On the day: Click here for more information about events and timings on this beach.
The portrait revealed on this beach was:
Elsie Maud Inglis
Age: 53 Date of Death: 26/11/1917
Elsie Inglis was an avowed suffragist and ally of campaigner Millicent Fawcett, who combined her medical background with a yearning for social justice.
Read MoreDoctor Elsie Maud Inglis (16 August 1864 – 26 November 1917)
Elsie Inglis was an avowed suffragist and ally of campaigner Millicent Fawcett, who combined her medical background with a yearning for social justice. Born in Naini, India, she came to Scotland with her parents when still young. Inglis trained as a surgeon in Edinburgh and Glasgow, at first seeking to improve facilities and healthcare for women. In 1901, she founded a maternity hospital for the poor in Edinburgh – The Hospice – staffed only by women.
At the outbreak of war, she was instrumental in setting up the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service Committee, a body funded by the suffrage movement to provide all-female care. Rebuffed by Great Britain’s War Office, which told her to “go home and sit still”, Inglis’s help was accepted by the French, who sent her unit first to Serbia, where she was instrumental in improving hygiene to reduce epidemics such as typhus. Despite being captured and repatriated in 1915, Inglis then went to work in Russia before she was diagnosed with a terminal illness and returned to Britain in November 1917. She passed away the day after she arrived home.
