Letters: This Remembrance day, remember Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker

In all probability then Scotland’s Mairi Chisholm and her friend from Exeter, Elsie Knocker, will be known and remembered by many, or waiting to be rediscovered by the likes of me, since I must admit I hadn’t heard of either until a couple of years ago. But what a story, what lives they led.

Mairi (Lambert Gooden-) Chisholm was born in 1896 to an independently wealthy Scottish family, and by the age of 18, with the family well settled in England, the tearaway Mairi had watched her brother Uailean compete in rallies on his Royal Enfield 425cc motorcycle. Owing much to her father’s liberal attitude, she got her own Douglas motorbike and very soon she was known to be able to strip down bikes and repair them, and thought nothing of honing her driving skills as she sped through the lanes of Hampshire and Dorset. Almost unique and feisty for sure. It was there she met the older fellow enthusiast, Elsie Knocker.

Elsie was some woman for her time! A bit older, born 1884, and by the time the two met, she was (shock horror) a divorcee with a young son, Kenneth Duke. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and knowing of society’s disapproval, Elsie wove a story that her husband Leslie Duke Knocker, whom she’d married in 1906, had died in Java.

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The two women became fast friends, driving fast and competing in motorcycle and sidecar trials together. Elsie would look the part and was regularly spotted wearing a dark green leather skirt, a long leather coat buttoned all the way down and belted round her middle. Despite having been designed by Dunhill, I haven’t been able to confirm she was sponsored by them: I rather think that was just a step too far in those days, even for Elsie. But to keep herself and her young son, she had, amongst other work, trained as a nurse, an important skill in the immediate years to come.

It was inevitable then that come the outbreak of World War One they would want to volunteer.

Mairi undertook her solo journey to London on her Douglas, where her mechanical and driving skills saw her invited to join Hector Munro’s Flying Ambulance Corps. Having done so and in solidarity with her friend, she pushed for Elsie with her nursing and language skills, French and German, to be included. Elsie was still in Hampshire and about to compete in a "ladies reliability trial", but cancelled when she got the call. As early as September 1914, Mairi and Elsie arrived in Ostend with the redoubtable Dr Munro and other volunteers including Dorothy Feilding and May Sinclair.

This was no quiet, gentile outpost and the women were immediately thrown into work: bodies, massacres, the wounded. Driving ambulances, from the front line back to their HQ, the town of Furnes, near Dunkirk, it was not unknown for them to be minus stretchers and to carry the injured between them or even on their backs.

But with their common sense prevailing, and unfettered by the regimented "workings" of war office thinking, both women realised that it would be so much better for the soldiers to be treated as close as possible to where they were wounded and not be driven those arduous miles away from where they were injured on the battle field at the distant front line. Now that was challenging the current practice of the day. Two women, neither a "doctor", with limited war experience and only one a trained nurse. You can imagine that didn’t go down too well.

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What they didn’t know was they were already gaining a reputation for their skills and bravery, with the men, and when they made it known they wanted to pursue this strange, new idea and practice, they were "cut loose" as it were, no longer part of the official war effort. Nothing daunted, they set up their own dressing station, November 1914, called "Poste de Secours Anglais" ("British First Aid Post"), sited literally hundreds of yards from the trenches, in a cellar in the village of Pervyse, north of Ypres.

The plan was simple. Elsie with her medical training to tend/first aid/ there and then and for Mairi to drive the severely wounded a "mere" 15 miles or so back to the nearest base hospital. This was the start of their legend as "The Madonnas of Pervyse", acknowledged as the only women to serve on the Belgian front line, for the duration of the war, with the accolade that by the end of the war they had saved the lives of thousands of soldiers. 

It is no surprise that their unconventional "working" saw them and their actions as being so eccentric they were no longer recognised and in effect, lost their official status and funding.

So what? It could be said they invented the notion of "free lancing". Graphic letter writing home and the canny use of cameras (they were the selfie originators) taking photos of themselves: plucky women, in the mud, beside their vehicles, amidst the horror, the true horror of the injured, the maimed. It is considered that they were the most photographed and recognisable women during the war years. Inevitably, the press took interest, and their work and determination saw them recognised by Belgian authorities and officially seconded to the Belgian garrison stationed there.

Oh and they just happened to be awarded for their work on the front lines and decorated by King Albert1 of Belgium, with the Order of Leopold 11, Knights Cross (with Palm), January 1915, just one of many decorations, awards and medals they were to receive. But you can’t live off medals, even with Palm, so their fundraising "at home" included trips back to Scotland and England with great success.

Elsie’s second marriage, in 1916, giving her the title the Baroness Elizabeth Blackall de T’Serclaes, helped raise profiles and eyebrows even further, but didn’t stop the work or the friendship between the two women. It continued all the way through to March 1918, when gas attacks did finally stop their work, resulting in a return to London. Despite being told not to return, it was no surprise that they did, and barely escaped with their own lives following another gas attack. The records show they had left before the Armistice. But not before their status as Madonnas was so well known not just by the thousands they had treated and saved, but by their colleagues, soldiers’ families, friends, governments and royalty.

Sadly, the friendship between the two didn’t survive. Remember Elsie’s first husband, who hadn’t died in Java? Well, when the truth emerged the second marriage fell apart, but Elsie retained the right to the title. Mairi, however, was so shocked at the deception, the two barely spoke or communicated again.

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There is so much written about them, including books about those their astounding contributions and continued trailblazing: Elsie joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force at the outbreak of World War Two and was twice mentioned in despatches. She died aged 93 of pneumonia and senile dementia, long after her only son, who was killed in World War Two. And Mairi Lambert Gooden-Chisholm of Chisholm? Her health had suffered very badly, as you can imagine, and motor cycling never lost its thrill in the immediate post-war years, but eventually it too had to stop, at least competitively. She was visiting family in Nairn in 1920, at the "doctor’s orders" with some hope of a quieter, more gentile life. She met and made new friends and made thus began another whole new career, setting up a poultry breeding farm. She died of lung cancer on August 22 1981, aged 85, in the home she had shared with her friends for almost 60 years.

So when we think we invented the selfie, made use of the press, to generate interest and "promotion", perhaps not.

Elsie got a blue plaque not all that long ago, put up in her home town. Rather fitting, don’t you think? But like many others, Mairi has to be remembered and recognised in different ways and surely not just on certain Sundays. To them and all the others, we owe so much.

Selma Rahman
Edinburgh