History - Military Medal Recipients - Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm
Today’s post is a joint one for the two women known as ‘The Madonnas of Pervyse’.
Elsie Knocker (L) and Mairi Chisholm
Elizabeth Blackall Shapter, who later gained the nickname, ‘Elsie’, was born on the 29th of June 1884 in Exeter, Devon to Dr Thomas Lewis and Charlotte Shapter, the youngest of their 5 children.
When Elsie was 4 years old, her mother died, and she lost her father to tuberculosis 2 years later.
She was eventually adopted by Lewis Edward Upcott, a teacher at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and his wife, Emily. They sent Elsie to be educated first at St. Nicholas’ in Folkestone, Kent and then at the exclusive Château Lutry in Switzerland.
Mairi Lambert Gooden Chisholm was born on the 26th of February 1896 in Buckinghamshire to Captain Roderick Gooden-Chisholm, who was Chief of Clan Chisholm, a Highland Scottish clan, and Margaret Fraser.
The family, independently wealthy, owned a plantation in Trinidad.
The teenage Mairi was clearly not one for pursuits considered ‘proper’ for young ladies of the time. Taken with her older brother Uilean’s prowess at motorcycle rallies, she yearned for her own motorbike.
Despite her mother’s strong disapproval, Mairi’s father bought her a Douglas motorbike, and the young girl spent her days in the family stables stripping down motorbikes and repairing them.
Douglas motorcycle (Wikipedia)
Elsie, meanwhile, had married Leslie Duke Knocker in 1906 after completing her training at the Children’s Hip Hospital in Sevenoaks, Kent. They had a son, Kenneth Duke, one year later.
The marriage didn’t last. After the couple divorced, Elsie began training as a midwife at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, one of the oldest maternity hospitals in Europe, founded in London in 1739.
As divorce was frowned upon in Edwardian England, Elsie invented a story about being a widow to avoid any stigma, claiming her husband had died in Java, Indonesia.
Despite this and being a single mother, she didn’t compromise her life and continued to do things that caught her interest, becoming a keen amateur motorbike enthusiast.
A member of the Gypsy Motorcycle Club, she gained the nickname ‘Gypsy’ and possessed a number of motorbikes including one with a sidecar, which she would take with her to the Western Front.
It was a shared passion for motorbikes that brought Elsie and Mairi together in 1912.
While riding her motorbike around Hampshire and Dorset, Mairi, then 18 years old, met the 30-year-old Elsie and they soon became best friends, competing in motorbike trials together.
When World War 1 was declared, Elsie wrote to Mairi, suggesting they go to London to join the Women’s Emergency Committee to do what work they could to help the war effort.
Although her father supported her wish to go, Mairi’s mother was totally against it, refusing to even let her daughter have a suitcase to pack her things. But the young woman stole away and set off on her motorbike, riding all the way from Dorset to London, a distance of about 100 miles, where she met up with Elsie.
After about a month working as a dispatch rider, Mairi was spotted by Dr Hector Munro. Impressed with her motorcycling skills, he asked if she’d like to join the Flying Ambulance Corps he’d set up to help wounded Belgian soldiers.
Mairi agreed and asked him to also invite Elsie who, apart from being an accomplished motorbike rider, was also a nurse and mechanic and could speak French and German.
In this excerpt from an interview Mairi did in June 1976, she relates how the invitation came about:
“[Munro] was deeply impressed with my ability to ride through the traffic. He traced me to the Women’s Emergency Corps and… said, ‘Would you like to go out to Flanders’ and I said ‘Yes, I’d love to.’”
Elsie and Mairi, along with Dr Munro and other volunteers, including Dorothie Feilding, arrived in Ostend, West Flanders on the 25th of September 1914.
They were initially based at Ghent before relocating to Furnes at the end of October.
Together with the other women drivers, Elsie and Mairi worked diligently ferrying wounded soldiers from close to the Front to the field hospital.
Despite this, men still died while in the ambulances, succumbing to shock and exposure.
It didn’t take Elsie and Mairi long to realise, if they were able to treat the wounded by the front lines, they’d be able to save more lives.
They decided to leave Dr Munro’s corps in November and established themselves in the town of Pervyse, north of Ypres, barely 100 yards from the trenches.
In a vacant cellar, they set up the ‘Poste de Secours Anglais’ or ‘British First Aid Post’.
Elsie & Mairi outside their advanced dressing station, Pervyse April 1917 - The Illustrated War News (Wikipedia)
For the next 3.5 years, they would aid the wounded, Elsie focussing on giving medical attention while Mairi transported the injured to a hospital 15 miles away, often under terrible conditions and usually under fire.
Elsie & Mairi in their Wolseley Ambulance, Pervyse, Belgium 1916 (Wikipedia)
Because they’d left the Ambulance Corps, the pair – known as ‘The Madonnas of Pervyse’ – were no longer affiliated with the Belgian Red Cross and had to raise their own funds to finance their First Aid Post.
They undertook a short trip back to Britain to raise funds and found themselves feted as celebrities.
The donations they secured enabled them to reinforce the cellar with concrete and to have a steel door fitted.
Elsie, meanwhile, was also working hard to have her and Mairi officially seconded to the Belgian garrison stationed at Pervyse, and her dogged determination was eventually met with success.
In January 1915, Elsie and Mairi were awarded the Order of Leopold II, Knights Cross (with palm) by King Albert I of Belgium in recognition of their bravery on the front lines.
Mairi & Elsie display their Order of Leopold II medals Jan 1917 - The War Budget (Wikipedia)
Mairi was also awarded the Order of Queen Elisabeth of Belgium in 1915.
Queen Elisabeth Medal (Belgium) - Fdutil (Wikipedia)
Elsie remarried in January 1916 to Baron Harold de T’Serclaes, a pilot in the Belgian Flying Corps. The couple managed a quick honeymoon after which they had to go their separate ways, Elsie back to Pervyse and the Baron, to his squadron.
1916 also brought happiness for Mairi when she became engaged, coincidentally, also to a pilot, Jack Petrie, a Royal Naval Air pilot. Sadly, he died a year later during flying practice.
The pair continued their courageous work, which included many battlefield rescues. They even carried fallen men on their backs to their First Aid Post.
Their work encompassed all wounded men, regardless of which side they were on.
It was their rescue of a wounded German pilot in No Man’s Land that earned both Elsie and Mairi the Military Medal in 1917.
Mairi was awarded the 1914 Star in 1917, and both women were made Officers of the Most Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem in 1918.
Venerable Order of St John (Military Wiki)
Their courageous deeds gained the attention of many and they received visits from journalists and photographers, and they were among the most photographed women of the war.
In 1918, a bombing raid and gas attack on their First Aid Post injured both Elsie and Mairi, and Elsie was shipped back to England.
Mairi recovered and returned to the post until a further gas attack forced her to leave some months before the end of the war.
Back in England, Mairi and Elsie joined the newly formed Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) where they saw out the rest of the war.
Mairi became engaged again in August 1918 to a 2nd lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, William Thomas James Hall. They had met during her training with the WRAF. However, the engagement was later called off.
By 1919, Elsie’s marriage was over. The Baron was Roman Catholic, and when he discovered she was a divorcee and not a widow as she’d claimed, that spelled the end of their union. However, as part of the settlement, she was allowed to retain the title, ‘Baroness’, which she would be in name only.
Probably the harder price to pay was the end of her friendship with Mairi. For the latter, the deception proved too much, and they barely spoke again.
Due to her time on the Front, Mairi’s health had taken a battering. She had been poisoned during the gas attack, and contracted septicaemia, which had weakened her heart.
That didn’t stop her living life on her terms, and she took up motor racing.
Eventually, though, she did have to heed her health. Partly on medical advice, Mairi moved to Nairn in Scotland.
With her childhood friend, May Davidson, they started a successful poultry business, which they moved to Jersey in the 1930s.
At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Elsie joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as an Aircraftwoman 2nd class.
WAAF Recruitment poster (Wikipedia)
In February 1940, she became an officer. Working with RAF Fighter Command, she rose to the rank of Squadron Officer in March 1942.
On the 3rd of July 1942, Elsie’s son, Wing Commander Kenneth Duke Knocker, was killed when his plane was shot down over Groningen in the Netherlands.
Partly due to the loss of her son, Elsie left the RAF in October 1942, and also because she needed to care for her elderly father.
After the war ended, Elsie was involved in raising funds for the RAF Association and the Benevolent Fund, which provides welfare support to the RAF family.
She continued to live in the Earl Haig Homes – a charity that provides housing for ex-servicemen – in Surrey for the rest of her life, breeding Chihuahuas. She never married again.
Mairi, meanwhile, had moved from Jersey to Argyll in Scotland where, together with May and 2 others, she ran a poultry farm.
In 1951, Mairi and her nephew, Alastair, son of her brother Uilean, revitalised The Clan Chisholm Society, which had been founded at the end of the 19th century by her grandfather, James Chisholm, and which is still going strong today.
Elsie Knocker died on the 26th of April 1978, aged 93, of pneumonia and senile dementia.
Mairi Chisholm died on the 22nd of August 1981, aged 85, of lung cancer.
I find the bravery of these women amazing. That they chose to live and serve in such dangerous conditions is truly incredible. And they lived to tell the tale.
A great bonus of their celebrity status during the war is the availability of photographs and written works about them.
I’m still in the process of reading this one, which is available in its entirety online – ‘The Cellar-House of Pervyse: A Tale of Uncommon Things from the Journals and Letters of The Baroness T’Serclaes and Mairi Chisholm’, published in November 1916.
For me personally, knowing that Mairi Chisholm rode her motorbike around the Dorset countryside makes her story and Elsie’s extra-special as it’s my neck of the woods.
It is a shame, though, that their friendship ended the way it did.