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Women At War
Women at war
Fanny Goes to War
On 30 June 1917 the Carlisle Journal reported that a Cumbrian recuperating in a French hospital after being severely wounded and having one leg amputated had been decorated with the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star by the French General Ditte. The citation said that for two years they had worked devotedly with the continual transportation of the wounded.
Numerous allied officers were present. Amongst the usual war reports that filled the paper this one may have especially caught the attention of the reader as the recipient was a Miss Catherine Marguerite Beauchamp 'Daisy' Waddell of Warwick Bridge, outside Carlisle. Two years later Miss Waddell, writing under the name of Pat Beauchamp, published her war memoirs entitled 'Fanny goes to War'.
The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry was founded in 1910. In 1913 Miss Waddell, aged 21, saw a photo in the Daily Mirror of a girl astride on horseback leaping a fence in khaki; underneath was the simple line 'Women Yeomanry in Camp.' Miss Waddell was inspired to join the FANYs and so found herself on active service in Flanders in January 1915 at a hospital, Lamark, for Belgian soldiers.
One of their tasks was to distribute comforts to the Belgian soldiers in the trenches. She recalls distributing 'woolies' to the men under a bombardment. However they ran short of comforts. She wrote 'It was heartbreaking to hear one man say 'Une paire de chaussettes, Mees, je vous prie; il y a trios mois depuis j'enai eu' [A pair of socks miss I beseech you, it's three months since I had any']. I gave him my scarf, which was all I had, and could only turn sorrowfully away.He put it on immediately, cheerfully accepting the substitute'.
She encountered many sad cases working in the typhoid wards. When transferred to ambulance driver for British wounded she had many trying encounters. One mortally wounded boy took her for his sister, asking her 'Will I see me old mother again, Sister?…Christ, but me back 'urts crool… I don't want to die, I tell you that straight'. She wished him goodnight and 'God bless you' saying she would come back in the morning. She came back early the next day but found he had died at 3 am. She commented 'Somebody's son and only nineteen. That sort of job takes the heart out of you for some days, though Heaven knows we ought to have got used to anything by that time.'
Amidst the Zeppelin raids, the coffin cart, blood and bandages there are many lighter moments; concert parties given to the soldiers, a sense of camaraderie with nurses and soldier, the innocence of cooking fish without gutting them.
After the war Miss Daisy Waddell married a wounded army officer, Peter Washington. They had two sons, Tim and Ralph. Daisy died in 1972.
