Soldiers’ notes to angel of mercy Alice

In the shadow of her wings
There is rest, sweet rest;
There is rest for Jack and Tom
There is rest from shell and bomb.
In the shadow of her wings
There is rest, sweet rest.

Sgt G Welch, 10th Devonshire Regiment

IN pencil and scratchy ink, the recuperating soldiers wrote little ditties or scribbled little drawings on the coloured pages of a small autograph book belonging to their nurse, Alice Welford.

Many of them were hugely thankful for her ministrations in the field hospitals to which they had been evacuated after they had been injured in some of the fiercest battles of the First World War; quite a few of them confessed that they had fallen in love with the North Yorkshire angel of mercy who tended them in their hour of desperate need.

Welford is your name
Single is your station
Happy be the little man
That makes the alteration

AE Sayer, 21st East Anglian Field Ambulance, December 17, 1915

For more than two-and-a-half years, Alice, the object of their admiration, served in field hospitals around the Mediterranean before, in Iraq on January 15, 1918, her motor launch was sliced in two by a steam tug, and she drowned in the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

She had been born in Crathorne, near Yarm, in 1887. Her father, James, came from a long line of shoemakers, and the family lived in estate properties. Alice was a committed Catholic, and it may have been her faith that inspired her to begin training as a nurse in 1908, when she was 20. Presumably she was in a local hospital but in 1911 she moved to London to train at St Bartholomew’s Hospital – a big, bold and unusual step for any woman in those days, let alone one from a lower social class in a rural community.

She finished training in November 1914 – she came 17th out of 24 in her class, and her reports describe her skills as ranging from “fairly good” to “very good”, although at times she could be “tactless”. Almost immediately she applied for a passport, and to join the Queen Alexandra Imperial Nursing Service.

In June 1915, she was sent to work in the British Military Hospital in Gibraltar to tend to the Australian, New Zealand and British soldiers injured during the Gallipoli landings, and in February 1916, she was moved to St Ignatius’ Hospital in Malta. There were 25,000 hospital beds on the island, and in the month after Alice arrived, there were 20,000 arrivals.

Life must have been hectic, but, according to her matron, Alice’s work as a staff nurse “proved very satisfactory in every way”, and on November 1, she was promoted to “sister”. Her patients continued their positive assessments in their ditties:

Beloved, in the noise of battle here
The thought of thee doth make all tumult cease,
Around my spirit folds thy spirit dear,
In its still strong arms, and girdles me with Peace.

Horace W Weddall

In July 1917, Alice was transferred to Salonika, in Greece, another very busy station where she worked in very high temperatures until her group was sent to No 3 British Field Hospital in Basra, southern Iraq, in early 1918.

About a dozen nurses, including Alice and their matron, arrived in Basra on January 8. “They had been at Salonika and had had a very horrible time after the Dardanelles fiasco,” nurse Marjery Swynnerton, already stationed in the field hospital, wrote later. “The ones I saw were jolly, pretty girls, and everyone was out to invite them to parties and to make a fuss of them.”

Consequently, the commander of the Beit Naana Officers’ Hospital invited the jolly group of about 13 young women to meet his convalescing officers and to take tea on the evening of January 15. Basra is known as “the Venice of the East” – it sits on a network of irrigation canals next to the Shatt al-Arab waterway which takes the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into the Persian Gulf. A motor launch was sent to collect the nurses and take them about five miles downstream to the hospital, which was in Mohammerah (now Khorramshahr) on the Iranian bank of the waterway, and then take them back to their base at the end of the evening.

But, shortly after sunset, their return journey ended in tragedy.

“They never arrived,” wrote nurse Marjery Swynnerton. “Their launch was cut in two by another boat in the dark, and most of them drowned.

“It was my unfortunate task to sit with the half-demented matron, who had been rescued, as the sodden piles of clothing were brought in for identification.”

At least four of the young women – three sisters, including Alice, and a staff nurse – died that night. Alice was 30.

When life’s troubles here are ended
And earth’s paths are no more trod
May your name in gold be written
In the autograph of God.

Pte V Race, East Anglian Field Artillery, December 18, 1915

A Court of Inquiry concluded that the accident was caused by “an error of judgement on the part of the steersman of the launch”, and that the deaths were “accidental”.

Alice is buried in Basra.

A letter informing her parents, James and Mary, of her death arrived in Crathorne on February 1, 1918. It came seven months after they had received a similar letter informing them that their son, John, 26, had been killed fighting near Arras, in northern France.

The two Welford siblings are among five names inscribed on the Crathorne war memorial, on which there is another snippet of poetry, this time written by Rudyard Kipling:

There is but one task for all
For each one life to give
Who stands if freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?

With thanks to Alice's great-great-niece, Pat Robinson, of Northallerton, and to Peter and Valerie Watkins who have researched her story