About Emily Jane Chidwick

A VAD Nurse during WW1

Lesley McCabe with research by Heather Johnson

Permission granted for use of the Record Cards by the British Red Cross Society

Emily was born in 1886 daughter of Joseph and Fanny Chidwick, landlord of the Live and Let Live Public House in Alma Street. The family moving around the lower end of Wivenhoe during the ensuing twenty years.

It is not known when Emily started teaching (was Emily Driver Huggett’s favourite teacher?) but we do know that in 1914 she was living at Park House in the High Street Wivenhoe and in the September had enrolled to be a VAD nurse.

She passed her certificate in Home Nursing in the June of 1915 and was working part time at the Colchester County Hospital and at Gostwyck House, which had been turned into a VAD temporary hospital. The boys of Colchester Royal Grammar School supplied the hospital with potatoes, and eggs, even growing cress in their classrooms for the soldier’s tea. It would appear that she stayed in this country as she was signed off in 1919 having done 125 hours in the two hospitals.

Emily died in 1938 at Barnet in Middlesex.

This page was added on 26/03/2015.

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