The wartime editors of the Grey Coat magazine carefully (and very helpfully) recorded news of the doings of Old Greys, arranged by occupation. As I am compiling spreadsheets on each decade of GCH alumni this is a wonderful resource! I found it especially useful when writing a talk about the wartime activities of our alumnae.
The June 1940 (no.52) edition has an entry about Betty Boxall who wrote to the magazine about her work with the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky.
'She writes that she is enjoying the life out there; she and another nurse live in a small wooden house by themselves from which they travel over a big district on horseback doing maternity work and health visiting'
I would never have known about Betty - or the Frontier Nursing Service - if not for this comment.
Betty passed her final State Midwifery exam in 1937 and started work as Staff Midwife at Guy’s Hospital. After passing the Royal Sanitary Institute’s exam in public health she went to Kentucky to join the Wilderness Nursing Service as a midwife and health visitor. I haven’t been able to find out anything about how she came to go to Kentucky, although the service recruited mainly from the UK until after the war, because at the time only British midwives were also trained nurses. I wonder also if she knew how to ride before she went, or learned on the job.
The Serivce had been founded in 1925 by the redoubtable Mary Breckinridge, who saw that the difficult lives of women living in the remote mountains of Kentucky were made more difficult, and dangerous, because of the complete lack of medical care. Being a woman of vision and iron will she founded the service which save the lives of many women and babies. (i)
After a little research, I found to my absolute delight that the University of Kentucky has a collection of papers relating to The Frontier Nursing Service, and their obliging archivist sent me all those related to Beatrice Boxall. (ii)
We now have two of the letters Betty sent to Mrs Breckenridge and her colleagues after her return to England in 1942 to help with the War Effort. She asks about her horse Tommy, anxious to know if he has a new rider
"Has Kermit found a way of keeping him in his stall. I hope not. Tommy loved to get out so much."
Her journey home was long and arduous with 3 months wait to leave the States, each permission seemed to depend upon another. ‘Still’, she wrote, ‘I can always make myself a raft & fly a shirt in the wind.’ When she did get a ship, the journey took 18 days and they picked up some merchant sailors who had been adrift in a boat for 4 days.
"It had been snowing - it was frightful. It was the 4th time for some of them. It was an experience I shall never forget. I don’t think I had realized the seriousness of our trip until we had picked up these seamen."
In her reference the founder of the service Mrs Breckenridge called Betty:
"a woman of the highest integrity ... tactful, courteous and energetic ... fearless in the face of the kind of danger that comes with rough riding over swollen streams and through a steep, mountain country."
There is no picture of Betty that I can find, but this contemporary photo of one of the nurses on her way to a patient, gives an idea of her experiences (iii)
Once she had arrived home, Betty found life very different
"I think by now I must have done all the things a good British citizen does not do. I’m getting tired of explaining that I don’t know any better! I saw some oranges in a shop & thought Whoopee – life isn’t going to be so bad after all – but I was soon disillusioned. You can’t imagine everybody’s surprise at my error, it was priceless. The oranges are for children under 7 years of age so I didn’t qualify. I haven’t been caught since. I also tried to buy a small lettuce – it was presented to me naked! One apparently has to provide the external wrappings oneself – I felt so very silly being faced with a poor little naked lettuce & a queue of people looking on in astonishment."
She learned how to handle an anti-aircraft gun, helped with planting food, and spent several evenings a week on firewatching. She tells her experiences so well
"I must confess it takes me a great deal of time just to exist – getting up and performing my daily duties with the maternity and child welfare scheme & managing to feed myself takes a lot of my time and energy – you see all the restaurants out of the West End close at 5pm – so that you feed then or never, unless you can get someone else to feed you. Of course you can cook your own meals but then you become involved with the shopping (ie standing in a queue for ages at the end of a day’s work when most things have already been sold) Still, we all manage and have enough energy left with which to laugh."
I find this comment particularly poignant
"I often wonder how I should have reacted in the blitz – I only feel half a Briton not having gone through it."
Reading her amusing, thoughtful letters makes me wish I could have known her.
i. https://wednesdayswomen.com/the-mother-of-american-midwifery-mary-carson-breckinridge/
ii. Documents from Special Collections Research Center University of Kentucky
iii. https://frontier.edu/news/holding-on-to-the-star-celebrating-100-years-of-the-frontier-nursing-service-part-1-of-6/
