York Minster Cathedral is one of the most ancient and beautiful in all of Christendom. Its cloistered halls and vaulted ceilings have long been the site of pomp and ceremony: investitures of the Archbishop, masses and requiems, splendid state visits of kings and queens. In June 1925, York Minster witnessed a very different kind of ritual, the first ever memorial service to ‘the women of the British Empire who gave their lives in the Great War’.

That day the Cathedral was filled ‘to the uttermost’ and – for the first time – by ‘hosts of uniformed women’. They represented ‘all the branches of the services in which women took part during the war’, a press report related:

Women doctors in their academic robes, hundreds of nurses in the various uniforms, V.A.D. workers in their blue-and-white with scarlet crosses on their apron. Wrens, munitions workers, and so on.1

The great congregation heard the sound of triumphal music as the Archbishop marched in procession to the dais; watched the Duke and Duchess of York receive the Royal Salute; and smelt the sweet, ashen scent of incense drift through the air. Then, at a signal from the Archbishop, ‘a great sheet’, which covered the northern transept drifted down from its moorings, and the brilliant colour of a stained glass window flashed ‘like rich jewels’ in the sunlight. The ‘assembled multitude’, it was said, let out a single sigh.

The Five Sisters Window had stood in York Minster since the 13th century but it was fundraising efforts led by women that had it restored. That day, the windows were rededicated to women who many feared would be forgotten – those who had made the supreme sacrifice ‘in the cause of King and Country’. Their contribution was no less than that of their menfolk, the Archbishop proclaimed from his pulpit. ‘The light of this service and sacrifice . . . ennobled the women of our land and Empire in the dark days of the Great War.’ It was a light more ‘glorious’, more ‘pure’ more ‘delicate’ than the filtered colour beamed through the great windows above him, and it would shine, he said, forevermore.2

Ennobling the women of our Land and the Empire: The soft filtered light of York Minster’s memorial window. The campaign to restore the Five Sisters Window began in 1923, an initiative of Helen Little of York. ‘I had a vision’, she explained in a letter to the London Times published after her death, ‘On entering York Minster for evensong I saw two white clad figures, one beckoning to me and the other pointing to the ‘Five Sisters’ window. I recognised them as my sisters who died in childhood. I looked at the window, which opened, revealing to my gaze an exquisite garden with five women sitting in the shade of a great tree, and many girls and women, clad in grey-blue approaching. The vision faded . . . I woke crying ‘The Five Sisters window for the Sisters’. Creative Commons courtesy Mattana.

Beneath the window, a wide oak screen had been erected. Like countless stone pillars raised across the Empire, it carried its burden of names – over one thousand from Great Britain, a single name from India, four from South Africa, thirty-nine from Canada, and thirty-nine names in all from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Included in the tally were women who died of sickness, were killed in air raids, drowned when their transports were torpedoed, lost their lives in munitions factories and – in the case of Edith Cavell – were executed by the Germans during the war.

The service at York Minster set a precedent across the British Empire. Synchronised ceremonies were organised by the National Council of Women throughout Australia, and the largest and most ‘impressive’ services took place in the Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney Town Halls. His Excellency Lord Forster, Governor of New South Wales, presided over the last of these. ‘I have taken part in many ceremonials to honour the memory of men,’ he told an attentive (and, again, largely female) audience, ‘but this is the first occasion I have had to participate in a ceremony devoted solely to women.’ A soldier himself, he had seen those women at work in many theatres of war:

In the midst of the greatest danger [they] carried on, with unfailing courage and endurance, and gave of their love and strength to the battered remains of humanity that were in their care.

A ceremony devoted wholly to honouring women: Breanna Janson from Bairnsdale, Victoria, pays her respects at Edith Moorhouse’s grave. Breanna represented Nagel College on the Victorian Premier’s Spirit of Anzac Tour in 2014 and chose Edith Moorhouse to commemorate. In the ninth year of the Tour’s operation, it was the first year the ‘Adopt a Digger’ program had been extended to include a nurse. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

On this occasion, the names of the Australian women who died in the conflict were read out to the audience, a way, as the Governor put it, ‘to affirm their remembrance’. Amongst the first to be called out was Sister Edith Moorhouse.3

Edith was born in Undera, a small town outside Kyabram in country Victoria. Her mother died in 1891 at the age of 38, her father a year later. At the age of six, Edith was left an orphan – as were her four siblings. All of them moved to Echuca where they came under the care of their uncle, Henry Moorhouse. As for many women of her generation, nursing offered Edith a chance of self-reliance and independence. She trained at Mooroopna General Hospital for three years and was still a resident at Mooroopna when she enlisted as a staff nurse in 1915. She embarked from Melbourne on HMAT Kyarra that August.

In over three years of service, Edith Moorhouse nursed servicemen in Australia, Egypt and France. She also worked on hospital ships, freighting sick, wounded and sometimes dying men across the Mediterranean back to England and even home to Australia. She had two periods of leave in England, both to recover from bouts of illness, and may well have visited York Minster where her memorial would eventually be placed. In 1918, she returned to France, was posted to the 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station.

Conditions in northern France were appalling. The hospitals around Lille swelled with the sick and wounded, and the site of the casualty clearing stations shifted hurriedly with every battle. And just like the steady stream of wounded, the weather gave no respite: ‘[We] were moved . . . [t]o a dreary spot called Fretin beyond Lille,’ Sister Leila Brown recalled:

Here we were billeted in an old château about 20 minutes walk from the camp . . . My team went on night duty and filthy weather prevailed cold winds and rain for it was now late in October. We were cold and miserable long before we reached our ward for the night’s work. It was during this night’s duty that . . . Sister Moorhouse took ill.4

Edith Moorhouse refused to leave her post. Despite illness and exhaustion, she continued to tend the ‘battered remains of humanity’ left in her care. ‘She would not give in until she could not move,’ Sister Brown remembered, ‘and it was too late [then] to save her precious life.’

Edith survived long enough to see the end of fighting but died of pneumonia two weeks after the signing of the Armistice. She was 33 years of age.5

Edith Moorhouse was buried beside the men she nursed, in Lille Southern Cemetery. Her uncle Henry died in 1920, long before the permanent headstones were set in place, so it was almost certainly her brother Matthew who composed the epitaph for her grave. Matthew had inserted a series of obituary notices in the Melbourne Argus. The few words he chose were simpler and more eloquent than any archbishop’s eulogy, or any grand speech the Governor might have made:

SHE HATH DONE WHAT SHE COULD

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: Along with extensive secondary sources, this story draws on the service dossier of Edith Moorhouse NAA: B2455 MOORHOUSE EDITH ANN; her Red Cross Wounded and Missing file AWM 1DRL/0428; the war diary of the Matron-in-Chief, The National Archives, Kew, W095/3991, November 1–30, 1918; the Papers of Matron Grace Wilson at the Australian War Memorial 3DRL 7819; and contemporary newspaper reports both in Australia and Britain.

1 News, 14 October 1925.

2 ibid.

3 Sydney Morning Herald, 25 June 1925.

4 Sister Leila Brown, AWM41, 946.

5 ibid.