Searching details on places for VAD Helen Sutherland

[Hdeb]

Hi,

I am looking for information about Helen Sutherland who was VAD from 1916 to 1918.

On the British Red Cross website her file is there : https://bit.ly/2YMO1Ln

I guess T.N.D. means Trained Nurse Department. I can't find information on that department.

She was a trained nurse and I think that she was sent in a place where she was useful.

How to find the hospitals she had been employed ?

Regards.

Henri

 

[DavidOwen]

Welcome to the forum

 

This site may help with background information on VADs in WW1 http://www.scarletfinders.co.uk/181.html

 

Others may be able to help re hospitals she served in.

 

Good luck with your research

[alf mcm]

Henri,

  Welcome to the forum. T.N.D. was indeed the Trained Nurse Department of the British Red Cross and Order of St. John. This means that Helen was not a V.A.D., but could have been the qualified Lady Superintendent required by each female Voluntary Aid Detachment. Her address on the Red Cross card is Greystones, Watten, Caithness. There was only 1 femaleVoluntary Aid Detachment in Caithness, and that was based in Thurso. There is no record of Helen serving abroad. I have a note of Miss H. Sutheerland serving as a Staff Nurse at North Staffordshire Infirmary in 1917, but it may not be her.

  Do you know anything about Helen Sutherland, apart from the Red Cross card.

[Hdeb]

Thank you for your answers.

At first there is a British nurse named Christina Helen Sutherland born in 1888 in Cape Town (South Africa).

She sailed to England in 1908 to learn nursing and worked as midwife for several years.

In 1913 she was no longer allowed to work as midwife because a child gone blind after his birth in Chelsea.

It seems that she moved to Queenstown (Ireland) to live with her uncle, Admiral Lewis Bayly.

She used to be named as Helen C. perhaps after the Chelsea incident.

In January 1918, the American Red Cross opened an hospital in Le Havre (France) in a place named Cercle Franklin.

It was dedicated to Belgian refugees, especially pregnant women and babies, who were installed in Le Havre as their government.

Miss Sutherland had worked there and from the following, she was pregnant. She had no other grade than nurse.

In August 1918, she gave birth to her daughter.

The address on the birth certificate is  No.11 Rue de Normandie which was the Visitors' Hostel managed by VADs.

The doctor who had assisted is Ruth E. Proctor who was in Royaumont Hospital..

On the baptism certificate, the godfather is a military chaplain, Edward Dowling known as "the colonel".

The godmother is the wife of the Belgian Justice minister.

 

I would like to know where Miss Sutherland was in October-November 1917.

I am not sure that the Red Cross card I found on the website is her card.

If she was engaged from 1916 I guess that when she declared her pregnancy she was taken away to Cercle Franklin.

And it was not necessary to move her to Le Havre if she was not already in France.

 

That's all I know.

 

 

[alf mcm]

Hdeb,

  I would think that the Red Cross card is not for your Helen Sutherland. All I can add is that Helen has been mentioned before in this forum. I am not sure how to post a link to an old thread, but if you put 'Arthur Pearman Reynardson' into the search box {at the top right of the page} you should find it. It is from 2009 and the poster is no longer on the forum, but it may be of interest.

 

Regards,

 

Alf McM

[Michelle Young]

 

[Hdeb]

You are right. I am trying a new approach to help.

This name was written on the baptism certificate but I got a copy of the church register some weeks ago and the father's name is left blank.

So it is established it was counterfeit. It was signed "p.p. D. J. Mc Hugh", a chaplain. I guess who signed this paper but it is not helping.

 

Visitors' Hostel in Le Havre was not only managed by VADs, it was also their headquarters.

I read in the scarletfinders war diary that VADs were sent back, or their engagement terminated for many reasons.

Pregnancy was certainly one of them.

Cercle Franklin was full of midwives, nurses and doctors. Was the pregnancy hidden ? Perhaps.

If she was not a VAD, did American Red Cross hire British volunteer nurses ? I don't know.