The_Poppy_March_2012.pdf - The Western Front Association

Millicent Duchess of Sutherland Ambulance
by Bridgeen Fox
Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, was born in Fife on 20th
October 1867 and married Cromartie-Leveson Gower in
1884, when she was just seventeen. In 1892 she became the
Duchess of Sutherland. She was a society beauty, a successful
London hostess, whose portrait was painted in Stafford
House by John Singer Sargent. She was an omnivorous
reader, wrote fiction which included a book entitled ‘ Seven
Love Stories,’ published by Heineman in 1902 and her war
memoir, ‘Six weeks at the War,’ published in 1915 by A.C.
McClurg , 1915.
She was a serious activist for social reform and one of her
projects was to form a technical school in Golspie, Scotland,
but she will probably be best remembered for establishing,
in 1896, the North Staffordshire Cripples’ Aid Society, a
charity with the aim of training a number of crippled boys
in North Staffordshire and teaching them a trade, ‘generally
assisting them to obtain a living when, by reason of their
misfortunes, they are disqualified from doing so through the
usual channels.’ In 1902 the Guild began to do practical silver
smithing and was soon producing handicrafts of a very high
standard in the Arts & Crafts Movement.
Her Involvement in philanthropic schemes at home was
interrupted when war was declared on 4th August 1914.
Millicent had persuaded the French Minister of War to
exempt her from those regulations forbidding foreigners
from serving in French hospitals. She had also enlisted the
Portrait of Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland
1904 by John Singer Sargent
help of Winston Churchill in overcoming entrenched Royal
Army Medical Corps opposition to her plans.
At the time British organisations, individuals and groups
of friends, gave lavishly of funds, stores and the services of
trained nurses to the French, Belgian and Serbian Allies and,
by 17th August 1914, Millicent had installed an ambulance
with eight trained nurses and a surgeon, Mr Oswald Morgan
of Guys’ Hospital, in Namur. This became the No.9 Red Cross
Hospital (Millicent Duchess of Sutherland’s Ambulance)
and it was established in the Convent of Les Soeurs de Notre
Dame. On 22nd August 1914 German forces attacked Namur
and the hospital was inundated with wounded soldiers. In her
book ‘Six Weeks at the War,’ which is really a diary, she gives
a graphic account of her experiences on that day:
45 soldiers were brought wounded mostly by shrapnel but
a few were bullet wounds which inflict terrible gashes but
if taken in time rarely prove mortal. The wounded were
all Belgian – Flemish and Walloon or French, many were
Reservists. Our young surgeon, Mr. Morgan, was perfectly
calm and so were our nurses. What I thought would be for
me an impossible task became perfectly natural: to wash
wounds, to drag off rags and clothing soaked in blood, to
soothe a soldier’s groans, to raise a wounded man while he
was receiving Extreme Unction, hemmed in by nurse and a
priest, so near he seemed to death; these actions seemed
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