Eleanor Elizabeth Bourne

“ A memorial service was held for her in the hospital chapel. Her life-story has been told in
by a book written by her daughter and published in 1939.
One famous woman whom we did meet was Mrṣ Pankhurst the militant suffragette leader, small but very definite and forceful. Dṛ Anderson won our admiration for having undergone a hunger strike but I am afraid that both she and Dṛ Murray regarded us Australians as rather luke-warm in the suffrage cause. They would say, "But you have had the vote for 15 years!" ”

“ Some of us went once to a vegetarian restaurant and our reaction was typified by an athletic Australian hockey-player who exclaimed with feeling, "Well, I call it a process of semi-starvation!" Getting tired of Bloomsbury, to the I scandalized some of my old-fashioned friends by my bad taste in moving nearer to the Parks, to a new, scarcely finished hotel behind Selfridges, which has now been incorporated by that octopus as its Provisions Department. ”

“ For a time it housed Belgians but, as these gradually found work and other accommodation, the place became empty and was offered by the War Office for the hospital. It must have looked an awkward proposition as it first appeared, for work-house infirmaries were not provided with all modern conveniences. The immediate necessity was lifts and a lift shaft was therefore erected in the courtyard outside each of the three blocks of wards which formed three sides of the square, the administrative block and the kitchens forming the fourth side. ”

“ The hospital here supplied satisfied a real need for them were at this point not nearly enough facilities for treatment
treating of the men who required it. The War Office appreciated the women's effort and in acknowledgment offered them accommodation for a hospital in London to be staffed entirely by women doctors and run on strict military lines. Dṛ Murray was C.O. and Chief Physician to the hospital and Dṛ Anderson was Chief Surgeon and besides them the staff was enriched by women specialists in all branches. ”

“ They looked very well in the uniform, which had a smart short skirt and a round cap with a crêpe veil; the colour was a light
^ khaki tending to mole-colour; the medical staff wore scarlet shoulder straps the orderlies blue. Besides nursing and other duties, the orderlies did all the stretcher-bearing except lifting down the patient from the upper stretcher in the ambulance; this was done by members of a small squad of R.A.M.C. men who were attached to the hospital under a sergeant-major. ”