The R.A.M.C. gleefully decorated the recreation room and polished the floor, and then arrived disguised as niggers, cowboys, or nurses, led by the Sergt.-major dressed as a ‘lady doctor.’
The Sisters, the masseuses, and the orderlies were well known to the assistants at Clarkson’s and Simpson’s, whose shops they ransacked periodically. Every kind of dress was worn. ‘Little Bits of Fluff’ and cavaliers, pages, sailors, officers, ballet girls; early Victorian ladies jostled doctors in Plantagenet costumes, doctors as Turkish houris, as pierrots or as navvies. Colonel and Mrs. Dug-out—the one exuberant in kilt and plaid, with fierce red whiskers; the other clinging and elegant, in lace cap and mittens—received the guests and joined in the dance. The invitation to sit down to supper was greeted with loud cheers by the guests, so was the Colonel’s speech; and the toast of ‘The Hospital’ was drunk with Highland honours and much acclamation. There never were such dances as those. Youth, in its beauty and happiness, was at its best.
No record of Endell Street would be complete which did not mention ‘Keogh Garrett.’ At the age of six months, he sat on the office table, asking for approval: a rather weak puppy, with a beautiful head, neat pointed ears and a manner which won all hearts. Once assured of his position, he grew more attractive every day; and a chorus of praise and adulation was wont to follow him as he passed—a dainty little aristocrat, full of character, full of idiosyncrasies, trotting at the heel of the Chief Surgeon, lying down before those he loved, turning a deaf ear and a white eye to those he did not favour. Affectionate to Sister Lawrence, who massaged his weak forelegs, adoring the Quartermaster, he was reticent and dignified towards the patients, failing to notice their friendly advances, but remonstrating with any man not in khaki or blue who entered the square. Outside, in park or street, he would recognise and run to greet the hospital uniform. To this day a floating veil attracts him, and he will do homage to unknown nurses.
The long hours that his family spent in the operating theatre tried him, and as the afternoon waned, he would come upstairs and lie with his nose on his paw just outside the door. He knew he must not enter and cross that shining surface of floor; but he also knew that it mattered less about the floor if the Sister was at tea. What hours he spent on the table in the office window, watching the lift by which friends came back to his world again; how many muddy footprints he left on official documents, and how many colonels he growled at, from his safe retreat on the blotting-paper!
For the sake of companionship, a little ball of white fluff with the blackest of black eyes and nose was added to the staff; and as they grew older, they became wonderfully possessive. William was every one’s friend—a veritable cupboard lover and wheedler. He had an unsubdued and boisterous spirit.
How naughty they were to the cats of Soho, who sought a refuge in the hospital precincts, and how rude to the Matron’s dog, whose lineage they persistently insulted. On their walks abroad, they excited admiration and constant reference to Buchanan’s Whisky. Elderly gentlemen, tightly buttoned into majors’ tunics, would journey the whole length of a railway car, swinging perilously on the straps, to bend over their guardian and chuckle, ‘Black and white!’ The patients thought they must be brothers, regardless of the difference of breed; and some even thought them the sons of Matron’s ‘Bully’; while the Daily Mail, describing a historic scene, referred to them as ‘Black and white Airedales.’ Garrett had all the dignity and airs of Dog-in-Charge. William was the little friend of all the world, and they accepted their position as the pets and mascots of the hospital.
CHAPTER VII
THE POSITION OF WOMEN UNDER THE WAR OFFICE
In the Spring of 1916, Sir Alfred Keogh called for forty women doctors to replace men in the hospitals of Malta. It was already a well-known fact that the soldier and the woman doctor were compatibles, and the outcry which had greeted the establishment of the Military Hospital, Endell Street, was not repeated. Out of her experience as an army surgeon, Dr. Garrett Anderson wrote to those who were engaged in recruiting these doctors, urging that an effort should be made to secure temporary rank as officers for them, and that they should ask to be formed into a uniformed corps attached to the R.A.M.C. She pointed out that as they were proceeding abroad and were to be distributed among the various hospitals, they would be working with R.A.M.C. officers, and that they would be at a disadvantage professionally if they had not the same status and position as their men colleagues.
Her advice was not taken, and the medical women left England in mufti. They were not graded, nor paid at officers’ rates, but were given a flat rate which made no allowance for seniority. These terms, once accepted, were imposed, in spite of protest, upon all the medical women—except those at Endell Street—who subsequently served in hospitals and camps at home or abroad under the War Office. They did fine work in Malta, Egypt, Salonika, India, and in France with the Q.M.A.A.C. At least four hundred of them gave of their best in the service of the sick and wounded, carrying on courageously and generously, although the conditions under which they had taken service often proved difficult and humiliating.
The Army’s need of women’s service grew greater every day, and the War Office was forced to consider the necessity of introducing them widely into hospitals and camps, as dispensers, storekeepers, cooks, and motor-drivers. In November 1916, a deputation of Red Cross ladies, headed by Dame Katherine Furse, visited the Doctor-in-Charge, to inquire into the work done by women who had replaced men at Endell Street, and to discuss the formation of a new section of V.A.D.’s for general service. The uniform of the Women’s Hospital Corps was highly approved by the deputation as a practical service dress, and when a letter was received asking for the name of the maker, the Doctor-in-Charge thought it advisable to request in writing that it might not be too closely copied. In her reply Dame Katherine Furse wrote: