ANNIE MABEL GURNEY (1868-1953) AND THE INJURED OF GALLIPOLI

My cousin Mabel Gurney graduated from Edinburgh University’s school of medicine in 1903, an early woman doctor following in the footsteps of the campaigning pioneer Sophia Jex-Blake. I wrote about Mabel’s training in a previous post; but her career after qualification was no less impressive.

Edinburgh Medical School,pictured in 1906, three years after the graduation of Dr Mabel Gurney 

Her widowed mother Phebe Gurney née Whitchurch, who had supported her medical training at a time when most widows expected their youngest daughters to stay at home looking after them, died soon after she graduated. By 1911 Dr Mabel Gurney was a school medical officer employed by the Cambridge Education Committee.

No doubt that was considered an appropriate job for a woman doctor; but it can hardly have challenged Mabel, for whom the decision at the age of 30 to enter medical school must have been a brave and bold one. She won a bronze medal in her first year for practical anatomy, and had proved then that she was not squeamish about the human body; but far greater challenges lay ahead.

 Australian and Ottoman dead at Lone Pine, Gallipoli, 1915

Mabel came from a Baptist family, for whom duty to God and public service were intertwined. Although she never knew her grandfather William Brodie Gurney, a leading Baptist of his day, his influence illuminated the family for many generations after his death. But she may have been guided even more by the example of a string of strong, active Gurney women.

Among them were her great aunt Martha, a pioneering campaigner against slavery, her great grandmother Rebecca Gurney née Brodie who started a school for local children, and her aunt Emma (my 2x great grandmother) who founded women’s groups. In her own generation her cousin Catherine was awarded an OBE for her work in establishing the first Police convalescent homes and orphanages in Britain. The great social reformer Elizabeth Fry was also a distant Gurney cousin.

Louisa Aldrich-Blake, the first British woman to graduate with a Master's Degree in Surgery

Consequently, when in the spring of 1916 Miss Louisa Aldrich-Blake appealed to the country’s female doctors, Mabel was one of 80 who stepped forward. Miss Blake was surgeon at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital and Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women (founded by Sophia Jex-Blake), and she realised just how overwhelmed the Royal Army Medical Corps was by the scale of injuries being incurred by British forces in the First World War. Indeed, the RAMC itself was suffering heavy casualties – nearly 7000 RAMC medical personnel died in the course of the war.

The notoriously disastrous campaign in Gallipoli was responsible for many of them – a quarter of a million dead and injured on each side of the conflict. Wounded survivors from the allied forces were evacuated to field hospitals in Malta and Egypt, and it was to Malta that Mabel and 47 of her colleagues were shipped in October 1916. There they were joined a month later by a further 33 “lady doctors,” none of them given the rank, uniforms, or ration and billeting allowances granted to every male doctor. 

Soldiers recuperating at Valletta Military Hospital

The women were attached to the RAMC and served principally in four Maltese hospitals – St David's Hospital, St Andrew's Hospital, St George's Hospital, and the Valletta Military Hospital. There they treated the injured of Gallipoli and the unsuccessful Salonika campaign; but they also had to contend with several outbreaks of disease including malaria, dysentery and enteric fever. Mabel’s main role was probably as a surgeon, but she is known to have attended in January 1917 the funeral of one of her colleagues, Isabella Tate, who was in charge of the bacteriological unit in the Valetta Hospital.

Soon after the funeral, Mabel was transferred to Egypt where she remained in service until 1919. Perhaps she administered to my cousin Will Piper of the Imperial Camel Corps, which had been formed there from the remnants of several Gallipoli cavalry units. Will died of pneumonia in an Egyptian field hospital in February 1919, two months before Mabel finally returned to Britain and resumed her post with the Cambridge Education Committee.

I know nothing (yet) of Mabel’s later life. She never married, and died in the same Norfolk parish of Runton in which, apart from the war years, she had lived all her life. 136,000 men were treated on Malta by Dr Mabel Gurney and her colleagues. Women accounted for 80 of the 245 doctors who treated them.

ANNIE MABEL GURNEY (1868-1953) AND THE EDINBURGH SEVEN

At 32 Mabel Gurney, a niece of my great great grandmother Emma Salter née Gurney, seemed to be following the familiar dutiful path of the youngest girl child, remaining unmarried to care for her widowed mother. Her father Henry Gurney, a timber merchant in Cheltenham, died there in 1883 when Mabel was only 14.

Henry Gurney (1818-1883)

At first Mabel and her mother Phebe lived with Mabel’s eldest brother Walter and his family. But in 1901 they were on their own, mother and daughter with a single servant, and I leapt to the conclusion that Mabel was, like so many of my female ancestors, trapped in spinsterdom. The eternal maiden aunt.

Different story altogether, when I looked more closely at the census record. They were no longer in Cheltenham but here, in Edinburgh, at an address only five minutes’ walk from my own. 29 Mansionhouse Road is an elegantly proportioned lodge in a vaguely Greek style, built in 1848 as the Scottish capital expanded to the south in the suburb of Newington. Today it sits on the edge of an area of the most expensive housing in the city called The Grange, large detached houses built by wealthy Scottish merchants and bankers; until recently Fred Goodwin the disgraced CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland lived in the district.

By the time Phebe and Mabel were living there the more densely populated Edinburgh tenements of Marchmont, thrown up in the 1880s, were pressing up against it. Marchmont is home to a mixture of urban professionals and a lively transient student population, and I don’t suppose its character has changed all that much since it was developed 130 years ago.

Elegant urban sprawl: the tenements of Marchmont, with Bruntsfield Hospital beyond - author's home also depicted

And why had they made the move from Cheltenham to Edinburgh? In 1901, at the age of 32, Mabel was herself a student. More than that, she was studying at Edinburgh University’s school of medicine to be a doctor. This was a remarkable ambition for a woman at the time, and her mother’s support for it was a very modern attitude. But Phebe was from a Baptist family, raised to believe there should be no barriers in education in the service of God.

Although Mabel was not the first woman doctor, she was one of the early beneficiaries of those who fought for women to be allowed to study medicine. And Edinburgh was the scene of the battle. In 1869 a group of women known as the Edinburgh Seven were the first to attend medical lectures, by private arrangement and at their own expense in segregated classes, at Edinburgh University.

Their presence outraged many, and caused a riot the following year outside Surgeon’s Hall (opposite my nearest stationery supplier) where they were taking an exam in anatomy. Women, it was felt, should not be expected or allowed to handle the human body. And although they had been allowed to matriculate in Edinburgh University, it was ruled at the end of their studies in 1873 that they would not receive degrees, and – to add insult to injury – that they should not have been permitted to study in the first place.

Surgeon’s Hall, Edinburgh (from Cassell’s Old and New Edinburgh, 1883)

They took their campaign to London, where Sophia Jex-Blake opened the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. A bill placed before parliament in 1876 by a cousin of Henry’s, the MP Russell Gurney (my 1^st cousin 4x removed), made it legal – but still not compulsory – for medical examining boards to treat men and women equally.

Jex-Blake returned to Edinburgh in 1878 and became the city’s first ever woman doctor. She established the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women and the Edinburgh Provident Dispensary for Women and Children. The latter, which provided medical care and education to the poor, became in time the Bruntsfield Hospital, built in the grounds of her home Bruntsfield Lodge (past which I walk my dog every day).

Signs of the times at Bruntsfield Hospital (closed in 1989 and converted into private accommodation)

Female undergraduates were at last admitted to Edinburgh University in 1892, less than ten years before Mabel enrolled there. Jex-Blake’s Edinburgh School had, in political terms, served its purpose and as other avenues for women’s medical education opened up, it closed in 1898. In 1899 Mabel won a medal for practical anatomy, the very subject on which her predecessors were being examined when the riots took place around Surgeon's Hall in 1870. She graduated in 1903, and her career as a woman doctor will be the subject of a future post here.

My own remarkable niece, supported by her remarkable mother, is about to start studying medicine at Edinburgh. She should know about the landmarks physical and historical with which the roads to her place of learning are lined.

Sophia Jex-Blake (1840-1912), first of the first, who assembled a class of women to study medicine in Edinburgh

CATHERINE GURNEY (1848-1930) AND THE OTHER FIVE BABIES (PART 1)

In 1848, year of pan-European revolution in whose turbulent events many of my ancestors were caught up and even played a part, the focus of Gurney attention was much closer to home. 1848 was the year of the “Six Babies”, the birth of six of my great great aunts and uncles.

William Brodie Gurney (1777-1855)

genial grandfather

Brodie Gurney was blessed with, if I've got this right, 62 grandchildren. Like many Victorian patriarchs, Brodie Gurney had produced a large family. From the middle of the nineteenth century, infant mortality figures began to fall, and birth rates also came down as parents benefitted from the greater survival rate. But three of Gurney’s first four children succumbed to measles epidemics between 1810 and 1812. It’s no wonder that he and poor Ann, Mrs Gurney, kept churning them out.

Of his eight surviving children, two were getting married in 1848, so could not properly be expected to be delivering grandchildren just yet. The other six however were doing all that was expected of them.

So for the record, here are those “Six Babies” stats in full:

BABY ONE

Catherine “Katie” Gurney, 6^th of 7 children of Brodie’s eldest son Joseph (3^rd of 4 with his second wife Harriet Tritton). So far I’ve traced her to Harrogate in 1901, where she was the unmarried Honorary Secretary of the Northern Police Orphanage; ten years earlier she had held the same post at the Christian Police Association in London. I think she died at Steyning in Sussex in 1930.

BABY TWO

Arthur Frederick Gurney, 4^th of 8 children born to next in line Thomas Gurney (the last with his first wife Margaret Hanson). Arthur trained as a barrister but entered the church and was minister of Bournemouth Baptist Church in 1881; but by 1891 he was merely the manager of a Mission Hall in Ramsey. I think he died at Tendring in Essex in 1925.

BABY THREE

Florence Emma Jameson, 9^th of 13 children from Brodie’s eldest surviving daughter Mary Ann and her husband William Kingsbury Jameson. Florence never married, and died just short of her 94^th birthday in 1942.

BABY FOUR

Frank Salter, 6^th of 7 children of Emma Gurney and her husband the Rev William Augustus Salter. Frank was a gifted engineer – see my earlier blog about him – who died young in 1888.

BABY FIVE

Herbert Smith, 4^th of 7 children for John James Smith and his wife Caroline Gurney. Herbert doesn’t seem to have made good headway in life; 1n 1891 he was a clerk for a timber merchant, and ten years later, still unmarried, he was living in lodgings and working as a shoemaker.

BABY SIX

Amelia “Millie” Gurney Angus, 3^rd of 10 children born to Amelia Gurney and her husband the Rev Joseph Angus. Joseph was a leading churchman of his day, and his wife Amelia served as foreign secretary of the Baptist Zenana Mission from 1869 to 1893. On her death, Millie and her sister Edith filled the office as joint secretaries. Millie died unmarried at the grand age of 97, in 1945 in Hammersmith.

EXCUSED PREGNANCY

Henry Gurney and his second wife Phoebe Whitchurch, getting married. Henry had 7 children altogether.

Maria Gurney and her first husband the Rev Henry Grey, getting married. Maria had 3 children in total.

More on the Year of Six Babies next week!