Scottish nurse Mairi Chisholm was born 26th February 1896 in *Nairn.
*Wiki have her as born in Buckiingham, but have a proviso saying the section needs verified, what is known is that her father was Captain Roderick Gooden-Chisholm, and Chief of Clan Chisholm, her connection as a Scot therefor stands wherever she may have been born.
Mairi's family were independently wealthy and when she was a child, the family moved from Scotland to Dorset. As a teen, she witnessed her older brother, Uailean, who owned a Royal Enfield 425cc motorcycle, competing at rallies and at the Bournemouth speed trials. Around this time, and against his wife’s wishes, her father bought her a Douglas motorbike. Chisholm spent hours in the family stables stripping down the bikes and repairing them. She was just 18 years old when, while roaring round the Hampshire and Dorset lanes, she met thirty-year-old Elsie Knocker, a divorcee and mother of a young son. They became fast friends and soon began competing in motorcycle and sidecar trials together.
When war was declared in 1914, Knocker wrote to Chisholm that there was “work to be done”,and suggested they go to London to become dispatch riders for the Women’s Emergency Corps.Chisholm rode her motorbike all the way from Dorset to the capital. It was while acting as a courier in this way that she was spotted making hairpin corners in the city by a Dr. Hector Munro. Munro was setting up a Flying Ambulance Corps to help the Belgians who had been caught unawares by the German invasion and invited her to join his team, as she describes in a June 1976 interview:
“Munro was deeply impressed with my ability to ride through the traffic. He traced me to the Women’s Emergency Corps and… said, ‘Would you like to go out to Flanders’ and I said 'Yes, I’d love to’.“
Both she and Knocker ended up in Belgium as part of the corps. The sense of adventure the two women shared led to them spending an incredible four years the wounded on the Western Front.
Mairi and Elsie set up a medical post in the cellar of a house in Pervyse.
Their bravery and the physical and spiritual benefits which they brought to the wounded would lead the Belgians to refer to them as the 'madonnas of Pervyse’.
The photos are of Mairi, the other woman with her is her friend Elsie Knocker.
Read more about Mairi and her friend here
Two British nurses endured misery at the Flanders frontline during World War One helping Belgian troops, the BBC's Rachel Hosie reports.
