Author: Charlie Forman

The women staffing Endell Street Military Hospital were closer to the Western Front than their Covent Garden address might suggest. Many of the hospital trains bringing troops from the south coast ended up within walking distance. At Waterloo or Charing Cross stations wounded soldiers were transferred to fleets of waiting ambulances. Proximity meant ambulances could do a quick turn-round. But it also offered near immediate surgical attention for the most seriously injured patients. So each time the Endell Street bell rang to announce another convoy of ambulances, staff scrambled to help move men – often with serious abdominal, cranial and orthopaedic wounds – from ambulance to ward as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Through the war, the army’s logistical connections with the London hospitals improved. When war broke out, London was entirely unprepared. For the first wounded soldiers arriving at Waterloo from Mons in August 1914, there were only enough ambulances for officers. Other ranks were left on the station concourse until 15 horse drawn Lyons bread vans were rustled up to take them to Whitechapel’s recently alerted London Hospital. Come the Battle of the Somme in 1916 there were fleets of hospital trains waiting. But for the 35,000 wounded on the Somme’s fateful first day- the highest casualty figure in British history – most of the trains were inexplicably in the wrong place. Ensuing delays caused many fatalities and extra complications for the surgeons waiting in London’s hospitals. Yet by June 1917, it was said that a soldier injured in the dawn assault on the Messines ridge might be in a London hospital that same night.

During the war there were 350 military and auxiliary hospitals in London. But it would be a mistake to see Endell Street as just one among the many. Very few had Endell Street’s operating capacity to handle arrivals straight from the front. In the vanguard were the five ‘general’ hospitals. Often planned, like Endell St, with 520 beds some were able to expand into surrounding open space creating wards out of single storey wooden huts. The one in Wandsworth even built a bespoke railway station. Endell Street’s very central constrained site prevented this. Instead they set up three convalescent hospitals in the suburbs for 250 patients. This increased throughput in the main hospital to the extent that each bedspace treated an average of 50 patients during the hospital’s 4 year life, accounting for 26,000 discharges in all.

Most of London’s auxiliary hospitals provided this second stage recuperative care, while some specialized either by medical condition or by the nationality or rank of the patient. (Officers were far more likely than other ranks to get a London bed). Measured by throughput, this leaves Endell St as one of the ten biggest military hospitals in London.

Plenty of other women made notable contributions in helping the war wounded. The women of Endell Street stand out as being an organisation of professionals, harbingers of women’s future role in the health service. Most of the others were in the thinning tradition of volunteers – donating their time, money and even property to the cause. Many of the hospitals were staffed by nurses from the Voluntary Aid Detachments. It is thanks to Beatrice Dent (nee Dimsdale), appalled by those scenes at Waterloo station in 1914, that money was raised from City institutions to pay for an adequate ambulance service. Meanwhile, more than a dozen aristocratic women donated their London town houses to become hospitals ‘for the duration’.

But as Queen Alexandra visited Endell Street in 1917 it is worth conjecturing whether the workforce would have been pleased or dispirited to know that it would take exactly 100 years for the number of women doctors to equal the number of men.