4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2017
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
During World War One, two British nurses set up a first aid station just a few hundred metres behind the trenches of the Western Front. Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker became known as “the Madonnas of Pervyse”. Mairi Chisholm spoke to the BBC in 1977.
(Photo: Mairi Chisholm (left) and Elsie Knocker. courtesy of Dr Diane Atkinson, author of Elsie and Mairi Go To War)
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0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less searching and a lot more |
0:26.4 | auction. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
0:29.7 | Hello and thank you for downloading Witness with me Lucy Burns from the BBC World Service |
0:34.7 | history told by the people who were there. Today we're going back to the first world war |
0:40.1 | when women on all sides joined him with the war effort. |
0:43.0 | They served as munitions workers, ambulance drivers. |
0:46.0 | They took on jobs left by men who'd gone to fight. |
0:50.0 | But perhaps the most famous were two British nurses who ran a field hospital among the trenches of the Western Front in Belgium. |
1:00.0 | Elsie Nocker and Marry Chisholmism volunteered as soon as war broke out. |
1:05.0 | Marie spoke to the BBC in 1977. |
1:08.0 | My mother said, of course, quite out of the question. |
1:10.0 | She's not going. |
1:11.0 | Anyway, I will not give her a box or anything to put me |
1:14.8 | clothes in, you see. And I went straight up to my bedroom and I got a large bandana |
1:19.7 | handkerchief. And I packed up, spare underclothes, tied it all up in his handkerchief and went out surreptitiously and partly the saables got out I motor bike and rode to Pordingbridge. Intrepid friends Mari and Elsie joined the Women's Emergency Corps, |
1:36.3 | and then they met a doctor called Hector Monroe. |
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