Monday 14 June 2010 Elsie and Mairi Go To War...
When it was first suggested that Marilyn Imrie and I could stage a reading of my book Elsie and Mairi Go To War…Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front, she took up the idea with boundless enthusiasm and ran with it. She suggested that I be the narrator and demanded of me an hour-long script taken from the book and made many editorial interventions on several occasions. Then she cast the reading, rehearsed and directed me and two wonderful Scottish actresses- Jennifer Black and Pauline Lockhart – in our first two performances at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh in October 2009 and at Dovecot Studios in December. The readings went very well and a member of the audience came up to me at the end of the performance and suggested we bring it to the Fringe – so we are. Since then Marilyn has re-cast the part of Elsie Knocker who will now be played by the splendid Glasgow-based actress Clare Waugh. Marilyn is a rock and has been my mentor and best friend throughout this new experience. I could not have begun to do it without her. She is a hugely-experienced and talented director. I love her.
The performance will last one hour, from 4-5pm, and paperback copies of Dates, times and tickets: Previews on Wednesday 4th Aug and Thursday Aug 5th at 4-5pm. Friday 6 Aug - Fri Aug 20 inclusive at 4-5pm ( no shows on Sundays). Tickets will be on sale at the Fringe Box Office and also at Dovecot at The Story within the Play This is a true story about best friends. Elsie Knocker was thirty and a lady with a past; and eighteen year-old Mairi Gooden-Chisholm, who had just left school. They met on motorbikes two years before the outbreak of the First World War. Elsie roared round the Dorset and Hampshire lanes in her bottle-green leathers made specially for her by Dunhill. Mairi was her brother’s mechanic when he took part in rallies and trials.
Munro was an interesting chap: a doctor, a suffragette, vegetarian and nudist, he took Elsie and Mairi, a glamorous American woman Helen Gleason, and Lady ‘Dolly’ Feilding to prove that women could do what men did. Their mission was to bring in wounded soldiers from the battlefield to Belgian hospitals. Elsie and Mairi noticed that many men died of shock and exposure in the back of their ambulances and decided to open up their own first-aid post just a hundred yards from the Belgian trenches in a village called Pervyse, twenty miles from Ypres.
A stray fox terrier called Shot moved in with them and became an important member of the team, keeping the rat population in order. He was also used to take messages, written by Elsie, to the German trenches asking if she and Mairi could retrieve the bodies of Royal Flying Corps pilots who had been shot down in No Man’s Land. In March 1918 Shot saved their lives, barking when an arsenic gas shell dropped into their dug-out; the women and their orderlies and patients got their gas masks on but the dog died.
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This one-hour play is the true story of two forgotten heroines of the First World War who ran the only first-aid post on the Front Line. Using their original diaries and letters this remarkable, moving and often funny tale is brought back to life at Dovecot, 10 Infirmary St, Edinburgh EH1. 
PAULINE LOCKHART lives in Edinburgh and has worked with many of the UK’s leading theatre companies including Manchester Royal Exchange, Hampstead Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, National Theatre of Scotland, Stellar Quines, Oran Mor, the Tron Theatre, and the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh. TV work includes: Holby City, Monarch of the Glen, Casualty (BBC), Heartless and The Glass (ITV) Films include Strictly Sinatra and Gladiatress. Radio work includes many plays for BBC Radio Scotland, Radio 3 and 4. Pauline has also been awarded the TMA Best Supporting Actress, and the Manchester Evening News Award for An Experiment with an Air Pump at Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre.
CLARE WAUGH trained at RSAMD and lives in Glasgow. Her theatre work includes: The Little Mermaid (Cumbernauld Theatre), For What We Are About to 
MARILYN IMRIE works in theatre, radio and television as a producer and director for BBC, ITV and Independent companies, Absolutely, Bona Broadcasting, Kindle, CBL and Sweet Talk. She has won awards for plays by Jessie Kesson, David Hare, Kazuo Isheguro, and John Mortimer and an RTS Award for her work on the animation series Big and Small, starring Lenny Henry and Imelda Staunton. Recent BBC radio work includes Rumpole, The Classic Serial: Clarissa, Baggage and The Stanley Baxter Playhouse. She divides her working and home life between Edinburgh and London. Theatre work includes: Lie Down Comic by John Mortimer, The Bones Boys by Colin Macdonald for Oran Mor, Overdue South by Jules Horne for the Traverse Theatre/BBC Scotland and Mortimers’s Miscellany for the Henley Festival. She is joint-chair of the board of Stellar Quines theatre company and on the board of the new writing theatre company Paines Plough. 
We are performing at 
In September 1914 Elsie and Mairi 
At night Elsie and Mairi would take out hot chocolate to the Belgian sentries and even once gave some to a German sentry who asked them who they were and what on earth they were up to. They grew marrows to make jam, had a giant see-saw in the back yard and took a punt out in the massive shell craters that littered the landscape pretending they were at the Henley Regatta. Their reputation for extraordinary courage while retrieving the wounded often under sniper fire, quickly grew and when King Albert of the Belgians awarded them a medal in 1915 their fame was assured. By the end of the war they had seventeen medals.
As the only women nursing at
Elsie and Mairi lived through so much together for four years. They were extremely close, sharing a bed, and a bath when they could have one. After they were demobilised at the end of the war they never saw each other again.