BRITISH MILITARY NURSES
***
***
Army Nursing Service
Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service and Reserve
Territorial Force Nursing Service
Queen Alexandra's Military Nursing Service for India
Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service
***
The British Army has always demanded the highest standards from its nurses. Shaking off any past reputation of nurses as being drunken, immoral and untrustworthy, it insisted that members of the Army Nursing Service and its successors were highly trained and educated women of impeccable social standing. As the Services expanded rapidly during the Great War, standards remained high, maintaining an elitism within the nursing profession.
The page on British Military Nurses gives a brief overview of each of the nursing services, and gives some idea of the chances of records surviving for women who served between 1875 and 1925. For women who entered the service after the end of the Great War, surviving records are still held by the Ministry of Defence, and are not likely to be released into the public domain until at least 2015. Details of how to apply for records of women who served during the Second World War will be found on the research page.
Family history has increased in popularity, but these intelligent, professional and sometimes intimidating women have remained in the background. Many did not marry and therefore have no direct descendants, and of the thousands who served during the Great War, most were children or very young women at the time of the 1901 census, and their later lives are still undiscovered. Now that the 1911 census is widely available, maybe more of them will be recognized.
***
GREAT WAR ACCOUNTS
Over recent years I've transcribed many unpublished nursing documents which are held at The National Archives, and some of these are now included here. They will include both official documents and personal accounts, and I think they will prove particularly beneficial to the serious student and those trying to make more sense of their relatives' time with the nursing services. The official war diary of the Matron-in-Chief is a document of extraordinary length and contains so much of interest that's unavailable elsewhere. However, make sure you have a bottomless coffee-pot if you embark on the journey it provides. Use the menu on the left or one of the links below, to start reading...
Miscellaneous Accounts - a bit of everything
***
MILITARY MEDALS
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
THIS INTREPID BAND

***
MILITARY NURSES ON FIND MY PAST
A series of searchable databases containing information on women who served as military nurses but may not be found elsewhereMILITARY NURSES ON FIND MY PAST
*****
NEW CONTENT
4 January 2012Researching a Nurse - what you can do yourself - UPDATED
27 November 2011
Report on hospital conditions in Nazareth for British prisoners of Turkey
10 October 2011
A Site Map to help you navigate around the content
8 October 2011
Account of the last days in Malaya before the evacuation in 1942
6 October 2011
British Military Hospitals 1899
7 October 2011
A Selection of reports of UK Military Hospitals 1902-3
19 September 2011
The Royal Red Cross and the Great War
21 August 2011 updated 25 August 2011
Appeal for help in tracing relatives of nurses and soldiers
8 August 2011
The United Kingdom Home Hospitals
These pages list all hospitals in the UK caring for military personnel in the autumn of 1917
7 July 2011
A Selection of Miscellaneous Accounts
11 August 2010
Nominal Rolls of members of QAIMNS, their Reserve and the Territorial Army Nursing Service working with the British Expeditionary Force in France, 1939-1940
13 February 2010
British Military Nurses and the Great War - A Guide to the Services
A newly-written article explaining the background to the different nursing services working under the auspices of the War Office, caring for the British Expeditionary Force during the Great War. This article has recently been published on the website of the Western Front Association

