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

  A year later Flora was still traipsing happily around the States. She had stopped temporarily in the Midwestern town of St Louis, Missouri, to work at the Irish Industrial Exhibit at the 1904 World’s Fair, but left on 8th August. “Miss Florence Sandes [sic],” the local paper reported, “started from the World’s Fair Grounds… to walk to San Francisco, whence she will sail for Hong Kong, thence to Australia and back to Ireland. Miss Sandes carries baggage weighing ten pounds and will be armed to protect herself while on the long journey.”25 By later that autumn she had made her way to Cripple Creek in Colorado, likely drawn there by curiosity about the famed “Miners’ War” that saw gold miners rise up against their oppressive overlords.26

  In December 1904 Flora’s Canadian sister-in-law, Rose Sandes (née Allison), died of heart failure, aged only twenty-nine.27 She left a five-year-old son, Dick, and a husband (Flora’s brother Sam) with little time or inclination for childcare. Flora, Sam knew, was somewhere in the American hinterland. He needed her urgently to take the young boy from Van Anda to their parents in England. The problem was that no one knew quite where to find her. “It appears that when my mother died my father was aware of the fact that Flora was somewhere in the States but [had] no positive address and he therefore employed the famous agency of Pinkerton to find her,” recollected Dick years later.

  She was eventually located working in a box factory in a very distant town, she received the message that she was urgently required but had no money with which to travel and promptly started to travel by goods van on the railways until she had an unpleasant experience with a guard or brakesman who she is alleged to have shot – and this delayed her journey to join my father, I asked her years later about this experience but only received a reply that it was something that happened long ago and she could not remember.28

  Flora stepped off a small steamer in Van Anda in January 1905 apparently no worse for wear. For the next month, she stayed with Sam and Dick. Van Anda was just the sort of rough-and-tumble place that she liked. Halfway between a mining camp and a town, many of its five hundred inhabitants were hard-living miners who drank and played cards late into the night.29 One of the many amusing pastimes, recorded a local paper, was to sit and “watch a young hopeful try to blast the head off his dog by getting it to retrieve lighted firecrackers”.30 Almost certainly against her will, Sam assigned Flora a bodyguard, “Buskie”, to protect her from the more lively individuals. “Not that she needed much protection,” commented Dick later. Despite any initial irritation she may have felt at Buskie’s assignment, she soon became fast friends with the “old-timer”, who began to teach her everything he knew about living in the outdoors. She listened avidly to every word. “He was about 70 years of age,” recorded Dick,

  [and] wore a very dirty Stetson hat out of which he constantly offered my aunt a drink whenever she was thirsty and which out of politeness she had to accept – Buskie lived in a decked-over boat which had been beached and used to take Flora on long trips on which he taught her to use an old Winchester .45 rifle and to hunt deer, I distinctly remember her first kill and the elation when it was brought home. It was there that she also learnt to become a good hand in a boat and to handle a fishing rod in the approved backwoodsman style.31

  In February the small boy was kitted out to travel to England but, still fired by the thought of adventure, Flora had no wish to return directly home. “It’s up to you,” Sam told her, when she proposed taking Dick with her on her travels. In early February she boarded a small steamer with her young nephew, who brought with him his two most treasured possessions, a Brownie box camera and a pet white rat that he carried in the camera case. With money given to them by Sam they set off first for San Francisco, visiting it only the year before the great earthquake. They then began working their way south along the western coast of the United States, before crossing first into Mexico and then, reputedly, into Central America.32 From there, they followed the coast north through the southern states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida before travelling up the eastern seaboard to New York.

  Having a five-year-old in tow restricted Flora’s freedom considerably, particularly after she “became friendly with a Captain McCarthy of the US Navy”.33 Likely under the impression that five was a perfectly good age to learn some self-sufficiency, her solution was to go out on her own, leaving him locked in a hotel room with only his white rat for company.34 Finally, in April, they reached Thornton Heath. Dick’s rat arrived with them, to the utter horror of Flora’s mother and her sister Fanny. “On arrival it was quietly got rid of,” remembered Dick. “It’s escaped,” they told him.35

  Around the time of Flora’s return a wealthy, unmarried uncle died, leaving her and her brothers and sisters a considerable legacy. “She proceeded to enjoy life,” wrote Dick. “I remember she joined several clubs and was continually at the opera.”36 One of the clubs was an underground rifle range for both men and women in Central London’s Cork Street. Her Australian sister-in-law, Clare Sandes (née Berry) joined too. “Flora was a fairly good shot with the ordinary service rifle, but she was not by any means the best in the club,” Clare recalled. “[She] was a capital shot with the big service revolver – a terribly difficult weapon to hit the target with, as I discovered for myself.”37

  In 1908, with part of the inheritance, she also bought her first motor car. Flora’s interest in cars took precedence over all else. “There seemed to be many admirers in the offing,” recollected Dick, “and amongst them being Capt. Mellelieu (from South Africa), a Mr Brook, but they all seemed to fade away. She seemed more and more interested in motor cars and [later] purchased a Caesare Naudine [Sizaire-Naudin] racing car which she took to Brooklands and I believe entered some races.”38 To his delight, she allowed Dick, aged fourteen, to race it round the track until reprimanded by the officials. Even when she showed some enthusiasm for her suitors, Flora’s car (and her fast driving) did not mix at all well with her romantic involvements. One relationship, Dick recalled, came to an abrupt end when she took her suitor out in her car, crashed, and put him in hospital. When he later came down with tuberculosis, rumours flew that he had caught it in the wards.39 Fortunately for Flora’s conscience and reputation, he was a taxidermist and almost certainly caught the disease in his line of work.

  She also entered the two-seater in reliability trials. “Once she entered it for a reliability non-stop race from Edinburgh to London, and drove it herself,” commented Clare. “She would have won the race if she had not taken the wrong road in the middle of the night.”40 And she was furious when regulations barring women from entering prevented her from driving a borrowed Deemster at the Royal Automobile Club Light Car Reliability Trial in Harrogate in the spring of 1914. “I have driven my own cars for eight or nine years, and have done all running repairs entirely myself,” she scribbled in an angry letter to the Autocar, a magazine whose readership was otherwise almost exclusively male. “On the light car which I am still driving every day I have covered a distance of over 70,000 miles. Experience, after all, is the thing that counts, and, given the necessary experience, it would be absurd to suggest that a woman driver is not as good as a man, except in handling a large car, which requires physical strength.”41

  Flora’s Sizaire-Naudin was her pride and joy. Whenever she could she packed her camping gear and spent weeks at a time motoring to far-flung places across England, including Land’s End. On many such trips, she was accompanied by a friend, Annie (“Nan”) MacGlade, the free-spirited daughter of a Belfast-based businessman who, unusually for the time, was the manageress of an engineering works.42 In May 1911, they took the Sizaire on their first driving holiday abroad. They packed their things in the car’s box, strapped their two suitcases on top and set off across the Channel to Boulogne. Over the subsequent days, on a hot, dusty drive through central France that took them south all the way to the French Riviera and back, they lost a suitcase off the back, drove the car up three thousand feet to the top of Mont Agel, rac
ed others on the roads, got lost several times and squandered money at the Casino in Monte Carlo. They slept at hotels and inns and, when none could be found, in sleeping sacks and rugs under the skies. Photographs from the trip show Flora with windswept brown hair, dressed in pantaloons, with baskets, blankets, cutlery, boxes, cooking tins, clothing and shoes strewn across the ground. Another shows one of them, dressed in long skirts, sunglasses and a scarf, outside the presciently named “Café de l’Orient”.43

  The Sizaire, to their dismay, “went very badly”. Within two hours of arriving in France they had their first of what would be “daily” punctures, which they patched themselves by the side of the road. Over the days that followed they also changed the sparking plug and dealt as best they could with a clutch that threatened to “give up the ghost”, an unreliable brake and lamps that stopped working after the car got drenched one time too many. So much time did they lose fixing the series of problems that, on the return journey, Flora was forced to drive almost continuously from nine o’clock one morning to three o’clock the following afternoon to catch the boat back to England. “We arrived at our destination covered with dust and dead tired,” wrote Nan. In around two weeks, they had driven the twelve-horsepower Sizaire two thousand miles.44

  Flora spent more of her inheritance buying the lease on the old guardroom at Beau Port Battery to use as family holiday cottage near St Brélade’s Bay, Jersey. It was an “extraordinary little place”, recalled her sister-in-law. “It had been a small square fort, built of solid masonry, and it dated back to the Middle Ages, or thereabouts. It stood at the extreme edge of the cliff at the farthest point of St Brélade’s Bay… It had long slits in the masonry – loopholes for arquebuses and demi-culverins, and other clumsy weapons with which people used to kill each other.”45 They spent wonderful summer weeks there, recollected Dick. The days were filled with cycle rides, swimming, poaching rabbits on a nearby estate and living “in luxury on rabbit stews, lobster… and Jersey cider”. Flora was “very fond” of the latter, he remembered. She could drink “more than the average man could take & never turn a hair – in all the years I knew her I never saw her the worse for liquor.”46

  Her holidays in Jersey gave her the opportunity to prove to herself how hardy she was. She bought a dinghy in St Heliers and rowed it single-handedly six miles back along the coast through dangerous currents to St Brélade’s Bay, recalled Dick. “We would go out with the St Brélade’s fishermen all night in all weathers and she never seemed to tire of physical exercise,” he added. “She made me accompany her on a cycle to every bay and inlet on the island. She always took a bath in the open… at the back of the [cottage] often having to break the ice before she could bath in a tin tub.” She did her best to get her young nephew to follow her example. “Flora encouraged me to harden up,” Dick remembered. “On several occasions I had to take my sleeping bag outside and sleep in the snow just to get to know what it was like.” But there was another side to her character, he commented. “Whenever she was in funds (which seemed to be quite often) she would indulge in the best hotel accommodation she could find whilst travelling and liked comfort.”47

  By the time Flora reached her thirties, the rector’s daughter was still living at home, single, and had a penchant for decidedly unfeminine pursuits which made her exciting company to those with similarly liberal inclinations. “She was hot-tempered, full of fun, and possessed an amazing amount of vitality,” described her sister-in-law. “When she became excited – which was frequently – she spoke with a marked Irish accent, although she was born and educated in England.”48 But there were many who took a dim view of what they regarded as her wayward antics. Some of the disapproval clearly got to her. “For anyone to say they are proud of anything I do is such a novel experience – it’s generally so much the other way,” Flora scribbled plaintively in a letter in 1916.49

  Still, she had no intention whatsoever of letting convention prevent her from doing what she wanted. In 1907 or 1908 she brought yet more disapproval upon herself by joining the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an organization formed by the self-styled “Captain” Edward Charles Baker in the autumn of 1907. That year, he advertised in the national press for members, with the vision of putting together a body of women to gallop onto the battlefields of a future war to rescue the injured.50 The women attracted to Baker’s pioneering group were a diverse collection of middle- and upper-class suffragists, eccentrics and those, like Flora, who were seeking excitement wherever they could find it. By 1909 she was a “corporal” and one of the most active members of the organization, which was London-based.51

  The FANY was one of many associations then established with the aim of increasing Britain’s readiness for war. With the rise of Germany as a military power it was widely believed that the country was both vulnerable to attack and grossly unprepared for such an eventuality. “War fever” reached such a pitch that an invasion was “expected every morning at breakfast time with the arrival of the Daily Mail”.52 All across the country, public and grammar schools began to form their own Officers’ Training Corps while the War Office launched a scheme of Voluntary Aid Detachments to assist in hospitals in the event of war.53 Even the Boy Scouts were founded to instil in the soldiers of tomorrow the right sort of military zeal.

  Although the motives behind the formation of the FANY reflected the same mood of concern, it was one step too far for many to see women in marching formation, subject to army discipline and attending military-style camps. There were instances of naked hostility to the uniformed women, who were mistaken for “——— suffragettes” (which many of them actually were) and had things thrown at them.54 More frequently, the women were ridiculed gently by the press. “Being women, however, as well as soldiers, they have smuggled in some comforts,” reported a journalist about one such military camp. “There are carpets on the wooden floors and easy chairs. Some of the tents have cottage-size pianos. The mess tent serves salads and pie, and other dainties.”55

  Despite such press reports implying otherwise, membership of the FANY involved much hard work. The women were given training in first aid, horsemanship, camp cookery and signalling. They attended organized camps where they slept in tents, took part in night marches to hunt for “casualties” and practised their battlefield skills. There was little that Flora enjoyed more. Her enthusiasm was such, according to a family anecdote, that it lost her a “wounded rescue race” despite finishing well ahead of her competition. She had lined up on horseback with the other women, a wheeled stretcher harnessed behind each. At the signal, she galloped off, selected her “patient”, bandaged him up, bundled him into her stretcher and raced back. But when the winner’s name was announced she was crestfallen to find that she had been disqualified on the grounds that, had he been a genuine patient, her reckless speed would more than likely have killed him.56

  By 1909 a number of the members, including Flora and the suffragist Mabel St Clair Stobart, were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Baker’s impractical leadership. Along with two others they formed a “tougher and more practical” faction to spearhead a rebellion against it.57 Matters came to a head after a charity matinee in London to raise funds for the organization. The event, which the famous Harry Lauder headlined, was a great success financially. It raised £170, much of which was earmarked for the purchase of an ambulance wagon. But the money ended up in the hands of Flora and the rebels, not Baker. While details of what happened next are sketchy, the end result was that the FANY split that summer.58 Flora and Mabel became part of the “Executive Committee of the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps” which kept half of the £170. They also took with them the majority of the members. Baker did not get his ambulance wagon and the FANY was left in a state of near collapse.59 In a letter to a friend in 1910, the harried Baker rued the day that he let “elderly women” join.60 This unflattering description would certainly have been directed at Mabel Stobart, who was in her late forties. It may also have encompasse
d Flora who, at thirty-three, would have been considerably older than the majority of the members.

  Due to the influence of Flora, Mabel and the other members of the Executive Committee, the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps had a decidedly pragmatic bent. Their grey-green uniforms were designed for practicality rather than elegance and, in addition to training in horsemanship and first aid, the women were taught military skills like trench-digging, tent-pitching and formation marching. To prove to the members that they could do without things normally considered essential, in their annual fortnight’s “camp” they slept on the ground without mattresses or beds and were taught to improvise with basic supplies. During the First Balkan War of 1912, the Corps formed the first all-female medical mission when they sent a unit in aid of the Bulgarian army under Mabel Stobart’s leadership. For reasons unknown, Flora was not with them.

  By the time Britain declared war on Germany on 4th August 1914, thirty-eight-year-old Flora was living at home with her fifteen-year-old nephew Dick, her bedridden elderly father, his Irish “butler, secretary and nurse” Moffat, two housemaids and Cullen, a former sea chef on the Castle Line, who had been employed after Flora had fallen out with a succession of female cooks. The house was “in turmoil”, remembered Dick. The housemaids were virtually unsupervised and Flora “knew nothing about housekeeping at that time and could not care less”.61 Above all, by 1914, Flora needed a change. She received the news of war with a thrill of excitement. She had been training for years to serve her country, via the FANY and the Women’s Convoy Corps, and knew at once that this was her opportunity, at long last, to put her knowledge into practice.