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

HARRY MASTERMAN (1875-1900) AND THE SECOND BOER WAR

The family of Kent farmers Willie and Maggie Masterman was a remarkable one. Amongst their offspring, my second cousins, were a medical pioneer, a bishop, a marine zoologist, a member of Lloyd George’s cabinet and a successful pulp fiction author (eventually).

The author was the wonderfully trashy Walter Sydney Masterman, who wrote 27 exuberantly fantastical blends of crime and sci fi between 1925 and his death in 1946. Walter was the youngest of the brood of six boys and one girl (who distinguished herself in academia).  The nearest to him in age, only fifteen months older, was his brother Harry, Henry Wright Masterman, and the two formed a close bond as they grew up.

The Masterman boys in 1899

Back L-R: Harry, Charles, Walter

Front L-R: John Arthur, Ernest

They were day boys together at Tonbridge School and both completed their education at Christ’s College, Cambridge, with sporting disctinction. Walter won the Swimming Points Cup at school in 1893, and a football blue at university; Harry was in both the cricket and the football teams at Weymouth College through which he had passed en route to Cambridge. Both also won a half blue in water polo at Cambridge, where in the 1897-98 season Walter was described as “a good half for defensive work and has played useful games at outside right.” After graduating, both played semi-professional football for their local side Tunbridge Wells FC. Walter played in defence, and Harry was centre half for this game against a London Welsh side on 18^th March 1899.

Tubridge Wells FC vs London Welsh, 18^th March 1899

Harry intended to pursue a career in medicine like his oldest brother Ernest. He had already begun his training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in January 1899, two months before the London Welsh match. But the Second Boer War erupted in October that year and both Harry and Walter signed up for service with the Royal Welsh Regiment. They shipped out to South Africa in December.

Like all wars, the Boer War had at its heart a struggle for control over resources – in this case the gold deposits of the Witwatersrand mines. Britain sought to bring the many states in the region into a federation under British control. But the resident Boer population feared a loss of power if voting rights were granted to the larger population of Britons arriving to exploit the mineral wealth of the land. The war began after the failure of negotiations between Paul Kruger, president of the South African Republic, and British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. 

 Paul Kruger and Joseph Chamberlain

The Boers launched pre-emptive strikes against British garrisons and towns and it wasn’t until the arrival of massive British reinforcements including Walter and Harry that the tide began to turn in Britain’s favour. The relief of the siege of Mafeking in May 1900 was an important boost to national morale.

Both Harry and Walter served as captains, but neither was in the front line. Walter was a railway staff officer at Vryburg, where the British built one of the world’s first concentration camps to house Boer women and children in appalling conditions. Harry was garrison adjutant at Prieska, which had been captured from the Boers in January 1900.

Harry Masterman at Prieska, 1900

Walter was invalided out of the Boer War, I think through illness, returning to London on board the SS Assaye in August 1901. Harry alas remained in southern Africa. In November 1900 he died of malaria and meningitis in Prieska, and is buried there. The death of his nearest and dearest brother must have hit Walter hard, unable as he was to be with Harry in his final illness. More than 8000 miles from Tunbridge Wells, less than 300 miles apart in the theatre of war, but not close enough.

Charles, the third youngest of the Masterman brothers, must also have felt the death of his younger brother keenly; he wrote a short story called With Death as my Friend about it soon afterwards. Charles and Walter took over the running of Horsmonden Boys’ School, a run-down establishment in Kent, for a few years in the first decade of the twentieth century; and Walter continued to play football for Tunbridge Wells until 1906, captaining the side for his last three seasons. But the absence of Harry from the field must have been a constant reminder, and I wonder if Walter’s subsequent career, so extremely chequered, was not in part the result of this early loss.

MARY SALTER BROWNE (1823-1906) AND THAT COLONY OF GOD

In 2010 I went to Leamington Spa in search of my great great grandfather’s grave. The local Parks and Cemeteries Department were very helpful and supplied me with a plot number and a map – of the wrong cemetery. I stood there baffled, at the graveside not of Reverend William Augustus Salter but of some other John Doe, until I figured out what must have happened. 

The Parks Department came through however. With no time to post me the right map, they guided me towards the correct cemetery and grave by phone, in the manner of ground crew helping a passenger land a stricken airliner. 

It was not a dignified spectacle. As they zero’d me in on the memorial in question, I got more and more worked up, leaping over other graves and shouting excitedly into the handset – “Yes, I can see a chapel. Yes, I’m on the left hand of the two paths! YES, a pair of yew trees ten yards back on the right!! OH! THERE IT IS!!! HOORAY!!!!” – while scattered groups of bereaved parents and children knelt quietly here and there placing flowers and communing with the dead.

The grave of Rev William Augustus Salter (1812-1879) in Warwick Cemetery

And then I burst into tears. For three years I’d been researching the life of this man who died a hundred and thirty years ago, and here I was, face to face at last with him and his wife and daughter. I hadn’t brought flowers, but I gave them all our news, took lots of photographs and transcribed his inscriptions. I was sad to leave.

On my way back to the car, I happened to pass the gravestone of Mary Salter Browne. She was at that time not a known relative; but Salter isn’t a common name, so I made a note, took more photos and transcriptions, and looked her up when I got home.

The grave of Mary Salter Browne (1823-1906), her mother Mary Browne née Salter (1790-1864) and her niece Emillie Annie Browne (12853-1938)

IN AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE OF 
MARY

WIDOW OF THE LATE
REV T.B. BROWNE

WHO DIED 10^TH DEC 1864 
AGED 74

AND OF THEIR DAUGHTER 
MARY SALTER BROWNE

WHO DIED 14 DEC 1906 
IN HER 84^TH YEAR

AND OF 
EMILLIE ANNIE BROWNE 

WHO DIED 20^TH DEC 1938 
AGED 84 YEARS
REJOICING IN HOPE, PATIENT IN TRIBULATION, 

CONTINUING INSTANT IN PRAYER    ROM XII 12

Mary was a niece of my great horticultural ancestor John Salter of the Versailles Nursery in Hammersmith. Her mother, his sister Mary, married the Rev Thomas Bulman Browne, who died aged only 43 in 1825. Mary Salter Browne, only three when her father died, remained dutifully unmarried to be her mother’s companion, and the household was increased in mid-century by the arrival of her young nieces Alice and Emillie. (One report names a third niece, Charlotte.) 

The nieces’ mother had died young in 1854, and their father soon afterwards emigrated to Australia, leaving his sister Mary in loco parentis. This role she fulfilled with great success, inspiring much love and affection from her “daughters”, who lived with her until her death, just as she had with her own mother.

Mary and her nieces made ends meet, like so many spinsters, as teachers at Beech Lawn College in Leamington of which Mary was principal. Emillie was an art mistress and Alice a gym teacher and “Professor of Dance”. (Charlotte, the only reference to her says, taught English.)

The title page of That Colony of God, the only novel which Alice published under her own name

Late in life Alice blossomed in an entirely different direction, as a novelist. In 1891 she published The Rector of Amesty under the pseudonym John Ryce – the last two letters of her and her aunt’s first names. She followed it with two more novels, An Oath in Heaven (1903) and That Colony of God (1923). I’ve read the opening chapters of Oath – it begins very racily with an accidental murder – and the dedication of Colony (written after the death of her beloved aunt) is “to the dear memory of Mary Salter Browne 1823-1906.” If further evidence of the affection in which Alice held Mary were required, she published their correspondence in 1911 under the title You and I Together Love.

Neither Mary, Alice or Emillie ever married. Alice died in 1936 and Emillie two years later.

Some information here comes from Troy Bassett’s excellent site about Victorian novelists, At The Circulating Library.

This is my 200^th post on Tall Tales from the Trees. Although I don’t have any of Alice’s novels at time of writing, I have inherited many books which have been handed down from father and aunt to son and daughter, nephew and niece through the generations. I am now writing my own book, which pulls many of these articles together in what I hope is a cohesive narrative of a bigger story of the books and the family. It arises from the books they wrote, read and gave each other, and in the more illustrious cases the books of which they were the subject. It also looks at the spiritual zeal for education which drove many generations of my family.