As a historian of British women in WW1, I was delighted to come across a wonderful photograph album belonging to Mary Muscat, a nurse in Malta. The whole album has been digitised and available to browse online. There is also a very detailed biography of Mary (link below). It is well worth a read,She nursed in two hospitals in Malta during the War. I have added another link, to a website that gives a huge amount of detail about the hospitals.
Mary's life had been well researched and we know a lot about her. However, many of the photographs have named nurses below them; these women are unknown to us. I decided to find out more about their lives before and after the war. What became of them? Did they continue nursing? Marry? Survive the War? I was intrigued and decided to investigate!
Here is my first nurse!
Dorothy Keziah Balderston
Dorothy: Pictured standing, 2nd left
Dorothy was born in Lincoln in 1896. Her father Thomas was a farmer and "horse owner". Dorothy joined the British Red Cross on 7th October 1915. She spent a year nursing in Lincoln, gaining two scarlet efficiency stripes before embarking to Malta in November 1916. She stayed in Malta until May 1918, when she returned to England and continued nursing with the Red Cross at the 2nd Eastern Military Hospital in Brighton, leaving in March 1919.
When I researched Dorothy's life after she left nursing, I discovered that she left the UK for Canada on 23rd May 1921 arriving on 29th May. .To my surprise, I found a marriage in Winnipeg just 3 days later on the 1st June! Her husband, John Louis Sutcliffe had been born in Yorkshire but before the Great War, he had emigrated to Canada, where he worked as a clerk. He enlisted in the Canadian army on his birthday on 29th August 1914. I do not know how the couple's paths crossed. John was a patient in a military hospital at Shorncliffe where Canadian Army Medical Corps were based but I cannot find a link to any of the hospitals that Dorothy worked in.
Dorothy and John had a son and a daughter; the son was in the Canadian air force in WW2 and their daughter, like her mother, became a nurse. Dorothy died in 1936; she had returned briefly to the UK in 1933 - perhaps she was already seriously ill. John remarried in 1938 but the happiness of that marriage was short lived. John had what seems to have been a remarkable military promotion. A private in WW1, he went to France with the Royal Canadian Dragoons and after seven
months service was commissioned in the Imperial Arms. He was in command
of British rearguard at Baku Russia, with only a small handful of men
who were almost out of ammunition but he successfully protected the main
body's withdrawal.
He became a government official after WW1. He volunteered for active service in WW2 on
Sept. 5, 1939.By this time he was a Lt Col. He was captured at the fall of Hong Kong and is thought to
have died of disease in February 1942.He was 44.
By the age of 19 Dorothy had left a comfortable life in Lincolnshire for the harsh life of a VAD
nurse in Malta.. She remained in nursing for 4 years, 2 of them in Malta. Tragically Dorothy died at the age of 40, having returned to England one
more time a few years before she died. Her husband, a soldier in WW1
and WW2 also died at in his 40s in a POW camp.
Within 2 years of leaving the Red Cross, Dorothy had met and married a soldier and left England for good; moving to a country she had never even visited! Her life story surely shows how much the War changed many women's
perspectives, aspirations and experiences in life.
Photo of Dorothy
Copyright
descendants of Carlo Maria Muscat , who was the Agius
brothers and Mary’s grandfather.
These
photos may be downloaded for private use but not used commercially.
https://hkvca.ca/cforcedata/indivreport/indivdetailed.php?regtno=X83#gsc.tab=0
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