Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Five: Nursing Sister Violet D. Stewart, née Chawner, Princess Christian’s Army Nursing Service Reserve, later British Red Cross and St. John of Jerusalem

Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, no clasp (Nursing Sister V. D. Chawner.); King’s South Africa 1901-02, no clasp (Nursing Sister V. D. Chawner.); 1914-15 Star (V. D. Stewart, B.R.C. & St. J.J.); British War and Victory Medals (V. D. Stewart) good very fine and better (5) £500-£700

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Norman Gooding Collection.

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Violet Dorothy Chawner was born in Newton Valence, Hampshire, in 1873, the daughter of a former Captain of the Duke of Cambridge’s Own (Middlesex Regiment). She trained as a nurse at Trinity Hospital in New York, before serving at the Presbyterian Hospital from 1892 to 1896, and at Guy’s Hospital in London from 1898 to 1899. Chawner enrolled in Princess Christian’s Army Nursing Service Reserve (as No. 150) on 8 December 1899, arriving in Cape Town on 19 January 1900. She initially served at No. 2 General Hospital in Pretoria, but is recorded in December 1900 at Driefontein. Sent to Durban, she departed South Africa for passage home to England on 4 May 1901.

In late 1902, Chawner married Captain Robert Joseph Tucker Stewart at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square, London. Originally Commissioned in the Northumberland Fusiliers, it appears that the couple met in South Africa whilst Stewart was serving as Transport Officer on the Staff of the Indian Army. Called to service at the commencement of the Great War, Nurse Stewart initially witnessed home service with the British Red Cross at Lady Ramsden’s Hospital, before crossing the Channel to France in September 1915. Posted to Étaples, she soon contracted an illness and was forced to return home.

Resigned from the British Red Cross, Stewart channelled all her energies into getting better. This proved fruitful and she served a further two terms in France and Flanders from June 1916 to October 1916, and February 1917 to June 1917. Acting as a Nurse under the British Committee of the French Red Cross, she thus attended to vast numbers of men wounded on the Somme and on the battlefield of Ypres. Stewart survived the war and travelled from London to Karachi on 4 December 1918. She is later recorded in 1931 travelling to Tangier with her daughter Iris, their address given as 147, Cromwell Road, London, which at that time was the Hotel Madrid.