Silent in an Evil Time (4 page)

The job was as night superintendent at the St. Pancras Infirmary in the middle of London, and it called for enormous stamina. Apart from the physical demands that went with working through the night and trying to sleep in the daytime, Edith treated the most impoverished and desperate patients. St. Pancras was a Poor Law Institution, dedicated to serving the penniless people of the community. As ever, Edith was attentive and sympathetic to those in her care.

When she won a better paying job two years later, it was once again in a Poor Law Institution in London, this time at the Shoreditch Infirmary, where she was made Assistant Matron. Among her patients at Shoreditch,
Edith became a favorite of the costermongers – traders who sold all sorts of goods from carts, which they pulled through London's streets. Costermongers wore clothes embroidered with pearl buttons, and they entertained their customers with jokes and funny patter. Despite the colorful costumes and outgoing personalities, costermongers lived difficult lives, working long days exposed to every illness. When they entered Shoreditch for medical treatment, they asked for Edith, the Assistant Matron who treated them with humor and compassion.

After four years at Shoreditch, Edith resigned to take a four-month trip through Europe with a nurse named Eveline Dickinson. It was the longest holiday of Edith's life, and when she returned refreshed, she got a temporary position as a nurse in one of the clinics known as Queen's District Homes in industrial Manchester, a city in the Midlands. Many of her patients were poorly paid miners who had been injured in accidents down in the mines. These men adopted Edith as their favorite, just as the costermongers had at Shoreditch. Someone who knew of Edith's work with both groups gave her a title that everyone in Manchester picked up. Edith was known as “the poor man's Nightingale.”

When the Matron at the Home fell ill, Edith was appointed to fill the job until she recovered. But Edith knew that whatever position she had at the Home was temporary. She could be out of work at any time. Since she was already forty-one years old, she worried about her future. Surely, she thought, she had shown enough talent as a nurse to win a steady position in a respected hospital. Over the years, she had applied for senior jobs at three or four hospitals, but she just missed out – the second choice on everyone's list. In Manchester, she was growing frustrated.

Then, unexpectedly, from a place she had never thought of, the perfect job was presented to her. It was to change Edith's life.

Dr. Antoine Depage of Brussels was often difficult and demanding, but he was a medical pioneer and visionary. Not only did he open the first institution in Belgium to train nurses, but he had the foresight to hire Edith as the first Matron.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

D
r. Antoine Depage of Brussels envied England's nursing system. A surgeon who ranked among the finest in Europe, Depage was brilliant and obstinate, and did not suffer fools gladly. Among the fools, in his opinion, were Belgium's nurses. Catholic nuns provided the care in the country's hospitals, and though the nuns had the best of intentions, their skills belonged in the dark ages of nursing, before Florence Nightingale brought enlightenment to the profession.

Dr. Depage was determined to raise Belgian nursing standards. He wanted his nurses to match the levels in care and knowledge of those in England. As a start, he decided to open Belgium's first training clinic. One thing that Depage insisted on for the new clinic was a Matron who had three qualifications: She must be English; she must speak fluent French; and she must have taken her training at one of England's great hospitals.

A young Brussels housewife named Marguerite Graux knew the very person who could meet each of Depage's requirements. Marguerite's maiden name was François. She was the oldest of the four François children in the household where Edith had served as governess from 1890 to 1895. The children never lost touch with their dear Edith Cavell, and Marguerite knew all about Edith's nursing career. She praised Edith to her mother-in-law, Madame Charles Graux, who happened to be president of the Ladies Committee that was helping Dr. Depage in launching his teaching clinic.

Among the upper classes, Brussels seemed a small town where everybody knew everybody else. The François, Graux, and Depage families moved in the same social circles, and through the connections, Dr. Depage soon learned all about Edith. He offered her the Matron's job. Edith was surprised and ecstatic, and in the middle of September 1907, she arrived in Brussels to take up her position at Dr. Depage's pioneering clinic.

Depage opened the clinic in four adjoining three-story houses on Rue de la Culture, in the Brussels suburb of Ixelles. It was only a short walk from the medical clinic where he carried on his practice. Edith and Dr. Depage assigned the houses to different uses. Number 143 became the living quarters for the nurses in training. Number 145 was divided into wards of five beds each, plus six single rooms for private patients. Number 147 underwent conversion into an operating theater and lecture rooms, in addition to providing beds for patients. Number 149 included wards on the upper stories and Edith's rooms on the ground floor. She had a small office and an even smaller reception room at the front; a kitchen, a sitting room, and a bedroom at the back.

Since Edith's responsibilities as Matron left her little free time, she hired a maid to look after the domestic chores at 149. The stocky middle-aged maid was named Marie – no record survives of her surname – and she was the kind of hard worker that Edith appreciated. Marie was German. Seven years later, once the First World War had broken out, Maries presence in the clinic would become a major problem for Edith. The question of Marie and her loyalties would cost her many sleepless nights.

The clinic in Brussels, where Edith served as Matron for eight years, occupied four adjoining houses on Rue de la Culture. Her office and living quarters were on the ground floor of number 149.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

In October 1907, while Edith was still figuring out how to run the clinic, five young women enrolled, becoming the clinics first trainees. Edith felt great pride in welcoming them to the new facility. These five, and all the
other women who soon followed, signed up for five years of training. The first three years were to be spent attending lectures and nursing patients who came to the clinic, and in the final two years, the nurses were to be sent out as working student nurses in Belgian hospitals and private homes. At the end of the five years, the clinic would present the graduating nurses with diplomas, which qualified them for nursing positions in medical institutions throughout the country.

The clinic thrived from the start. Each year brought more young women keen to learn about nursing under Matron Cavell. By 1912, sixty nurses were at different stages of training. Besides Belgium, they came from France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and even England.

“The Belgian school of nursing has been an entire success,” Dr. Depage reported in a speech to the International Congress of Nurses in Cologne, Germany, in 1912. Then he listed all the places in Belgium where Cavell-trained nurses provided services: three hospitals, three private nursing homes, twenty-four communal schools, and thirteen kindergartens. Depage's speech drew a rousing ovation.

Edith ran a happy clinic. She set high standards, and at times, she could be severe in enforcing them. Like Eva Luckes at the London, Edith cracked down on nurses when they flirted with the doctors who treated the clinic's patients. This was a rule that puzzled the European nurses, who thought of themselves as more sophisticated than the English in matters of the heart. But the nurses found little else to complain about in the generous atmosphere that Edith created around the clinic.

The smart uniforms, which Edith helped to design, set the tone. The nurses wore blue cotton dresses, with long skirts and long sleeves. White aprons went over the dresses, and the caps were white and perky in a style called Sister Dora. These uniforms were a big leap forward from the dark and heavy robes that the nursing sisters wore in Belgium's hospitals. Edith said in a speech that the difference in clothing was “a contrast of the unhygienic past with the enlightened present.”

Edith and her staff of senior nurses at the Brussels clinic wore plain but appealing uniforms. Such smart outfits were previously unknown in Belgium's hospitals.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

Edith never missed a chance to pass along a piece of her personal philosophy to the nurses. Once, during a lecture – Edith was a clear and enthusiastic teacher – a spider crawled across the floor. A student nurse raised a foot to crush it. Edith stopped her. “A woman does not take life,” Edith said. “She gives it.”

The tea parties were another custom that Edith adopted from Eva Luckes. Luckes gave them every week for her nurses at the London, and so did Edith in Brussels. Luckes invited the young women into her sitting room, where she poured cups of tea and kept the conversation lively. Edith went a step further. She joined the nurses in their rooms, in the house at 143, for musical evenings. A piano was installed in the nurses'
quarters, and when enough of the young woman were off duty, they gathered at the piano to sing and play Edith joined in, and none of the nurses felt awkward in their Matron's company Clara Bohme, one of the first five nurses to join the clinic, said, “We were more like a family than anything else.”

Edith kept two dogs as pets – one a Belgian sheepdog named Jackie and the other a mutt named Don, both born in 1909. Don died about six years later, while Jackie lived much longer. Edith had taken Jackie in as a stray, and he became his mistress' devoted companion. Later, in the time of Edith's work with the escape organization, Jackie accompanied her whenever she left the clinic on risky errands. Edith thought the Germans would never imagine that a middle-aged woman walking her dog could be up to anything suspicious.