Inside history

London, 1915-19

Take a look at the Endell Street Military Hospital

The Endell Street Military Hospital was the only one of its kind to be entirely run by women, with female doctors, nurses, surgeons and orderlies

— all of them campaigners for women’s rights.

Over 26,000 patients were treated at the hospital, including soldiers wounded during World War

I and those infected during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19.

The hospital was founded in May 1915 by doctors Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. Garrett Anderson — Millicent Fawcett’s niece — had previously been sent to prison for smashing a window during a protest while Murray was known for treating militant suffragists recovering from hunger strikes. They realised that they would struggle to get approval to open a military hospital so they approached the French instead, who were known to be more liberal, and established one in Paris, followed by another in Wimereux.

The success of the French hospitals, under the Women’s Hospital Corps, won the British authorities over. The War Office gave them a former workhouse, St Giles Union, in London’s Covent Garden. It was ideal because of its large size and proximity to major railway stations, so convoys of casualties arrived for treatment.

While the hospital was critical to treating the war-wounded, Garrett Anderson and Murray understood that it was also the perfect propaganda opportunity for the suffrage movement. Its success proved that women were just as capable and therefore as equal as their male counterparts.

A banner with the suffragette motto ‘Deeds

Not Words’ hung above the stage in the hospital’s recreational room. When the Representation of the People Act was passed in 1918, giving women over 30 the right to vote, a flag for the Women’s Social and Political Union was also hoisted in the hospital’s courtyard in jubilant celebration.