Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

The Great War pair awarded to Miss May M. MacDougall, Women’s Royal Naval Service, who was the travelling companion of celebrated adventurer, artist and writer Emily Kemp in her journeys through Central Asia, India, China and Korea between 1907 and 1914, and assisted in her nursing endeavours in France; she later became one of the earliest officers of the Women’s Royal Naval Service

British War and Victory Medals (M. M. Macdougall); together with the recipient’s British Red Cross Society Medal for War Service 1914-18, with integral top riband bar, good very fine (3) £200-£240

Miss May Meiklejon MacDougall was born at Galashiels in 1875, the daughter of a Scottish surgeon; she was educated at Carlisle High School for Girls, and in Switzerland. Her first journey with Emily Kemp was a six-month exploration of China, described in the book The Face of China (1909). Of a wealthy Lancashire industrialist family and fifteen years Macdougall’s senior, Emily Kemp had been one of the first students at Somerville College, Oxford, and afterwards continued her studies at the Slade School of Fine Art. During her many journeys she sketched, painted and wrote down her experiences and observations, with a focus on the education and welfare of women, and their role in religion. The intrepid pair’s subsequent expeditions were chronicled in The Face of Manchuria, Korea and Russian Turkestan (1910) and Wanderings in Chinese Turkestan (1914); they were among the earliest Western travellers to use the Trans-Siberian railway, and in 1912 made a hazardous crossing of the Karakorum Mountains from India into western China. The terrain was rugged and the area in political turmoil; to allay the fears of their families, Kemp and MacDougall promised that, on arriving safely in the town of Kashgar on the Chinese side of the border, they would telegraph the word ‘good’ to Emily’s brother George (a Member of Parliament, shortly to be made a peer) in Rochdale, to confirm that all was well. The journey was completed safely, but the telegram was mangled in transmission, startling Kemp’s brother into using his political connections to instigate a flurry of enquiries from the Foreign Office to India, to confirm their safety. Lord Rochdale was afterwards pursued by the Foreign Office for the sum of eight guineas, to reimburse the costs of the investigations: “Lord Rochdale ought to pay. If he will let his feminine relations go on these journeys, he must accept the consequences."

After the outbreak of war in 1914, Emily Kemp was the organiser and benefactor of the staff of trained nurses who travelled to France in January 1915 to work at the ‘Hopital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois’, which became as well known for its volunteer corps of renowned artists and writers, including Lady Kathleen Scott (widow of Robert Falcon Scott), John Masefield, Henry Tonks and Laurence Binyon. May MacDougall accompanied her in this enterprise as well, and later to the convalescent hospital in the same village to which she afterwards transferred her support.

After undertaking further war work as a V.A.D. volunteer in England, in March 1918 Miss MacDougall was accepted as an officer in the recently-formed Women’s Royal Naval Service, with the rank of Principal. Her service record shows her employed at Inverness; Glynn Hostel, Royal Naval Depot Crystal Palace; and South Shields Seaplane station, before release in January 1919. She died of a brain tumour in August 1932, whilst visiting her sister in Buckinghamshire.

Note: The medals awarded to Emily Georgiana Kemp, FRGS, were sold in these rooms in September 2014.

Sold with a DVD of copied research.