Earlier blogs
Friday 4 October 2013 Reclaim the F Word ... An extract of a new play based on Elsie and Mairi Go To War will be shown at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow on October 7, 2013. Rosie Kellagher will direct and Clare Waugh, Pauline Lockhart, Brian James and Harry Ward will make up the cast. Friday 17 August 2012 Emily Wilding Davison ... When Emily, who was forty-one, unfurled her purple, white and green suffragette flag and rushed onto the race course she was reminding the King, and the world's press, of the British government's callous injustice to women. She grabbed the bridle and was knocked over screaming: Anmer hit her in the chest and she received a horrible head wound and blood streamed out of her mouth and nose. The horse turned a complete somersault and landed on Bertie Jones who, amazingly, was not killed. People rushed towards her to attack her for her behaviour but were restrained by the police who quickly formed a cordon round her and she was taken to the cottage hospital in Epsom. Emily Wilding Davison was too experienced around horses to have made a mistake that day. She knew the extreme danger in which she was placing herself but she did not mind or even care. Ever since she died on the 8th of June, her death was said to have been a dreadful accident and any suggestions it might have been a suicidal protest have been brushed to one side. After detailed day-by-day examination of her career within the Women's Social Political Union, I believe the intensely difficult last twelve months of her life had prepared her for martyrdom. She stepped in front of Anmer because she wanted to die in the ongoing struggle for votes for women. Friday 17 August 2012 News Flash ...
It is a self-portrait in pen and watercolour probably made in September 1828, when she was twenty years-old, and staying with her in-laws, Sir Neil Menzies and his wife Grace (who was her husband’s elder sister), at Rannoch Lodge on the shores of Loch Rannoch. Caroline was a year into a marriage which had started with violence on the honeymoon. This picture of Caroline looking at herself in a mirror suggests she was enjoying the attention of men. Given her reluctance to marry George – her mother had had no other offers for her, and allowed George Norton to marry her in 1827 - and the drunken beatings that followed, we must assume Caroline did not paint this for him. Caroline described Rannoch Lodge as a ‘comfortless house’, and Grace Menzies as‘that most masculine of Scotch women’, finding her ‘haughty and intemperate’. Lady Menzies did not like her new in-law Caroline, or that her husband was clearly smitten by her. Many men who met Caroline and her sisters, Helen and Georgiana, widely known as ‘The Three Graces’, fell for them. The actress Fanny Kemble was charmed by Caroline who ‘looks as if she were made of precious stones, diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires; she is radiant with beauty… a splendid creature nobly endowed in every way.’ Not everyone was infatuated by Caroline, some found her language racy and her manner more masculine than ladylike. There are a dozen surviving oil paintings and drawings of the gorgeous Mrs Norton but none which show this coquettish side of her character. Getting pictorial evidence of her beauty was easy, but evidence of her flirty sensuality proved elusive and I gave up hope of seeing her as her many admirers saw her, until now. The picture was painted a year after her wedding and a year before her first child, Fletcher, was born in 1829. She was bored with George and even though she had been on the wrong side of his fists she dared to mock and mimic him in company. The sheet of paper is three and a half inches square and at some point it was slipped into the Menzies’s commonplace book which spanned the late eighteenth century to the 1840s. She is scantily clad and, if not in the boudoir, surely heading in that direction. Fast forward three years and George Norton will prevail on Caroline to exert her considerable charm on Lord Melbourne, then Home Secretary and soon to be Prime Minister, to get George a cushy job. During the many afternoons Mrs Norton and Lord Melbourne spent together in the Norton’s drawing-room in Storey’s Gate, a short walk from 10 Downing Street, she fell head-over-heels in love with one of the louchest of Whig lounge lizards. Although they both denied they were lovers – they had to – there is plenty of evidence in Caroline’s letters to Melbourne to suggest they were more than good friends, and this picture of Caroline is how she would have wanted a lover to see her.
Friday 11 May 2012 Why I wrote ...
Where Caroline Norton is concerned I have to admit to being a heroine addict. To write this biography I read more than fifteen hundred of the letters she wrote to her family and friends and strangers and there is not one in which she does not impress me with her passion and poise, honesty and generosity of spirit and purse, humanity and humour and hilarious self-deprecation. She performed many unsolicited acts of kindness to people she had never met. Caroline’s letters are scattered all over the world, their recipients read and re-read them, treasured them and donated them to archives and libraries so others could enjoy them too. Almost a hundred and fifty years after she last picked up her pen, Caroline Norton’s letters feel very modern: the legal battles she waged to see her children and leave her wretched marriage feel contemporary; hers is a universal story. I hope Fathers For Justice read this book. Mrs Norton is a nineteenth-century heroine for the twenty-first century, an inspiration to every woman who has had a problem being married to a man; she turned herself from victim to victor. The child custody laws we enjoy today derive from Caroline Norton’s wretched marriage, and her love for her three boys to whom she was lost for six years and then found again. Mothers, single or married, now owe their status as parents of their own children to Caroline Norton, for taking that first step which put them within the law and changed the rules of patriarchy for ever. 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 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.
In September 1914 Elsie and Mairi rushed off to London to ‘do their bit’ and joined Dr Hector Munro’s Flying Ambulance Corps. Their diaries are full of words like ‘spiffing’, ‘plucky’, ‘beastly’, ‘topping’, ‘ripping’ and ‘horrid’; ‘things got hot’ means they were under artillery bombardment, and getting ‘pinked’ is how they describe almost being killed by snipers.
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.
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 the front line they soon became
a man-magnet and almost as famous for their hospitality as their bravery.
There were tea-parties, sing-songs round a piano they found in a bombed-
out house, and pantos. Politicians, royals, journalists, photographers, and
well-known actresses went to meet the ‘Madonnas of Pervyse’ to be photographed with them. ‘The Crumps’, a troupe of troop entertainers, went there to entertain the daring duo. Elsie married a Baron, Harry, a dashing Belgian airman. Mairi had several proposals of marriage but her special friend, Jack, an ace pilot, who used to chuck love tokens attached to parachutes out of his plane into the skies over the dug-out,
was killed in 1917.
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.
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.
I hope to see lots of you who read this Blog at the show. Any questions and reviews welcome.
Talk in Ypres/Ieper
Thursday October 8th 2009
At first light, dressed for the cold and driving rain, I set off for Belgium on Thursday 8th October, to give a power-point presentation in the town-hall in Ieper. It turned out to be a balmy day but at least I was prepared for typical Flemish First World War Weather.
I was keen to present the story of Elsie and Mairi Go To War in Ypres as Pervyse is just 15 miles away and when the wind was in the right direction our dauntless duo could hear the big guns booming in the Ypres Salient. A million soldiers from all sides were killed defending and attacking this town.
I had received an astonishing amount of help from Piet Chielens and Dominiek Dendooven of the In Flanders Fields Museum. Just days before I handed in my manuscript Dominiek emailed me some explosive material concerning what became of Elsie’s dashingly handsome Belgian husband, the Baron de T’Serclaes; his betrayal of his country when he became a Nazi and infiltrated the Antwerp Resistance.
One day, while Dominiek was chatting quietly to a colleague at the Documentation Centre attached to In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, he was overheard by Dr De Moor, a gentleman in his eighties who was researching the Belgian medical services during the war. In the hushed room of the archives Dr De Moor announced that during the war, De T’Serclaes had visited his mother’s house in Antwerp looking for his two brothers who were members of the local resistance. Immediately Mrs De Moor suspected he was a spy and sent him on his way. Later, dozens of members of the resistance, who included school teachers and those who hid Jewish families, were rounded up by the Germans in de T’Serclaes’s presence and arrested. Some were executed and others died in captivity.
Imagine how I felt when Dominiek introduced me to Dr De Moor and his wife Sabine. This was one highlight of my visit.
My good friend Hermine came from Picardy. Walter Pieters, who told me so much about Belgian airmen in the Great War, and his wife Hilde, travelled from Kontich, near Antwerp, for my talk. Christopher Vandewalle, the city archivist of Dixmuide, came too; he also has a connection with Elsie and Mairi. His family had a brewery in Pervyse before the war and there is a super photograph of Mairi popping her head out of a shell hole blown in the wall of Chris’s grand-dad’s brewery. He is keen to have a memorial to Elsie and Mairi in Pervyse, and he and I are going to work on this together.
It was also good to meet Gen and Elizabeth, two English women who have bed and breakfast accommodation near Pervyse, and run battlefield tours. They are mad keen to have a memorial to Elsie and Mairi and have pledged their help.
A few days after I returned I had an email from Herman Declerk who could not come to my talk but kindly arranged for me to see the cellar of the house where Elsie and Mairi had their first dug-out, just a hundred yards from the fighting, on a more recent visit to Ieper. It was wonderful to stand in the room where Elsie and Mairi had patched up so many wounded soldiers nearly a hundred years ago, and to walk down the same steps that Elsie’s future husband, Baron Harold de T’Serclaes, had walked down in crimson jodhpurs. Herman has also curated an excellent exhibition about Pervyse during the First World War which I saw for the first time. It is well worth a visit.
Elsie and Mairi Go To War...
Performance of a rehearsed reading at the National Library of Scotland
Monday October 12th 2009
Mairi’s photograph albums and scrap books are held by the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and as soon as the book was published Duncan Welsh, head of events at the Library, invited me to sign copies in their new shop. I agreed at once and then decided that instead of a reading and a question and answer session, I would present their extraordinary story by writing a piece for a rehearsed reading: I would be the narrator and two actors would read Elsie and Mairi’s words.
My great friend Marilyn Imrie asked Jennifer Black and Pauline Lockhart, two wonderful actors who live in Edinburgh, to read Elsie and Mairi’s parts, and then she script-edited and directed the piece. Duncan was very happy with the change to the evening’s programme. So, armed with a few props - two battered Union Jacks and an equally tattered Belgian flag, and two of the same the Order of Leopold Medals that were awarded to Elsie and Mairi in 1915 for their courage and care of Belgian soldiers – I set off for Edinburgh.
We four read the piece through on Sunday night and the next day Marilyn and I went to check out the sound and lighting at the venue, the Board Room at the Library. A few days before I set off I had a remarkable conversation with a lady who telephoned me from Oban. Her son Benedict was the great-nephew of Jack Petre, Mairi’s ‘special friend’ whom the Chisholm family say she would have married if he had survived the war. Sadly he was killed in a flying accident in the spring of 1917.
I had the great good fortune to be put in touch with Kirsty by Mrs Elizabeth Edwards who was Jack’s niece, and who only recently learnt that her relation Kirsty had, quite by chance, met Mairi in 1980. So, all those years after his death we found that Mairi had met and spent an afternoon with Jack’s great-nephew shortly before she died in 1981. She bequeathed her Jack memorabilia to Benedict, who hero-worshipped his great-uncle. One of the precious objects Mairi gave him was a toy soldier he had chucked to her out of his plane attached to a parachute – one of many love tokens he threw down. It survived its unusual delivery method intact, Mairi went out and retrieved it and cherished it for all those years and then gave it to Benedict.
Imagine my excitement when Kirsty offered to bring the doll from Oban to the performance. It was a thrill to have such precious object for Pauline, who played the part of Mairi, to have as a prop. It was the prop of props, and a real coup de theatre.
When she held it up, it was as if Jack Petre had dropped it down from heaven into her hand.
Among the hundred or so people who were at the reading were Mairi’s great-niece, Mairi-Angela Foster; Mrs Elizabeth Edwards, Jacks’ great-niece, came from Harrogate and her daughter Nicky joined her from London. Also, my friend Liz Goring, whom I met in the 1990s on suffragette business.
It was an extraordinary evening. The performances of Jennifer Black and Pauline Lockhart were superb. People were bowled over by the women’s courage and determination, and amused to by the way they managed to keep cheerful in the most terrifying and trying circumstances. After all, so close were they to the German trenches on the Western Front for nearly four years, they were at the most dangerous party in the world.
Elsie and Mairi Go To War...
Book-signing at the Imperial War Museum
Saturday, November 7th 2009
On the 7th of November, the day before Remembrance Sunday, I spent the day signing my book at the Imperial War Museum. Much of the material, such as their diaries, is from their Department of Documents and many of the best pictures come from their Photographic Collection. Mairi was interviewed in the 1970s and the tapes, held in the Museum’s Sound Archives, reveal some of the finer details which appear in the book. The Museum was very busy that day and many visitors made their way to the shop. I sold and signed 32 copies of Elsie and Mairi Go To War, every copy they had in the shop, by the end of a long day.
Elsie and Mairi Go To... Ypres/Ieper
8 October, 2009 at 20:15
On Thursday night, October 8th, at 20:15, after the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate at 8pm, I will be giving a power point presentation at the Town Hall (Nieuwerck) which is situated on the east wing of the Cloth Hall (Lakenhallen) which houses the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres/Ieper. The event is free; you do not need to book but do let me know if you are coming.
Every night during the half hour leading up to 8pm crowds start to gather at the Menin Gate as they have been doing for the last eighty ears. Four local firemen in best uniforms, buttons gleaming, march to the Menin Gate to play The Last Post. The ten minute ceremony is a moving tribute to the hundreds of thousands of British men who died near Ypres. Winston Churchill said of the ruined city: ‘a more sacred place for the British race does not exist’.
I hope that if you are one of those people, on October 8th, you will make the short walk to the marvellous Town Hall in the east wing of the museum in the Cloth Hall (Lakenhallen), Grote Markt 34. I have been invited by Piet Chielens,
the Coordinator, to give a talk on my book Elsie and Mairi Go To War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front.
Elsie Knocker and Mairi Gooden-Chisholm were the only women to nurse ON the front line, operating from a snug dug-out just yards from the German trenches at Pervyse, not far from Ypres/Ieper.
I will tell the women’s story through wonderful photographs of their time in Belgium for about hour and then take questions. I’ll sign copies of the book which will be on sale that evening.
I look forward to seeing you on Thursday 12th October at 20:15.
Town Hall (Nieuwerck)
In Flanders Fields Museum
Cloth Hall (Lakenhallen)
Grote Markt 34
Ypres/Ieper
Elsie and Mairi Go To...
The National Library of Scotland
12 October, 2009, 19:00
On Monday the 12th of October Elsie, Mairi, and I will be at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. When I say that, I mean I shall be the narrator of their extraordinary story, and their words will be interpreted by two actresses, Jennifer Black and Pauline Lockhart. My friend Marilyn Imrie will be producing this show which is free to the public.
Tickets which are free are to be had from Duncan Welsh at the National Library of Scotland, telephone 0131 623 3918.
The evening starts at 19:00 and the performance will last for one hour. My new book about this daring and dauntless duo, which is on sale in the library shop, will also be available on the night. During October Elsie and Mairi Go To War will be the N.L.S’s Book of the Month.
I have just finished the first draft of the script, something I haven’t done before. It is quite a different discipline constructing a narrative for an audience who is with you in the flesh. Elsie and Mairi are the stars of the show, I shall be putting them in their context and cuing them in to speak their own words which I have taken from their letters and diaries. I’ll be taking big blow-up pictures of them to put up all round the room.
ELSIE: Sometimes Mairi and I felt extremely lonely in our little ambulance. We were often the last of the column, so if anything happened to us no one would have known. One day Mairi and I were sent to collect a wounded officer at Lokeren which was very close to the German line, as we drove there the Belgian army was streaming towards us in retreat. We found the cottage where the officer had been left and stepped inside; it was pitch black. All we could hear was the horribly eerie sound of a dripping kitchen tap. We groped our way down the hall and found our man lying on a table. His uniform was brand new, his buttons shone in the gloom, his blood was dripping on to the floor, his life was draining away. We could do nothing for him and left. As we got into the ambulance we heard the Germans pouring into the other end of the village and scarpered as fast as we could.
At Pervyse the day would start at 6 am when they lit the stove and made cauldrons of soup or hot chocolate which they served to the wounded or took to the Belgian trenches. Sometimes German sentries asked them what they were doing.
MAIRI: We had to walk in icy freezing stillness without a light and in silence. Sometimes the Germans would call out asking us who we were and what we were dong. Elsie, who could speak German, was rather cheeky, and would reply “Do you want a cup of hot chocolate? There’s one going spare.” So there we were, with the Belgian sentry and the German sentry imbibing hot chocolate, right out in No Man’s Land. I mean it was just too silly for words.
When I re-read the book I was taken aback by Elsie and Mairi all over again; so brave, so selfless and so amusing. They were good at making the best of the most difficult situation they could have found themselves in. Reading their diaries and scrap books, it is clear that at times they were at the most dangerous party in the world. They never grumbled, just coped with life and death as best they could, and when the occasion arose they partied, trying to inject some normality into their far from normal lives. Tea and cakes, wine and champagne, bloater paste and bunting flutter through their accounts. Writing the script I was struck again by their determination to make their dug-out at Pervyse as homely and as jolly as possible.
Last weekend I bought an old Belgian flag from a bric-a-brac stall at Spitalfields Market, which we can hoist on the night, and I’m now in search of a well-worn British flag. Any help would be much appreciated.
I look forward to seeing you on Monday October 12th at 19:00.
National Library of Scotland
George IV Bridge
Edinburgh EH1 1EW