4th December: Edith Cavell

Edith Cavell was born on this date in 1865, making today the 150th anniversary of her birth.

1. She was the eldest of four children of a Norwich Vicar.
2. She worked as a governess is Brussels before training as a nurse.
3. Her nursing training took place in East London, at the London Hospital under Matron Eva Luckes.
4. Working as a nurse in Belgium, Cavell decided that the nursing profession warranted a journal of its own, and so she launched one, L'infirmière. A year later, she was a training nurse for three hospitals, 24 schools, and 13 kindergartens in Belgium.
5. When war broke out, she was in England visiting her mother. She went back to Belgium to find that The Red Cross had taken over her nursing school.
6. Her crime was not, as many believe, espionage, but treason, namely helping wounded soldiers and civilians escape to countries at war with Germany.
7. She was arrested on 3 August 1915 and charged with harbouring Allied soldiers. She had been betrayed by Gaston Quien, who was later convicted by a French court as a collaborator.
8. The British Government declared it was powerless to help, but America, which had not yet joined the war, did apply diplomatic pressure. Hugh S. Gibson, First Secretary of the U.S. legation at Brussels, made clear to the German government that executing Cavell would harm Germany's already damaged reputation.
9. The night before her execution, she told the Reverend Stirling Gahan, the Anglican chaplain who had been allowed to see her and to give her Holy Communion, "Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone." Her final words to the German Lutheran prison chaplain, Paul Le Seur, were recorded as, "Ask Father Gahan to tell my loved ones later on that my soul, as I believe, is safe, and that I am glad to die for my country."
10. Initially buried by Belgian women near the prison, her body was returned to England after the war to be re-buried at Norwich Cathedral. When the ship carrying her body arrived in Dover, church bells were rung "with the bells deeply muffled" a practice usually reserved for the death of a sovereign - and a state funeral was held at Westminster Abbey. The date of her death, 12 October, is appointed for the commemoration of Edith Cavell.