New play will honour Scots women who braved frontline carnage in World War I

They were the group of women who defied Britain’s medical and military establishment to play a part in the First World War effort.

The picture, entitled John Patrick, was taken outside Royaumont Hospital, France in December 1914. Obstetrician Frances Ivens & actress Cicely Hamilton are among the team pictured.

Now the heroics of those who served in the Scottish Women’s Hospitals across Europe are to be honoured with the staging of a new play based on some of their personal journals and letters.

They are held in the archives of the Royal College of Surgeons, in Edinburgh, where the play will be staged next month to coincide with International Women’s Day. It is currently playing host to an exhibition of new artwork created in honour of the 1500 women who worked in the medical camps throughout the First World War.

Last year the Surgeons’ Hall Museum played host to the premiere of a new play on the Edinburgh Seven, the group of female medical students who blazed a trail for the rights of women to study at university and practise medicine.

The new play is based on the journals and letters of staff in the Scottish Women's Hospitals, set up by Elsie Inglis during the First World War.

The new production, “Go Home and Sit Still,” is named after the infamous advice given by the War Office to Elsie Inglis, the Edinburgh doctor after she suggested the idea to allow women to play a more active role in the front line.

Undaunted, Inglis formed the Scottish Women’s Hospitals with women from the suffragist movement. By the end of the war, 14 units were set up to provide nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, cooks and orderlies in Corsica, France, Malta, Romania, Russia and Serbia.

Billed as “a moving and timely interpretation of a remarkable humanitarian journey, Go Home and Sit Still draws on the real-life words of women deployed to the Balkans during the conflict to relive their story and reflect on their legacy.

Director Jordanna O’Neill, who also works at the Royal College of Surgeons’ museum, said: “I first became aware of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and the role that they played in the First World War through our archives. I was amazed their history wasn’t more widely known and that I’d never heard of their amazing efforts and sacrifice.”

Picture of nurses and patients in a hospital tent at Troyes

Playwright Christopher Silver, whose script is based on elements of the journals and letters in the museum archive, said: “Some of the material was really just fragments of diaries or scrapbooks. But they were really well-written and very varied in terms of the subject matter. Some of it was obviously harrowing and difficult, but a lot of it was also light-hearted and the day-to-day life of surviving in some very exceptional circumstances.

“Their story is not really familiar as others from the First World. Part of that is because the Scottish Women’s Hospitals were rejected by the military top brass. They made a huge impact overseas, but it wasn’t felt in the same way at home.”

Christopher Henry, director of heritage at Surgeons’ Hall Museums, where the play will be staged from 7-9 March, said: “Museums have a duty to try to create new forms of access for the public at all levels. Our theatrical development Go Home and Sit Still is intended to give people who wouldn’t necessarily visit a museum a new way of engaging with the subject.

“This production also addresses the role of women in medicine and issues about casualties in World War One in an entertaining and engaging way.”