RRC 1st Class Recipient

Recipient QAIMNS Nursing Sister Elizabeth Taylor Ferguson receiving the RRC 1st Class military decoration award at Buckingham Palace for her service in France during World War One.

David Ferguson has kindly shared his memories, newspaper clippings and research of his aunt, Elizabeth Taylor Ferguson RRC, which includes two newspaper photographs of her on the day she was decorated with the Royal Red Cross by the King.

David says:

Elizabeth was born in Glasgow in 1884. She was known as 'Tib' to her family.

When my siblings and I were children, Tib used to tell us stories of her service as a Sister in the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS) in which she enlisted early in the First World War. She disembarked in northern France with forward units of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on 16th August 1914, only nineteen days after the outbreak of war. She was posted initially to 32 Ambulance Train and later to field hospitals behind the BEF's front lines. I don't remember any of the detail of her stories, but I do remember her mentioning field hospitals in or around towns like Bapaume, Bethune, Arras and Amiens. These towns were very close to the industrial scale slaughter in the trenches. I didn't understand the horrors of trench warfare when I was a child, but now that I do understand, I cannot imagine the horror and chaos of thousands of badly wounded and dying soldiers flooding into the field hospitals, day after day, week after week, month after month for four long years, with little respite. She would have been working in France during the Retreat from Mons, the First Battle of the Marne, the Race for the Sea, the Somme, Passchendaele and countless other battles, large and small.

It must have taken an immense amount of personal courage and fortitude for a young woman in her early thirties to show "exceptional devotion and competence in the performance of nursing duties, over a continuous and long period". Her extraordinary service was recognised by the award of the Royal Red Cross First Class (RRC). The RRC is the highest and most prestigious award for a military nurse.

She was decorated with the RRC First Class by King George V at Buckingham Palace on Saturday, 4th March 1916. The photographs below, which are 107 years old, were reproduced in several national newspapers:-









A copy of her War Record is reproduced below.





This is an extract from the RRC Register, held by the Museum of Military Medicine.





Never married. She lived with my family for several years in her old age. She died in 1969.

As a footnote, three of her brothers (my two uncles and my father) also served in the forces in WW1. John Ferguson served in the Royal Engineers. Alexander Ferguson served in the Royal Veterinary Corps. My father, Lieutenant Arthur Charles Beaumont Ferguson, was a pilot in 51 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, later the Royal Air Force. Fortunately, all four of them survived the appalling slaughter of WW1, but not necessarily without some psychological scars. John, Alexander, and Arthur all received campaign medals, but none as prestigious as Tib's RRC.

David Ferguson

August 2023

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