Born: 4 December 1865, United Kingdom
Died: 12 October 1915
Country most active: Belgium
Also known as: NA
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Edith Cavell: the British nurse who taught women the way of the stiff upper lip
Thomas Dixon, Queen Mary University of London
In 1932, Madame Tussaud’s asked their younger visitors to choose from among the waxworks the individual they most wanted to be like when they grew up. The most popular answer was not the kind of figure you might expect. Daring explorers such as Captain Scott and Sir Earnest Shackleton were among the top choices, as were Joan of Arc, and Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. But the winner of the poll was a pious, middle-aged nurse from Norfolk who had worked in Belgium during its German occupation in World War I.
This was Edith Cavell, who had been instrumental in saving the lives of hundreds of soldiers not only by providing them with medical care, but also by helping to smuggle them secretly back home across enemy lines. After her undercover resistance work was discovered by the German secret police, Cavell was tried for treason, found guilty, and shot at dawn by a firing squad in Brussels on October 12 1915, exactly 100 years ago today.
The shooting of Cavell – a woman, a nurse, an icon of feminine care-giving – became an international incident, and was used as propaganda tool in Britain and America to heighten anti-German feeling and boost recruitment. The American artist George Wesley Bellows, in his The Murder of Edith Cavell (1918), depicted the English nurse as something between the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel, almost hovering at the top of a staircase, dressed in white, above a dark scene of the brutality and chaos of war. But from the outset, it was Cavell’s courage and firmness, as much as her angelic goodness, that were emphasised. The combination of selflessness and stoicism – the two hallmarks of the “stiff upper lip” – still strongly appealed, decades later, to the children visiting Madame Tussaud’s.
Cavell’s innocence of the charges of espionage brought against her was an important part of the propaganda message. But in a fascinating recent documentary, former head of MI5 Stella Rimmington discusses evidence suggesting that Cavell was indeed helping to transmit documents and secret information, as well as allied soldiers, back to Britain.
For me, the most compelling segments of the programme are the archival recordings from the early 1960s of women sharing their recollections of working with Cavell, who seems to have been an extremely austere character. Ruth Moore was a probationer at Cavell’s nursing school in Brussels in 1912. She remembered a pale, very thin figure with “practically no sense of humour” – a strict disciplinarian. Cavell would sit at the breakfast table with her watch next to her plate, checking that all her charges were seated by the appointed hour of a quarter past six.
Keep it all in
It was Cavell’s character, especially as it was posthumously represented, that first caught my own attention when I was researching the histories of tears and emotions in Britain. When contemplating the notion of a British “stiff upper lip”, we might think first of men – of an explorer like Captain Scott, or of the famous face of Lord Kitchener on recruiting posters, or of the ideal of manliness expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If–”.
But searching through the literature, journalism and popular culture of the early 20th century, it becomes clear that the admiration of Edith Cavell was just one element of a wider trend celebrating a newly restrained and unemotional femininity. The “stiff upper lip” mentality may have started as the preserve of elite men – especially ones with military connections – but it was soon extended to women too. And Edith Cavell was one of the first British women to be celebrated for her “stiff upper lip”.
Although the immediate public reaction to the killing of Cavell had been one of outrage and grief, this was soon followed by calls in the press for resolve and stoicism. One periodical article complained about the “hysterical outburst” which had followed the execution, interpreting it as “one among many signs of the flabbiness of certain people’s minds”. The piece concluded with the observation that:
Nobody would have been more startled or distressed by the public attitude in the matter than Miss Cavell herself, who, when all is said, died not in the spirit of sentimental patriotism but because she was a firm woman and insisted on the stiff upper lip.
A few weeks later, a poem entitled “Edith Cavell” was published in The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph. Its opening line set the tone: “Weep for her, sigh for her, cry for her? No!” Celebrating Cavell’s exemplary life and death as evidence of how proudly a woman may die, and how close a woman may come to the example of Christ, it continued:
To think on her name is to thrill and to glow –
But weep for her, sigh for her, cry for her? No!
Fight for her, ache for her, wake for her? Yes!
Brothers! This murder is yours to redress!
At the same time as Cavell’s stoical spirit was being invoked in this way in newspapers, her image was used to a similar end on British recruitment posters with the words “Murdered by the Huns”.
Votes not tears
The period in Britain covered by the two world wars was a time when modern women struggled to escape from the age-old idea that theirs was the lachrymose sex – soft, caring, soppy, sobbing, hysterical, and manipulative. This was true in several different spheres, both private and public. Advice columns told women that tears would spoil their looks, annoy their husbands, damage their health, and alienate their friends. Newspapers carried advertisements for products called things like “Dr Williams’ Pink Pills” and “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound” offering women relief from nerve-strain and its attendant tearful outbursts.
The argument for female suffrage also required women to show that they could master their emotions sufficiently to make rational political decisions. Many were certain they could not.
In America, Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress. Her election coincided with President Wilson seeking support for American entry into the war, in April 1917 – the eventual outcome of earlier incidents such as the sinking of the Lusitania and the shooting of Edith Cavell. Rankin was one of a substantial minority of 50 representatives who voted against joining the war. As she explained her reasons, she was reported to have shed tears.
Some of the male representatives wept too, but the press focused on the actions and tears of Rankin. In Britain one article wrote about the “lady member of Congress who, asked to decide between war and peace at the great session, could only burst into tears and say nothing”. A principled pacifist stand, albeit a tearful one, had been recast as a paralysing outburst of feminine emotion.
In this context, figures like Edith Cavell – brave, principled, and coolly unemotional – would be of propaganda value not only in short-term military recruitment campaigns, but also in longer term ones against centuries of gender stereotypes.
Thomas Dixon, Reader in History, Queen Mary University of London
The following is excerpted from Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company.
Edith Cavell, an English war-nurse, head of a nurses’ training school in Brussels, where she attended German as well as Allied soldiers during the European War. In August 1915, she was accused by the German military authorities of Belgium of assisting prisoners to escape, and in October was condemned to be shot by a firing squad of German soldiers.
The execution roused England and France and was commented on throughout the United States.
In England Edith Cavell was henceforth regarded a a martyr, a notable memorial service was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and later a statue of her was erected near Trafalgar Square.
In May, 1919, her body was conveyed to England in a warship, and buried with military honors in her native town.
The following is excerpted from the 1912 supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography, originally published between 1885 and 1900, by Smith, Elder & Co. It was written by Benedict William Ginsburg.
CAVELL, EDITH (1865-1915), nurse, was born at Swardeston, Norfolk, 4 December 1865, the eldest daughter of the Rev. Frederick Cavell, vicar of Swardeston, by his wife, Louisa Sophia Walming. She was educated at home, at a school in Somerset, and in Brussels. In 1888, having inherited a small competency, she travelled on the Continent. When visiting Bavaria, she took much interest in a free hospital maintained by a Dr. Wolfenberg, and endowed it with a fund for the purchase of instruments. In 1895 she entered the London Hospital as a probationer. In 1897 she took charge of an emergency typhoid hospital at Maidstone. Having attained the position of staff nurse at the London Hospital, she engaged in poor law nursing, serving in the Highgate and Shoreditch infirmaries. Subsequently she took temporary charge of a Queen’s district nursery in Manchester. In 1906 she went to Brussels to co-operate with Dr. Depage in establishing a modern training school for nurses on the English system, the best nurses hitherto obtainable in Belgium having been sisters belonging to Catholic religious orders. Edith Cavell was appointed in 1907 the first matron of Depage’s clinic—the Berkendael medical institute—the success of which soon made it of national importance. Shortly before the European War it obtained official recognition, a new and larger building being added to it from state funds. She also organized and managed the hospital of St. Gilles. In August 1914 Dr. Depage went away to organize military hospitals, and Miss Cavell remained in charge. The German authorities gave her permission to continue her work in Brussels, the institute became a Red Cross Hospital, and she and her assistants devoted themselves to the care of the wounded, Germans as well as Allies.
When, in the latter part of 1914, the French and British forces were compelled to retire from Belgium, many soldiers from both these armies were cut off from their units. They hid themselves as best they could, for some, at least, of those who fell into German hands were summarily executed. But many escaped with the aid of the Belgian farmers and peasants. A regular system grew up under which these men were enabled to escape from the country. Miss Cavell was naturally one to whom those who needed aid applied; and she readily responded. Her conduct, careful as it was, aroused. suspicion. Suspicion led to espionage. On 5 August 1915 she was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in the prison of St. Gilles. Nine weeks later (7 October) she was brought to trial together with some thirty-five other prisoners. The charges against all were of a similar kind; the tribunal before which these persons, many of them women, were arraigned was a court martial; the proceedings were conducted in German, though a French interpreter was provided.
During the weeks when Miss Cavell lay in prison Mr. Brand Whitlock, the United States minister in Brussels, was active on her behalf. He wrote to Baron von Lancken, the civil governor of Belgium, stating that he had been instructed to take charge of her defence, and he asked that a representative of his legation might see her. This letter elicited no reply. When Mr. Whitlock wrote again he was told that the prisoner had already confessed her guilt, and that a M. Braun had been engaged by her friends to conduct the defence. In fact the defence was handed over to a member of the Brussels bar, M. Sadi Kirschen, who did everything possible under the circumstances. But, as the event showed, the conviction of Miss Cavell was a foregone conclusion. In accordance with the usual procedure of such courts in Germany, the prisoner was not allowed to see her advocate before the trial, nor was he granted access to the documents in the case. The allegation was that she had enabled no less than 130 persons to escape from Belgium. Merely assisting these men to escape to Holland would have constituted no more than an attempt to ‘conduct soldiers to the enemy’. Under German military law this is not a capital offence. But the confession which Miss Cavell is alleged to have signed on the day previous to the trial stated that she had actually assisted Belgians of military age to go to the front, and that she had also concealed French and English soldiers, providing them with funds and with guides whereby they had been enabled to cross the Dutch frontier.
That such a confession was made by Miss Cavell is probable enough. Nine weeks of solitary confinement, the absence of any adviser who might have insisted that she should put her accusers to the proof of their charges, the conviction that what she had done was morally right, though legally wrong—all these considerations might well have induced her to tell the full story. But for her confessions, however, the capital charge would seem not to have been sustainable. The prosecution appears to have had no evidence that she had succeeded in enabling military refugees to reach England. She stated at the trial, however, that she had received letters of thanks from those whom she had helped to repatriate. In the absence of this admission she could only have been found guilty of an attempt to conduct soldiers to the enemy. Her statement showed that her attempt had been successful. So the penalty was death. The trial ended on Friday, 8 October. At eight o’clock on the evening of the following Monday (11 October) an official of the United States Legation was told unofficially that three hours previously sentence of death had been pronounced on Miss Cavell and that she would be shot at 2 a.m. on the following morning (12 October). Strenuous, but unavailing, efforts were made both by Mr. Whitlock and the Spanish minister to obtain at least a respite. All that they were granted was permission for the chaplain of Christ Church, Brussels, the Rev. H. S. T. Gahan, to visit her before the end, and he brought away her last messages.
Memorials of Miss Cavell have been set up in England and elsewhere. On 15 May 1919 her body was brought to Norwich Cathedral after a memorial service in Westminster Abbey. A statue of her, the work of Sir George Frampton, R.A., stands in St. Martin’s Place, London, to record the price which she paid for doing what she conceived to be her duty.
To many English minds the execution of Miss Cavell was a judicial murder. British tribunals throughout the War avoided passing sentence of death upon women, even when found guilty of the most dangerous espionage. There is no evidence that Miss Cavell was in any sense a spy. She did nothing for pecuniary reward. Charity and the desire to aid the distressed were the mainsprings of her life. But the German military code prescribed the penalty of death for the offence of which she was found guilty. The procedure in this case was the same as that in other courts martial. Deference to her sex and some allowance for honourable motives might have been expected from humane judges. Presumably the judges were afraid to be humane and thought that the obedience of the Belgian population must be assured by severe sentences. The execution then was justified according to German standards. But, if legally justifiable, it was assuredly a blunder. Popular opinion in the allied countries considered Nurse Cavell to be a martyr.