A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Read online

  Despite their differences in age and financial standing, Flora and Emily found they had much in common. Thoughts of courageous work for the Allied cause were, for the moment, far from their minds and both were determined to enjoy their trip, come what may. And enjoy it they did. “Miss Saunders lost her purse and Americano her reputation – neither ever found again,” wrote Flora in her diary as they travelled through Italy.20

  Flora and Emily’s disregard of proper decorum (and numerous shopping trips) soon incurred the disapproval of their stolid and duty-bound colleagues. When they missed their ship due to a “mistake” at their next stop, Corfu, the other nurses simply left them behind. After they rejoined them in Athens, they did their threadbare reputations even more damage when a bouquet arrived for them from a war correspondent they had befriended. It “nearly caused a battle”, recorded Flora. Undeterred, they spent the evening in his company and that of “sundry others”, being driven about in the balmy heat of a late summer’s evening. The other nurses were so scandalized by Flora and Emily’s escapades that the following day they would barely speak to them. There was an “awful frost after last night”, Flora noted tersely in her diary.21

  From Athens the women made the short journey to Piraeus, its busy, industrial port. There they boarded a filthy Greek cattle steamer and piled into one large cabin. The ship travelled north through the Aegean Sea, past the scenic Greek islands, straight into the heart of a raging thunderstorm. “Of the eight who were in one cabin, all were ill; half of them were lying on the floor, and the rest in the bunks,” recalled nurse Ada Mann, from Dartford, Kent. “Some of the bunks were full of rainwater. The luggage, which was on one deck, was piled in confusion, large trunks on top of small bags, etc., smashed and broken, and everything was soaked and spoilt in water.”22 Thirty-six hours later, they arrived. “I never want to do another journey like it,” commented Flora abruptly.23

  Flora and Emily’s first experience of Salonika was brief. They were overwhelmed more by a sense of relief at having reached the horseshoe-shaped harbour than by the awe that so many felt upon arrival. From the sea, the town was imposing. Graceful white minarets vied with the cupolas of Greek Orthodox churches against a backdrop of rugged hills. Along the modern quayside, dominated by the fortress-like White Tower, hundreds of brightly painted fishing boats were moored, overlooked by hotels, restaurants and cinemas. Once the women stepped shakily ashore they were ushered past the crowded quay and through its narrow, dirty streets to a hotel. This time even Flora collapsed into bed. The shops would have to wait, she thought to herself.

  It was now nearing the end of August. After one night’s rest in Salonika the women caught a slow train north that took them alongside the marshland that bordered the muddy waters of the Vardar River, over the arid plains and low hills of Macedonian Greece and through the mountains of southern Serbia. They stopped overnight in Niš, Serbia’s second largest city, to receive their orders from Colonel Subotić, the Vice-President of the Serbian Red Cross, then climbed back aboard a train for the final leg of their journey. Early in the morning of 29th August, the women clambered off the train at Kragujevac, a town that was rapidly becoming a main hospital centre by virtue of its position astride transportation routes.24 Sixty miles south of Belgrade, it was also the closest town of any size to the fighting in the north-west. Although the journey had taken them fourteen long days, they had defied the predictions of those who had told them they could never do it. Their success, praised Flora, was due to the “pluck and perseverance” of Mabel Grouitch.25

  Chapter 2

  Antebellum

  1876–1914

  “I was the youngest, and the only one to disgrace the family, at least according to my brothers, by being born in England,” said Flora, when asked about her childhood.1 The granddaughter of the Bishop of Cashel, she came from a Protestant Anglo-Irish family from Cork who, while not wealthy, were comfortably off. Her father, Samuel Dickson Sandes, was educated prestigiously at Eagle House School in Hammersmith, Rugby and Trinity College Dublin and eventually followed in his own father’s footsteps by graduating from theological college, although he did not succeed in mirroring the latter’s success. In 1856, he married Sophia Julia Besnard, the daughter of a prominent Cork family of Huguenot origins with eccentric connections. Sophia’s first cousin was Sir Samuel Baker, explorer of the Nile, who, when his first wife died, simply purchased another at a Bulgarian slave market. His brother, Valentine Baker, was convicted of assaulting a woman on the train to Waterloo. After serving a short prison term, he transferred his career to the Turkish and Egyptian armies, where previous convictions for sexual assault were no impediment to promotion.2

  Sophia and Samuel’s first child, Stephen, was born the year after their marriage, in 1857. Sophia, Mary (known as Meg), John, Sam, William and Fanny followed at two-year intervals. In 1874, seventeen-year-old Stephen died at sea on a voyage to Melbourne, Australia.3 His death affected the family deeply and the first child to be born to one of his siblings, Sophia’s son, was named after him. Flora’s birth, two years after Stephen’s death and seven years after the arrival of Fanny, the next youngest, had all the signs of being unplanned. She was born on 22nd January 1876, in the Parish of Nether Poppleton, County of York, where her fifty-four-year-old father was rector for a couple of years. Her mother was forty-three. The family had left Ireland for good four years earlier after being caught up in the rising tide of violence against the Anglo-Irish community. “On the night of 23rd December 1867 the fenians burned us out,” recorded Flora’s father in his sketchy diary.4 Her parents had clung on to their home for a further five years, before joining the throngs of Protestants to cross the Irish Sea to Britain.

  Flora’s early life was unusually unsettled, which may at least partly account for the wanderlust that would characterize her adulthood. Her father’s attempts to establish himself in several parishes clearly failed, although the reasons remain unclear. In 1878, having failed to find a permanent job, he advertised in the English press. “A clergyman, for upwards of twenty years a vicar, is willing to serve as curate without any remuneration,” he wrote, evidently worried about finding a permanent home for his large family.5 His appeal does not appear to have met with great success, as he moved his unwieldy household at least five times in the following years, including a spell in Boulogne in France.

  The family made the best of it in each of the towns and villages that provided them with a temporary home. They organized fêtes to raise funds for improvements to their parish church, allowed the parishioners free use of the glebe meadows for games of lawn tennis, cricket and quoits, ran the Sunday school and church choirs and held Christmas parties for the local children.6 All members of the family were drafted in to help. At a concert organized in Monewden, Suffolk, in 1881, several members of the Sandes family took a turn on the stage, along with a succession of local talents. Even Flora, “a young lady not yet six years”, was pushed forward to sing her own composition, the ‘Floating Scow’. Her efforts were “vociferously applauded and encored”, recorded a local paper.7 When they left each parish, their departure was marked by genuine sorrow. “They have, by their courtesy to all and extreme kindness to the poor, won the esteem and affection of its inhabitants,” wrote one paper in tribute.8

  In 1885, when Flora was nine years old, the family finally settled in Marlesford, Suffolk, when her father found a position as rector of its small church dedicated to St Andrew. The rural village, set on a stream amid rolling land, was small but not isolated. At the time they arrived it had a population of nearly four hundred, most of whom made a comfortable living from farming. The village was important and prosperous enough to boast its own small railway station, which allowed its residents to travel easily to other towns in the district as well as to London. It was even big enough to support its own grocer, blacksmith, bootmaker and “thatcher and vermin killer”. The Reverend Sandes took charge of its low, twelfth-century grey-stone church and moved his family into th
e adjacent rectory, an elegant, cream-coloured house of high ceilings, large windows and many fireplaces.9 Its inhabitants, who lived along its quiet lanes in two-storey stone, brick and painted cottages, soon came to know the Irish rector, his wife and their many children.

  Flora’s childhood in the village was a happy one, spent amid a close-knit tumble of family members, parishioners and various pets, including the improbably named Womary Tizey the cat, and Dicky the dog. Like all families of their standing they also had servants, although they managed on the bare minimum for a household of their size, employing only a young female cook and parlour maid when Flora was very young, and later a sole “ladyhelp”.10 The activities of the family were centred on the village and the Reverend Sandes’s position as rector. Flora’s sister Meg described a comfortable, carefree and happy existence of “frequent trips to [nearby] Framlingham and Ipswich, much walking, visiting the sick and elderly, and village activities in the tithe barn adjacent to the rectory”.11 The girls were home-schooled by governesses and Flora was later sent to finishing school in Switzerland, while her brothers attended public school and university. It was an education designed by the standards of the day to turn her into a well-rounded but leisured young lady, able to manage a household, play an instrument – in her case, the violin – paint and attract a suitable husband. Crucially, it catered to her aptitude for languages. By the time she left the school she could speak both French and German, skills that would in the coming years prove vitally important.

  Flora read avidly and developed an early preference for heady tales of imperial glory and far-flung adventure, which fired her desire for excitement and to see the world for herself. While other girls of her age and standing spent their hours practising sewing, painting and dreaming of their wedding day, Flora immersed herself in Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, wondering what it would be like to be “Storm’d at with shot and shell”. As she grew older, she spent long hours in the rolling Suffolk countryside galloping through the lanes on horseback, imagining that she was rushing into battle against the Russians at Balaklava, all the while practising her field skills by shooting rabbits. Her choice of reading material also reflected the obsession with travel that took hold of her from a young age. From the time she was a child she kept a scrapbook into which she avidly pasted her favourite cuttings and poems. Many of the latter were by “R.K.” – Rudyard Kipling – and almost all were devoted to one overarching theme: ‘Vagrant’s Epitaph’, ‘The Spell of the Road’, ‘Wander Thirst’, ‘Wanderlust’, ‘The Vagabond’, ‘A Camp’, ‘The Traveller’. One of the poems that Flora carefully transcribed into her book was Dora Sigerson Shorter’s ‘A Vagrant Heart’:

  Ochone! to be a woman, only sighing on the shore –

  With a soul that finds a passion for each long breaker’s roar,

  With a heart that beats as restless as all the winds that blow –

  Thrust a cloth between her fingers, and tell her she must sew;

  Must join in empty chatter, and calculate with straws –

  For the weighing of our neighbour – for the sake of social laws.

  Somewhat incongruously, Flora also collected recipes – some pasted from newspapers or magazines, some handwritten – all her life, which by all accounts never apparently translated into any real cooking ability. Inside the front cover of her first recipe book is written “Flora Sandes Her Book” in a child’s painstaking but awkward script. Even the domestic staff helped her. Kate Jones, the young “ladyhelp” from Wales who lived with the family, contributed a recipe for scones to Flora’s second book, in her own neat and careful handwriting.12

  Flora, or “the brat” as she was called by her brothers and sisters, displayed the stubbornness early on that would characterize her for the rest of her life. Many of the pictures of her in her childhood and teenage years show her looking impatient at having to stand still for long enough for the photograph to be taken. In another, taken when she was around fifteen, she looks defiantly at the camera, head slightly cocked and lifted, half-smiling with eyebrows raised in amusement, as if challenging the photographer to do his or her worst. She envied her brothers their freedom from social disapproval and, in her early childhood, “used to pray every night that I might wake up in the morning and find myself a boy”. “Fate,” she commented further while reflecting on her youth, “plays funny tricks sometimes, so that it behoves one to be careful of one’s wishes. Many years afterwards, [I] realized that if you have the misfortune to be born a woman it is better to make the best of a bad job, and try not to be a bad imitation of a man.”13

  She was lucky at least that the countryside surrounding Marlesford gave her the perfect base to practise her beloved pursuits of riding and shooting, in which she soon became proficient. She was also fortunate to have been born into a liberal family that valued athleticism and a love of the outdoors, while giving an unusual amount of independence to all the children, irrespective of gender. Her father was remembered as a “kindly old chap” by his grandchildren, who illustrated his later letters to his children with various stories that he thought might amuse them.14 He was also a keen reader of the Times, contributing one letter to the editor arguing the need for tolerance to others in matters of religion and another advocating the “habitual and temperate” taking of alcoholic drinks.15 Little is known of Flora’s mother Sophia Julia, except that she suffered periods of ill health when Flora was still young and when able occupied herself with her children, managing the household and organizing community and charitable events. Flora’s sisters appear to have stepped into the gap left by their mother’s indisposition, indulging her as the baby of the family. Sophia Julia died in 1911, when Flora was thirty-five.

  Flora’s sister Fanny shared her enthusiasm for physical challenges and became one of the first women to climb Mount Fuji. Meg, another sister, travelled as a pioneer to Canada in 1887 with her new husband before moving to the Australian bush. Her brother Sam, a master mechanic, left for Canada in the same year and soon found a job with a mining company in Van Anda, British Columbia, before he moved to Papua New Guinea. Another brother, William, worked as a teacher in Norway. Only Flora’s sister Sophia remained permanently in England.

  William was the only other member of the immediate family to enlist in the armed forces during the First World War, although his modest contribution to the war effort was soon eclipsed by that of his younger sister. Listing his occupation as “independent gentleman”, he joined the Bedford Regiment in May 1916, aged forty-nine. To improve his chances of being accepted, he fibbed about his age, telling them he was forty-one. He served for the duration of the war on English soil. In 1919, fifty-one-year-old Private Sandes was discharged as no longer fit for war service. His minor ailments were listed as “shortness of breath on exertion” and gout, indicating that he likely shared the familial appreciation of alcohol.16

  The most professionally successful of Flora’s siblings was her brother “Johnnie”. John, a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, attained widespread public recognition in Australia as a writer of verse and popular novels and as a contributor to the Sydney Daily Telegraph. In 1919 he became the paper’s London correspondent and reported from the Versailles Peace Conference. He was a man of firm opinions, many of them “determinedly patriotic, Christian, [and] anti-socialist”, and was considered something of a theatre-loving, affable “literary genius” by those of his colleagues who enjoyed his company, and “sleepy and bad-tempered” by those who did not.17

  Flora’s remaining family stayed in Marlesford until 1894. That year, they moved to Thornton Heath, near Croydon, where Flora’s sister Sophia was now living with her new husband.18 The main purpose of the move was almost certainly to ensure that eighteen-year-old Flora and her sister Fanny, both of whom then aspired to become writers, were in commuting distance of London. There they would have access to training and employment opportunities that would be unavailable to them in Marlesford.19

  Others had the same
idea. By the time the Sandes family moved to their two-storey semi-detached house, Thornton Heath was quickly changing from a quiet rural hamlet to an affluent London suburb, while the open countryside that surrounded it was rapidly being swallowed up by roads, houses and new amenities. By the early years of the twentieth century the residents could visit the local library, play tennis on one of the grass courts in the recreation grounds and join the customers who thronged the many brick-fronted shops along the busy high street. There were also the swimming baths, whose charges varied according to how long it had been since the water was last changed. Then, in 1911, Thornton Heath’s first cinema, the white-fronted, ornately decorated “Electric Palace”, opened its doors to feature “The World and Its Wonders Week by Week”.20 Flora made the most of her new-found opportunities. After completing a course in secretarial training, she began work in the capital.21

  By the time she reached adulthood Flora showed scant desire to lead the respectable and leisured life that was expected of a woman of her background. Easily bored, she had little interest in domesticity and, in search of adventure, worked as a typist in Cairo for a year.22 In September 1903 she set off again, this time for New York.23 Along with her friend Bessie Stear, a fellow typist and stenographer who was every bit the thrill-seeker she was, Flora planned to “type” her way “around the world”. It was a first, “a record in the way of travel”, reported a professional journal of their exploits. The “two young lady typists” were “working their way along from city to city and from country to country”.24