LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE GIRLS

How good to read this month’s piece by Maggie Ritchie on

The Glasgow Girls [August 2021]. It is especially interesting to see how, alongside their painting, Eleanor Allen Moore and Norah Neilson Gray contributed so notably to women’s involvement in WW1. Both Eleanor and Norah signed up as Volunteer Aid Detachment members (VADs), Eleanor at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, among many others, were treated for 'shell shock'.

Norah was much nearer the war action at Abbaye de Royaumont in France. She was part of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, set up and led by Dr Elsie Inglis, a pioneering physician and surgeon who faced similar barriers to the Glasgow Girls. But, like them, she didn’t let them stand in her way.

As we know, women’s artwork was largely overlooked at this time. At least the Imperial War Museum commissioned Norah to produce her drawings and paintings from Royaumont. Elsie Inglis was rightly commemorated after her untimely death in 1917, when the streets of Edinburgh were lined by thousands who wanted to pay their respects to the woman who defied the British Army, when she would not accept their advice to ‘Go Home and Sit Still’.

We must not forget these brave and inspiring women.

Fiona Garwood, Edinburgh