Converting a royal residence into a functional hospital presented a challenge

Ineligible for active service, John could do little. He tried to enlist as a medical orderly for the British but the Royal Army Medical Corps turned him down.

By this stage British volunteers were rushing to France: men unsuitable for active service either because of their age or disability and women who wished to dress wounds but had little training in nursing.

Determined to halt the outflow of hopefuls, the British Red Cross stepped in and the War Office gave instructions to limit the number of volunteers.

One pre-war guest at Largie was Granville Bromley-Martin who visited in autumn of 1906, the year of John and Daisy’s marriage. During the first months of the war the Macdonalds, still in touch with Granville, learned that his older sisters, Madeline and Susan, were trying to establish a hospital for wounded servicemen.

While stopping at Vichy in France, a relative noticed a train-load of wounded French soldiers with nobody to care for them. This gave the sisters the idea of setting up a small nursing unit.

Madeline Bromley-Martin was well-connected and one of her contacts was Kathleen Scott, widow of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whose doomed expedition to the Antarctic two years previously was still fresh in the public’s memory.

Enterprise

Lady Scott, who studied sculpture under Auguste Rodin, lent her name to the enterprise. Winning publicity, contacts and money she organised a motor ambulance corps for the hospital.

Once she gained permission for her venture, the redoubtable Madeline Bromley-Martin, raised in Worcestershire where she took piano lessons with Edward Elgar, began to search for suitable staff.

She recruited Emma Maud Banfield, who, as matron, was put in charge of 12 trained nurses. Although many offered their services free, the professional staff had to be paid.

Since initially they received no financial help from the French authorities, money had to come from private donors.

One of them was the author, painter and explorer, Emily Georgiana Kemp, who paid for the nurse’s salaries. Dr Graham Aspland was chief surgeon, while the painter and Slade Art School professor, Henry Tonks, who had trained as a physician, was the hospital anaesthetist.

Providing unpaid support to the staff were 20 volunteers: probationary nurses and medical orderlies.

For the hospital building, the French government offered the Bromley-Martins a remote chateau in Haute-Marne in the village of Arc-en-Barrois, some 60 miles behind the fighting line.

Originally the hunting retreat of the Duc de Penthievre, (a grandson of Louis-Philippe) the chateau was situated in a wooded valley. The river Anjou flowed through this peaceful area. With the premises established, the staff were answerable to the French army’s Service de Santé and could only admit French patients.

Additionally, all hospital personnel had to arrive in France with a personal guarantee signed by the Hon. Arthur Stanley, MP, co-chairman of Britain’s JointWar Committee. With its sizable rooms, high ceilings, large windows and roomy corridors, the chateau was admirably suited for its new purpose.

In early January, 1915, after gaining access, the Bromley-Martin sisters cleared all the main rooms of furniture and brought in beds to create the wards.

Functional

Converting a royal residence into a functional hospital presented a challenge, as the chateau had neither gas nor electric lighting, an adequate lift, hot running water, proper drainage, or efficient heating. However, it boasted a lovely park with three acres set aside for cultivating food for the patients and staff; timber from the woods was used as fuel for the hospital.

On January 27 1915 with a staff of 60, the hospital opened with 110 beds. It served the wounded from the French 3rd Army Corps who fought in the Argonne, a large forested region north of Arc-en-Barrois.

Very quickly men needing treatment inundated the hospital so while the chateau handled severe cases (like septic wounds), a convalescent unit in the village, headed by Miss Kemp (later Susan Bromley-Martin) dealt with less serious complaints.

When John heard from Granville Bromley-Martin about Madeline’s nursing unit, he acted quickly. Hopital Temporaire was too good an opportunity to miss, as it was the only one in France taking voluntary orderlies.

He was a perfect candidate: well enough off to finance his passage and work for nothing, a Francophile, as proved by his exhaustive oeuvre on the country’s history which was about to go to press in 1915. He also spoke French. He not only persuaded Madeline Bromley-Martin to take him on but also won an all-important guarantee from the British Government.

When John arrived at Arc-en-Barrois to act as a medical orderly, stretcher-bearer and ambulance driver, he worked with John Masefield, future poet laureate, who described my grandfather as “very tall, a public school type, stone deaf, who follows me like a faithful dog.”

Another orderly was the Impressionist artist, Wilfrid de Glehn, who arrived at the chateau in early 1915 with Jane, his American artist wife. She drew pastel portraits of the patients to raise money for an artificial limb fund.

I have her drawing, dated December 20 1915, of John: a sensitive study of a middle-aged man in army uniform. Judging from photographs of my grandfather, de Glehn made his neck too thick and chin too dimpled; when I first saw the sketch, I failed to recognise him.

Hopital Temporaire attracted other men and women from the arts. Some were living in France and their response to men mobilising on the Front was to help the country in crisis. Many had few family ties and were perfect candidates for work at the hospital.

Inspired

The poet and art scholar, Laurence Binyon, part of whose poem For the Fallen has become an integral feature of Remembrance Sunday services, lent a hand at Arc.

Some of his most famous poems like An Orderly’s Day and Fetching the Wounded were inspired by his time there.

Artists served in nearly all departments of the hospital: Susan Strong, a Wagnerian opera singer, who ran a shop in Paris selling luxury lingerie, volunteered to cook at the chateau.

The hospital relied on both professional and amateur; John’s orderly colleagues also included an architect, an Oxford don and RC Phillimore, son of Lord Justice Phillimore, who supplied two ambulances, one driven by himself and the other with his chauffeur behind the wheel.

(More tomorrow).

© 2017 Mary C Gladstone, all rights reserved, courtesy of the author and Firefallmedia; available in hardcover and paperback online and from all booksellers.