Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

The rare lady’s Memorial Plaque to Miss Margaret T. Arnold, Voluntary Aid Detachment, who served as a Nurse at No. 16 General Hospital at Le Tréport, and died of double pneumonia on 12 March 1916

Memorial Plaque, ‘She Died for Freedom and Honour’ (Margaret T. Arnold) in card envelope, polished, very fine £3,000-£4,000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, A Fine Collection of Medals to Female Medics.

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Margaret ‘Peggy’ Trevenen Arnold was born in 1884, the eldest of four daughters of Edward Arnold, and the great-granddaughter of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby. In her twenties she became involved with the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Bloomsbury, London; her cousin Mary Ward was the driving force of the settlement, which provided educational, social and health services to the disadvantaged of the area. Over the next ten years, Miss Arnold’s voluntary work at the settlement included running the children’s library, being a manager of the school, and making home visits to families. The 1911 census lists her occupation as a ‘social worker for the London County Council Care Committee’.

In 1913 Miss Arnold moved with her family to Chiddingfold, Surrey, and following the outbreak of the Great War she joined the Chiddingfold Emergency Committee, as well as the Surrey branch of the British Red Cross, attending lectures and practical classes. After training as a nurse at Hilders House, Shottermill, Haslemere, a newly-established Red Cross War hospital, she enrolled in the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and served as a Nurse with the 16th General Hospital at Le Tréport, France, from 5 June 1915. The hospital, atop 300-foot cliffs, was ‘entirely under canvas’, although wooden huts were later provided for the nurses’ living quarters.

Miss Arnold’s nine months at Le Tréport are vividly chronicled in her diary (which is held by her family), with day-to-day accounts of hospital life with all its panics and lulls, tragedies and camaraderie. The frontline trenches were about 60 miles away in the valley of the Somme, and hospital life was governed by the ebb and flow of war - plus the vagaries of the weather. In October 1915 she wrote that there were days when the ‘fighting [must have] been fearful and we have had convoy after convoy in, and they have been cleared off the next morning to make room for others’. On the ward there were ‘groans, and moans, and shouts, and half-dazed mutterings, and men with trephined heads suddenly sitting bolt upright ... nearly every sheet showing signs of the wound, and face wounds showing pus at the side of their dressing. It was awful, and I really know now what war means’.
But there was also the delight of time off with a chance to go shopping in Le Tréport, have a proper bath in an hotel, or to drive into the surrounding countryside. ‘Oh, why is there a war to spoil things!’ (Exploring Surrey’s Past refers).

In February 1916, Miss Arnold started nursing in an isolation unit for patients with ‘blue pus’, caused by bacterial infection of wounds or injuries. Possibly as a result of this work she developed double pneumonia and died on 12 March 1916. She is buried in Le Tréport Military Cemetery, France, and is also commemorated on the Chiddingfold War Memorial. A tribute to her appeared in The Times of 31 March, written by someone ‘who witnessed her work and the enormous help and sympathy she gave to our sick and wounded men’. It concludes: ‘Her spirit of fun, which helps Tommy more than anything, was unfailing, however tired she was herself. Men have told me that no one could help feeling happy when Sister Arnold was there... To those capable of appreciating her, her unselfishness, her uncomplaining fearless nature, Peggy Arnold will ever remain a blessed memory’.