Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

An impressive Order of St. John pair awarded to Sister Flora K. Fitzmaurice, Princess Christian’s Army Nursing Service Reserve, who risked her own life to save others during a serious typhus outbreak in 1897

The Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Serving Sister’s shoulder badge, 1st type (1892-1939), silver and enamel, circular badge with white enamel cross with heraldic beasts in angles raised above the background, on lady’s bow riband, the reverse privately engraved ‘Flora Kathleen Fitz Maurice Inniskea Augt. 1897. Conferred Augt. 1898.’; Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, no clasp (Sister F. K. Fitzmaurice. I.Y. H.P. Staff.) good very fine (2) £300-£400

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

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Flora Kathleen Fitzmaurice trained as a nurse at the City of Dublin Nursing Institution and was one of 11 nurses selected from that hospital to nurse the victims of a typhus outbreak on the remote west coast island of Inniskea. Located off the coast of the Belmullet peninsula in County Mayo, the island offered extremely primitive working conditions. An extract from the British Journal of Nursing offers a vivid description:

‘The nurses who first went to the island had to cook both for the patients and for themselves, to wash their own clothes and to do everything that was possible under the circumstances for the patients also. The food was scant and of very bad quality. There were no beds, and when the nurses had done a hard day’s work in all the filth and misery prevailing among the people, they were often unable to cook any food for their own use, and had to go without... They had at one time forty-eight cases of typhus to nurse in the separate huts, and had to visit all of these patients two or three times a day. They made no complaint, but worked on until they both broke down, and both took typhus fever from those whom they were attending.’

Contracting typhus herself, Fitzmaurice was fortunate to survive. She was later decorated with the Order of St John of Jerusalem, the bestowal by the Countess Cadogan at the Vice-regal Lodge offering public recognition to both the individual nurses and the Order of St John, the group citation noting: ‘in recognition of very conspicuous and devoted conduct in the month of June, during an outbreak of virulent typhus fever on the Island of Inniskea on a very wild and barren part of the west coast of Ireland.’

Making a good recovery, Fitzmaurice enrolled in Princess Christian’s Army Nursing Service Reserve on 2 July 1900, and served on the Staff of the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital at Dreelfontein during the Boer War.

Sold with private research and a copied group photograph of the 11 nurses decorated by the Countess Cadogan, the recipient being among their ranks.