Book description
When they met at a motorcycle club in 1912, Elsie Knocker was a
thirty year-old motorcycling divorcee dressed in bottle-green Dunhill
leathers, and Mairi Chisholm was a brilliant eighteen-year old
mechanic, living at home and borrowing tools from her brother. Little
did they know, theirs was to become one of the most extraordinary
stories of the First World War.
In 1914, they roared off to London 'to do their bit', and within a
month they were in the thick of things in Belgium driving ambulances
to distant military hospitals. Frustrated by the number of men dying
of shock in the back of their vehicles, they set up their own
first-aid post on the front line in the village of Pervyse, near
Ypres, risking their lives working under sniper fire and heavy
bombardment for months at a time.
As news of their courage and expertise spread, the 'Angels of
Pervyse' became celebrities, visited by journalists and photographers
as well as royals and VIPs. Glamorous and influential, they were
having the time of their lives, and for four years, Elsie and Mairi
and stayed in Pervyse until they were nearly killed by arsenic gas in
the spring of 1918. But returning home and adjusting to peacetime life
was to prove even more challenging than the war itself.
Diane Atkinson was born in the North-East and educated in Cornwall
and London, where she completed a PhD on the politics of women's sweated
labour. At the Museum of London she worked as a lecturer and curator
specializing in women's history. She has an MA from the University of
East Anglia in Life-writing. She is the author of
Suffragettes in Pictures,
Funny Girls: Cartooning for Equality
and
Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick,
which
was published in 2003.
