Remembering VAD Ethel Dickenson

While this blog is dedicated to the memory of Canadian military nurses who died during the Great War, I have been receiving emails about VADs who also lost their lives while on active service during the conflict. These are a welcome addition to the blog. Colleague David Parsons has sent another note, this time about Ethel Dickenson, a VAD from Newfoundland who went overseas and worked as a VAD, returning home in late 1917/early 1918. According to David, "When the flu epidemic hit Newfoundland, she was a volunteer at the make shift hospital in the Grenfell Hall. She died of the flu in September 1918. A memorial was erected in her memory and to all the women who served during the war." Thanks David for that information. I encourage others who have come across similar information to please share their comments on this blog.

Remembering a Newfoundland VAD

Thanks so much to all those who have already sent me emails of support for my new blog. Some have also posted links to this site. One colleague, David Parsons, has kindly forwarded the information about Bertha Bartlett, a VAD from Newfoundland. Apparently Bertha died in the flu epidemic in 1918and is buried in the Newfoundland plot in the Wandworth Cemetery in London. If anyone has further information about Bertha, please let me know and I will post it.

Welcome to "Finding the Forty-Seven"

I am a writer who has spent the past ten years researching and writing about aspects of women's experience during the First World War. As part of that work I have observed the recent publishing boom in Great War books. Doorstop-size books by John Keegan, Niall Ferguson, and Margaret MacMillan have crowded onto bestseller lists. Biographers such as Dominic Hibbard and Jean Wilson have drawn compelling new portraits of the Great War writers, and memoirists David Macfarlane and Stephen O'Shea have charted their own journeys "back to the front." Novelists have also plowed the fertile fields of Flanders. Pat Barker's Ghost Road series, Sebastien Faulks's Birdsong, and Jack Hodgins's Broken Ground were all critically acclaimed explorations of the war's wrenching impact on the lives of individuals and communities.

With few exceptions, men are the main subjects of these works. Despite a surge of scholarly interest in women's experience of the Great War, most historians and writers have been focusing on the strategies of generals and politicians, and the battles, mud, blood, and anguish of front-line soldiers. Women are usually only present in short chapters or footnotes describing how they nursed the wounded or "kept the home fires burning." Some writers leave them out entirely, making it hard to believe that women of any nationality ever walked on the martial fields of France and Belgium, sold their bodies on the edges of military encampments, or sailed in the hospital ships that plied the Mediterranean.


Recently, documentarians have explored the Great War, with programs such as "Finding the Fallen" making their way onto television screens. While these are wonderful programs that reveal much about the social history of the first war, they are created in such a way that women's experience is often excluded. Evidence of men's bodies on battlefields are used as the basis to trace men's lives and experience at war. Women seldom fell in combat during the first war, so their bodies cannot furnish the basis of programs that seek to reclaim their lives. That's why I've created this blog.

On the fourth day of each month (up until the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War in 2014), I will be posting the story of one of the forty-seven Canadian nurses who died while serving overseas during the first war. Wherever possible, I will provide photographs or other images and as much information about each woman as I can. If you know anything about these women or about other women who served during the war and you would like to share that with others, I would welcome your comments and input.