Elsie and Mairi Go to War

by Diane Atkinson

Overview

The incredible story of two courageous and spirited women who were the only female participants to serve on the western front during World War I.

When they met at a motorcycle club in 1912, Elsie Knocker was a thirty year-old motorcycling divorcee dressed in bottle-green Dunhill leathers, and Mairi Chisholm was a brilliant eighteen-year old mechanic, living at home borrowing tools from her brother. Little did they know, theirs was to become one of the most extraordinary stories of World War I.

In 1914, they roared off to London 'to do their bit,' and within a month they were in the thick of things in Belgium driving ambulances to distant military hospitals. Frustrated by the number of men dying of shock in the back of their vehicles, they set up their own first-aid post on the front line in the village of Pervyse, near Ypres, risking their lives working under sniper fire and heavy bombardment for months at a time. As news of their courage and expertise spread, the 'Angels of Pervyse' became celebrities, visited by journalists and photographers as well as royals and VIPs. Glamorous and influential, they were having the time of their lives, and for four years Elsie and Mairi and stayed in Pervyse until they were nearly killed by arsenic gas in the spring of 1918. But returning home and adjusting to peacetime life—and the role of women in British society—was to prove more challenging than even the war itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681770161
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	10/12/2011
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Diane Atkinson was educated in Cornwall and London, where she completed a Ph.D. on the politics of women's labor. At the Museum of London she worked as a lecturer and curator specializing in women's history. She has an MA from the University of East Anglia and is the author of Suffragettes in Pictures, Funny Girls: Cartooning for Equality and Elise and Mairi Go to War.

Editorial Reviews

In the heady days preceding WWI, two thrill-seeking motorcycle enthusiasts chucked their comfortable lives to join a small group of British women providing medical care on the Belgian front lines. Atkinson (Suffragettes in Pictures) utilizes wartime journals, interviews, family genealogies, and a sanctioned contemporary biography to give life to the pair of spirited friends who displayed extraordinary courage and plenty of attitude. Elsie Knocker, 30, was a divorced mother of one, and a trained midwife from a unconventionally broad-minded middle-class background; Mairi Gooden-Chisholm was an upper-class Scottish teenager. Together they found their calling in Pervyse, Belgium, as they drove packed frontline ambulances and nursed wounded soldiers in the midst of shelling and gravely unhygienic conditions. Elsie, unimpressed with visiting Marie Curie, who had created a mobile X-ray unit, effectively employed new, and potentially life-saving, methods of treating the soldiers for shock with simple rest, warmth, and comfort before shipping them to hospitals,. The startling end of the women's friendship remains the subject of speculation. And though the lack of footnotes is lamentable, , Atkinson details the gritty effects of trench warfare while fully celebrating the exploits of two intensely linked young women who benefited hundreds of lives. 14 pages of photos. (June)

Publishers Weekly

It's a lost, antique, opaque England that Diane Atkinson evokes here—fascinating.

Washington Post

indeed, none of this seems to square with the way we’ve been brought up to think of war. The Belgian setting—dotted with Flanders Field and Ypres and Dunkirk, places that now carry such horrific connotations—seemed to these ladies, at least, something of a playground.

Carolyn See - Washington Post

It's a lost, antique, opaque England that Diane Atkinson evokes here—fascinating.

Washington Post

indeed, none of this seems to square with the way we’ve been brought up to think of war. The Belgian setting—dotted with Flanders Field and Ypres and Dunkirk, places that now carry such horrific connotations—seemed to these ladies, at least, something of a playground.

Carolyn See

The many women who played supporting roles to the troops in World War I are scarcely ever mentioned by name in the histories of that war. Atkinson, who has published many books in the UK on the suffragette movement, attempts to right this wrong in her portrayal of these two women, who met as part of a motorcycling club in 1912 and joined the Munro Flying Ambulance Corps when Britain entered the war. They set up an aid station on the Western Front, being among the first nurses to realize that the wounded would be better treated for shock before being shipped to a hospital. Atkinson shows that these two women's courage and dedication brought them fame in Britain, yet once the war ended, each tried to find a place back in traditional society and never quite succeeded. They retreated separately into obscurity and near poverty. VERDICT Because World War I histories that involve a true look at women's contributions are few and far between, this accessible work, acknowledging these important contributions, adds dimension to general readers' understanding of the war. Companion works include Margaret Higonnet's Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War, which is far more rigorous and scholarly.—Maria Bagshaw, Ecolab, St. Paul, MN

Library Journal

History of the only two women permitted on the military front during World War I. Women's-labor historian Atkinson (Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, 2004, etc.) tells the impressive life stories of Elsie Knocker and Mairi Gooden-Chisholm. Elsie was a 30-year-old divorcee in 1914 when she left her seven-year-old son with her parents and convinced her motorcycling companion Mairi to join the war effort. Mairi was an 18-year-old tomboy from a good Scottish family that moved in royal circles. Her mother was horrified when Mairi followed Elsie to the Women's Emergency Corps headquarters in London, where they were recruited by the liberal Dr. Hector Munro for his Flying Ambulance Corps. What began as a post shuttling wounded Belgian soldiers from the battlefield soon became a legacy of work for which they received numerous medals and international fame. The mercurial Elsie liked to be in charge, so she and Mairi, whose more even-keel temperament was a necessary complement, set up their own first-aid post at Pervyse, in northern Belgium. In addition to providing food and friendship, they treated wounded Belgian soldiers on or near the battlefield before carting them to hospitals miles away. This approach, now standard in EMT practice, combined with their perseverance and fundraising savvy, allowed them to become wartime media darlings, the "Angels of Pervyse." Visits from King Albert and Marie Curie and Elsie's second marriage to a Belgian Baron added to the element of glamour that marked their lives in Pervyse. Still, they endured the less-exciting experiences of treating venereal boils, bandaging mangled faces and making due without plentiful supplies of food and water. Their foreign service ended in 1918, when the Germans gassed their post twice, to devastating effect, and both women returned to Britain. Not a page-turner, but Atkinson's balanced account justly gives its heroines their due and captures the jolly spirit with which they carried out their work.

Kirkus Reviews