This website displays the remarkable diaries which Edith Elizabeth Appleton wrote while nursing in Northern France from 1914 to 1919.

Copyright  ©  2008. Dick Robinson, Piers and Jill Stainforth.  All rights reserved.
Permission granted to reproduce for personal and educational use only. Commercial copying, hiring, lending is prohibited.

Brief Biography

Edith Elizabeth Appleton (‘Edie’ or ‘E’) was born on 9 June 1877 in Deal, Kent, 10^th of 13 children.  Ten year old Edie is on the left of the 1887 photo below. Her father was a Trinity Pilot.

Edie trained at St Bartholomew’s Hospital between October 1900 and October 1904. Click here to see a copy of the 1901 census; Edie is listed as a resident of St. Bartholomew the Less, along with at least 200 other nurses.  She worked in private nursing between 1905 and 1908, as a Health Visitor in 1911/12 and, just prior to the war, as a District Nurse at Crediton in Devon.  With WW1 looming, she volunteered for the Queen Alexandra’s Military Nursing Service.  She joined for duty at Fort Pitt, Chatham on 16 September 1914 and went to the front lines in France immediately as a nursing Sister, based first at Casualty Clearing Station No. 3 at Hazebrouck.  3 CCS was forced, by enemy action, to move to Poperinghe in April 1915 and then to Bailleul in May. 

In November 1915 she transferred to No. 1 General Hospital at Étretat and there followed several other postings throughout the war including to Abbeville, to 45 CCS at Achiet-le-Grand (click here for more info) and to hospitals at Le Tréport and Boulogne.  After the armistice in November 1918 she joined 42 Ambulance Train and, in February 1919 was appointed to the staff of Dame Maud McCarthy, Matron in Chief, at Boulogne (more about Dame Maud here).  She was demobilised on 22 December 1919.

• Click here to see an edited version of her service record (PDF file 44 KB)

• Click here to see a photograph of the original Active Service Form

Edie kept a handwritten diary throughout the war which details all the horrors, including the first use of poison gas, but also records how she spent her time off duty including a number of drawings and many accounts of what life was like for nurses.  Amongst her decorations were the Military OBE, the Royal Red Cross and the Belgian Queen Elizabeth medal. 

After the war she worked at Bedford College in London and in 1923 she and an elder sister bought ‘Buddlebrook’ in the Isle of Wight; this house became the home centre of the Appleton family. Living there, as well as Edie, were her sisters, Lil and Minnie, and her brother, Fred, vicar of Brightstone, Mottistone and Brook.

We think Edie spent a period looking after her elderly mother until her death in 1923 and there is then an exchange of letters between Edie and Maud McCarthy, with whom she had remained in touch, in which Dame Maud persuades her to join the Territorial Army Nursing Service.  At first Edie declines, on 16 August 1923, with this delightful paragraph:

“Thank you for offering to have me in the Territorials.  I am afraid I cannot join – much as I should like to for many things – and should love having you as my Chief again.  One reason is that I am 46 and the other is that I really mean to give up nursing next year and to make my living at poultry keeping etc.”

But clearly the Matron in Chief, who replied on 18 August, was persuasive and by 23 August Edie had agreed to join! (More about Dame Maud here).

In 1926 she married Lt Cmdr John Bonsor Ledger.  They had no children. 

Edie died in 1958.  Times obituary 10 February 1958:

This picture is dated 1887.

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