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D/DLI 7/7/920/11(11) Watercolour of a nurse tending to a wounded soldier in a hospital, by Captain
Robert Mauchlen, 9th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry c.1917
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Recently a volunteer enquired as to whether Victoria and myself ever
clashed over who did a certain piece of research. While we may have had words over the last
biscuit at teatime, we seem to have developed our own spheres of interest and
even of seamlessly batting research between ourselves to suit our particular talents.
For example: Victoria has a special interest in Prisoners of War, be it
German prisoners in Durham camps or Durham men in camps in Germany or
Switzerland. This led her to the
Hamsterley Parish magazines, looking for mention of the German POWs from Harperley. In addition to what she was looking for, she
found a record of the awarding of the Military Medal to Nurse Spence.
This information she passed to me, as she knows that I am interested in
the role women played during the war and have been co-ordinating the Five
Sisters research. I soon found that
Cissy Spence (also known as Sarah Jane and Joan) received the Military Medal
for calmly carrying on with her work while bombs dropped all around her. The Casualty Clearing Station that she was
stationed at had 250 patients of which 27 were killed and 68 wounded during the
raid. In a piece of quintessentially
British understatement her citation describes this as “trying circumstances.”
The Military Medal was first introduced as an honour in March 1916 and
was awarded to its first female recipient, Dorothie Feilding, in September of
that year. During the war, 135 Military
Medals were awarded to women. Two of
those medals we have tracked down to women from County Durham: Cissy Spence
and Kate Maxey. I wonder if there’ll be
others…
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