First World War VAD Stories from the British Red Cross Archives: The Holmfirth Auxiliary Hospital

Abstract

Histories of Voluntary Aid Detachment [VAD] nursing in the First World War have focused almost entirely on nursing in France or in the large military home-based hospitals and has been based on the writings of a very select group of women. This article will use a new resource, the British Red Cross VAD database, to discover the VADs who worked in the hundreds of small auxiliary hospitals scattered around the country. It focuses on one hospital in Holmfirth, a small mill town in West Yorkshire, and uses prosopographical techniques to investigate the social make-up of the hospital’s staff. The study reveals that a much more diverse group of women were working at this hospital than might be imagined from existing histories, through the uncovered presence of large numbers of working women who gave up their evenings to nurse wounded soldiers in their spare time, rather than the ‘leisured’ middle class we are accustomed to associate with this work.