far as my influence goes.
It is simply sham liberalism that will not recognize that it is a real liberal question.
1893.
That is a capital letter of Miss McLaren's.
It is quite true, and women are awful fools to truckle to their party,
instead of putting their foot down about the franchise. You would certainly hear more about wife murders
than you do at present if the women had a vote. Do you know what they said at the liberal club the other day
in answer to some deputation or appeal? Or rather, it was said in the discussion that the Liberal
Party would do all they could to remedy abuses and give women justice, but the vote they would not
give, because they would put power into women's hand which could never be taken away.
Plain speaking, was it not?
Did I tell you that I have to speak at a drawing-room meeting on woman suffrage?
Mrs. Elmy asked me to.
I had just refused to write a paper for her on the present state of medical education in the country,
for I thought that would be too great cheek in a house surgeon,
so I did not like to refuse the other.
The drawing-room meeting yesterday was very good.
I got there late, and found a fearfully and awfully fashionable audience,
being harangued by a very smart-looking man, who spoke uncommonly well, and was saying everything I meant to say.
Mrs. Elmys smiled and nodded away to me, and suddenly it flashed on me that I was to second the motion this man was speaking to.
I was in such an awful funk that I got cool, and got up and told them that I did not think Mr. Wilkins had left any single thing for me to say.
However, as things struck people in different ways, I should simply tell them how it struck me,
and then went ahead with what I meant to say when I got in.
Mrs. Elmy was quite pleased, and several people came up afterwards and said,
I had got on all right.
Mrs. Elmy said, I had not repeated Mr. W., only emphasized him.
He was such a fluent speaker.
He scared me awfully.
The decade that saw the controversy of Home Rule for Ireland was the first of the
first that brought women prominently into political organizations. Many women's associations were formed,
and the religious aspect, as between Ulster and the South, interested many very deeply.
Elsie was not a liberal unionist, and, as she states her case to her father, there is much that
shows that she was thinking the matter out for herself, on lines which were then fresher than they are
today. From Glasgow in 1891, she writes,
I have spent a wicked Sunday. I read all the morning and then went up to the infirmary to bandage with Dr. D.
Dr. T says, I am quite sure to be plucked after such worldliness. I have discovered he is an Australian from Victoria.
Dr. D. is an Aberdeen man and a great admirer of George Smith, also a violent home ruler.
Never mind about the agricultural laborer, Papa dear, I am afraid Gladstone's majority won't be a
working one, and we shall have the whole row over again in six months. Dr. D says every available
voter has been seized by the scruff of his neck and made to vote this time, and six months
hence there'll be no fresh light on the situation, and will be where we are now. I should not
wonder if the whole thing makes us devise some plan for one imperial parliament and local government
for Ireland, Scotland, and the colonies, ending in making the integrity of the embassy. Ending in making the integrity
of the empire and unity of the English-speaking race, more apparent that it is now, and with the
Irish contented in managing their own affairs in their own mad way. Our future trouble is with the
Labour Party. Mr. Gladstone has been so engrossed with his HR measure that he does not seem to have
noticed these other questions that have been quickly growing, and he has made two big blunders
about woman suffrage and the labor question. I have no doubt these men are talking a lot of
nonsense and are trying for impossibilities, but there is a great deal of sense in what they say.
It is no good shutting our eyes to the facts they bring forward. As to Mr. D, I am very much
afraid you would not agree with him. He is a rank socialist. The only point in which he agrees
with you is that he would make everybody do what he thinks right. Only his ideas of right
are very different from yours. He believes in an eight-hour day, local option, and state-owned minds.
His chief amusement at present is arguing with me. He generally gets angry and says,
I argue like a woman, but he always pluckily begins anew. He was a tradesman and gave it up
because he says, you cannot be an honest tradesman nowadays. He is studying medicine.
The last day I worked at Brains, he rampaged about the room, arguing.
about the unearned increment. I tell him he must come and argue in Edinburgh. I have not time at present.
I will tell you what I think of the home rule bill tomorrow, that is to say, if I have time to read it.
It is really a case of officers and men here just now. I can't say go on instead of come on.
I cannot order cold spongines and hot fomentations by the dozen and then sit in my room and read the newspapers, can I?
Glasgow, May 1892. What do you think of Lord Salisbury's speech, inciting to rebellion and civil war?
Now, don't think of it as Lord Salisbury and Ulster, but think of it as advice given by Mr. Gladstone to the rest of
Ireland. If you like to, take the lead into your own hands and march on Dublin. I don't know that
any government would care to use the forces of the crown against you. You will be quite justified
because the government of your country is in the hands of your hereditary foes.
There is only one good point in Lord Salisbury's speech,
and that is that he does not sham that the Ulster men are Irishmen.
He calls them a colony from this country.
Lord S must have been feeling desperate before he made that speech.
1894.
I think Mr. Chamberlain's speech was very clever.
It was this special home rule bill he pulled to pieces,
and one could not help feeling that that would have been the result whatever the bill had been,
if it had been introduced by anybody but Mr. C.
His arguments seemed to be in favor of Imperial Federation, as far as I could make out.
I have no doubt the bill can be very much improved in committee,
but the groundwork of it is all right.
The two houses and the gradual giving over of the police and land,
when they have had time to find their feet.
as to the retaining the Irish members in Parliament being totally illogical, there is nothing in that.
We always make illogical things work, and the Irish members must stay.
I do like Mr. Balfour. He is so honest.
I expect he hates the Irish Party as much as any man, but he spoke up for them all the same.
If he had not, I don't believe Mr. Chamberlain and some of the others would have spoken as they did.
The Conservative Party was quite inclined to laugh at the paid stipendiaries until Mr. Balfour spoke.
I have been reading up the Bishop of Chester's scheme and the direct veto bill.
I don't like his scheme. It would be very nice to turn all the pubs into coffee houses,
but a big company over whom the ratepayers have no control would be just as likely to do what would pay best,
as the tramway companies now, who work their men 17 hours and their horses three in
a stretch. It would be quite a different thing to put the pubs under the town and county councils.
As to this bill, it is not to stop people drinking, but simply to shut up pubs. A man can still buy
his whiskey and get drunk in his own house, but a community says, we won't have the nuisance of a pub
at every corner, and I am not sure they have not that right, just as much as the private
individual has to get drunk if he chooses. A great many men would keep straight. A great many men would keep
straight if the temptation were not thrown in their faces. The system of licenses was instituted for the
good of the public, not the good of the publican. The elections will be three days after my exam.
Dearest Papa, there is as much chance of Mr. Gladstone being beaten in Midlothian as there is of a
conservative majority. End of Section 7. Section 8 of Dr. L. C. Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
This Lieber Fox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 6. Political Enfranchisement in National Politics.
Part 2.
Another friend writes,
I should like to send you a recollection of her in the early 90s.
My friend, Dr. Jesse McGregor, wrote to my home in Rothsey,
asking us to put up Dr. Ingalls,
who was to give an address at a sanitary Congress to be held there.
It was, I believe, her first public appearance, and she did do well.
One woman alone on a platform filled with well-known doctors from all parts.
Her subject was advocating women as sanitary inspectors.
She was one of the pioneers in that movement also.
I can well remember her, a slim little girl in black, fearless as ever, doing her part.
After she had finished, there was a running criticism of her subject.
Many against her view, few for the cause on which she was speaking.
It was an unique experience. The discussion got quite hot. One well-known doctor asked us to picture
his dear friend, Elsie Ingalls, carrying out a six-foot smallpox patient. I think she was the
first lady medical to speak at a Congress. It was such a pleasure to entertain her. She was so quiet and
unobtrusive, and yet so humorous. I never met her again, but I could never forget her,
though we were just like ships that pass in the night.
One of her suffrage organizers, Miss Burry,
gives a vivid picture of her work in the suffrage cause.
It was Dr. Elsie Ingalls who brought me to Scotland
and sent me to organize suffrage societies in the Highlands.
I speak of her as I knew her,
the best of chiefs,
so kind and encouraging and appreciative of one's efforts,
even when they were not always crowned with success.
I remember saying I was did.
disappointed because the hall was only about three-quarters full, and her reply was,
My dear, I was not counting the people. I was thinking of the efforts which had brought those who
were there. Her letters were an inspiration. She gave one the full responsibility of one's
position, and always expected the best. Resolutely direct and straightforward in her dealings
with me as a subordinate worker, she never failed to tell me of any word of appreciation that reached her,
as she also told me candidly if she heard of any criticism.
She had such a big, generous mind,
even condescending to give an opportunity for argument
when there was any difference of opinion,
and absolutely tolerant and kind when one did not agree with her.
She was always considerate of one's health
and insisted that the hours laid down for work were not to be exceeded,
or, if this was unavoidable,
that the time must be taken off as soon as possible afterwards,
She only saw difficulties to conquer them, and I well remember in one of her letters from
Lizaravats she wrote so characteristically, the work is most interesting, bristling with difficulties.
My happiest recollection is of a visit to the Highlands to speak at some suffrage meetings I had
arranged for her. In the train, she was always busy riding in that beautiful, clear, characteristic
hand, like herself, triumphing over the jolting of the Highland Railway.
way, as she did later in Serbia. In the early morning she had to catch a train at Inverness,
and we went by motor from Nairn. For once the riding was laid aside, and she gave herself up to
the enjoyment of the sunrise and the beautiful lights on the Rosh Shire Hills, as we traveled
along the shores of the Moray Firth. When the car broke down, out came the dispatch case again,
while the chauffeur and I put on the stepney. There was no complaining about the lost train,
a wire was sent to the committee apologizing for her absence, and then she immediately turned her attention to other business.
One who first came under her influence as a patient and became a warm friend, give some reminiscences.
Her greeting to the elect at the beginning of the year was, a good new year and the vote this year.
I remember once, as we descended the steps of St. Giles, after attending a service at which the Edinburgh town
Council was present, she spoke joyfully of the time coming when we, the women of Edinburgh and of
Scotland, would help to build the New Jerusalem, with the weapon ready to our hand, the vote.
The year 1906 brought the liberals into political power, and with the great wave of democratic
enthusiasm, which gave the government of Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, an enormous majority,
there came other expressions of the people's will. The franchise for women had,
hitherto been of academic interest in the community. A crank, many thought it, like total abstinence or
Christian science. The claims of women were frequently brought before Parliament by private members,
and if the bill was not talked out, it was talked round as one of the best jests of a parliamentary
holiday. The women who advocated it were treated with tolerance. Their public advocacy was deemed
a tour de force, and their portraits were always of the nature of caricatures.
except those in punch, where the opponent was caricatured and the women immortalized.
The Liberal Party found its right wing mainly composed of labor,
and socialist members were returned to Parliament.
From that section of thought sprang the militant movement,
and the whole question of the enfranchisement of women took on a different aspect.
This chapter does not attempt to give a history of the common cause,
or the reasons for the rapid way it came to the front,
and ranked with Ireland as among the questions which, left unseen,
settled, became a thorn in the side of any government that attempted to govern against, or
leaving outside the expressed will of the people. This is no place to examine the causes,
which, along with the militant movement, but always separated from them, poured such fresh life
and vigor into the old constitutional and law-abiding effort to procure the free rights of
citizenship for women. The pace quickened to an extent which was bewildering, where a dozen meetings a
year had been the portion of many speakers, they were multiplied by the tens and scores.
Organizations had to be expanded, a fighting fund collected, meetings arranged, debates were held
all over the country and among all classes. A press, which had never written up the subject
while its advocates were law-abiding, tumbled over each other to advertise every movement of all
sections of suffragists. It must be admitted that the militants gave them plenty of copy.
and the constitutionalists had an uneasy sense that their stable companions would kick over the traces in some embarrassing and unexpected way on every new occasion.
Still, the tide flowed steadily for the principle, and those who had its guidance in Parliament and the country had to use all the strength of the movement in getting it well-organized and carefully worked.
societies were federated, and the greatly growing numbers coordinated into a machine which could bring the best pressure to bear on Parliament.
The well-planned federation of Scottish suffrage societies owed much to Dr. Ingle's gift of organization and of taking opportunity by the hand.
She was honorary secretary to the Scottish Federation, and in those fighting years between 1906 and 1914, she impressed herself much on its policy.
in the early years of her professional life she used gaily to forecast for herself a large and paying practice her patience never suffered but she sacrificed her professional prospects in a large measure for her work for the franchise
she gave her time freely and she raised money at critical times by parting with what was of value and in her power to give perhaps the writer may here again give her own reminiscences her fellowship with dr ingle
was all too rarely social. They met almost entirely in their suffrage work. To know Dr. Inglis at all
was to know her well. The transparent sincerity and simplicity of her manner left nothing to be discovered.
One felt instinctively she was a comrade one could go tiger hunting with, and to be in her company
was to be sustained by a true helpmate. We were asked to speak together, invited by the elect,
and sometimes by the opponents to enjoy hospitality,
Dr. Ingalls was rarely able to come in time for the baked meats
before we ascended the platform,
and uttered our platitudes to rooms, often empty woodyards,
stuck about with a remnant of those who would be saved.
She usually met us on the platform,
having arrived by the last train,
and obliged to leave by the first.
But she never came stale or discouraged.
There was always the smile at the last setback,
the ready joke in our opponents, the subtle sense that she was out to win, the compelling force of
sustained effort that made at least one of her yoke fellows ashamed of the faint heart that could
never hope to win through. Sometimes we traveled back together. More often we would meet next day
in St. Giles after the daily service, and our walk home was always a cheer. Never mind,
the note to discouragement. Remember this or that in our favor. Our next month. Our next
must be in this direction. And the thought was always there, if her unself-consciousness prevented it
being spoken, as one wishes today it had been, the meeting went because you were there and set your
whole soul unwilling it through. She had no sympathy with militantism. There was no better fighter
with legitimate weapons, but she saw how closely the claim to do wrong that good might come was related
to anarchy, and her sense of true citizenship was outraged by law-breaking, which, to her clear
judgment, could only retard the ultimate triumph of a cause rooted in all that was just and
righteous. She was not confused by any cross-currents of admiration for individual courage and
self-sacrifice, and her one desire was to see that the Federation was purged of all those
who belonged to the forces of disintegration. She had the fruit of her political, and her political, and her
political sagacity, and her fearless pursuit after integrity, indeed and in word.
When the moment came when she was to go to the battle-fronts of the world, a succour of many,
she went in the strength of the suffrage women of Scotland. They were her shield and buckler,
and their loyal support of her work and its ideals was her exceeding great reward.
Without their organized strength, she could never have called into existence those units in their
equipment, which have justly earned the praises of nations allied in arms.
With the rise of the militant movement, the whole suffrage cause passed through a cloud of
opprobrium, an almost universal objurgation. Women were alt-harded with the same stick,
and fell under one condemnation. It is now of little moment to recall this, except inasmuch as it
affected Elsie Ingalls. The Scottish suffrage societies, who gave their organization and their
workers to start the Scottish women's hospitals, found that the community desired to forget the
unpopular suffrage and to remember only the Scottish hospitals. Speakers for the work that Dr. Engels
was doing were asked to avoid the common cause. No one who knew her would consent to deny,
by implication, one of the deepest mainsprings of her work. The churches were equally timid
in aught that gave comfort or consolation to those who were loyal to their Christian
social ideal for women. No organized society owes more to the administrative work of women than
does the Christian church throughout the world. No body of administrators have been slower to perceive
that women in responsible positions would be a strength to the church than have been the clergy of the
church. The writer of Uncle Tom's cabin puts into the mouth of the clerical type of that day
the argument that the Old Testament gave an historic basis for the enslavement of races,
and St. Paul had sanctioned slavery in the New Testament.
The spirit of Christianity has raised women from a low estate,
and women owe everything to the results of Christianity.
But the ecclesiastical mind has never shaken off the belief
that they are under a special curse from the days of Eden,
and that St. Paul's outlook on women in his day
was the last revelation as to their future position in a jealously guarded corporation.
Which of us, acquainted with the church history of our day,
but remembers the general assembly when the women missionaries were first invited to stand by their fellow
workers and be addressed by the moderator on their labors and sufferings in a common cause.
It was a great shock to the fathers and brethren that their sect should not disqualify them
from standing in the assembly, which would have more democratic weight in the visible church on earth
if some of its elected lay members were women serving in the courts of the church.
In this matter and in many others concerning women, the church is not yet triumphant over its prejudices
bedded in the geological structure of Genesis.
In all periods of the enfranchisement struggle, there were individual clergy who aided women with
their warm advocacy and the helpful direction of thought. Elsie Ingalls was a leader of this movement
in its connection with a high Christian ideal of the citizenship of women. To those who gathered in
St. Margaret's, the Church of Parliament in history, to commemorate all her works began and ended as a member
of Christ's church here on earth, it was fitting that Bishop Gore, who had so consistently upheld the
cause, should speak of her work as one who had helped to win the equality of women in a democratic,
self-governing state. This memoir would utterly fail to reproduce a picture of Dr. Ingalls if it did not
emphasize how her spirit was led and disciplined, tempered and steeled, through this long and fiery
trial to the goal of a leading ideal. The contest trained her for her splendid achievements in
overcoming all obstacles in ministering to the sufferings of nations, rightly struggling to be free.
Her friend, Miss Wright, says,
We did not always agree. Many were the arguments we had with her,
but she was always willing to understand another point of view,
and willing to allow for difference of opinion.
She was very fair-minded and reasonable,
and deplored the excesses of the militant suffragettes.
She was in no sense a man-hater.
To her, the world was good.
composed of men and women, and she thought it a mistake to exalt the one unduly over the other.
She was never embittered by her struggle for the position of women.
She loved the fight and the endeavor, and to arrive at any point just meant a fresh setting forward
to another further goal. From her girlhood onward, her effort was to free and broaden life
for other women, to make the world a better place to live in. I had a letter this week from
Annie Wilson, Elsie's great friend. She says, it seems to me Elsie's whole life was full of
championship of the week, and she was so strong in maintaining what was right. I feel sure she has
inspired many. I remember once saying in connection with some work I was going to begin,
I wonder if I shall be able, and Elsie saying in her bright way, what man has done, man can do.
I am so glad that she had the opportunity of showing her great administrative capacity,
and that her power is known and acknowledged. She is a great woman. I cannot tell you what it will be
not to have her welcome to look forward to when I come home. Elsie had in many respects what is
perhaps wrongly called a man's mind. She was an imperialist in the very best sense, and had high ideals for
her country and people. She was a very womanly woman, never affecting mannish ways as a pose.
If she seemed a strong-minded woman, it was because she had strenuous work to do.
She was never a lone woman. She was always one of a family, and in the heart of the family.
Elsie always had the loviness appreciation and backing from her nearest and dearest, and
that a wide and varied circle. So also, she did not need to fight for her position. It has been said of her,
whenever she began to speak, her pleasant, well-bred accent and manner gained her a hearing.
She was ever a fighter, but it was because she wanted those out in the cold and darkness
to come into the love and light which she herself experienced and sought after always more fully.
We looked forward to more frequent meetings when working days were done.
Now she has gone forward to the great work beyond.
Somewhere, surely, afar, in the sounding labor home vast of being, is practiced that strength.
Zellous, beneficent, firm.
End of Section 8.
Section 9 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
This Libre Vox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 7. The Profession and the Faith, Part 1. Run the straight race through God's good grace,
lift up thine eyes and seek his face. Life with its way before us lies. Christ is the path and Christ
the prize. Prove all things. Hold fast that which is good. Elsie Ingalls took up practice
in Edinburgh and worked in a happy partnership with the late Dr. Jesse McGregor, until the latter left
Scotland for work in America. When the University of Edinburgh admitted women to the examinations for
degrees in medicine, Dr. Ingalls graduated M.B.C.M. in 1890. From that date onwards, her practice,
her political and suffrage work, and the founding of the hospice in the High Street of Edinburgh,
as a nursing home and maternity center staffed by medical women, occupied a life which grew
and strengthened amid so many and varied experiences.
Her father's death deprived her of what had been the very center and mainspring of her existence.
As she records the story of his passing on, she says that she cannot imagine life without him,
and that he had been so glad to see her begin her professional career.
She was not one to lose her place in the stream of life from any morbid inaction or useless repining.
She shared the spirit of the race from which she had sprung,
a reaching forward to obtain the prize of life fulfilled with service,
and she had inherited the childlike faith and confidence
which inspired their belief in the father of spirits.
Elsie lost in her father the one who had made her the center of his thoughts
and of his most loving watchfulness.
From the day that her home with him was left under her desolate,
she was to become a center to many of her father's wide household,
and even as she had learnt from him, she became a stay in support to many of his children's children.
The two doctors started practice in Athol Place, and later on they moved into Eight Walker Street,
an abode which will always be associated with the name of Dr. Elsie Ingalls.
Mrs. McLaren says,
My impressions of their joint house are all pleasant ones.
They got on wonderfully together, and in everything seemed to appreciate one another's good quality.
They were very different, and had in many ways a different outlook.
I remember Jessie saying once,
Elsie is so exceptionally generous in her attitude of mind it would be difficult not to get on with her.
They both held their own opinions on various subjects without the difference of opinion really coming between them.
Elsie once said about the arrangement,
it has all the advantages of marriage without any of its disabilities.
We used always to think they did each other worlds of good.
I know how I always enjoyed a visit to them if it was only for an afternoon or some weeks.
There was such an air of freedom in the whole house.
You did what you liked, thought what you liked, without any fear of criticism or of being
misunderstood.
I do not know much about her practice, as medicine never interested me, but I believe at one time,
before the suffrage work engrossed her so much, she was making quite a large income.
Professionally, she suffered under two disabilities. The restricted opportunities for clinical work,
in the days when she was studying her profession, combined with the constant interruptions,
which the struggle against the medical obstructionists necessitated. Secondly, the various stages
in the political fight incident to obtaining that wider enfranchisement, which aimed at freeing
women from all those lesser disabilities which made them the hellots of every recognized profession
and industry. When in the Scottish women's hospitals abroad, Dr. Engels rapidly acquired a surgical
skill, under the tremendous pressure of work which often kept her for days at the operating table,
which showed what a great surgeon she might have been, given equal advantages in the days of her
peace practice. Dr. Ingalls lost no opportunity of enlarging her knowledge. She was a lecturer on
gynecology in the Medical College for Women, which had been started later than the Dr. Jek's Blake's school,
and was on slightly broader lines. After she started practice, she went to study German clinics.
She traveled to Vienna, and later on spent two months in America, studying the work and
methods of the best surgeons in New York, Chicago, and Rochester. She advocated, at home and abroad,
equal opportunities for work and study in the laboratories for both men and women students.
She maintained that the lectures for women only were not as good as those provided for the men,
and that the women did not get the opportunity of thorough laboratory practice before taking
their exams. She thus came into conflict with the university authorities, who refused
to accept women medical students within the university, or to recognize extramural mixed classes
in certain subjects. Step by step, Dr. Ingalls fought for the students. With a great price,
she might truly say she had purchased her freedom, and nothing would turn her aside.
If one avenue was closed, try another. If one principal was adamant, his day could not last
forever. Prepare the way for his successor.
Indomitable, unbeaten, unsowered. Dr. Ingalls, with the smiling, fearless brow,
trod the years till the influence of the red planet Mars opened to her and others the gate of
opportunity. She had achieved many things, and was far away from her city and its hard-earned
practice when, at length, in 1916, the university, under a new, open-minded, generous-hearted
head opened its doors to women medical students. There were other things besides her practice,
which Dr. Ingalls subordinated in these years to the political enfranchisement of women.
It has been shown in a previous chapter how keen were her political beliefs. She joined the
Central Edinburgh Women's Liberal Association in its earliest organized years. She acted as
vice president in it for 16 years and was one of its most active members.
Mr. Gulland, the liberal whip, knew the value of her work, and must have had reason to respect the order in which she placed her political creed.
First, the citizenship of women, then the party organization.
He speaks of her fearless partisanship, an aloof attitude towards all local political difficulties.
An obstacle to her was a thing to be overcome, not to be sat down before.
anyone in politics who sees what is right and cannot understand any reason why the action should not be straight rather than compromising is a help to party agents at rare intervals. Normally such minds cause anxiety. Her secretary, Miss Cunningham, says about her place in the liberal organization. Not only as a speaker, though as that she was invaluable, but as one who mixed freely with all our members, with her
sympathy, in fact, her enthusiasm for everything affecting the good of women, she won respect and liking
on every side. It was not until she became convinced that she could help forward the great cause for
women better by being unattached to any party organization, that she severed her connection
with the Liberal Party. Regretted as that severance was by all, we understood her point of
view so well that we recognized there was no other course open to her.
Her firm grasp of and clear insight into matters political made her a most valued colleague,
especially in times of difficulty, when her advice was always to be relied upon.
In 1901, she was a member of the Women's Liberal League, a branch of the WLA which split off at the time of the Boer War,
in opposition to the Little Englanders.
Dr. Ingle's was on its first committee and lent her drawing room for meetings, addressing
other meetings on the imperialist doctrines born in that war. When that phase of politics ended,
the league became an educational body and worked on social and factory legislation. Among her other
enterprises was the founding of the Muir Hall of Residence for women's students at the university.
Many came up from the country, and, like herself in former days in Glasgow, had to find
suitable and in many cases uncomfortable lodgings. Principal Muir's old Indian friendship with Mr. Engels
had been most helpful in former years, and now Lady Muir and other friends of the women students
started a residence in George Square for them, and Miss Robertson was appointed its first warden.
Dr. Engels was honorary secretary to the Muir Hall till she died, and from its start was a moving spirit
in all that stood for the comfort of the students. She attended them when they were ill,
and was always ready to help them in their difficulties with her keen, understanding advice.
The child of her love, among all other works, was her maternity hospice. Of this work, Miss Mayor,
who was indeed a nursing mother to so many of the undertakings of women in the healing profession,
rights of Dr. Ingle's feeling with perfect understanding.
To Dr. Ingle's clear vision, even in her early days of student life,
they're shown through the mists of opposition and misunderstandings
a future scene in which a welcome recognition would be made
of women's services for humanity.
And with a strong, glad heart, she joined with other pioneers
in treading the stony way that leads to most reforms.
Once landed on the firm rock of professional,
recognition, Dr. Ingalls said about the philanthropic task of bringing soccer and helpful advice to mothers
and young babies and expectant mothers in the crowded homes in and about the High Street.
There, with the help of a few friends, she founded the useful little hospice that we trust now to see
so developed and extended by an appreciative public that it will merit the honored name,
the Dr. Elsie Ingalls Memorial Hospice.
This little hospice lay very near the heart of its founder. She loved it, and with her always
sensitive realization of the needs of the future, she was convinced that this was a bit of work
on the right lines for recognition in years to come. Some of us can recall the kindling eye,
the inspiring tones that gave animation to her whole being when talking of her loved hospice.
She saw in it a possible future that might affect much, not only for its purpose, but
patients, but for generations of medical women. With Dr. Elsie, one idea always started another,
and a felt want in any department of life meant an instantly conceived scheme of supplying the need.
Those who came after sometimes felt a breathless wonder how ways and means could be found
to establish and settle the new idea which had been evolved from the fertile brain.
The hospice grew out of the establishment of a nursing home for working women, where they
could be cared for near their own homes. Through the kindness of Dr. Barbor, a house was secured
at a nominal rent in George Square and opened in 1901. That sphere of usefulness could be extended
if a maternity home could be started in a poorer district. Thus, the hospice in the High Street
was opened in 1904. Dr. Ingalls devoted herself to the work. An operating theater and
eight beds were provided. The Midwifery Department,
grew so rapidly that after a few years the hospice became a center, one of five in Scotland,
for training nurses for the CMB examination. Dr. Engels looked forward to a greater future for it
in infant welfare work, and she always justified the device of the site as being close to where
the people lived, and in the air to which they were accustomed. Trained district nurses
visited the people in their own homes, and in 1910 there were more cases.
than nurses to overtake them.
In that year, the hospice was amalgamated with Brunsfield Hospital.
Medical, surgical, and gynecological cases were treated there,
while the hospice was devoted entirely to maternity and infant welfare cases.
Dr. Ingle's vision was nearly accomplished
when she had a small ward of five beds for malnutrition cases,
a baby clinic, a milk depot, health centers,
and the knowledge that the hospice has the distinctest.
of being the only maternity center run by women in Scotland. This affords women's students' opportunities
denied to them in other maternity hospitals. A probationer in that hospice says,
Dr. Ingle's idea was that everything, as far as possible, should be made subservient to the
comfort of the patients. This was always considered when planning the routine. She disapproved
of the system prevalent in so many hospitals of roused.
the patients out of sleep in the small hours of the morning in order to get through the work of the wards.
She would not have them awakened before 6 a.m., and she instituted a cup of tea before anything else was done.
To her nurses, she was very just and appreciative of good work, and if complaints were made against anyone,
the wrongdoing had to be absolutely proved before she would take action.
She also insisted on the nurses having adequate time off and that it should not be infringed upon.
These, in outline, are the interests which filled the years after Dr. Elsie began her practice.
Of her work among the people living round her hospice, it is best told in the words of those who watched for her coming
and blessed the sound of her feet on their thresholds.
Freely she gave them of her best, and freely they gave her the love and confidence
of their loyal hearts. Mrs. B. had been Dr. Ingalls' patient for 20 years, and she had also attended
her mother and grandmother. Of several children, one was called Elsie Maude Ingalls, and the child was
christened in the Dean Church by Dr. Williamson, who had known Dr. Ingalls as a child in India.
The whole family seemed to have been her charge, for when Mrs. B.'s' husband returned from the
South African War, Dr. Ingalls fought the war office for nine months to secure her.
him a set of teeth. And needless to say, after taking all the trouble entailed by a war office correspondence,
she was successful. A son fought in the present war, and when Dr. Ingalls saw the death of a private
bee, she sent a telegram to the war office to make sure it was not the son of Mrs. Bee. She would
never take any fees from this family. On one occasion, Mr. Bee gave her some feathers he had brought
home from Africa. She had them put in a new hat she had got for a wedding.
and came round before she went to the festival to show them to the donor.
Her cheery ways helped them all,
and when a child of the family broke its leg
and was not mending all round in the infirmary,
Dr. Inglis was asked to go and see her,
and the child from then went for it.
In another family there was some stomach weakness,
and three infants died.
Dr. Inglis tried hard to save the life of the third,
a little boy, who was evidently getting no nourishment,
So anxious was she that she asked a sister who had recently had a baby to try if she could nurse the child.
This was done, the foster mother going every day to the house, but they could not save the infant.
When the next one arrived, Dr. Ingalls was so determined the child should live,
she came every day, whatever were her engagements, to sterilize the milk.
The child throve under her care and grew up in health.
Another of these patients of her care could not control her feelings when speaking of the good physician.
It was evident the family had lost their best friend.
The husband spoke most warmly of Dr. Ingle's kindness to them.
She would come round after she had finished her other work at night to bathe the baby.
When another child was ill, she told the mother not to open the door even if the king himself wished to come in.
The husband said she was so bright one felt the better for her visit,
though her orders had to be obeyed in no mistake,
and she would tell you off at once if you did not carry them out.
If they offered payment, she would say,
Now go and buy a nice chop for yourself.
End of Section 9.
Section 10 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
This Librevax recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 7. The profession and the faith.
Part 2. Another family had this story, Mr. G. That woman has done more for the folk living between
Morrison Street and the High Street than all the ministers in Edinburgh and Scotland itself
ever did for anyone. She would never give in to difficulties. She gave her house,
her property, her practice, her money to help others. Mrs. G. fell ill after the birth of one of her
children. Dr. Elsie came in one night, made her a cup of tea in some toast, and, as she failed
to get well, she raised money to keep her in a sanatorium for six months. After she had been there,
one child, in charge of a friend, fell ill and finally died, Dr. Ingle's doing all she could to
spare the absent mother and save the child. When it died, she wrote,
My dear Mrs. G, you will have got the news by now. I cannot tell you, I cannot tell you,
how sorry I am for you, my dear.
But you will believe, won't you,
that we all did everything we could
for your dear little boy.
Mrs. E. was simply goodness itself.
Dr. H. and I saw him
three times a day between us,
and yesterday we saw him four times.
When I sent you the card,
I hope the high temperature was due to his teeth,
because his pulse seemed good.
However, later Dr. H telephoned
that she was afraid that his pulse was flagging,
and he died suddenly about,
one. Mr. G. has just been here. You must get well, my dear, for his sake, and for the sake of
all the other little children. Poor little Johnny has had a great many troubles in his little life,
has he not? But he is all over them now, dear little man, and the God in whose safe keeping he is.
Comfort you, dear Mrs. G. Ever your sincere friend, Elsie Maude Ingalls.
The caretaker of the dispensary in St. Cuthbert's mission in Morrison Street speaks of Dr. Ingalls as the true friend of all who needed her.
She gave an hour three mornings in the week, and if she could not overtake all the cases in the time, she would occasionally come back later in the day.
Another of her patients was the mother of twelve children. Six of them were brought home by Dr. Ingalls.
She was a friend to them all, and never minded what trouble she took.
If they did not send for her, wishing to spare her, she scolded them for thinking of herself
and not of their need for her services.
All the children loved her, and they would watch from the window on her dispensary days for her,
and she would wave to them across the street.
She would often stop them in the street to ask after their mother, and even after she had
been to Serbia and returned to Edinburgh, she remembered about them and their home affairs.
She always made them understand that her orders must be carried out.
Once, Mississie was very ill, and Dr. Ingalls came to attend her.
The eldest girl was washing the floor, and Dr. Engels told her to go for some medicine.
The girl continued to finish the work she was at.
Child, said Dr. Ingalls, don't you know that when I say a thing I mean it?
Another time she had told Mississie to remain in her bed till she came.
household cares were pressing, and Mrs. C. rose to wash the dishes. Dr. Ingle's suddenly appeared at the door.
What did I tell you? Do not touch another dish, and she herself helped Mrs. C. back to bed.
Later on, two of the children got scarlet fever, and Dr. Ingalls told the mother she was proud of her,
as through her care the infection did not spread in the family or outside it.
The people in Morrison Street showed their gratitude by collecting a little sum of money
to buy an electric lamp to light their doctor friend up the dark staircase of the house.
These were the true mourners who stood round St. Giles with the bairns she had brought home
on the day when her earthly presence passed from their sight.
These were they who had fitted her for her strenuous enterprises in the day when the battle was set in array.
And these were the people who knew her best,
and never doubted that when called from their midst, she would go forth strong in that spirit
which is given to the weak things of the earth, and that it would be her part to strengthen
the peoples that had no might. The little sisters of the poor had a dispensary of St. Anne,
and Dr. Elsie had it in her charge from 1903 to 1913, and the sister superior speaks of the
affection of the people and the good work done among them.
How often, writes one in charge of the servant department of the YWCA, her deliberate tread has
brought confidence to me when getting heartless over some of the poor creatures who would not
rouse themselves, judging the world was against them. Many a time the patient fighting with
circumstances needed a sisterly word of cheer which Dr. Engel supplied and sent the individual
heartened and refreshed. The expression on her face, I mean business, had a wonderful uplift,
while her acuteness in exactly describing the symptoms to those who were in constant contact
gave a confidence which made her a power amongst us. A patient has allowed some of her written
prescriptions to be quoted. They were not of a kind to be made up by a chemist. I want you never
to miss or delay meals. I want you to go to bed at a reasonable
time and go to sleep early. I want you to do your work regularly and to take an interest in outside
things, such as your church and suffrage. We should not let these things, with a capital T,
affect us so much. Our cause is too righteous for it to be really affected by them,
if we don't weaken. My dear, the potter's wheel isn't a pleasant instrument. Go home and say your prayers.
realize what you are, a free-born child of the universe. Perfection, your polar star.
These stories of her healing of mind and body might be endlessly multiplied.
Sorrow and disease are much the same, whether they come to the rich or the poor,
and poverty is not always the worst trial of many a sad tale.
Dr. Elsie's power of sympathy and understanding was as much called upon in her pain practice,
as among the very poor. She made no distinction in what she gave. Her friendship was as ready as her
trained skill. There was one patient whose sufferings were largely due to her own lack of willpower.
Elsie, after prescribing, bent down and kissed her. It awoke in the individual the sense that
she was not altogether bad, and from that day forward there was a newness of life.
From what sources of inner strength did she increasingly minister in that sphere in which she moved?
Thy touch has still its ancient power. And no one who knew this unresting, unhasting, well-balanced life,
but felt it had drawn its spiritual strength from the deep wells of salvation.
In these years, the kindred points of heaven and home were always in the background of her life.
Her sister's homes were near her in Edinburgh, and when her brother Ernest died in India in
1910, his widow and their three daughters came back to her house. Her friendship and understanding
of all the large circle that called her aunt was a very beautiful tie. The elder ones were
near enough to her own age to be companions to her from her girlhood. Miss Simpson says that
she was more like an elder sister to them when she stayed with the family on their arrival from
Tasmania. The next thing I remember about her was when she went to school in Paris, she promised to
bring us home Paris dolls. She asked us how we wanted them dressed, and when she returned,
we each received a beautiful one, dressed in the manner chosen. Aunt Elsie was always most
careful in the choice of presents for each individual, when always felt that she had thought of
and got something that she knew you wanted. While on her way to Russia, she sent
me a check because she had not been able to see anything while at home. She wrote,
This is to spend on something frivolous that you want, and not on stockings or anything like that.
It is not her great gifts that I remember now, says another of that young circle. It is that
she was always such a darling. These nieces were often the companions of Dr. Elsie's holidays.
She had her own ideas as to how these should be spent. She always had to have. She always had
September as her month of recreation. She used to go away, first of all, for a fortnight quite alone to
some out-of-the-way place, when not even her letters were sent after her. She would book a station,
get out, and bicycle round the neighborhood till she found a place she liked. She wanted scenery
and housing accommodation, according to her mind. Her first requirement was hot water for baths.
If that was found in abundance, she was suited. If it could not.
puppy requisition, she went elsewhere. Her paintbox went with her, and when she returned to
rejoin or fetch away her family, she brought many impressions of what she had seen. The holidays
were restful because always well planned. She loved enjoyment and happiness, and she sought
them in the spirit of real relaxation and recreation. If weather or circumstances turned out
adverse, she was amused in finding some way out, and if nothing else could be done,
she had a power of seeing the ludicrous under all conditions, which in itself turned the rain-clouds of life into bursts of sunlight.
Mrs. Ingalls gives a happy picture of the life in Eight Walker Street when she was the guest of Dr. Ingalls.
Her love for the three nieces, the one in particular who bore her name, and in whose medical education she deeply interested herself, was great.
She used to return from a long day's work, often late, but with a mind at least,
leisure from itself for the talk of the young people. However late she was, a hot bath precluded
a dinner party full of fun and laughter, the account of all the day's doings, and then a game of
bridge or some other amusement. Often she would be anxious over some case, but she used to say,
I have done all I know I can only sleep over it, and to bed and to sleep she went, always
using her willpower to do what was best in the situation. Those who were with
her in the retreats in Serbia or Russia saw the same quality of self-command. If transport broke down,
then the interval had better be used for rest, in the best fashion in which it could be obtained.
Her Sundays, as far as her profession permitted, were days of rest and social intercourse
with her family and friends. After evening church, she went always to supper in the Simpson family,
often detained late by pacing's to and fro with her friends,
doctor and Mrs. Wallace Williamson,
engaged in some outpouring of the vital interests which were absorbing her.
One of the members of her household says,
We all used to look forward to hearing all her doings in the past week
and of all that lay before her in the next.
Sunday evening felt quite wrong and flat
when she was called out to a case and could not come to us.
It was the same with our summer holidays.
Her visit in September was the best bit of the holidays to us.
She laid herself out to be with us in our bathing and golfing and picnics.
The house was well run.
Those who know what is the highest meaning of service have always good servants,
and Dr. Elsie had a faithful household.
Her cooks were all engaged under one stipulation,
hot water for any number of baths at any time of the day or night,
and the hot water never failed under the most exacting conditions.
Her guests were made very comfortable, and there was only one rigid rule in the house.
However late she came downstairs, after any night work, there was always family prayers before breakfast.
The book she used was Eucologian, and when in Russia asked that a copy should be sent her.
Her consulting room was lined with bookshelves containing all her father's books, and of these she never lost sight.
any guest might borrow anything else in her house and forget to return it but if ever one of those books were borrowed it had to be returned for the quest after it was pertinacious
in her dress she became increasingly particular but only as the adornment not of herself but as the cause of women as citizens or as doctors when a uniform became part of her equipment for work she must have welcomed it with great enthusiasm
it is in the hot and gray with the tartan shoulder straps and the thistles of scotland that she will be clothed upon in the memory of most of those who recall her presence
it is difficult to write of the things that belong to the spirit and dr elsie's own reserve on these matters was not often broken she had been reared in a god-fearing household and surrounded from her earliest years with the atmosphere of an intensely devout home
that she tried all things and approved them to her own conscience was natural to her character certain doctrines and formulas found no acceptance with her
man was created in god's image and the almighty did not desire that his creatures should despise or underrate the work of his hand the attitude of regarding the world as a desert and human beings as miserable sinners incapable of rendering the highest service never commended itself
to her eminently just mind. Such difficulties of belief as she may have experienced in early years
lay in the relations of the created to the creator of all that is divine in man. Till she had convinced
herself that a reasonable service was asked for and would be accepted, her mind was not completely at
rest. In her correspondence with her father, both in Glasgow and London, her interest was always living and
vital in the things which belong to the kingdom of heaven within. She wandered from church to church in both
places. Oblivious of all distinctions, she would take her prayer book and go for music to the Episcopal
Church or attend the undenominational meetings connected with the YWCA. Often, she found herself most
interested in the ministry of the Reverend Dr. Hunter, who subsequently left Glasgow for London.
There are many shrewd comments on other ministers on the declaratory acts than agitating the free church.
She thought the Westminster Confession should either be accepted or rejected,
and that the position was made no simpler by declarations.
In London, she attended the English church almost exclusively,
listening to the many remarkable teachers who, in the 90s,
occupied the pulpits of the Anglican Church.
It was not till after her father,
death that she came to rest entirely in the ministry of the Church of Scotland, and found in the
teaching and friendship of Dr. Wallace Williamson that which gave her the vital faith which
inspired her life and work, and carried her at last triumphantly through the swellings of Jordan.
St. Giles lay in the center of her healing mission, and her alert, active figure was a familiar
sight as the little congregation gathered for the daily service. When the Kirk scaled in the
the fading light of the short days, the westering sun on the windows would often fall on the fair hair
and bright face of her whose day had been spent in ministering work. On these occasions she never
talked of her work. If she was joined by a friend, Dr. Elsie waited to see what was the pressing
thought in the mind of her companion, and into that she at once poured her whole sympathy. Few ever
walked west with her to her home, without feeling in an atmosphere of
high and chivalrous enterprise. Thus, in an ordered round, past the days and years, drawing ever
nearer to the unknown destiny, when that which was to try the reins and the hearts of many
nations was to come upon the world. When that storm burst, Elsie Ingalls was among those
whose lamp was burning, and whose heart was steadfast, and prepared for the things which were
coming on the earth. End of Section 10.
Section 11 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
This Libre Fox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 8, War and the Scottish Women, Part 1.
God, the all-terrible king, who ordainest, great winds thy clarion, the lightnings thy sword.
Show forth thy pity on high where thou reignest. Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.
God the all-wise, by the fire of thy chastening.
earth shall to freedom and truth be restored.
Through the thick darkness thy kingdom is hastening.
Thou wilt give peace in thy time, O Lord.
The year of the war coincided with that period in the life of Dr. Engels
when she was fully qualified for the great part she was to play
among the armies of the allied nations.
It is now admitted that this country was unprepared for war
and incredulous as to the German menace.
The services of women have now attained so high of value in the state that it is difficult to recast their condition in 1914.
In politics, there had been a succession of efforts to obtain their enfranchisement.
Each effort had been marked by a stronger manifestation in their favor in the country,
and the growing force of the movement, coupled with the unrest in Ireland,
had kept all political organizations in a high state of tension.
It has been shown how fully organized were all the women suffrage societies. Committees,
organizers, adherents, and speakers were at work, and in the highest state of efficiency.
Women, linked by a common cause, had learnt how to work together. The best brains in their midst
were put at the service of the suffrage, and they had watched in the political arena where to expect
support, and who could be trusted among the leaders of all parties. No sure. No sure.
ruder or more experienced body of politicians were to be found in the country than those women
drawn from all classes in all social, professional, and industrial spheres, who acknowledged Mrs. Fawcett
as their leader, and trusted no one party, sect, or politician in the year 1914.
When the war caused a truce to be pronounced in all questions of acute political difference,
the unenfranchised people realized that this might be.
mean the failure of their hopes for an indefinite time. They never foresaw that, for the second time
within a century, emancipation was to be bought by the lifeblood of a generation. The truce made no
difference to any section of the suffrage party. It was accepted by the whole people. War found both
men and women unprepared, but the path of glory was clear for the men. A great army must be formed
in defense of national liberty. The army was mobilized. It would have been well had the strength of
the women been mobilized in the same hour. Their long claim for the rights of citizenship made them
keenly alive and responsive to the call of national service. War and consequences had for many
years been uppermost in their thoughts. In the struggle for emancipation, the great argument they
had to face among the rapidly decreasing anti-party was the one that, the one that the one that the war on the
that women could take no part in war, and, as all government rested ultimately on brute force,
women could not fight, and therefore must not vote. Encountering this outlook, women had watched
what war meant all over the world, wherever it took place. With the use of scientific weapons of
destruction, with the development of scientific methods of healing, with all that went to the
maintenance of armies in the field and the support of populations at home, women had some vision
in what manner they would be needed if war ever came to this country. The misfortune of such a
controversy is that of the rights of women is that it necessarily means the opposition has to
prove a negative proposition, a most sterilizing process. Political parties were so anxious to
prove that women were incapable of citizenship that the whole community,
got into a pernicious habit of mind.
Women were underrated
in every sphere of industry
or scientific knowledge.
Their sense of incapacity
and irresponsibility was encouraged,
and when they turned militant
under such treatment,
they were only voted a nuisance,
which it was impossible
to totally exterminate.
Those who watched the gathering war clouds
and the decline of their parliamentary hopes
did not realize
that in the overruling providence
of God, the devastating war among nations was to open a new era for women. They were no longer to be
held cheap as irresponsibles, mere clogs on the machinery of the state. They were to be called on
to take the place of men who were dying by the thousand for their homes, fighting against the
doctrine that military force is the only true government in a Christian world. After mobilization,
military authorities had to make provision for the wounded.
We can remember the early sensation of seeing buildings raised for other purposes taken over for hospitals.
Since the Crimea, women as nurses at the base were institutions understood of all men.
In the vast camps which sprang up at the commencement of the war, women modestly thought that they might be usefully employed as cooks.
The idea shocked the war office till it rocked to its foundations.
A few adventurous women started laundries for officers and others for the men.
They did it on their own, and in peril of their beneficent soap suds being ordered to a region where they would be out of sight
and out of any seasonable service to the vermin-ridden camps.
The suffrage organizations, staffed and equipped with able, practical women jacks of all trades in their midst,
put themselves at the call of national service, but were headed back from all enterprises.
It had been ordained that women could not fight, and therefore they were of no use in wartime.
A few persisted in trying to find openings for service. Among these were Dr. Ingalls.
It is one thing to offer to be useful without any particular qualification. It is another
to have professional knowledge to give, and the medical women were strong in the conviction,
that they had their hard-won science and skill to offer.
Those who have read the preceding pages
will realize that Dr. Ingalls carried into this offer
a perfect knowledge of how women doctors were regarded by the community,
and she knew political departments too well to believe
that the war office would have a more enlightened outlook.
In the past, she had said, in choosing her profession,
that she liked pioneer work,
and she was to be the pioneer woman doctor, who, with the aid of suffrage societies,
founded and led the Scottish women's hospitals to the healing of many races.
After bringing the story of Dr. Ingalls to this point,
it is very easy to imagine the working of her fertile brain and her sense of vital energy
in the opening weeks of the war.
What material for instant action she had at hand she used.
She had helped to form a detachment of the V.A.D.
when the idea of this once despised and now greatly desired body began to take shape.
Before the war, men spoke slightingly of its object, and it was much depreciated.
Dr. Ingalls saw all the possibilities which lay in the voluntary aid offer.
Dr. Ingalls was in Edinburgh at the commencement of the war, and the sixth Edinburgh V.A.D,
of which she was commandant, was at once mobilized.
For several weeks, she worked hard at their training.
She gave up the principal rooms in her house for a depot for the outfit of Cargafield as an auxiliary hospital.
The hospital was not accepted. If it had been, and Dr. Ingalls put in charge of it,
the wider work of her life might never have had its fulfillment.
Dr. Engels from the first advocated that the VAD should be used as probationers in military hospitals,
and the orderlies who served in her units were chiefly drawn from this body.
in september she went to london to put her views before the national union in the war office and to offer the services of herself and women colleagues miss mayor expresses the thoughts which were dominating her mind
to her it seemed wicked that women with power to wield the surgeon's knife in the mitigation of suffering and with knowledge to diagnose and cure should be withheld from serving the sick and wounded
her love for the wounded and suffering gave her a clear vision as to what lay before the armies of the allies at the root of all her strenuous work of the last three years says her sister was the impelling force of her sympathy with the wounded men
this feeling amounted at times to almost agony only once did she allow herself to show this innermost feeling this was at the root of her passionate yearning to get with her unit to mesopotamia
during the early years of 1916.
I cannot bear to think of them, our boys.
To the woman's heart within her,
the wounded men of all nations
made the same irresistible appeal.
In that spirit, she approached a departmental chief.
Official reserve at last gave way,
and the historic sentence was uttered,
My good lady, go home and sit still.
In that utterance lay the germ of that inspiration,
which was to carry the Red Cross and the Scottish women among many nations, kindreds, and tongues.
It is easy to picture the scene, the overworked red tape-bound official,
the little figure of the woman with the smile and the ready answer before him.
There is a story that while a town in Serbia was under bombardment,
Dr. Ingalls was also in it with some of her hospital work.
She sought an official in his quarters as she desired certain things for her hospital.
hospital. The noise of the firing was loud and the shells were flying around. Dr. Ingalls seemed oblivious
of any sound, save her own voice, and she requested of an under-officer an interview with his chief.
The official had at last to confess that his superior was hiding in the cellar till the calamity
of shell fire was overpassed. In much the same condition was the local war office official
when confronted with Dr. Engels and her practical importunity.
No doubt she saw it was useless to continue her offers of service.
Mrs. Fawcett says,
Nearly all the memorial notices of her have recorded the fact that,
at the beginning of her work in 1914,
the war office refused her official recognition.
The recognition so stupidly refused by her own country
was joyfully and gratefully given by the French,
and later the Serbian AMS and Red Cross.
She went home to her family,
who so often had inspired her to good work,
and as she sat and talked over the war in her plans
with one of her nieces, she suddenly said,
I know what we will do, we will have a unit of our own.
The we referred to that close-knit body of women
with whom she had worked for a common cause,
and she knew at once that we would work with her
and in her for the accomplished
of this ideal which so rapidly took shape in her teeming brain. She was never left alone in any part of
her life's work. Her personality knit not only her family to her in the closest bonds of love,
but she had devoted friends among those who did not see eye to eye with her in the common cause.
She never loved them the less for disagreeing with her, and though their indifference to her views
might at times obscure her belief in their mental caliber, it never interfered with
the mutual affections of all. She did not leave these friends out of her scheme when it began to
take shape. The Edinburgh suffrage offices, no longer needed for propaganda and organization work,
became the headquarters of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, and the enlarged committee,
chiefly of Dr. Engel's personal friends, began to work under the steamhammer of her energy.
Miss Mayer may again be quoted. Well, do I recall the first suggestion that passed between
us on the subject of directing the energies of our suffrage societies to the starting of a hospital.
Let us gather a few hundred pounds, and then appeal to the public, was the decision of our ever
courageous Dr. Elsie, and from that moment she never swerved in her purpose. Some of us gasped
when she announced that the sum of 50,000 pounds must be speedily advertised for. Some timid
souls advised the naming of a smaller amount is our goal. With unerring perception, our leader refused
to lower the standard, and abundantly has she been proved right. Not 50,000 pounds, but over 200,000
pounds have rewarded her faith and her hope. This quick perception was one of the greatest
of her gifts, and it was with perfect simplicity she stated to me once that, when on rare occasions
she had yielded her own conviction to pressure from others, the result had been unfortunate.
There was not an ounce of vanity in her composition. She was merely stating a simple fact.
Her outlook was both wide and direct. She saw the object aimed at, and she marched straight on.
If, on the road, some obstacles had to be not exactly ruthlessly, but very firmly brushed aside,
her strength of purpose was in the end a blessing to all concerned.
Strength combined with sweetness,
with a wholesome dash of humor thrown in,
in my mind sums up her character.
What that strength did for agonized Serbia,
only the grateful Serbs can fully tell.
A letter written in October of this year to Mrs. Fawcett
tells of the rapid formation of the hospital idea.
8 Walker Street, October 9th, 1914.
Dear Mrs. Fawcett, I wrote to you from the office this morning, but I want to point out a little more fully what the committee felt about the name of the hospitals.
We felt that our original scheme was growing very quickly into something very big, much bigger than anything we had thought of at the beginning.
And we felt that if the hospitals were called by a non-committal name, it would be much easier to get all men and women to help.
The scheme is, of course, a national union scheme, and that fact the Scottish Federation will never lose sight of or attempt to disguise.
The National Union will be at the head of all our appeals and press notices and paper.
But if you could reverse the position and imagine, for a moment, that the anti-suffrage society had thought of organizing all these skilled women for service,
you can quite see that many more neutrals, and a great many suffragists would have been ready to help
if they sent their subscriptions to the Scottish Women's Hospital for Foreign Service,
than if they had to send to the Anti-Suffrage League Hospital.
We were convinced that the more women we could get to help, the greater would be the gain to the woman's movement,
for we have hit upon a really splendid scheme.
When Mrs. Lori and I went to see Sir George Beetson, the head of the Scottish Red Cross,
in Glasgow, he said at once,
Our war office will have nothing to say to you.
And then he added,
yet there is no knowing what they may do before the end of the war.
You see, we get these expert women, doctors, nurses, and ambulance workers organized.
We send our units wherever they are wanted.
Once these units are out, the work is bound to grow.
The need is there, and too terrible to allow any haggling about who does the work.
If we have a thoroughly good organization here, we can send out more and more units,
or strengthen those already out.
We can add motor ambulances, organize rest stations on the lines of communication, and so on.
It will all depend on how well we are supplied with funds and brains in our base.
Each unit ought to be carefully chosen, and the very best women doctors must go out with them.
I wrote this morning to the Registered Medical Women's Association,
in London and asked them to help us, and offered to address a meeting when I come up for your meeting.
Next week, a special meeting of the Scottish Medical Women's Association is being called to
discuss the question. From the beginning, we must make it clear that our hospitals are as well
equipped and well manned as any in the field, more economical, easy, and thoroughly efficient.
I cannot think of anything more calculated to bring home to men the fact that we,
women can help intelligently in any kind of work. So much of our work is done where they cannot see it.
They'll see every bit of this. The fates seem to be fighting for us. Sometimes schemes do float off
with the most extraordinary ease. The Belgian council here is Professor Saralea, the editor of
every man. He grasped at the help we offered and has written off to several influential people.
And then yesterday morning he wrote, saying that his brother, Dr. Leon Serala, would come and work under us.
He is an MP, a man of considerable influence, so you can see the Belgian Hospital will have everything in its favor.
Then Mr. Seton Watson, who has devoted his life to the Balkan states, has taken up the Serbian unit.
He puts himself entirely in our service. He knows all the powers that be in Serbia.
Two people in the press have offered to help.
The money is the thing now.
It must not be wasted, but we must have lots.
And as the work grows, do let's keep it together,
so that however many hospitals we send out,
they all shall be run on the same lines.
And wherever people see the Union Jack,
with the red, white, and green flag below it,
they'll know it means efficiency and kindness and intelligence.
I wanted the executive, for this reason,
to call the hospitals British women's hospitals for foreign service. But of course it was their
own idea, and one understood the desire to call it Scottish. But if there is a splendid response
from England and from other federations, that will have to be reconsidered, I think. The great thing is to
do the thing well, and do it as one scheme. I do hope you'll approve of all this. I am marking this
letter private because it isn't an official letter, but just what I think. To you, my chief.
But you can show it to anybody you like as that. I can think of nothing except these units just now.
And when one hears of the awful need, one can hardly sit still till they are ready.
Professor Saralaya simply made one's heart bleed. He is just back from Belgium. He said,
you talk of distress from the war here, you simply know nothing about it.
Ever yours, sincerely, Elsie Maude Ingalls.
In October 1914, the scheme was finally adopted by the Scottish Federation,
and the name of Scottish Women's Hospitals was chosen.
At the same meeting, the committee decided to send Dr. Ingalls to London,
to explain the plan to the National Union,
and to speak at a meeting in the Kingsway Hall on,
what women could do to help in the war. At that meeting, she was authorized to speak on the plans of the
SWH. The NUWSS adopted the plan of campaign on 15th October, and the London Society was soon
taking up the work of procuring money to start new units, and to send Dr. Ingalls out on her last
enterprise, with a unit fully equipped to work with the Serbian army, then fighting on the Bulgarian front.
The use she made of individuals is well illustrated by Miss Burke. She was found by Dr. Ingl's in the Office of the London Society and sent forth to speak and fill the treasury chest of the SWH. It is written in the records of that work how wonderfully Miss Burke influenced her countrymen in America, and how nobly, through her efforts, they have aided the great adventure.
Dear Lady Francis, certainly I am one of Dr. Elsie's children. It was largely due to her intuition and
clear judgment of character that my feet were placed in the path, which led to my reaching my maximum
efficiency as a hospital worker and a member of the Scottish women's hospitals. I first met Dr. Elsie
after I had been the secretary of the London Committee for about a month. There was no question
of meeting a stranger. Her kindly eyes smiled,
straight into mine. Was I young and rather shy? Well, the best way to encourage me was to give me
responsibility. Do you speak French? Yes. Very well. Go write me a letter to General D'Eauce,
telling him we accept the building he has offered at Troy. Someone hazarded the suggestion that the
letter should be passed on. Nonsense, replied Dr. Elsie. I know the type. That girl probably
speaks six languages. If she says she speaks French, she does. She practically signed the letter
I wrote her without reading it. Doubtless, all the time I was with her, I was under her keen scrutiny,
and when finally, after arranging a meeting for her at Oxford, which she found impossible to take,
owing to her sudden decision to leave for Serbia, she had already judged me, and without hesitation,
she told me to go to Oxford and speak myself.
I have wondered often whether anyone else would have sent a young and unknown speaker.
It needed Dr. Elsie's knowledge of human character and rapid, energetic method of making decisions.
It would be difficult for we young ones of the Scottish women's hospitals to analyze our feelings towards Dr. Elsie.
A wave of her hand in passing meant much to us.
End of Section 11
Section 12 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
The Slibervox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 8. War and the Scottish Women, Part 2.
Space utterly forbids our following the fortunes of the Scottish women's hospitals
as they went forth, one by one, to France, to Belgium, to Serbia, to Corsica and Russia.
That history will have some day to be written.
It is only possible in this memoir to speak of their work in relation to their founder and leader.
Not I, but my unit, was her dying watchword, and when the work of her unit is reviewed,
it is obvious how they carried with them as an oriflum, the inspiration of unselfish devotion
set them by Dr. Ingalls. Besides going into all the detailed work of the hospital equipment,
Dr. Ingalls found time to continue her work of speaking for the cause of the hospitals.
We find her addressing her old friends.
I have the happiest recollection of Dr. I addressing a small meeting of the W.L. Association here.
It was one of her first meetings to raise money.
She told us how she wanted to go to Serbia.
She was so convincing, but with all my faith in her, I never thought she would get there.
That and much more she did, a lesson in faith.
She looked round the little gathering in the good Templar Hall and said,
I suppose nobody here could lend me a yacht.
She did get her ship there.
To one of her workers in this time, she said,
My dear, we shall live all our lives in the shadow of war.
The one to whom she spoke says,
A cold chill struck my heart.
Did she feel it, and no.
know that never again would things be as they were?
At the close of 1914, Dr. Ingalls went to France
to see the Scottish Women's Hospital established and working
under the French Red Cross at Royumont.
It was probably on her way back that she went to Paris
on business connected with Royimont.
She went into Notre Dame and chose a seat
in a part of the cathedral where she could feel alone.
She there had an experience,
which she afterwards told to Mrs. McCorme.
Claren. As she sat there, she had a strong feeling that someone was behind her. She resisted the
impulse to turn round, thinking it was someone who, like herself, wanted to be quiet. The feeling
grew so strong at last that she involuntarily turned round. There was no one near her, but for the
first time she realized she was sitting in front of a statue of Joan of Arc. To her, it appeared
as if the statue was instinct with life. She added, wasn't it curious? Then later she said,
I would like to know what Joan was wanting to say to me. I often think of the natural way
which she told me of the experience and the practical conclusion of wishing to know what Joan
wanted. Once again, she referred to the incident before going to Russia. I see her expression now,
just for a moment for getting everything else, keen, concentrated, and her humorous smile, as she said,
You know, I would like awfully to know what Joan was trying to say to me.
Elsie Ingalls was not the first, nor will she be the last woman who has found help in the story of the maid of Orleans,
when the causes dear to the hearts of nations are at stake.
It is easy to hear the words that would pass between the two leaders in the time of their country's warfare,
The graven figure of Joan was instinct with life, from the undying love of race and country,
which flowed back to her from the woman who was as ready to dedicate to her country,
her self-forgetting devotion, as Jean-Dark had been in her day.
Both in their day and generation had heard,
The quick alarming drum, saying, come, freemen come, ere your heritage be wasted, said the quick alarming drum.
abbe de royamont december twenty second nineteen fourteen dearest amy many many happy christmases to you dear and to all the others everything is splendid here now and if the general from headquarters would only come and inspect us we could begin
the wards are perfect i only wish you could see them with their red bed covers and little tables there are four wards and we have called them blanche of castile the woman who really started to see them-the-womenes
the building of this place, the mother of Louis 9th, the founder, as he is called,
Queen Margaret of Scotland, Joan of Arc, and Millicent Vossett. Now, don't you think that is rather nice?
The Abbey itself is a wonderful place. It has beautiful architecture, and it is placed in delightful
woods. One wants to spend hours exploring it, instead of which we have been working like
galley slaves getting the hospital in order. The equipment has come out. The equipment has come out,
practically all right. There are no thermometers and no sandbags. I feel they'll turn up.
Yesterday, I was told there were no toothbrushes and no nail brushes, but they appeared.
After all the fuss, you can imagine our feelings when the director, an official of the French
Red Cross, who has to live here with us, told us French soldiers don't want toothbrushes.
Our first visitors were three French officers, whom we took for the inspecting general,
and treated with grovelling deference, till we found they knew nothing about it,
and were much more interested in the tapestry in the proprietor's house than in our instruments.
However, they were very nice, and said we were bien mouble.
Once we had been on tenterhooks all day about the inspection.
Suddenly, a man poked his head round the door of the doctor's sitting-room and said,
The General.
In one flash, every doctor was out of the room and into her bedroom for her uniform,
coat, and I was left sitting. I got up and wandered downstairs when an excited orderly dashed
past, singing, nothing but two British officers. Another time we were routed out from breakfast by the
cry of the general, but this time it turned out to be a French regiment whose officers had been
moved by curiosity to come round by here. The general has not arrived yet. We have had to get a new
boiler in the kitchen, new taps and lavatories, and electric light, an absolute necessity in this
huge place, and all the theater sinks. We certainly are no longer a mobile hospital, but as we are
12 miles from the point from which the wounded are distributed, I am getting very discreet about names,
since a telegram of mine was censored. We shall probably be as useful here as anywhere. They think we
may even get English tommies. You have no idea of the conditions to which the units came out,
and they have behaved like perfect bricks. The place was like an ice hole. There were no fires,
no hot water, no furniture, not even blankets, and the equipment did not arrive for five days. They
have scrubbed the whole place out themselves, as if they were born housemaids, put up the beds,
stuffed the mattresses and done everything. Really, I am proud of them. They stick at absolutely nothing,
and when Madame came, she said, what it is to belong to a practical nation. We had a service in the ward on Sunday.
We are going to see if they will let us use the little St. Louis Chapel. There are two other chapels,
one in use, that we hope the soldiers will go to, and a beautiful chapel, the same style of architecture as
the chapel at Mont Saint-Michel. It is a perfect joy to walk through it to meals.
The village Cure has been to tea with us. Will you believe it? That general hasn't arrived yet.
Your loving, Elsie. Mr. Seton Watson has permitted his article in the December number of
the New Europe, 1917, to be reprinted here. His complete knowledge of Serbia enables him to
describe both the work and Dr. Ingalls, who undertook the great tasks set before her.
Elsie Ingalls was one of the heroic figures of the war, one whose memory her many friends
will cherish with pride and confidence, pride at having been privileged to work with her,
confidence in the race which breeds such women. This is not the place to tell the full story
of her devotion to many a good cause at home, but the New Europe owes her a debt
of special interest and affection. For in her own person, she stood for that spirit of sympathy
and comprehension, upon which intercourse between the nations must be founded if the ideal of a new
Europe is ever to become a reality. Though her life work had hitherto lain in utterly different fields,
she saw in a flash the needs of a tragic situation, and when war came, offered all her
indomitable spirit and tireless energy to a cause till recently unknown and even frowned upon in our country.
Like the Douglas of old, she flung herself where the battle raged most fiercely, always claiming,
and at last obtaining, permission to set up her hospitals where the obstacles were greatest
and the dangers most acute. But absorbed as she was in her noble task of healing, she saw beyond it
the high national ideal that inspired the Serbs to endure sufferings, unexampled even in this war,
and became an enthusiastic convert to the cause of southern Slav unity. To her, as to all true Europeans,
the principle of nationality is not indeed the end of all human wisdom, but the sure foundation
upon which a new and saner internationalism is to be built, and an unalienable right to which
great and small alike are entitled. Perhaps the fact that she herself came out of a small nation,
which, like Serbia, has known how to celebrate its defeats, was not without its share in determining
her sympathies. The full political meaning of her work has not yet been brought home to her
countrymen, and yet what she has done will live after her. Her achievement in Serbia itself in
1915 was sufficiently remarkable, but even that was a mere prelude to her achievement on the
Eastern Front. The Serbian division in southern Russia, which the Scottish women's hospitals went
out to help, was not Serbian at all in the ordinary sense of the word. Its proper name was
the Yugoslav division, for it was composed entirely of volunteers drawn from among the Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary, who had been taken prisoners by the Russian army.
Thousands of these men enrolled themselves on the side of the Entente and in the service of Serbia,
in order to fight for the realization of southern Slav independence and unity under the national dynasty
of Kara George. Beyond the ordinary risks of war, they acted in full knowledge that
capture by the enemy would mean the same fate as Austria met it out.
to the heroic Italian deputy, Chesere Battisti,
and some of them, left wounded on the battlefield after a retreat,
shot each other to avoid being taken alive.
Throughout the Dobruja campaign,
they fought with the most desperate gallantry
against impossible odds,
and, owing to inadequate support during the retreat,
their main body was reduced from 15,000 to 4,000.
Laterally, the other divisions had been withdrawn,
to recruit in Odessa, after sharing the defense of the Romanian Southern Front.
To these men in the summer of 1916, Serbia had sent a certain number of higher officers,
but for equipment and medical help, they were dependent upon what the Russians could spare
from their own almost unlimited needs. At the worst hour, Dr. Ingalls and her unit
came to the help of the Yugoslavs, shared their privations and misfortunes, and spared no
effort in their cause. History will record the name of Elsie Ingalls, like that of Lady Paget,
as preeminent among that band of women who have redeemed for all time the honor of Britain in the
Balkans. Among the Serbs it is already assuming an almost legendary quality. To us, it will serve
to remind us that Florence Nightingale will never be without successors among us, and in particular,
every true Scotsman will cherish her memory. Every believer in the cause for which she gave her life
will gain fresh courage from her example. R.W. Seton Watson. End of section 12. Section 13 of Dr.
L. C. Ingalls by Francis Balfour. The Sliber Fox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 9, Serbia, Part 1. Send thy hand from above. Rid me and deliver me out of great
waters from the hand of strange children, and pray ye that your flight be not in the winter,
for in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation
which God created unto this time, neither shall be. On either side of the river was there the tree of
life, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Dr. Ingalls remained at home,
directing the many operations necessary to ensure the proper equipment of the units,
and the difficult task of getting them conveyed overseas. From the beginning, till her return with
her units serving with the Serbian army in Russia, she had the sustaining cooperation both of the
Admiralty and the Foreign Office. In the many complications surrounding the history of the
hospitals with the Allied armies, the Scottish women owed very much to both Secretaries of State
for Foreign Affairs, and very particularly to Lord Robert Cecil in his department of the
foreign office. It was not easy to get the scheme of hospital staffed entirely by women,
serving abroad with armies fighting the common and unscrupulous foe, accepted by those in authority.
The foreign office was responsible for the safety of these British outpost hospitals,
and they knew well the dangers and privations to which the devoted pioneer band of women would
be exposed. They made many stipulations with Dr. Ingalls, which she accepted and abided by,
long as her work was not hindered. No care or diplomatic work was spared, and if at the end of their
service in Russia, the safety of the unit was a matter of grave anxiety to the foreign office,
it had never caused to be ashamed of the way this country's honor and good faith was upheld
by the hospitals under the British flag, amid the chaotic sufferings of the Russian people.
In the spring of 1915, Dr. Eleanor Soltow, who was in charge of the first Serbian unit,
became ill with diphtheria in the midst of the typus epidemic which was devastating the Serbian people.
The Serbian minister writes of that time,
they were the first to go to the help of Serbia when the Austrians, after they were defeated,
besides 60,000 prisoners, also left behind them epidemics in all the districts which they had invaded.
The Scottish women turned up their sleeves, so to speak, at the railway station itself,
and went straight to typhus and typhoid-stricken patients who were pitifully dying in the crowded hospitals.
Colonel Hunter, AMS, wrote after her death,
It was my privilege and happiness to see much of her work in Serbia when I was officer
in charge of the corps of RAMC officers sent out by the W.O.
to deal with the raging epidemic of typhus and famine fevers then devastating the land.
I have never met with anyone who gave me so deep an impression of single-mindedness,
gentle-heartedness, clear and purposeful vision, wise judgment, an absolutely fearless disposition.
No more lovable personality than hers, or more devoted and courageous body of women,
ever set out to help effectively a people in dire distress than the SWH, which she organized and sent out
and afterwards took personal charge of in Serbia in 1915. Amidst the most trying conditions, she, or they,
never faltered in courage or endurance. Under her wise and gentle leadership,
difficulties seemed only to stir to further endeavor, more extended work, and greater endurance of hardship.
Captain Ralph Glynn writes from France,
I see you went to the funeral of that wonderful person, Dr. Elsie Ingalls.
I shall never forget arriving where that SW unit was in the midst of the typhus in Serbia,
and finding her and all her people so clean and obviously ready for anything.
The Serbian nation lost no time in commemorating her services to them.
At Mladenovats, they built a beautiful fountain close to the,
the Camp Hospital. On 7th October 1915, it was formally opened with a religious service,
according to the rights of the Greek Church. Dr. Ingalls turned on the water, which was to flow
through the coming years in grateful memory of the good work done by the Scottish Women's
Hospitals. In honor of Dr. Elsie Ingalls, Obit November 27, 1917. At Mladenovats, still the
fountain sings, raised by the Serbs to you, their angel friend, who fought the hunger typhus to its end.
A nobler fountain from your memory springs, a fountainhead where faith renews its wings.
Faith in the powers of womanhood to bend, wars curse to blessing, and to make amend by love
for hates unutterable things. Wherefore, when cannon voices cease to roar, a louder voice,
voice shall echo in our ears, voice of three peoples joined in one accord, telling that,
gentle to your brave heart's core, you faced unwavering all that woman fears, and clear a vision
followed Christ the Lord. Note, two years ago the Serbians dedicated a simple fountain in Bladenevats
to the grateful memory of one they spoke of as the angel of their people. The Romanian and Russian
refugees in the Dubruja will never forget her. H. D. Ronsley
The Englishwoman, April and June 1916, has two articles written by Dr. Ingalls, under the title
The Tragedy of Serbia. The literary power of her narrative makes one regret that she did not live
to give a consecutive account of all she passed through in the countries in which she
suffered with the peoples. When we reached Serbia in May 19th,
She was lying in sunshine. Two storms had raged over her during the preceding months,
the Austrian invasion and the terrific typhus epidemic. In our safe little island, we can hardly
realize what either meant. At the end of 1914, the Austrian Empire hurled its punitive expedition
across the Danube, a punitive expedition that ended in the condign punishment of the invader. They left
behind them a worse foe than themselves, and the typhus, which began in the hospitals they left
so scandalously filthy and overcrowded, swept over the land. Dr. Ingalls describes the long,
peaceful summer, with its hopes of an advance to their aid on the part of the Allies. The Serbs
were conscious the great powers owed them much, for how often we heard the words,
we are the only one as yet who has beaten our enemy. Not until, since we were,
September did any real sense of danger trouble them. Then the clouds rolled up black and threatening
on the horizon, Bulgaria arming, and a hundred thousand Germans massing on the northern frontier.
They began to draw off the main part of their army from the Danube towards the east to meet their old
enemies. The powers refused to let them attack, and they waited till the Bulgarian mobilization
was complete. The Allies discounted the attack from the north.
Airplanes had been out and there are no Germans there. There are no signs whatever of any military
movements, so said the Wise Acres. The only troops there are untrained Austrian levies, which the Serbs
ought to be able to deal with themselves if they were up to their form last year. Then the storm broke.
The 100,000 Germans appeared on the northern frontier. The Bulgar's invaded from the east, the Greeks did not come
in, and the Austrians poured in from the west. The Serbian army shortened the enormous line they
had to defend, but they could not stand against the long-distance German guns, and so began the
retreat. What is coming to Serbia, said a serb to me, we cannot think. And then, hopefully,
but God is great and powerful, and our allies are great and powerful too. Strong men could
hardly speak of the disaster without breaking down. They looked at one so eagerly. When are your men
coming up? They must come soon. We must give our people two months, the experts among us answered,
to bring up the heavy artillery. We thought the Serbs would be able to hold the West Morava Valley.
It is too hilly for the German artillery to be of any use, they said.
Dr. Inglis goes on to relate how all the calculations were wrong.
how the Austrian force came down that very valley. The Serbs were caught in a trap,
and that 160,000 of their gallant little army escaped was a wonderful feat. That they are
already keen to take the field again is but one more proof of the extraordinary recuperative
power of the nation. Dr. Elsie gives an account of the typhus epidemic. The first unit under Dr. Soltow
in 1914 was able at Krogievots to,
to do excellent work for the Serbian army after its victories, and it was only evacuated owing to the
retreat in October 1915. The unit had only been a fortnight out when the committee got it from
a telegram, dire necessity for more doctors and nurses. The word dire was used, hoping it would
pass unnoticed by the censor, for the authorities did not wish the state of Serbia from
typhus to be generally known. We shall never know what the death rate was.
was during the epidemic, but of the 425 Serbian doctors, 125 died of the disease, and two-thirds
of the remainder had it. The Scottish Committee hastened out supplies and staff. For three months
the epidemic raged, and all women may ever be proud of the way those women worked. It was like a
long, drawn-out battle, and not one of them played the coward. Not one of them asked to come away.
There were three deaths and nine cases of illness among the unit, and may we not truly claim that those three women who died gave their lives for the great cause for which our country stands today as much as any man in the trenches?
Dr. Ingle speaks of the full share of work taken by other British units. Lady Paget's Hospital at Scopio, magnificently organized. The Red Cross, under Dr. Banks, took more than its share of the burden.
and how Dr. Ryan of the American Hospital asserted that Serbia would have been wiped out but for the work of the foreign missions.
Miss Holm tells of some of her experiences with her leader.
Krogivots
One day, Dr. Elsie Ingalls took me out shopping with her, and we wanted a great many things for our hospital in the way of drugs, etc.
And we also wanted, more than anything else, some medical scales for weighing drugs.
While we were in the shop, Dr. Engels saw hanging up in it three pairs of these scales,
so she asked the man, in her most persuasive manner, if he would sell her a pair of these scales for our
hospital use. He explained at length that he used all the scales and was sorry that he could not
possibly sell them. So Dr. Ingalls bought some more things. In fact, we stayed in the shop for
about an hour, buying things to the amount of 10 pounds. And between each of the different articles
purchased, she would again revert to the scales and say,
You know, it is for your men that we want them, until, at last, the man, exhausted by his
refusals, took down the scales and presented them to her.
When she asked, How much are they?
He made a bow and said it would be a pleasure to give them to her.
When we were taken prisoners, and had been so for some time, and before we were liberated,
the German command came bringing a paper, which they commanded Dr.
Engels to sign. The purport of the paper was a statement which declared that the British prisoners
had been well-treated in the hands of the Germans, and was already signed by two men who were the heads
of other British units. Dr. Ingalls said, why should I sign this paper? I do not know if all the
prisoners are being well-treated by you, therefore I declined to sign it. To which the German authorities
replied, you must sign it. Dr. Ingalls then said,
well, make me, and that was the end of that incident. She never did sign it. So convinced were some of the
people belonging to the Scottish Women's Unit that the British forces were coming to the aid of their
Serbian ally, that long after they were taken prisoners, they thought, each time they heard a gun
from a different quarter, that their liberators were close at hand. So much so indeed that three
of the members of the unit beg that, in the event of the unit being sent
home, they might be allowed to stay behind in Serbia with the Serbs to help the Serbian Red Cross.
Dr. Ingalls unofficially consented to this, and with the help of the Serbian Red Cross,
these three people in question adjourned to a village, hard by which was about a mile from
the hospital, three days before the unit had orders to move. No one except Dr. Ingalls and three other
people of the unit knew where these three members were living. However,
the date of the departure was changed, and the unit was told they were to wait another 20 days.
This made it impossible for these three people to appear again with the unit.
They continued to live at the little house which sheltered them.
Suddenly, one afternoon, one of the members of the unit went to ask at the German command
if there were any letters for the unit.
At this interview, which took place about three o'clock in the afternoon,
the person was informed that the whole unit was to leave that night at 7.30.
Dr. Ingalls sent the person who received this command to tell the three people in the cottage to get ready and that they must go, she thought.
But the message only said,
We have had orders that the unit is to go at 7.30 tonight, but did not say that Dr. Ingalls had sent an order for the three people to get ready.
So they did nothing but simply went to bed at 10 o'clock, thinking the unit had already started.
It was a wintry night, snowing heavily, and not a night that one would have.
sent out a dog. At about half-past ten a knock came to the window, and Dr. Engel's voice was heard saying,
You have to come at once to the train. I am here with an armed guard. All the rest of the unit had been
at the station for some hours, but the train was not allowed to start until everyone was there.
So Dr. Ingalls came herself for us. It was difficult to get her to enter the house, and naturally
she seemed rather ruffled, having had to come more than a mile in the deep snow, as she was the only
person who knew anything about us. One of the parties said, are you really cross, or are you
pretending because the armed guard understands English? She gave her queer little smile and said,
No, I am not pretending. The whole party tramped through the snow to the station, and on the way,
she told them she was afraid that she had smashed somebody's window, having knocked at another cottage
before she found ours in the dark, thinking it was the one we lived in,
for which she was very much chaffed by her companions,
who knew well her views on the question of militant tactics.
The first stages of this journey were made in horse boxes,
with no accommodation whatsoever.
Occasionally the train drew up in the middle of the country,
and anybody who wished to get out had simply to ask the sentry,
who guarded the door, to allow them to get out for a moment.
The next night was spent lying on the floor of the station at Belgrade, the eight sentries and all their charges lying on the floor together.
The only person who seemed to be awake was the officer who guarded the door himself all night.
In the morning one was not allowed to go even to wash one's hands without a sentry to come and stand at the door.
The next two days were spent in an ordinary train, rather too well heated, with four aside in second-class compartments.
In Vienna, all the British units who were being sent away were formed into a group on the station at 6 a.m.,
where they awaited the arrival of the American Council, guarded all the time by their sentries,
who gave us his parole that if the people were allowed to go out of the station,
they would return at 8 o'clock the time they had to leave that town.
This was granted.
Dr. Engels, with a party, adjourned to a hotel, where baths, etc., were provided.
other members were allowed to do what they liked.
The unit was detained for eight days at Bludence,
close to the frontier, for Switzerland.
On their arrival at Zurich,
they were met by the British Council General,
vice council, and many members of the British colony,
who gave Dr. Engels and her unit a very warm-hearted welcome,
bringing quantities of flowers,
and doing all they could to show them kindness and pleasure at their safe arrival.
It is difficult for people who have never been,
prisoners to know what the first day's freedom means. Everybody had a different expression and seemed to
have a different outlook on life. But already we could see our leader was engrossed with plans and
busy with schemes for future work of the unit. The next day the Council General made a speech
in which he told the unit all that had passed during the last four months, of which they knew nothing.
to her sister, Brindisi, en route for Serbia, April 28, 1915.
The boat ought to have left last night, but it did not even come in till this morning. However,
we have lost only 24 hours. It has been a most luxurious journey, except the bit from Naples
here, and that was rather awful, with spitting men and shut windows, in first-class carriages,
remember. When we got here, we immediately ordered back.
baths, but the boiler was broken. So I said, well then, we must go somewhere else,
with the result that we were promised baths in our rooms at once. That was a nice bath, and then I
curled up on the sofa and went to sleep. Our windows look right onto the docks, and the blue
Mediterranean beyond. It is so queer to see the red, white, and green flags, and to think they
mean Italy and not the N-U-W-S-S. I went out before dinner last night and strolled through the quaint
streets. The whole population was out, and most whole-hearted and openly interested in my uniform.
This is a most delightful window with all the shops and the colors. There are three men of war in,
and half a dozen of the quaintest little boats, which a soldier told me were scouts. I wish I had
asked a sailor, for I had never heard of scouts. The soldier I asked is one of the Bersallieri
with cocks feathers, a huge mass of them in his hat. They all say Italy is certainly coming into the
war. One man on the train to Rome was coming from Cardiff to sell coal to the Italian government.
He told us weird stories about German tricks to get our coal through Spain and other countries.
It was a pleasure seeing Royumont.
It is a huge success, and I do think Dr. Ivans deserves a lot of credit.
The wards in the theater and the X-ray department and the rooms for mending and cleaning the men's clothes were all perfect.
End of Section 13.
Section 14 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
The Sleeper Fox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 9. Serbia. Part 2.
2 Mrs. Simpson
S.W.H.
May 30, 15. Well, this is a perfectly lovely place, and the Serbians are delightful. I am staying with a
charming woman, Madame Milanovic. She is a vice-president of the Serbian Women's League, formed to help
the country in time of war. I think she wanted to help us because of all the hospital has done here.
Anyhow, I score. I have a beautiful room in everything. She gives me an early cup of coffee,
and for the rest I live with the unit.
Neither she nor I can speak six words of one another's languages,
but her husband can talk a little French.
Now she has asked the little Serbian lady
who teaches the unit Serbian to live with her to interpret.
Anyhow, we are great friends.
We have had a busy time since we arrived.
The unit is nursing 550 beds in three hospitals,
having been sent out to nurse 300 beds.
there is first the surgical hospital called reserve number three it was a school and is in two blocks with a long courtyard between i think we have got it really quite well equipped with a fine x-ray room
the theatre and the room opposite where the dressings are done both very well arranged and a great credit to sister bosget the one thing that troubled me was the floor old wood and holes in it impossible to sterilize but yesterday made
Protoich, our director, said he was going to get cement laid down in it and the theater.
Then it will be perfect.
He said to Dr. Chesney, this is the best surgical hospital in Serbia.
You must not believe that quite, for they are very good at saying pleasant things here.
There are two other hospitals, the typhus one, number six reserve, and one for relapsing
fever and general diseases, number seven reserve, both bearers.
We have put most of our strength in number six, and it is in good working order, but number seven
has had only one doctor and two day sisters in one night for over 200 beds. Still, it is wonderful
what those three women have done. We have Austrian prisoners as orderlies everywhere,
in the hospitals and in the houses. The conglomeration of languages is too funny for words,
Serbian, German, French, English. Sometimes you have to get an orderly to translate Serbian into
German and another to translate the German into French before you can get it what is wanted.
Two words we have all learnt, Dautra, which means good, and which these grateful people use
at once if they feel a little better or are pleased about anything, and the other is Boli, pain, poor men.
so much for what we have been doing, but the day before yesterday we got our orders for a new bit of work.
They are forming a disinfecting center at Miladanovats, and Colonel Grustitch, who is the head of the medical service here,
wants us to go up there at once with our whole fever staff under canvas.
They are giving us the tents till ours come out.
Typhus is decreasing so much that number six is to be turned into a surgical hospital,
and there will be only one infectious diseases hospital here.
I am so pleased at being asked to do this,
for it is a part of a big and well-thought-out scheme.
The surgical hospital is to remain here.
Alice Hutchison goes to Peshirevats also for infectious diseases.
I hope she is at Salonica today.
She left Malta last Sunday.
We really began to think the governor was going to keep her altogether.
Her equipment has all come.
And yesterday I sent Mrs. Haverfield and Mr. Smith up to Peshirevats to choose the site and pitch the tent.
They gave me an awfully exciting bit of news in Colonel G's office yesterday,
and that was that five motor cars were in Serbia, north of Mladonovats, for me.
Of course, I had wired for six, but you have been prompt about them.
How they got into the north of Serbia I cannot imagine, unless they were dropped out of aeroplanes.
Really, it is wonderful the work this unit has done in the most awful stress all through March and April.
We ought to be awfully proud of them.
The Serbian government gave Dr. Saltow a decoration, and Patsy Hunter had two medals.
To her niece, Amy McLaren.
Valuvaux, August 16, 1915.
Darling, Amy.
I wonder if you could find this place on the map.
I have spelt it, probably.
but if you want to say it, you must say valuvo. One of the hospitals mother has been collecting
so much money for is here. Such a beautiful hospital it is. It is in tents, on a bit of sloping
ground looking south. There are big tents for the patients and little tents for the staff.
I pull my bed out of the tent every night and sleep outside under the stars. Such lovely starlight
nights we have here. Dr. Alice Hutchison is head of this unit, and I am here on a visit to her.
My own hospital is in a town, Krogivats. Now, I wonder if you can find that place.
The hospital here is in a girls' school. Now, I wonder what will happen to the lessons of all
those little girls as long as the war lasts. Serbia has been at war for three years,
four wars in three years, and the women of the country have kept the agriculture of the country
going all that time. A Serbian officer told me the other day that the country is so grateful to them
that they are going to strike a special medal for the women to show their thanks when this war is
over. This is such a beautiful country and such nice people. Someday when the war is over,
we'll come here and have a holiday. How are you getting on, my president? How are you getting on, my
precious. Is school as nice as ever? God bless you, dear little girlie. Ever, your loving aunt,
Elsie. As the fever died out, a worse enemy came in. Serbia was overrun by the Austro-German
forces, and she, with others of her units, was taken prisoner, as they had decided it was
their duty to remain at their work among the sick and wounded. Again, the Serbian minister is
quoted. When the typhus calamity was overcome, the Scottish women reorganized themselves as tent
hospitals, and offered to go as near as possible to the army at the front. Their camp in the town of
Aluvo, which suffered most of all from the Austrian invasion, might have stood in the middle of
England. In Lazarevats, shortly before the new Austro-German offensive, they formed a surgical
hospital almost out of nothing, in the devastated shops and the village in,
and they accomplished the nursing of hundreds of wounded who poured in from the battlefield.
When it became obvious that the Serbian army could not resist the combined Austrians,
Germans, Magyars, and Bulgarians, who were about four times their numbers,
the main care of the Serbian military authorities was what to do with the hospitals full of wounded,
and whom to leave with the wounded soldiers, who refused to be left to fall into the hands of the cruel enemy.
then the scottish women declared that they were not going to leave their patience and that they would stay with them whatever the conditions and whatever might be expected from the enemy they remained with the serbian wounded as long as they could be of use to them
to mrs simpson crucivats november sixth nineteen fifteen we are in the very centre of the storm and it just feels exactly like having the rain pouring down and the wind beating in gusts and not being able to see for the water in one's eyes and just holding on and saying it cannot last it is so bad
These poor little people, you cannot imagine anything more miserable than they are.
Remember, they have been fighting for years for their independence, and now it all seems to end.
The whole country is overrun, Germans, Austrians, Bulgar's, and all that has left is this
Western Morava Valley, and the country a little south of it. And they're big allies.
From here it looks as if they are never going to move.
I went into Creuvo yesterday in the car to see about Dr. McGregor's unit.
The road was crowded with refugees pouring away.
All their goods piled on their rickety oxwagons, little children on the top,
and then bands of soldiers, stragglers from the army.
These men were forming up again as we passed back later on.
The hospitals are packed with wounded.
We decided we must stand by our hospitals.
It was too awful leaving badly wounded men with no proper care.
Sir Ralph eventually agreed, and we gave everybody in the units the choice of going or staying.
We have about 115 people in the Scottish unit, and 20 have gone.
Mr. Smith brings up the rear guard today, with one or two lagers and a wounded English soldier we have had charge of.
Two of our units are here.
Dr. McGregor has trekked for Novi Bazaar.
It is the starting place for Montenegro.
We all managed wonderfully in our first evacuations and saved practically everything, but now it is hopeless.
The bridges are down, and the truck standing anyhow on sightings, and worst of all, the people have
begun looting.
I don't wonder.
There'll be famine as well as cold in this corner of the world soon, and then the distant prospect of
150,000 British troops at Salonica won't help much. The beloved British troops, the thought of them
always cheers, but not the thought of the idiots at the top who had not enough gumption to know this
must happen. Anybody, even us women, could have told them that the Germans must try and break through
to the help of the Turks. We have got a nice building here for a hospital, and Dr. Holloway is helping in the
military hospital. I believe there are about 1,000 wounded in the place. I can't write a very
interesting letter, Amy dear, because at the bottom of my heart, I don't believe it will ever reach
you. I don't see them managing the Montenegrin passes at this time of year. There is a persistent
rumor that the French have retaken Scopiro, and if that is true, perhaps the Salonica route
will be open soon.
Someday, I'll tell you all the exciting things that have been happening, and all the funny things,
too, for there have been funny things in the middle of all the sadness.
The guns are booming away, and the country looking so lovely in the sunlight.
I wonder if Serbia is a perfectly beautiful country, or whether it looks so lovely because
of the tragedy of this war, just as bed seems particularly delightful when the nightmen.
goes. Serbian military hospital,
Khrushchevats, November 30, 1915.
We have been here about a month. It was dreadfully sad work
leaving our beautiful little hospital at Khrushchevats.
Here we are working in the Serbian military hospital and living in it also.
You can imagine that we have plenty to do when you hear we have 900 wounded.
The prisoners are brought in every day, sometimes thousands,
and go on to the north, leaving the sick.
The director has put the sanitation and the laundry into our hands also.
We have had a hard frost for four days now, and snowstorms.
My warm things did not arrive. I suppose they are safe at Salonica.
Fortunately, last year's uniform was still in existence,
and I wear three pairs of stockings with my high boots.
We have all cut our skirt short, for Serbian mud is awful.
It is a lovely land, and the views round here are very cheering.
One sunset I shall never forget, a glorious sky and the hills deep blue against it.
In the foreground the campfires, and the prisoners round them in the fading light.
With the invasion came the question of evacuation.
At one time, it was possible the whole of the British unit might escape via Montenegro.
Sir Ralph Padgett, realizing that the equest,
equipment could not be saved, allowed any of the hospital unit who wished to remain with their wounded.
Two parties went with the retreating Serbs, and their story and the extraordinary hardships they endured
has been told elsewhere. Those left at Crucivats were, in Dr. Ingle's opinion, the fortunate units.
For three months they tended the Serbian wounded under foreign occupation. The unit with Dr. Ingalls
kept to their work, and when necessary, confronted the Austro-German officers with all the audacity
of their leader and the Scottish thistle combined. Their hospital accommodation was designed for
400 beds. When we went up, there were 900 patients. During the greatest part of the pressure,
the number rose to 1,200. Patients were placed in the corridors. At first, one man to one bed,
but later two beds together and three men in them.
Then there were no more bedsteads and mattresses were placed on the floor.
We filled up the outhouses.
The magazine in full blast was a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten.
Upstairs, the patients occupied the shelving.
There were three tiers, the slightly wounded men in the highest tier.
The magazine was under Dr. Holloway, and Dr. Ingle says the time to see the place
at its best or its worst was in the gloaming, when two or three feeble oil lamps illuminated the
gloom, and the tin bowls clattered and rattled as the evening ration of beans was given out,
and the men swarmed up and down the poles of their shelves, chattering as Serbs will chatter.
The sisters called the place the zoo.
The dread of the renewal of the typhus scourge amidst such conditions of overcrowding,
underfeeding, fatigue and depression was great. Dr. Engels details the appalling tasks the unit
undertook in sanitation. There was no expert among them. When we arrived, the hospital compound was a
truly terrible place, the sights and smells beyond description. We dug the rubbish into the ground,
emptied the overflowing cesspool, built incinerators, and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned.
That is an Englishman's job all over the world.
Our three untrained English girl orderlies took to it like ducks to water.
It was not the pleasantest or easiest work in the world, but they did it and did it magnificently.
Laundry and bathing arrangements were installed and kept going.
We had not a single case of typhus.
We had a greater achievement than its prevention.
late of an evening when men among the prisoners were put into the wards straight from the march unwashed and crawling with lice there was great indignation among the patients already in dr ritzha they said if you put these dirty men in among us we shall all get typhus our hearts rejoiced if we have done nothing else we thought we have driven that fact home to the serbian mind that dirt and typhus go together
Dr. Ingalls describes the misery of the Serbian prisoners.
They had seen men go out to battle, conscious of the good work they had done for the allies
in driving back the Austrians in their first punitive expedition.
We are the only ones who so far have beaten our enemy.
They came back to us broken and dispirited.
They were turned into the hospital grounds with a scanty ration of beans,
with a little meat and half a loaf of bread for 24 hours.
Their campfires flickered fitfully through the long, bitter, cold nights.
Every scrap of wood was torn up,
the footbridges over the drains,
and the trees hacked down for firewood.
We added to the rations of our sanitary workers.
We gave away all the bread we could,
but we could not feed that enclosure of hungry men.
We used to hear them coughing and moaning all.
night. Dr. Ingalls details the starving condition of the whole country, the weakness of the famine-stricken
men who worked for them, the starved yoke oxen, and all the manifold miseries of a country
overrun by the enemy. There was, she says, a curious exhilaration in working for those
grateful patient men, and in helping the director, Major Nikolich, so loyal to his country and so conscientious
and his work, to bring order out of chaos. And yet the unhappiness in the Serbian houses and the
physical wretchedness of those cold, hungry prisoners lay always like a dead weight upon our spirit.
Never shall we forget the beauty of the sunrises or the glory of the sunsets, with clear, cold,
sunlit days between, and the wonderful starlit nights. But we shall never forget the zoo either,
or the groans outside the windows when we hit our heads under the blankets to shut out the sound.
The unit got no news, and they made it a point of honor to believe nothing said in the German telegrams.
We could not believe Serbia had been sacrificed for nothing.
We were convinced it was some deep-laid scheme for weakening other fronts,
and so it was natural to believe rumors, such as that the English had taken Belgium, and the French were in Mets.
the end of the five months of service in captivity and to captive serbs ended on the eleventh february nineteen sixteen they were sent north under an austrian guard with fixed bayonets thus to vienna and so by slow stages they came to zurich
it was a great thing to be once more home and to realize how strong and straight and fearless a people inhabit these islands to realize not so much that they mean to win the world to realize not so much that they mean to win the world
war, but rather that they consider any other issue impossible.
So Dr. Ingalls came back to plan new campaigns for the help of the Serbian people who lay
night and day upon her heart. She knew she had the backing of the suffrage societies, and she
intended to get the ear of the English public for the cause of the Allies in the Balkans.
We, who had sent her out, found her changed in many ways. Physically she had altered much,
and if we could ever have thought of the body in the presence of that dauntless spirit,
we might have seen that the Angel of Shadows was not far away.
The privations and suffering she described so well
when she had to speak of her beloved Serbs had been fully shared by the unit.
Their comfort was always her thought.
She never would have anything that could not be shared and shared alike,
but there was little bit hardship to share,
and one and all scorned to speak of privation,
which were a light affliction compared to those of a whole nation groaning and waiting to be redeemed from its great tribulation.
There was a look in her face of one whose spirit had been pierced by the sword.
The brightness of her eyes was dimmed, for she had seen the day when his judgments were abroad upon the earth.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loosed the fatal lightning of his terrible swift sword.
I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps.
They have built him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
She could never forget the tragedy of Serbia,
and she came home not to rest,
but vowed to yet greater endeavors for their welfare.
the attitude of the allies she did not pretend to understand. She had something of the spirit of
Oliver Cromwell when he threatened to send his fleet across the Alps to help the Waldensians.
In her public speeches, when she set forth what in her outlook could have been done,
no censor could cut out the sentences which were touched by the live coals from off her altar
of service. Dr. Elsie never recognized the word impossible for herself.
and for her work that was well. As to her political and military outlook, the story of the nations
will find it a place in the history of the war. For a few months, she worked from the bases of her two
loyal committees in London and Edinburgh. She spoke at many a public meeting and filled many a
drawing room. The Church of Scotland knew her presence in London. One of our most treasured memories
will be that keen, clever face of hers in St. Columbas of a Sunday,
with the far wistful melancholy in it, added to its firm determination.
So writes the minister.
We knew what lay behind the wistful brave eyes,
a yet more complete dedication to the service of her Serbian brethren.
End of Section 14.
Section 15 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
This Lieber Fox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 10, Russia, 1917, Part 1. Even so in our mortal journey, the bitter north winds blow,
and thus, upon life's red river, our hearts as oarsmen row, and when the angel of shadow rests his
feet on wave and shore, and our eyes grow dim with watching, and our hearts faint at the oar,
happy is he who heareth the signal of his release, in the bells of the, bells of the
Holy City, the Chimes of Eternal Peace. Dr. Engel's return to England was the signal for renewed efforts
on the part of the committees managing the SWH. This memoir has necessarily to follow the personality of the
leader, but it must never be forgotten that her strength and all her sinews of war lay in the
work of those who carried on at home week by week. Strong committees of women, ably organized and
thoroughly staffed, took over the burden of finance. A matter Dr. Ingalls, once amusingly said,
did not interest her. They found and selected the personnel on which success so much depended. They contracted
for and supervised the sending out of immense consignments of equipment and motor transport.
They dealt with the government department, and in loyal devotion smoothed every possible obstacle
out of the path of those flying squadrons, the units of the SWH.
It was inevitable the quick brain and tenacious energy of Dr. Ingalls,
far away from the base of her operations,
should at times have found it hard to understand
why the wheels occasionally seemed to drag,
and the new effort she desired to make
did not move at the pace which, to her eager spirit,
seemed possible.
Two enterprises filled her mind on her return in 19,
2016. One, by the help of the London Committee, she put through. This was the celebration of Kosovo
Day in Great Britain. The flag day of the Serbian Patriot King was, under her chairmanship, prepared for
in six weeks. Hundreds of lectures on the history of Serbia were arranged for and delivered throughout
the country, and no one failed to do her work, however remote they might think the prospect
of making the British people interested in a country and patriot so far from the ken of their
island isolation. Kosovo was a success, and through the rush of the work, Dr. Engels was planning
the last and most arduous of all the undertakings of the SWH, that of the unit which was to serve
with the Serbian volunteers on the Romanian-Russian Front. Dr. Engels knew from private sources
the lack of hospital arrangements in Mesopotamia,
and she, with the backing of the committees,
had approached the authorities for leave to take a fully equipped unit to Basra.
When the story of the Scottish Women's Hospital is written,
the correspondence between the War Office, the Foreign Office, and SWH,
will throw a tragic light on this lamentable episode,
and, read with the report of the committees,
it will prove how quick and foreseeing of trouble was her outbursts,
look. As soon as Dr. Engels brought her units back from Serbia, she again urged the war
office to send her out. Of her treatment by the war office, Mrs. Fawcett writes,
she was not only refused, but refused with contumly an insult. True to her instinct,
never to pause over a setback, she lost no time in pressing on her last enterprise for the
Serbians. Monsieur Cressin and the Englishwoman says,
She was already acquainted with one side of the Serbian problem, Serbia.
She was told that in Russia there was the best opportunity to learn about the second half,
the Serbs of Austria, the Yugoslavs.
In six weeks, Dr. Engel succeeded in raising a hospital unit and transport section,
staffed by 80 women heroes of the Scottish women's hospitals,
to start with her on a most adventurous undertaking,
via Archangel, through Russia, to Odessa,
and the Dobrugia. Dr. Engel succeeded also, most difficult of all, in getting permission from the
British authorities for the journey. Eyewitnesses, officers and soldiers tell everybody today how
those women descended practically straight from the railway carriages, after 40 days traveling,
beside the stretchers was wounded, and helped to dress the wounds of those who had had to defend the
center and also a wing of the retreating army. For 15 months she remained with those men,
whose role is not yet fully realized, but is certain to become one of the most wonderful and
characteristic facts of the conflagration of nations. The Edinburgh Committee had already
so many undertakings on behalf of the SWH that they gladly allowed the committee formed by the London
branch of the NUWSS to undertake the whole work of organizing this last
adventure for the Serbian army. It was as their commissioner that Dr. Engels and her unit sailed
the wintry Maine, and to them she sent the voluminous and brilliant reports of her work.
When the Russian Revolution imperiled the safety of the Serbian army on the Romanian front,
she sent home members of her unit charged with important verbal messages to her government.
Through the last anxious month, when communications were cut off, short messages,
unmistakably her own, came back to the London Committee, that they might order her to return.
She would come with the Serbian army, and not without them.
We at home had to rest on the assurances of the Foreign Office,
always alive to the care and encouragement of the SWH, that Dr. Engels and her unit were safe,
and that their return would be expedited at the safest hour.
In those assurances we learnt to rest, and the British government did not fail that
allied force, the Serbian army and the Scottish women serving them. The following letters were those
written to her family with notes from her graphic report to her committees. The clear style and
beautiful handwriting never changed even in those last days, when those who were with her knew that
nothing but the spirit kept the wasted body at its work. The Serbian division is superb,
we are proud to be attached to it. These were the last words.
in her last letter from Odessa in June 1917.
That pride of service runs through all the correspondence.
The spirit she inspired is noteworthy
in a book which covers the greater part of these 15 months
with the Scottish nurses in Romania by Yvonne Fitzroy.
In a daily diary, a searchlight is allowed to fall
on some of the experiences,
born with such high-hearted nonchalance
by the leader and her gallant disciples.
Miss Haverfield, who saw her work, writes,
It was perfectly incredible that one human being could do the work she accomplished.
Her record piece of work, perhaps, was Galatz Romania at the end of the retreat.
There were masses and masses of wounded, and she and her doctors and nurses performed operations and dressings for 58 hours out of 63.
Dr. Scott, of the armored cars, noted the time,
and when he told her how long she had been working, she simply said,
Well, it was all due to Mrs. Milne, the cook, who kept us supplied with hot soup.
She had been very tired for a long time.
Undoubtedly, the lack of food, the necessity of sleeping on the floor,
and nursing her patients all the time, told on her health.
In Russia, she was getting gradually more tired until she became ill.
When she was the least bit better, she was up again.
and all the time she attended to the business of the unit.
Just before getting home, she had a relapse,
and the last two or three days on board ship,
we know now, she was dying.
She made all the arrangements for the unit which she brought with her, however,
and interviewed every member of it.
To Miss Onslow, her transport officer, she said,
when she arrived at Newcastle,
I shall be up in London in a few days' time,
and we will talk the matter of a new unit over.
Miss Onslow turned away with tears in her eyes.
HM Transport, September 6, 1916.
Dearest Amy,
Here we are more than halfway through our voyage.
We got off eventually on Wednesday night
and lay all Thursday in the river.
You never in your life saw such a filthy boat
as this was when we came on board.
The captain had been taken off an American liner the day before.
The only officer who had been taken off.
had been on this boat before was the engineer officer. All the rest were new. The crew were drunk to a man,
and as the transport officer said, the only way to get this ship right is to get her out. So we got out.
I must say we got into shape very quickly. We cleaned up, and now we are painting. They won't know her
when she gets back. She is an Austrian Lloyd captured at the beginning of the war, and she has been trooping in the
Mediterranean since. She was up at Glasgow for this new start, but she struck the Glasgow Fair and could
therefore get nothing done, so she was brought down to the port we started from, as she was.
We are a wonderful people. The captain seems to be an awfully good man. He is Scotch and was on the
anchor line to Bombay. This is quite a tiny little boat. She has all our equipment, 14 of our cars.
For passengers, there are ourselves, 75 people, and three Serbian officers,
and the mother and sister of one of them, and 32 Serbian non-commissioned officers.
They are going to our division.
The cabins are most comfortable.
On the saloon deck, there are 22 very small, single cabins,
and on this deck larger cabins, with either three or four berths.
I am on this deck in the most luxurious quarters.
It is called the commanding officer's cabin.
Ahem.
There is a huge cabin with one berth.
Off it on one side, another cabin with a riding table and sofa,
and off it on the other side, a bathroom and dressing room.
Of course, if we had had rough weather and the ports it had to be closed,
it would not have been so nice,
especially as the glass in all the portholes is blackened.
But we have had perfectly glorious weather.
At night, every porthole and wreaths in our house,
window is closed to shut in the light, but the whole ship is very well ventilated. A good many of
them sleep up in the boats or in one of the lorries. We sighted one submarine, but it took no notice of us,
so we took no notice of it. We had all our boats allotted to us the very first day. We divided
the unit among them, putting one responsible person in charge of each, and had boat drill several
times. Then one day the captain sounded the alarm for practice, and everybody was at their station
in three minutes in Great Coat and Life Belt. The amusing thing was that some of them thought it was a
real alarm, and were most annoyed and disappointed to find there was not a submarine really there.
The unit as a whole seems to be very nice and capable, though there are one or two queer characters,
but most of them are healthy, wholesome bricks of girls.
I hope we shall get on all right.
Of course, a field hospital is quite a new bit of work.
We reach our point of disembarkation this afternoon.
The voyage has been a most pleasant one in every way.
As soon as seasickness was over,
the unit developed a tremendous amount of energy,
and we have had games on deck and concerts and sports
and a fancy dress competition.
All this in addition to drill every morning, which was compulsory.
We began the day at 8.30.
Breakfast.
The cabins were tidied.
9.30, roll call and cabin inspection immediately after.
Then drill.
Ordinary drill, stretcher drill, and Swedish drill in sections.
Lunch was at 12.30, and then there were lessons in Russian, Serbian, and French,
to which they could go if they liked.
And most of them took one or even two, and lectures on motor-dirt.
construction, etc. T at 4 and dinner 630. You would have thought there was not much time for anything else,
but the superfluous energy of a British unit manages to put a good deal more in. The head of a British
unit in Serbia once said to me that the chief duty of the head of a British unit was to use up
the superfluous energy of the unit in harmless ways. He said that the only time there was no superfluous
energy was when the unit was overworking. That was the time I found that particular unit playing
rounders. The sports were most amusing. I was standing next to a Serb officer during the obstacle race,
and he suddenly turned to me and said,
It's a total new for no, madame. I thought it must be, for at that moment they were getting under a
sail which had been tied down to the deck. Two of them hurled themselves on the sail and dived under
it. You saw four legs kicking wildly, and then the sail heaved and fell, and the two dishevelled
creatures emerged at the other side, and tore at two life-belts, which they went through, and so on.
I should think it was indeed, Tour de Fe Nouveau. Some of the dresses at the fancy dress competition
were most clever. There was Napoleon. The last phase, in the captain's long coat and
somebody's epaulettes and one of our grey hats side to the front, excellent, and tweedledum
and tweedled knee in sauce pans and life belts. One of them got herself up as a greaser and went down
to the engine room to get properly dirty, with such successful result that when she was coming up
to the saloon with her little oiling can in her hand, one of the officers stopped her with,
now where are you going to, my lad? We ended up with all the Allied National Amher,
anthems, the Serbs leading their own. I do love to see them enjoying themselves and to hear them
chattering and laughing along the passages, for they'll have plenty of hard work later.
We had service on Sunday, which I took, as the captain could not come down. Could you get us
some copies of the Archbishop of Canterbury's war prayers? We have just had our photograph taken.
The captain declares he was snapshoted six times one morning. I don't know if the Russian government
will let us take all these cameras with us. We are flying the Union Jack for the first time
today since we came out. It is good to know you are all thinking of us, ever your loving sister,
Elsie Maude Ingalls. On the train to Moscow, September 14, 1916, Dearest Amy, here we are,
well on our way to Moscow, having got through Archangel in two and a half days, a feat, for we were
told at home that it might be six weeks. They did not know that there is a party of our naval men there
helping the Russians, and Archangel is magnificently organized now. When one realizes that the population was
5,000 before the war, and is now 20,000, it is quite clear there was bound to be some disorganization at
first. I never met a kinder set of people than are collected at Archangel just now. They simply did
everything for us and sent us off in a train with a birth for each person and gave us a wonderful
send-off. The Russian Admiral gave us a letter which acts as a kind of magic ring wherever it is
produced. The first time it was really quite startling. We were longing for Naimdonia, where we were to get
dinner. We were told we should be there at four o'clock, then at five, and at six o'clock we pulled up at a place
unknown, and rumors began to spread that our engine was off, and sure enough it was, and was
shunting trucks. Miss Little, one of our Russian-speaking people, and I got out. We tried our united
eloquence, she and fluent Russian, and I saying, chichaz, which means immediately at intervals,
and still they looked helpless and said, two hours and a half. Then I produced my letter, and you never
saw such a change. They said, five minutes, and we were off in three. We tried it all along the line
after that. My own belief is that we should still be at the unknown place, without the letter, shunting
trucks. At one station, Miss Little heard the stationmaster saying, there is a great row going on here,
and there will be trouble tomorrow if this train isn't got through. Eventually, we reached Nyamdonia at 1130,
and found a delightful Russian officer and an excellent dinner paid for by the Russian government waiting for us.
We all thought the food was very good, and I thought the sauce of hunger helped.
The next day, profiting over our Naimdonia experience, I said meals were to be had at regular times from our stores in the train,
and we should take the restaurants as we found them, with the result that we arrived at Vorega,
where Dijunet had been ordered just as we finished a solid lunch,
of ham and eggs. I said they had better go out and have two more courses, which they did with
great content, and found it quite as nice as the night before. This is a special train for us and
the Serbian officers and non-coms. We broke a coupling after we left Naimdonia, and they sent out
another carriage from there, but it had not top berths, so they had another sleeper ready when we
reached Vologda. They gave us another and stronger engine at Naimdonia, because we had not a lot of
because we asked for it, and have repaired cisterns and given us chicken and eggs, and when we thank
them, they say, it is for our friends. The crowd stand round three deep while we eat and watch us all
the time quite silently in the stations. In Archangel, one old man asked, who on God's earth are
you? They gave us such a send-off from Archangel. Russian soldiers were drawn up between the ship and the
train and cheered us the whole way, with a regular British cheer. Our own crew turned out with a drum
and a fife and various other instruments, and marched about singing. Then they made speeches and
cheered everybody, and then, suddenly, the Russian soldiers seized the Serbian officers and tossed
them up and down, up and down, till they were stopped by a whistle. But they had got into the mood by
then, and they rushed at me. You can imagine I fled and seized hold of the British Council.
I did think the British Empire would stand by me, but he would do nothing but laugh. And I found
myself up in the air above the crowd, up and down, quite safe, hand under one and round one.
They were so happy that I waved my hand to them, and they shouted and cheered. The unit is only
annoyed that they had not their cameras, and that anyhow it was dark.
Then they tossed Captain Bevan, who was in command there, because he was English, and the
council for the same reason, and the captain of the transport because he had brought us out.
We sang all the national anthems, and then they danced for us. It was a weird sight in the moonlight.
Some of the dances were like Indian ones, and some reminded me of our Highland flings.
We went on till one in the morning, all the British colony there. I confess I was,
tired, though I did enjoy it. Captain Bevan's goodbye was the nicest and so unexpected.
Simply, God bless you. Mrs. Young, the council's wife, Mrs. Carr, both Russians, simply gave up
their whole time to us, took the girls about, and Mrs. Carr had the whole unit to tea.
I had lunch one day at the British mess and another day at the Russian admirals. They all came
out to dinner with us. Of course, a new face means a lot in an out-of-the-way place, and 75 new faces
was a godsend. Well, as I said before, they are the kindest set of people I ever came across.
They brought us our bread and changed our money, and arranged with the bank, and got us this train
with births, and thought of every single thing for us. Neary Nodessa, September 21, 1916.
We are nearing the second stage of our journey, and they say we shall be in Odessa tonight.
We have all come to the conclusion that a Russian minute is about ten times as long as ours.
If we get in tonight, we shall have taken nine days from Archangel, with all the lines blocked with military trains, that is not bad.
All the same, we have had some struggles, but it has been a very comfortable journey and very pleasant.
The Russian officials all along the line have been most helpful and kind. A Serbian officer on board,
or rather a Montenegrin, looked after us like a father. What we should have done without Monsieur and Madame
Malinina at Moscow, I don't know. They gave the whole afternoon up to us, took us to the Kremlin,
he, the whole unit on special tram cars, and she, three of us in her motor. They are both very busy people.
a beautiful hospital, a clearing one at the station, and he is a member of the Duma and commandant
of all the red crosswork in Moscow. We only had a glimpse of the Kremlin, yet enough to make one
want to see more. I carried away one beautiful picture to remember, the view of Moscow and the
sunset light, simply gorgeous. The unit are very, very well and exceedingly cheerful. I am not
sorry to have had these three weeks since we left to get the unit in hand. They are in splendid
order now. When Monsieur Malinina said it was time to leave the Kremlin and the order was given to fall
in, I was quite proud of them. They did it so quickly. It is wonderful even now what they managed to do.
Miss H says they are like eels in a basket. They were told not to eat fruit without peeling it,
so one of them peeled an apple with her teeth. They were told not to drink
unboiled water, so they handed their water bottles out at dead of night to Russian soldiers,
to whom they could not explain to fill for them, as of course they understood they were not to fill
them from water on the train. I must say they were an awfully nice lot on the whole. We certainly
shall not fail for want of energy. The Russian crowds are tremendously interested in them.
Ever, your loving aunt, Elsie.
Rennie, September 29th.
1916. Dearest Amy, we have left Odessa and are really off to our division. We are going to the
first division. General Hadditch is in command there. We are told this is the important point in the war
just now, a second Verdun. The great General McKensen is in command against us. He was in command
at Krushnyovats when we were taken prisoners. Everyone says how anxiously they are looking out for us,
and, indeed, we shall have our work cut out for us.
We are two little field hospitals for a whole division.
Think if that was the provision for our own men.
They are such a magnificent body of men.
We saw the second division preparing in Odessa.
Only from the point of view of the war they ought to be looked after,
but when one remembers that they are men,
every one of them with somebody who cares for them,
it is dreadful.
I wish we were each six women instead of one.
I have wired home for another base hospital to take the place of the British Red Cross units
when they move on with the second division.
The Russians are splendid in taking the Serbs into their base hospitals,
but you can imagine what the pressure is from their own huge armies.
We had such a reception at Odessa.
All the Russian officials, at the station, and our council,
and a line drawn up of 20 Serbian officers.
They had a motor car and 40 droskies and a squad of Serbian soldiers
to carry up our personal luggage
and most delightful quarters for us on the outskirts of the town in a sanatorium.
We were the guests of the city while we were there.
Our council was so good and helpful.
Odessa is immensely interested in us.
We were told that the form of greeting while we were there was,
Have you seen them?
The two best things were the evening at the Serbian mess
and the gala performance at the opera.
The cheering of the Serbian mess when we went in
was something to remember.
But I can tell you I felt quite choking
when the whole house last night turned round and cheered us
after we tried to sing our national anthem to them with the orchestra.
Reney October 28, 1916.
Dearest Amy.
Just a line to say I am all.
right. Four weeks tomorrow since we reached Magidia and began our hospital. We evacuated it in three weeks,
and here we are all back on the frontier. Such a time it has been, Amy dear, you cannot imagine what
war is just behind the lines, and in a retreat, our second retreat and almost to the same day. We evacuated
Kraguyovats on the 25th of October last year. We evacuated Magidia on the 22nd this year. We evacuated Magidia on the 22nd
this year. On the 25th this year, we were working in a Russian dressing station at Harshova and were
moved on in the evening. We arrived at Briaila to find 11,000 wounded and seven doctors, only one of them a
surgeon. Boat came, must stop. I'm going back to Briaela to do surgery. Have sent every trained
person there. Your loving sister, Elsie. P.S. We have had lots of exciting things, too,
and amusing things and good things.
On the Danube at Tulsiah, November 1116.
Dearest Amy, I am riding this on the boat between Tulsiah and Ismail,
where I am going to see our second hospital and transport.
Admiral Vilsolskine has given me a special boat,
and we motored over from Braila.
The Aetapan command has been expecting us all afternoon,
and the boat was ready.
They were very amused to find that the doctor they had,
had been expecting was a woman. Our main hospital was at Magidia and our field hospital at Bobimik,
only about seven miles from the front. They gave us a very nice building, a barrack and Magidia for the
hospital, and the personnel were intense on the opposite hill. We arrived the day of the offensive
and were ready for patients within 48 hours. We were there less than three weeks, and during
that time we unpacked the equipment and repacked it. We made really,
a rather nice hospital at Magidia and the field hospital. We pitched and struck the camp. We were
nursing and operating the whole time and evacuating rapidly too, and our cars were on the road
practically always. The first notice we got of the retreat was our field hospital being brought back
five versts, then the transport. Then we were told to send the equipment to Galatz, but to keep
essential things in the personnel. Then came orders to go ourselves. I never saw such a retreat.
Serbia was nothing to it. The whole country was covered with groups of soldiers who had lost their
regiments, Russians, Serbs, and Romanians. The Romanian guns were simply being rushed back through the
crowds of refugees. The whole country was moving. In some places the panic was awful. One part of our
scattered unit came in for it. You would have thought the bulgars were at the heels of the people.
One man threw a baby right in front of the cars. They were throwing everything off the carts to
lighten them, and our people, being of a calmer disposition, picked up what they wanted in the way of
vegetables, etc. Men, with their rifles and bayonets, climbed on to the Red Cross cars to save a few
minutes. We simply went head over heels out of the country. I want to collect all the different
stories of our groups. My special lot slept the first night on straw and Karamakot. The next night on
the roadside round a lovely fire, the next, much reduced in numbers, for I had cleared the majority
off in barges for Galats. We slept in an empty room at Hersheva, and spent the next day dressing at the
wharf. And by the next night, we were,
were in Braila, involved in the avalanche of wounded that descended on that place, and there we have
been ever since. We found some of our transport, and while we were having tea, an officer came in and
asked us to go round and help in a hospital. There, we were told, there were 11,000 wounded.
I believe the official figures are 7,000. They had been working 36 hours without stopping when we
arrived. The wounded had overflowed into empty houses and were lying about in their uniforms and their wounds
not dressed for four or five days. You can imagine the conditions. So we just turned up our sleeves and went
in. I got back all the trained sisters from Galatz and now the pressure is over. One thing I am going up to
Ismail for is to get into touch with the Serbian H-2 and find out what they want us to do next.
The Serb wounded were evacuated straight to Odessa.
The unit as a whole has behaved splendidly,
plucky and cheery through everything
and game for any amount of work.
And we are prouder of our Serbs than ever.
I do hope the papers at home have realized
what the First Division did
and how they suffered in the fight
in the middle of September.
General Genlikovsky said to me,
"'Ceté magnifice, magnificent,
and another russian we did not quite believe in these austrian serbs but no one will ever doubt them again personally i have been awfully well and prouder than ever of british women
i wish you could have seen trained sisters scrubbing floors at magidia and those strapping transport girls lifting the stretchers out of the ambulances so steadily and gently
I have told in the report how Miss Boroughman and Miss Brown brought the equipment through to Galatz.
We lost only one Ludgate boiler in one box of radiators.
We lost two cars, but that was really the fault of a rather stupid Serbian officer.
It is a comfort to feel you are all thinking of us, your loving sister, E.I.
In an ambulance train between Rennie and Odessa, January 24, 1917,
Eve. Now we have got a hospital at Reni again, for badly wounded, working in connection with the
evacuation station. We have got the dearest little house to live in ourselves, but as we are getting
far more people out from Odessa, we shall have to overflow into the expedition houses. Reni itself
is quite a small village. I remember thinking Reni a most uninteresting place. Crowds of shipping
and the wharf all crammed with sacks. It was just a big junction like crew.
The hospital at Reney is a real building, but it is not finished. One unfinished bit is the windows,
which have one layer of glass each, though they have double sashes. When this was pointed out,
I thought it was a mere continental foible. When the cold came, I realized that there is some sense
in this foible after all. We cannot get the wards warm.
notwithstanding extra stoves and roaring fires.
The poor Russians do mind cold so much,
but they don't want to leave the hospital.
One man, whom I told he must have an operation later on in another hospital,
said he would rather wait for it in ours.
The first time we had to evacuate,
we simply could not get the men to go.
Nice, isn't it?
We have got a Russian secretary now,
because we are using Russian Red Cross money,
and he told us he had been told in Petrograd
that the S.W.H. were beautifully organized,
and the only drawback was the language.
Quite true. I wish we were polyglots.
We have got a certain number of Austrian prisoners as orderlies,
and most of them, curiously, can speak Russian,
so we get on better.
Did you know I could speak German?
I did not until I had to.
This is a most comfortable way of traveling and the quickest. We have 500 wounded on board,
23 of them ours. I am going to Odessa to find out why we cannot get Serb patients.
There are still thousands of them in Odessa, and yet Dr. Chesney gets nothing but Russians.
The Serbs we meet seem to think it is somehow our fault. I tell them I have written and
telegraphed and planned and made two journeys to Ismail to try and get a real Serbian hospital going,
and yet it doesn't go. What did happen over the change of government? I do hope we have got the
right lot now to put things straight at home and carry through things abroad. Remember, it all
depends on you people at home. The whole thing depends on us. I know we lose perspective in this gloomy
corner, but there is one thing quite clear, and that is that they are all trusting to our
sticking powers. They know we'll hold on, of course. I only wish we would realize that it would
be as well to use our intellects, too, and have them clear of alcohol.
End of Section 15. Section 16 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour. The Sleeper-Vox
recording is in the public domain. Chapter 10, Russia, Part 2.
in an ambulance train near Odessa, January 25, 1917.
You don't know what a comfort it is on this tumultuous front
to know that all you people at home have just settled down to it
and that you'll put things right in the long run.
It is curious to feel how everybody is trusting to that.
The day we left Braila, a Romanian said to me in the hall,
it is England we are trusting to.
She has got hold now like a strong dog.
But it is a bigger job than any of you imagine, I think.
But there is not the slightest doubt we shall pull it off.
I am glad to think the country has discovered that it is possible to have an alternative government.
If it does not do, we must find yet another.
To her little niece Amy McLaren, on an ambulance train near Odessa, January 25, 1917.
Darling Amy, how are you all?
We have been very busy since we came out.
here. First, a hospital for the Serbs at Magidia, then in a Romanian hospital at Braila,
and then for the Russians at Galatz and Rene. In the very middle, by some funny mistake, we were
sent flying right on to the front line. However, we nipped out again just in time, and the station
was burnt to the ground just half an hour after we left. I'll tell you the name of the place
when the war is over and show it to you on the map. We saw the petrol tanks on fire as we came
away, and the ricks of grain, too.
Our hospital at Galatz was in a school.
I don't think the children in these parts are doing many lessons during the war,
and that will be a great handicap for their countries afterwards.
Perhaps, however, they are learning other lessons.
When we left the Dobrudya, we saw the crowds of refugees on their carts,
with the things they had been able to save, and all the little children packed in
among the furniture and pots and pans and pigs.
In one cart I saw two fascinating babies about three years old, sitting in a kind of little nest made of pillows and rugs.
They were little girls, one fair and one dark, and they sat there as good as gold, watching everything with such interest.
There were streams of carts along the roads, and all the villages deserted.
That is what the war means out here.
It is not quite so bad in our safe Scotland, is it, thanks to the fleet.
and that is why it seems to me we have got to help these people because they are having the worst of it i wonder if you can knit socks yet for i can use any number and bandages do you know how to roll bandages
blessings on you precious little girl your loving aunt elsie i have had my meals with the staff unfortunately most of them speak only russian but one man speaks french and another german one of the sisters one of the sisters
speaks English. The man who speaks German is having English lessons from her. His despair over the
pronunciation is comic. He picked up punch and showed me, you, so I said, you. He repeated it quite
nicely, then found another oh you, though. And when I said though, he flung up his hands and said,
why a practical nation like the English should do things like this.
Reney March 5th, 1917. Darling Mary, we have been having such icy weather here, such snowstorms
sweeping across the plain. You should see the snow drifts. One day I really thought the house would
be cut off from the hospital. The unit going over to Roll was quite a sight with the India rubber
boots and peaked Russian caps with the ends twisted round their throats. We should have thoroughly
enjoyed it if it had not been for the shortage of fuel. However, we were never absolutely without wood,
and now have plenty, as a Cossack regiment sent a squad of men across the Danube to cut for us,
and we brought it back in our carts. The Danube is frozen right across, such a curious sight.
The first time in seven years, they say. So nice of it to do it just when we are here.
I would not have missed it for anything. The hospital has only had about 40 patients,
for some time, as there has been no fighting, and it was just as well when we were so short of wood.
We collected them all into one ward and let the other fires out.
The chief of the medical department held an inspection. That was an inspection.
The old gentleman poked into every corner, took off the men's shirts and looked for lice,
turned up the sheets, and beat the mattresses to look for dust, tasted the men's food,
and in the end stated we were Ochin Cheste.
very clean, and that the patients were well cared for medically and well nursed, all of which was
very satisfactory, but he added that the conditions of the orderlies was disgraceful, and so it was.
I hadn't realized they were my job. However, I told him next time he came he should not find one
single louse. He was very amused and pleased. Dr. Laird and I have a nice snug little room together.
That is one blessing here. We have plenty of sun. Very soon it will begin to get quite hot.
I woke up on the 1st of March and thought of getting home last year that day, and two days
after, waking up in Eve's dear little room with the roses on the roof.
Bless all you, dear people, ever your loving aunt, Elsie.
March 23, 1917. We have been awfully excited and interested in the news from Petrogram.
We heard of it probably long after you people at home knew all about it.
It is most interesting to see how everybody is on the side of the change,
from Russian officers who come to tea and beam at us and say,
Herrichot, good, to the men in the wards.
In any case, they say we shall find the difference all over the war area.
One Russian officer, who was here before the news came,
was talking about the revolution in England 200 years ago,
and said it was the most interesting period of European history.
They say all these ideas began with the French Revolution,
but they didn't.
They began long before in England, he thought.
He spoke English beautifully, and had had an English nurse.
He had read Milton's political pamphlets,
and we wondered all the time whether he was thinking of changes in Russia after the war.
But now I wonder if he knew the changes were coming sooner.
Do you know we have all of the changes.
been given the St. George Medal? Prince Delgurikov, who is in command on this front,
arrived quite unexpectedly just after roll call. The telegram saying he was coming arrived a quarter
of an hour after he left. General Cropensky, the head of the Red Cross, rushed up, and the prince
arrived about two minutes after him. He went all over the hospital, and a member of his gilded staff
told Matron he was very pleased with everything. He decorated two months. He decorated two
men in the wards with St. George's Medal, and then said he wanted to see us together,
and shook hands with everybody and said, thank you, and gave each of us a medal, too.
Dr. Laird's was for service, as she had not been under fire.
St. George's Medal is a silver one with four bravery on its back.
Our patients were awfully pleased and impressed on us that it carried with it a pension of
a ruble a month for life. We gave them all cigarettes to commemorate the occasion.
It was rather satisfactory to see how the hospital looked in its ordinary, and even I was fairly satisfied.
I tell the unit that they must remember they have an old maid as commandant and must live up to it.
I cannot stand dirt in crooked charts and crumpled sheets.
One sister, I hear, put it delightfully in a letter home.
Our CMO is an idealist.
I thought that was rather sweet.
I believe she added, but she does,
appreciate good work. Certainly, I appreciate hers. She is in charge of the room for dressings,
and it is one of the thoroughly satisfactory points in the hospital. The Greek priest came yesterday
to bless the hospital. We put up icons in each of the four wards. The Russians are a very
religious people, and it seems to appeal to some mystic sense in them. The priest just put on
a stole, green and gold, and came in in his long gray cloak.
The two wards open out of one another, so he held the service in one, the men saying all the responses and crossing themselves.
The four icons lay on the table before him, with three lighted candles at the inner corners,
and he blessed water and sprinkled them, and then he sprinkled everybody in the room.
The icons were fixed up in the corner of the wards, and I bought little lamps to burn in front of them,
as they always have them.
We are going to have the evening hymn sung every evening at six o'clock.
I heard that first in Serbia from those poor Russian prisoners, who sang it regularly every evening.
The mud has been literally awful. The night nurses come up from the village literally wet through,
having dragged one another out of mud holes all the way. Now a cart goes down to fetch them each
evening. We have 20 horses and nine carts belonging to us. I have made Vera home master of the horse.
I have heard two delightful stories from the sisters who have returned from Odessa.
There is a great rivalry between the Armored Carman and the British Red Cross men
about the capabilities of their sisters.
We, it appears, are the Armored Car Sisters.
A BRC man said their sisters were so smart,
they got a man onto the operating table five minutes after the other one went off.
Said an Armored Carman,
but that's nothing.
The Scottish sisters get the second one on before the first one is off.
The other story runs that there was some idea of the men waiting all night on a key,
and the men said,
But you don't think we are Scottish sisters, sir, do you?
I have no doubt that refers to Galatz, where we made them work all night.
Reney Easter Day, 1917.
We, all the patients, sick and wounded, belonging to the Army and Navy,
and coming from different parts of the great free Russia who are present in your hospital
are filled with feelings of the truest respect for you. We think at our duty as citizens on this
beautiful day of Holy Easter to express to you highly respected and much-beloved doctor,
as well as to your whole unit, our best thanks for all the care and attention you have bestowed upon
us. We bow low and very respectfully before the constant and useful work which we have
seen daily, and which we know to be for the well-being of our allied countries. We are quite sure that,
thanks to the complete unity of action of all of the allied countries, the hour of gladness,
and the triumph of the Allied arms and the cause of humanity and the honor of nations is near.
Vive Lengelterre. Russian soldiers, citizens, and the Russian sister, Vera V. de Kolesnikov.
Reney, March 2nd, 1917. Darling Eve. Very many thanks for the war prayers. They are a great help on Sundays.
The Archbishop's prayers that I wanted are the original ones at the beginning of the war.
Just at present we are very lucky as regards the singing, as there are three or four capital voices in the unit.
We have service at 1.30 on Sunday. That lets all the morning work be finished.
I do wonder what has become of Miss Henderson in the new orderlies and the equipment.
We want them all so badly, not to speak of my cool uniform.
That will be needed very soon, I think.
It is so delicious to feel warm again.
We are having glorious weather, so sunny and warm.
All the snow has gone, and the mud is appalling.
I thought I knew the worst mud could do in Serbia, but it was nothing to this.
We have made little tiled paths all about our domain, and keep comparatively clean there.
I wish we could take over the lot of buildings.
The other day I thought I had made a great score and bought 2,000 pound of wood at a very small price.
It was 35 versts out.
We got the Cossacks to lend us transport, but the transport stuck in the mud,
and came back the next day, having had to haul the empty carts out of mud holes
by harnessing four horses first to one cart and then to another.
It was no wonder I got the wood so cheap.
One of our great difficulties has been fuel.
April 18, 1918.
I am writing this sitting out in my little tent
with a glorious view over the Danube.
We have pitched some of the tents to relieve the crowding in the house.
They are no longer beautiful and white as they were at Magidia.
We have had to stain them a dirty gray color.
so as to hide them from airplanes.
Yesterday we had an awful gale and a downpour of rain,
and the tent stood splendidly,
and not a drop of water came through.
Miss Plyster and the Austrian orderly
who helped her to pitch them are triumphant.
Do get our spy incident from the office.
My dear, they thought we were spies.
We had an awful two days,
but it is quite a joke to look back on.
The unit was most thoroughly and Britishly angry,
quite rightly but i very soon saw the other side and managed to get them in hand once more general corpenski our chief was a perfect brick the armored car section sent a special dispatch rider over to galatz to fetch him and he came off at once he talks perfect english and he has since written me a charming letter saying our sang foi and our savour fair saved the situation i am afraid there was not much sang foi among us but some of us manage to say that
to keep hold of our common sense. As I told the girls, in common fairness they must look at the
other side, spy fever raging, a foreign hospital right on the front, and a revolution in progress.
I told them, even if they did not care about Russia, I suppose they cared about the war in England,
and I wondered what effect it would have on all these Russian soldiers if we went away with the
thing not cleared up, and still under suspicion. After all, the ordinary,
Russian soldier knows nothing about England, except in the very concrete form of us. We should have played
right into the devil's hands if we had gone away. Of course, they saw it at once, and we stuck to our
guns for England's sake. The Sixth Army, I think, understands that England, as represented by this
small unit, is keen on the war and does not spy. We have had a telegram from the general in command
apologizing, and our patients have been perfectly angelic. And the men from all regiments round come up to
the outpatients department, and are most grateful and punctiliously polite. So, all is well that ends well.
We had a very interesting Easter. You know, the Russian greeting on Easter morning, Christ is risen,
and the answer, he has risen indeed. We learnt them both and made our greetings in Russian fashion.
On Easter Eve we went to the church in the village. The service is at midnight. The church was crowded
with soldiers, very few women there. They were most reverent and absorbed outside in the courtyards.
It was a very curious scene, little groups of people with lighted candles waiting to get in.
Here we had a very nice Easter service. My choir had three lovely Easter hymns, and we even sang the
Magnificat. One of the armored carmen on his way from Galatz to Belgrade stayed for the service,
and it was nice to have a man's voice in the singing. We gave our patients Easter eggs and cigarettes.
Except that we are very idle, we are very happy here. Our patients are delightful, the hospital
in good order. The step is a fascinating place to wander over, the little valleys and the villages
hidden away in them, and the flowers.
We have been riding our transport horses, rather rough but quite nice and gentle.
We all ride astride, of course.
On active service to Mrs. Flinders Petri, Honorary Secretary Scottish Women's Hospitals,
Reney May 8, 1917.
Dear Mrs. Petri, how perfectly splendid about the Egyptologists!
Miss Henderson brought me your message saying how splendidly they are subscribing.
that is, of course, all due to you, you wonderful woman.
It was such a tantalizing thing to hear that you had actually thought of coming out as an administrator,
and that you found you could not.
I cannot tell you how splendid it would have been if you could have come.
I want a woman of the world, and I want an adaptable person,
who will talk to the innumerable officers who swarm about this place,
and ride with the girls and manage the officials.
I do wish you could see our hospital now. It really is quite nice.
Such a nice story. Maitren was in Reni the other day, seeing the commandant of the town about
some things for the hospital, and when she came out, she found a crowd of Russian soldiers
standing round her house. They asked her if she had got what she wanted, and she said
the commandant was going to see about it, whereupon the men said, the commandant must be told
that the Scottish hospital,
Shat-Lunsched Bonizza,
is the best hospital on this front
and must have whatever it wants.
That is the opinion of the Russian soldier.
Do you recognize the echo
of the big reverberation
that has shaken Russia?
We get on awfully well
with the Russian soldier.
Two of our patients were overheard
talking the other day,
and they said,
the Russian sisters are pretty,
but not good,
and the English sisters are good and not pretty.
the story was brought up to the mess-room by quite a nice-looking girl who had overheard it but we thought we'd let the judgment stand and be like kingsley's maid though we don't undertake to endorse the russian part of it
we have got some of the personnel tents pitched now and it is delightful it was rather close quarters in the little house i am riding in my tent now looking out over the danube such a lovely place rennie is and the step is fascinating with its wide plain
and little unexpected valleys full of flowers.
We have some glorious rides over it.
The other night our camp was the center of a fight,
only a sham one.
They are drilling recruits here,
and suddenly the other night we found ourselves being defended by one party
while the other attacked from the step.
The battle raged all night,
and the camp was finally carried at four o'clock in the morning,
amid shouts and cheers and barking of dogs.
It was even too much for,
for me, and I have slept through bombardments.
It has been so nice hearing about you all from Miss Henderson.
How splendidly the money is coming in.
Only one thing, dear Mrs. Petrie, do make them send the reliefs more quickly.
I know all about boats, but as you knew the orderlies had to leave on the 15th of January,
the reliefs ought to have been off by the first.
I wish you could hear the men singing their evening hymn in hospital.
They have just sung it.
I am so glad we thought of putting up the icons for them.
Goodbye for the present, dear Mrs. Petrie.
My kindest regards to Professor Flinders Petrie.
Ever yours, affectionately, Elsie Maude Ingalls.
May 11, 1917.
It was delightful seeing Miss Henderson and getting news of all you dear people.
She took two months over the journey,
but she did arrive with all her equipment.
The equipment I wired for in October, and which was sent out by itself, arrived in Petrograd,
got through to Jassy, and has there stuck. We have not got a single thing, and the councils have done
their best. Mr. French, one of the chaplains in Petrograd, came here. He said he would have some
services here. We pitched a tent, and we had the communion. It was a joy. I have sent down a notice
to the armored car yacht, and I hope some of the men.
will come up. We and they are the only English people here. The Serbs have sent me a message saying
we may have to rejoin our division soon. I don't put too much weight on this, because I know my dearly
beloved Serbs and their habit of saying the thing they think you would like, but still we are preparing.
I shall be very sorry to leave our dear little hospital here and the Russians. They are a fascinating
people, especially the common soldier. I hope that as we have done this work for the Russians,
and therefore have some little claim on them, it will help us to get things more easily for the Serbs.
We have one little ladian about ten years old, the most amusing brat. He was wounded by an airplane
bomb in a village seven-versed out, and was sent into Reni to a hospital. But when he got there,
he found the hospital was for the sick only, a very inferior place. So he proceeded on to us.
He wanders about with a Russian soldier's cap on his head and wrapped round with a blanket,
and we hear his pretty little voice singing to himself all over the place.
Nikolai, the man who came in when the hospital was first opened and has been so very ill,
is really getting better. He had his dressing left for two days for the first time the other day,
and his excitement and joy were quite pathetic.
Ochin Hiroshua, Dr. Ocho, Ochin Hirosho.
Very good, dear doctor, very good, he kept saying.
And then he added,
Now I know I am not going to die.
Poor boy, he has nearly died several times,
and would have died if he had not had English sisters to nurse him.
He has been awfully naughty, the wretch.
He bit one of the sisters one day when she tried to give him his medicine.
Now he kisses my hand to make up.
The other day I ordered massage for his leg, and he made the most awful row, howled and whined, and declared it would hurt.
Really, he has had enough pain to destroy anybody's nerve, and then suddenly pointed to a sister who had come in and said,
what she had done for him was the right thing. I asked what she had done for him.
Massaged his leg, she said. I got that promptly translated into ruffer,
and the whole room roared with laughter. Poor Nikolai. After a minute he joined in. His home is in Serbia,
a very nice home with a beautiful garden. His mother is evidently the important person there.
His father is a smith, and he had meant to be a smith too. But now he has got the St. George's
cross, which carries with it a pension of six roubles a month, and he does not think he will do any work at all.
He is the eldest of the family, 24 years old, and has three sisters and a little brother of five.
Can't you imagine how he was spoiled, and how proud they are of him now?
Only 24, and is sous officier, and has been awarded the St. George's Cross, which is better than the medal,
and has been wounded four months in hospital and had three operations.
He has been so ill, I am afraid the spoiling continued in the Scottish Women's Hospital.
little. Dr. Laird says she would not be his future wife for anything. We admitted such a nice
looking boy today, with thick, curly yellow hair, which I had ruthlessly cropped against his
strong opposition. I doubt if I should have had the heart if I had known how ill he was. He will
need a very serious operation. I found him this evening with tears running silently over his
cheeks, a Cossack, a great big man. His nerve is quite gone. He may have to go on to Odessa as a severe
operation and bombs and a nervous breakdown don't go together. We will see how he settles down.
We have made friends with lots of the officers. There is one, also a Cossack, who spends a great part of
his time here. His regiment is at the front, and he has been left for some special work, and he seems
rather lonely. He is a nice boy and brings nice horses for us to ride. We have been having quite a lot
of riding on our own transport horses, too. It is heavenly riding here across the Great Plain.
We all ride astride, and at first we found the Cossack's saddles most awfully uncomfortable,
but now we are quite used to them. Our days fly past here, and in a sense are monotonous,
but I don't think we are any of us the worse for a little monotony as an interlude.
alas quite fairly often there is a party at one of the regiments here the girls enjoy them and matron and i chaperone them alternately and reluctantly it was quite a rest during lent when there were no parties
the spy incident has quite ended and we have won matron was in rennie the other day asking the commandant about something and when she came out she found a little crowd of russian soldiers round her house they asked her if she had got what she wanted
and she said the commandant had said he would see about it. They answered,
The commandant must be told that the S.W.H is the best hospital on this front,
and that it must have everything it wants. That is the opinion of the Russian soldier.
If you were here, you would recognize the new tone of the Russian soldier in these days,
but I am glad he approves of our hospital.
Odessa, June 24, 1917. I wish you could realize how the little name
nations, Serbs and Romanians and Poles, count on us. What a comfort it is to them to think we are the
most tenacious nation in Europe. In their eyes, it all hangs on us. It is all terrible and awful.
I don't believe we can disentangle it all in our minds just now. The only thing is to just go on
doing one's bit, because one thing is quite clear. Europe won't be a habitable place if Germany wins,
for anybody.
I think there are going to be a lot of changes here.
July 15, 1917.
I have had German measles.
The council asked me what I meant by that at my time of life.
The majority of people say,
how unpatriotic and hush of you.
Well, a few days off did not do me any harm.
I had a very luxurious time lying in my tent.
The last lot of orderlies brought it out.
odessa august fifteenth nineteen seventeen the work at rniz coming to an end and we are to go to the front with the serbian division i cannot write about it owing to censors and people but i am going to risk this
the serbs ought to be most awfully proud the russian general on the front is going to insist on having them to stiffen up his russian troops i think you people at home ought to know what magnificent fighting men these serbs are and so splendidly disciplined simply worth their weight in gold
There are only two divisions of them after all.
We have about thirty-five of them in hospital just now is sanitaries,
and they are such a comfort.
Their quickness and their devotion is wonderful.
The hospital was full and overflowing when I left, still Russians.
Most of the cases were slight,
a great many left hands if you know what that means.
I don't think the British Army does know.
We had a Red Cross inspecting officer down from Petrograd,
He was very pleased with everything, and kissed my hand on departing, and said we were doing
great things for the alliance. I wanted to say many things, but I thought I had better leave it
alone. We are operating at 5 a.m. now, because the afternoons are so hot. The other day we
began at 5 and had to go till 4 p.m. after all. Matron and I had a delightful ride the other evening.
Just as we had turned for home, an airplane appeared, and the first shot from the anti-aircraft guns
close beside us was too much for our horses, who promptly bolted. However, there was nothing but
the clear step before us, so we just sat tight and went. After a little, they recovered themselves,
and really behaved very well. August 28th, You dear, dear people, how sweet if you to send me a
telegram for my birthday. You don't know how nice it was to get it and to feel you were thinking of me.
It made me happy for days. Miss G. brought it me with a very puzzled face and said,
I cannot quite make out this telegram. It was written in Russian characters. She evidently was not
used to people doing such mad things as telegraphing the many happy returns of the day
half across the world. I understood it at once, and it nearly made me cry. It was good to get it,
though I think the food controller or somebody ought to come down on you for wasting money in the
middle of a war. I am finishing this letter in Reney. We closed the hospital yesterday,
and joined our division somewhere on Friday. The rush that had begun before I got to Odessa
got much worse. They had an awfully busy time, a faint reminiscence of Galilee.
though, as they were operating 12 hours on end. I don't know it was so very faint. We had no more left
hands, but all the bad cases. Everybody worked magnificently, but they always do in a push.
The time a British unit goes to pieces is when there is nothing to do. So this bit of work ends,
eight months. I am quite sorry to leave it, but quite, quite glad to get back to our division.
Well, Amy Dearest, goodbye for the present. I wonder what will happen next. Love to all you dear people.
S.W. H. H. H. H. Abdul, October 17, 1917. I wonder if this is my last letter from Russia. We hope to be off in a very few days now.
We have had a very pleasant time in this place with its Turkish name. It shows how far north Turkey once came.
We are with the division.
and were given this perfectly beautiful camping ground,
with trees and a slope towards the east.
The question was whether we were going to Romania or elsewhere.
It is nice being back with these nice people.
They have been most kind and friendly,
and we have picnics and rides and dances and dinners.
Until this turmoil of the move began,
we had an afternoon reception every day under the walnut trees.
Now we are packed up and ready to go,
and I mean to walk in on you one morning.
It does not stand thinking of.
We shall have about two months to refit,
but one of those is my due as a holiday,
which I am going to take.
I'll see you all soon,
your loving aunt, Elsie.
To Mrs. Simpson.
Archangel, November 18, 1917.
On our way home.
Have not been very well,
nothing to worry about.
Shall report in London,
then come straight to you, longing to see you all.
Engels.
End of Section 16.
Section 17 of Dr. Elsie Ingalls by Francis Balfour.
The Slibervox recording is in the public domain.
Chapter 11. The Moorings Cut.
Not I, but my unit.
My dear unit, goodbye.
November 26, 1917, E.M.I.
Into the wide deep seas which we, we,
call God, you plunged. This is not death, you seem to say, but fuller life. The reports of Dr. Engels
as chief medical officer to the London Committee were as detailed and foreseen in the very last one
that she wrote as in the first from on board the transport that took her and her unit out. She writes,
In view of the fact that we are in the middle of big happenings, I should like Dr. Laird to bring
one-half-ton cotton wool, six bales, moss dressings, 100 pounds chloroform, 50 pounds ether,
20 gallons rectified spirits. I wonder what news of the riverboat for Mesopotamia?
After they had landed and were at work, I have wired asking for another hospital for the base.
I know you have your hands full, but I also know that if the people at home realize what their
help would mean out here just now, we would not have to ask twice. And again, keep the home fires
burning and let us feel their warmth. She soon encountered the usual obstacles. I saw that there was
no good in the world talking about regular field hospitals to them until they had tried our
metal. The ordinary male disbelief in our capacity cannot be argued away. It can only be
worked away. So she acted.
Russia created disbelief, but the men at arms of all nations saw and believed.
In November, she wrote back incredulously, rumors of falling back. Things look serious, anxious about the
equipment. In bombardments, in retreat, and evacuations, the equipment was her one thought.
Stand by the equipment became a joke in her unit. On one occasion, one of the orderlies had a
heavy fall from a lorry on which she was in charge of the precious stuff. Dusty and shaken,
she was gathering herself up when the voice of the chief rang out imperatively urgent. Stand by the
equipment. On the rail, certain trucks, bearing all the equipment, got on a wrong line and were
carried away. The blue ribbon belongs to Miss Barrowman and Miss Brown. They saw our wagons
disappearing with a refugee train, whereupon these two ran after it and jumped on.
and finally brought the equipment safely to Galatz.
They invented a General Popovich, who would be very angry if it did not get through.
Without these two girls and their ingenuity, the equipment would not have got through.
She details all the difficulties of packing up and evacuating
after the dispatch writer came with the order that the hospitals were to fall back to Galats.
The only method, their own, all else chaotic and helpless,
working night and day, the unit accomplished everything. At the station, packed with a country and army in
flight, Dr. Engels had a talk with a Romanian officer. He told her that he had been in Glasgow,
and had there been invited out to dinner, and had seen English customs. It was good to feel
those English customs were still going on quietly, whatever was happening here,
breakfast coming regularly in hot water for baths and everything as it should be.
It was probably absurd, but it came like a great wave of comfort to feel that England was there,
quiet and strong and invincible, behind everything and everybody.
As we read these natural, vivid diary reports, we too can feel it was good of England
that Dr. Engels was to the last on that front.
ambassador from Britain's crown and type of all her race.
Dr. Ingalls never lost sight of the army she went out to serve.
She refused to return unless they were brought away from the Russian Front with her.
I wonder if a proper account of what happened then went home to the English papers.
The Serbian division went into the fight 15,000 strong.
They were in the center, the Romanians on their left and the Russians on their right.
The Romanians broke, and they fought for 24 hours on two fronts.
They came out of the fight having lost 11,000 men.
It is almost incredible, and that is when we ought to have been out,
and could have been out if we had not taken so long to get underway.
In the last report, dated October 29, 1917,
she tells her committee she has been tied by the leg to bed.
There are notes on coming events.
There really seems a prospect of getting away soon.
The Foreign Office knows us only too well.
Only 6,000 of the division go in this lot,
the rest, 15,000, to follow.
There is a characteristic last touch.
I have asked Miss Onslow to get English paperback novels
for the unit on their journey.
At a certain shop, they can be got for a ruble each, and good ones.
To the members of that unit,
doctors, sisters, orderlies, we are indebted for many personal details, and for the story of the
voyage west, when for her the sun was setting. Her work was accomplished when, on the transport
with her and her unit, were the representatives of that Serbian army with whom she served,
faithful unto death. Miss Arbuthnot, the granddaughter of Sir William Muir, the friend of John Ingalls,
was one of those who helped to nurse Dr. Ingalls.
I sometimes looked after her when the nurse attending her was off duty. Her consideration and kindness
were quite extraordinary, while her will and courage were quite indomitable. To die as she did,
in harness, having completed her great work in getting the Serbs away from Russia, is what she
would have chosen. I first met Dr. Engels at Haji Abdul, a small mud village about ten miles from Galat's.
She was looking very ill, but was always busy.
For some time she had been ill with dysentery, but she never even stayed in bed for breakfast
till it was impossible for her to move from bed. During our time at Haji, we had about 40 Serbian patients,
a few wounded, but mostly sick. Dr. Engels did a few minor operations, but her last major one
was a gastroenterotomy, performed on one of our own chauffeurs, a Serb, Joe by name.
The operation took three hours and was entirely satisfactory.
although Dr. Ingalls did not consider him strong enough to travel back to England.
She was particularly fond of this man and took no end of trouble with him.
Even after she became so very ill, she used constantly to visit him.
The Serbs entertained us to several picnics, which we duly returned.
Dr. Engels was always an excellent hostess, so charming and genial to everyone,
and so eager that both entertainers and entertained should equally enjoy themselves.
provided her permission was asked first, and duty hours or regular meals not neglected,
she was always keen everyone should enjoy themselves, riding, walking, or going for picnics.
If anyone was ill, she never insisted on their getting up in spite of everything,
as most doctors, and certainly all matrons, wish us to do.
She was strict during duty hours, and always required implicit obedience to her orders, whatever they were.
She was always so well-groomed, never a hair out of place.
In appearance, she was a splendid head.
One felt so proud of her among the dirty and generally unsuitably dressed women in other hospitals.
She was very independent and would never allow any of us to wait on her.
The cooks were not allowed to make her any special dishes that the whole unit could not share.
As long as she could, she messed with the unit, and there was no possibility.
of avoiding her quick eye. Anything which was reserved for her special comfort was rejected.
Once a portion of chicken was kept as a surprise for her. She asked whether there had been enough for
all, and when the cooks reluctantly confessed there was only the one portion, she sent it away.
During one of the evacuations, an order had been given that there were only two blankets
allowed in each valise. Someone, mindful of her weakness, stuffed an extra one into Dr.
Ingl's bag, because in her emaciated condition she suffered much from the cold. It stirred her to
impetuous anger, and with something of the spirit of David, as he poured out the water brought him at
the peril of the lives of his followers, she flung the blanket out of the railway carriage,
as a lesson to those of her unit who had disobeyed an order. Every Sunday Dr. Ingalls read the
church service with great dignity and simplicity. On the weekday evenings,
Before she became so ill, she would join us in a game of bridge, and played nearly every night.
During the retreats when nothing more could be done, and she felt anxious, she would sit down and
play a game of patience. During the weeks of uncertainty, when the future of the Serbs was doubtful,
and she was unable to take any active part, she fretted very much. After endless conflicting
rumors and days of waiting, the news arrived that they were to go to England. Her delight was
extraordinary, for she had laying in her bed day after day planning how she could help them,
and sending endless wires to those in authority in England, but feeling herself very impotent.
Once the good news arrived, her marvelous courage and tenacity helped her to recover sufficiently
and prepare all the details for the journey with the Serbs. We left on the 29th October,
with the HG staff and 2,000 Serbian soldiers in a special train going to Archangel.
Dr. Engel spent 15 days on the train in a second-class compartment with no proper bed.
Her strength varied, but she was compelled to lie down a great deal, although she insisted on dressing
every morning. On two occasions she walked for five minutes on the station platform. Each time it
absolutely exhausted her. Though she suffered much pain and discomfort, she never complained.
She could only have Benker, chicken broth, and condensed milk, and she would have her. And she
often found it impossible to take even these. If one happened to bring her tea or her food,
she thanked one so charmingly. At Archangel there was no means of carrying her onto the boat,
so with help, one orderly in front, the other lifting her behind, she climbed a ladder 20 feet
high from the platform to the deck of the transport. She was a good sailor and had a comfortable
cabin on the ship. She improved on board slightly and used to sit in the small cabin
allotted to us on the upper deck. She played patience and was interested in our seasick symptoms.
There was a young naval officer very seriously ill on the boat. Our people were nursing him,
and she constantly went to prescribe. She feared he would not live, and he died before he reached our port.
After some improvement, Dr. Ingalls had a relapse, violent pain set in, and she had to return to
bed. Even then, a few days before we reached England, she insisted on going through all the accounts,
and prepared fresh plans to take the unit on to join the Serbs at Salonica. In six weeks, she expected
to be ready to start. She sent for each of us in turn, and asked if we would go with her.
Needless to say, only those who could not again leave home refused, and then with the deepest regret.
The night before we reached Newcastle, Dr. Ingalls had a violent attack of pain and had no sleep all night.
Next morning she insisted on getting up to say goodbye to the Serbian staff.
It was a wonderful example of her courage and fortitude to see her standing unsupported,
a splendid figure of quiet dignity.
Her face ashen and drawn like a mask, dressed in her worn uniform coat with the faded ribbons that had seen
such good service. As the officers kissed her hand and thanked her for all she had done for them,
she said to each of them a few words accompanied with her wonderful smile. As they looked on her,
they also must have understood, sorrowing most of all that they should see her face no more.
After that parting was over, Dr. Engels collapsed from great weakness. She left the boat
Sunday afternoon, 25th November, and arrived quite exhausted at the hotel. I was allowed to see her for a
minute before the unit left for London that night. She could only whisper, but was as sweet and patient as she ever
was. She said we should meet soon in London. After her death, many who had watched her through these
strenuous years regretted that she did not take more care of herself. Symptoms of the disease appeared so
soon, she must have known what overwork and war rations meant in her state. This may be said of every
follower of the one who saved others, but could not save himself. The life story of saint and
pioneer is always the same. To continue to ill-treat brother body meant death to St. Francis.
To remain in the fever swamps of Africa meant death to Livingston. The poor and the freedom of the
slave were the common cause for which both these laid down their lives. Of the same spirit was this
daughter of our race. Had she remained at home on her return from Serbia, she might have been with us
today. But we should not have the woman we know now, and for whom we give thanks on every remembrance of
her. The long voyage ended at last. Miss Arbuthnot makes no allusion to its dangers. Everything written by
the unit is instinct with the high courage of their leader. We know now how great were the
peril surrounding the transport on the North Seas. Old and unseaworthy, the menace below,
the storm above, through the night of the Arctic Circle, she was safely brought to the haven
where all would be. More than once, death in open boats was a possibility to be faced.
There were seven feet of water in the engine room, and only the stout hearts of her captain
and crew knew all the dangers of their long watch and ward. As the transport entered the tyne,
a blizzard swept over the country. We who waited for news on shore, wondered where on the
cold gray seas labored the ship bringing home Dr. Elsie in her unit. In her last hours,
she told her own people of the closing days on board. When we left Orkney, we had a dreadful passage,
and even after we got into the river it was very rough. We were more. We were more. We were
moored lower down, and, owing to the high wind and storm, a big liner suddenly bore down upon us,
and came within a foot of cutting us in two. When our moorings broke, we swung round and were saved.
I said to the one who told me, who cut our moorings? She answered, no one cut them, they broke.
There was a pause, and then to her own she broke the knowledge that she had heard the call,
and was about to obey the summons. The same hand who cut them,
our moorings then, is cutting mine now, and I am going forth. Her niece, Evelyn Simpson,
notes how they heard of the arrival. A wire came on Friday from Aunt Elsie, saying they had
arrived in Newcastle. We tried all Saturday to get news by wire and phone, but got none. We think now
this was because the first news came by wireless, and they did not land till Sunday.
Aunt Elsie answered our prepaid wire, simply saying,
I am in bed, do not telephone for a few days.
I was free to start off by the night train,
and arrived about 2 a.m. at Newcastle.
I found the SWH were at the station hotel,
and I saw Aunt Elsie's name in the book.
I did not like to disturb her at that hour,
and went to my room till 7.30.
I found her alone. The night nurse was next door.
She was surprised to see me, as she thought it would be noon before anyone could arrive.
She looked terribly wasted, but she gave me such a strong embrace that I never thought the illness
was more than what might easily be cured on land with suitable diet.
I felt her pulse, and she said,
It is not very good, Eve, dear, I know, for I have a pulse that beats in my head,
and I know it has been dropping beats all night.
She wanted to know all about everyone, and we had a long talk before anyone came in.
She told me how good Dr. Ward had been to her, always, and we arranged that Dr. Ethel Williams
should come.
And Elsie then packed me off to get some breakfast, and Dr. Ward told me she was much worse than
she had been the night before.
I telephoned to Edinburgh saying she was very ill.
When Dr. Williams came, I learned that there was practically no hope of her living.
They started injections and oxygen, and Aunt Elsie said,
Now, don't think we didn't think of all these things before,
but on board ship nothing was possible.
It was not till Dr. William's second visit that she asked me if the doctor thought this was the end.
When she saw that it was so, she at once said, without pause or hesitation,
Eve, it will be grand starting a new job over there.
Then with a smile,
although there are two or three jobs here I would like to have finished.
After this, her whole mind seemed to be taken up with the sending of last messages
to her committees, units, friends, and relations.
It simply amazed me how she remembered everyone down to her grand nieces and nephews.
When I knew Mother and Aunt Eva were on their way, I told her, and she was overjoyed.
Early in the morning, she told me wonderful things about bringing back the serve.
I found it very hard to follow, as it was an unknown story to me.
I clearly remember she went one day to the council in Odessa and said she must wire certain things.
She was told she could only wire straight to the war office, and so I got into touch straight with the war office.
Mrs. McLaren at one moment commented,
You have done magnificent work.
Back swiftly came her answer, not I, but my unit.
mrs mclaren says mrs simpson and i arrived at newcastle on monday evening it was a glorious experience to be with her those last two hours
she was emaciated almost beyond recognition but all sense of her bodily weakness was lost in the grip one felt of the strong alert spirit which dominated every one in the room
she was clear in her mind and most loving to the end the word she greeted us with were so i am going over to the other side when she saw we could not believe it she said with a smile for a long time i meant to live but now i know i am going over to the other side when she saw we could not believe it she said with a smile for a long time i meant to live but now i know i am
going. She spoke naturally and expectantly of going over. Certainly she met the unknown with a cheer.
As the minutes passed, she seemed to be entering into some great experience, for she kept repeating,
this is wonderful, but this is wonderful. Then she would notice that some one of us was standing,
and she would order us to sit down. Another chair must be brought if there were not enough. To the end,
she would revert to small details for our comfort.
As flesh and heart failed,
she seemed to be breasting some difficulty,
and in her own strong way,
without distress or fear,
she asked for help.
You must all of you help me through this.
We repeated to her many words of comfort.
Again and again, she answered back,
I know.
One, standing at the foot of the bed, said to her,
You will give my love to father.
instantly the humorous smile lit her face and she answered,
Of course I will.
At her own request, her sister read to her words of the life beyond.
Let not your heart be troubled.
In my father's house are many mansions.
If it were not so, I would have told you.
And even as they watched her, she fell on sleep.
After she had left us, there remained with those that loved her
only a great sense of triumph and perfect peace.
The room seemed full of a glorious presence.
One of us said,
This is not death. It makes one wish to follow after.
As we waited those anxious weeks
for the news of the arrival of Dr. Ingalls in her army,
there were questionings how we should welcome and show her
all love and service.
The news quickly spread she was not well,
might be delayed in reaching London.
the manner of greeting her must be to ensure rest.
The storm had spent itself,
and the moon was riding high in a cloudless heaven,
when others waiting in Edinburgh on the 26th
learnt the news that she too had passed through the storm in shadows,
and had crossed the bar.
That her work here was to end with her life,
had not entered the minds of those who watched for her return,
overjoyed to think of seeing her face once more.
She had concealed her mortally.
weakness so completely that even to her own the first note of warning had come with the words that
she had landed but was in bed. Then we thought it was time one of us should go to her. Her people
brought her back to the city of her fathers and to the hearts who had sent her forth and carried her
on the wings of their strong confidence. There was to be no more going forth of her active feet in
the service of man, and all that was mortal was carried for the last time into the church she had
loved so well. Then we knew and understood that she had been called where his servants shall serve him.
The Madonna lilies, the lilies of France and of the fields, were placed around her. Over her
hung the torn banners of Scotland's history. The Scottish women had wrapped their country's flag
around them in one of their hard-pressed flights. On her coffin, as she lay looking to the east
in High St. Giles, were placed the flags of Great Britain and Serbia. She had worn the faded ribbons
of the orders bestowed on her by France, Russia, and Serbia. It has often been asked at home and abroad
why she received no decorations at the hands of her sovereign. It is not an easy question to answer.
On November the 29th, Dr. Ingalls was buried, amid marks of respect and recognition, which make that
passing stand alone in the history of last rights of any of her fellow citizens.
Great was the company gathered within the church. The chancel was filled by her family and
relatives, her suffrage colleagues, representatives from all the societies, the officials
of the hospitals and hostels she had founded at home, the units whom she had led, and by whose
age she had done great things abroad. Last and first of all true-hearted mourners, that
the people of Serbia, represented by their minister and members of the legation. The chief of the
Scottish command was present, and by his orders, military honors were paid to this happy warrior
of the Red Cross. The service had, for its keynote, the hallelujah chorus, which was played
as the procession left St. Giles. It was a thanksgiving instinct with triumph and hope. The
resurrection and the life was in prayer and praise. The Dean of the Order of the Thistle
revealed the thoughts of many hearts in his farewell words. We are assembled this day,
with sad but proud and grateful hearts, to remember before God a very dear and noble lady,
our beloved sister, Elsie Ingalls, who has been called to her rest. We mourn only for ourselves,
not for her. She has died as she lived, in the clear
light of faith in self-forgetfulness, and now her name is linked forever with the great souls who
have led the van of womanly service for God and man. A wondrous union of strength and tenderness,
of courage and sweetness. She remains, for us, a bright and noble memory of high devotion
and stainless honor. Especially today, in the presence of representatives of the land for which she died,
we think of her as an immortal link between Serbia and Scotland,
and as a symbol of that high courage which will sustain us, please God,
till that stricken land is once again restored,
until the tragedy of war is eradicated and crowned
with God's great gifts of peace and of righteousness.
The buglers of the Royal Scots sounded the revely to the waking morn,
and the coffin with the allied flags was placed on the gun carriage.
women were in the majority of the mass crowd that awaited the last passing why did they know ghehe her the v c asked the shawl-draped women holding the barons of her care these and many another of her fellow-citizens lined the route and followed on foot the long road across the city
As the procession was being formed, Dr. Engel's last message was put into the hands of the members of the London Committee for the SWH. It ran.
November 26, 1917. So sorry I cannot come to London. Dr. Williams and Dr. Ward are agreed, and quite rightly. We'll send Gwyn in a day or two with explanations and suggestions.
Colonel Milantinovich and Colonel Chala Antich were to make appointment this week or next from Winchester.
Do see them, and also as many of the committee as possible, and show them every hospitality.
They have been very kind to us, and whatever happens, dear Miss Palliser, do beg the committee to make sure that they, the Serbs, have their hospitals and transport, for they do need them.
many thanks to the committee for their kindness to me and their support of me elsie ingalls dictated to miss evelyn simpson how the people loved her was the thought as she passed through the grief-stricken crowds these who knew her best smiled as they said one to another how all this would surprise her
edinburgh is a city of spires and of god's acres the graves cut in the living rock within gardens and beside running waters across the water of leith the long procession wound its way
within sight of the grave it was granted to her grateful brethren the representatives of the serbian nation to carry her coffin and lower it to the place where the mortal in her was to lie in its last rest
her life story was grouped around her the serbian officers the military of her own nation at war the women comrades of the common cause the poor and suffering to one and all she had been the inspiring succour
november mists had drifted all day across the city veiling the fortress strength of scotland and the wild wastes of seas over which she had returned home to our island's strength
even as we turned and left her the gray clouds at even tide were transfused and glorified by the crimson glow of the sunset on the hills of time
end of section seventeen end of dr elsie ingles by francis balfour
