Isabel Emslie Hutton Part IV

 

 

Isabel Emslie Hutton Part IV

Introduction

In the final part of the blog on this remarkable woman who seems to have packed more into one lifetime than is humanly possible, I want to address some of her activities during World War II and immediately afterwards.

In 1938, Tom Hutton was promoted to Major General and appointed to take charge of the Western General District in India. Isabel decided to take 6 months leave to accompany him ‘for the experience’. Though they had happily negotiated their semi-detached marriage, which had worked out ‘beyond their mutual expectations’, they thought it would be good to spend some tme together in a new country.

Before travelling, she asked advice from other women who had spent time in India and she was horrified when one aquaintance advised her to ‘consider herself superior to every Indian in the country, no matter how high born’. Emslie decided that this said a great deal more about the speaker than about the residents of India.

India and Beyond

In 1938, Emslie departed for the subcontinent. On boarding the vessel in Marseilles, she became immediately aware of how badly the English passengers treated the Indian travellers and crew. Their attitudes were, even for those days, rabidly colonialist and racist.

. On arrival in Quetta, in Baluchistan, a region now divided between Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, five thousand feet up in the mountains, she noticed that there were very few Indians. other than servants. It was an English settlement where the British and the Indians lived separate lives. Perceptively, and as always ahead of the game, she picked up too, on the language used. In her diary she recorded

India will be lost unless ‘they’ is changed to ‘we’ and ‘them’ to ‘us’.

The house they were given was seriously damaged due to an earthquake, but she resolved that once it was repaired and decorated, she would have parties and she would invite Indian guests.

The British custom was to hire furniture for the duration of the posting, but Emslie decided that she and her husband should have their own. She purposely sought out a Sikh carpenter to manufacture it, before employing an Indian seamstress to make the soft furnishings.

No sooner was the work complete than true to her word, she began to have parties for young Indian women, some of whom were in purdah. She treated them as equals and they were free to explore her house and go where they pleased. She was highly amused to find that the thing that most excited them was the way in which her kitchen cupboards were arranged.

While life in India was peaceful, Emslie began to receive alarming letters from Albania with rumours of war. There were fears that the Italians would invade, which they did on Good Friday 1939.

New Projects

By May 1940, they were at war and Tom Hutton became Deputy Chief of Staff at Army HQ. This necessitated a move to Simla. Emslie was sad to leave the house she had lovingly created, and where she had first got to know the people of India, but always ready for a new adventure, while most British wives and children had already returned to England, she decided to remain in India and make the move to Simla..

Having made the move, they heard of the invasion ofThe Netherlands, and the heavy fighting in France and the fall of Belgium. Though the news was heartrending, she decided that there was nothing she could do to relive those in Europe while she was stuck in India. She could however, use her skills to improve the quality of life for those in her immediate vicinity.

Emslie had met a Scottish woman called Jennie Copeland, who was the daughter of a Church of Scotland Minister. Miss Copeland was the founder of an organisation called the ‘Coolie’s Welfare Society’. Though we may flinch at the term ‘Coolie’  today, it was ther term used by the British to described indentured labourers who were mainly porters and baggage carriers. It has been said that these men and women carried the baggage of Colonisalism; there were employed to meet the expectations of white men and were defined by them.

As usual though, Emslie saw beyond the term. She regarded the bearers simply as human beings who were living in poverty and who were in need of medical care. Her response was to set up a twice weekly medical clinic where they could be treated. This would be during their lunch break, rather than in the working day, so that in attending they would not lose out on fares.  She mainly treated their wounded feet and everyday illnesses like coughs, colds, scabies and eye infections. Many had bad teeth and a dentist who was willing to offer them voluntary care was also found.

After meeting their basic needs, Emslie then extended the work that Jennie Copeland had initiated. She raised funds so that the ‘coolies’ could be supplied with food and necessities. She set up a bank account which would gain interest and she bought household staples in bulk at cost price to ensure the money was put to the best use. Always modest, she refused to take credit for this extended service, stating that none of this would ever have happened, without Miss Copeland.

Although the welfare society was now running as a thriving concern, Emslie remained bored while in Simla. It simply was not her kind of place. She felt that she was wasting her time there and she longed to practice psychiatry again.

It was at during this period that she learned that her London home had been irreparably damaged by a bomb on 22 Sept 1940. Her neighbours  and their servants were killed in the same explosion. She was upset but made a conscious decision not to grieve for her home as it was only goods and chattels in comparison to the human life that was being lost in the war. The news made her feel even more dissatisfied and impotent at being stuck in India though.

Fortuitously, the government decided to move Army Headquarters to Delhi, so Emslie and her husband made the move there. It transpired that this was a mixed blessing, as the plains were boiling hot and life in Delhi was hugely uncomfortable.

Undaunted as always, Emslie embarked on another project. She set up a charity to raise funds for the war effort. This would be done by means of a chain of Thrift Shops in Delhi.

These shops helped support the Indian Red Cross and other organisations. The venture also brought her into contact with The Red Cross and Order of St John who were also involved in charity work as were the Women’s Voluntary services and the Auxilliary Nursing Services. Emslie agreed to become chairman of the Auxilliary Nursing service, and she later became Director of the Indian Red Cross. She was particularly attracted to these last two organisations since they were multi-racial.

The Auxilliary Nursing Service provided a shortened nurse training and unusually, was open to Indians and Anglo-Indians as well as white women. Members went on to serve in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Italy and for a short time, in England, during the war.

The Indian Red Cross was open to members of all races and creeds to join and members played a significant role in searching for those reported wounded or missing. As the Japanese never provided any lists of wounded or dead prisoners of war, this became an increasingly important task.

These ‘voluntary’ tasks became Emslie’s full-time work and she enjoyed travelling to visit hospitals in India as well as Burma and the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Much as she herself had done when part of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, groups of Indian women were deployed to look after Indian troops in Ceylon, the Middle East, Iraq, Persia and Italy. Post-war, welfare workers travelled as far as Japan, Singapore, Malaya, Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Rabaul in Papua New Guinea in order to care for and to help repatriate prisoners of war, the wounded and those ‘stragglers’ who had been left behind through illness or other misadventure.

Emslie’s journeys by rail and air were taxing and hazardous and during monsoon season she paid ‘some unforeseen visits to places which had no reason to expect me’. Her friends were appalled and did their best to deter her from such jaunts, but true to form, she would not be deterred from these adventures. In today’s parlance, she might have been described as an ‘adrenalin junkie’.

Emslie’s great contribution to the Indian Red Cross and the Auxilliary Nursing Service  was her understanding that goodwill was not enough for staff. They required proper training.  She created a course and ensured that workers undertook the minimum of  a six week basic training. One of the things she most enjoyed was that this also helped foster co-operation and social interaction between British, Indian and Anglo-Indian women.

When the war ended, Emslie formulated a plan for the rehabilitatiuon and ongoing welfare of Japanese prisoners of war. This desperately needed service was unfortunately disrupted by Partition, when the country split in the midst of bloodshed, murder and a massive refugee crisis. The Indian Red Cross did its best to carry on the good work with prisoners of war, but it now had a more immediate crisis to deal with .

Emslie and Major Hutton had already met Gandhi some time before and now they met Jawaharlal Nehru. Though she was not in a position to say so since she was the wife of a senior army officer, Emslie secretly sympathised with the cause for the non-violent struggle for Indian independence and she likened this to the struggle for ‘Votes for Women’, in which she had played a non-violent part, though she greatly admired those who were self-sacrificing enough to become militant. She was, needless to say, horrified by the events of Partition.

Return to England.

With the ending of 300 years of British rule in India, in the Autumn of 1946, Emslie and her husband finally returned to London.  Instead of spending six months in India, she had spent eight years, and there were many changes in London in the interim.The couple were shocked when confronted by the bombsite in Montagu Place where their house had been and it was only then that Emslie allowed herself to grieve for the place they had been so happy.  She would later say that it took her years before she could even walk along Montagu Place. This was not the only loss she suffered while in India. Both her parents died while she was overseas and the reality of their deaths now hit her hard.

After spending time in a hotel, the couple eventually found a new house at 5, Spanish Place, a rather swish area of Marylebone close to Harley Street. They moved in the Spring of 1947 and Emslie set up a private consulting room there.

The British Hospital in which she had been so happy, had miraculously escaped damage and had carried on its work right through the blitz.  It was only once she took up her post there and began work that she had the feeling that ‘her old London life had returned’.

Visiting Old Haunts.

Between the wars, Emslie visited Jugoslavia several times and she was instrumental in setting up a scheme whereby Serbian women would be funded to receive training in British medical schools. As training developed and became available in their own country, this later developed into a scheme whereby women doctors could do a year’s postgraduate training in British medical schools. This was halted by WWII and funds had accumulated.

In 1952, Emslie decided to resurrect the scheme through the auspices of the British Council, as though Jugoslavia was now a Communist country, there was still a crying need for doctors. She received many invitations to visit Jugoslavian hospitals and medical schools, and she eventually did so in 1956.

She was openly unsympathetic to the Communist regime, but she planned to visit Belgrade, once more scaring her friends to death. They worried for ber safety ‘behind the iron curtain’ but her longing to see the country again, was greater than their misgivings.. She was not naive and realised that

… many changes will have taken place and I will not meet the same gay young men deancing the ‘kolo’ as I did 40 years before.

In the event, she was accompanied by her husband, and far from finding it a difficult trip, on being greeted by the familiar Dobla Dosha she immediately knew ‘she was back among friends’.

Emsie’s mission was to investigate the state of the Jugoslavian health service. She discovered that of the 8,500 doctors in the country, a third were women, employed on an equal status with men. Many were heads of hospitals or university professors, and most were married with children. There was still a struggle however,in  getting well-educated young women to train as nurses.

Of the many hospials she visited, the one she was most looking forward to seeing was the one that the Edinburgh and London committees of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals built after WWI and gave to the medical women of Jugoslavia. It now formed one of the pavilions of a larger hospital on the outskirts of Belgrade. She had been pondering how to request that  it be returned to women doctors, but when she met the staff, she was thrilled to discover that this was already the case.

Though most of the staff were unaware of the history of the hospital she was not surprised, as even in Scotland, little was remembered of the many doctors, nurses and orderlies who gave their services, and some their lives, to Serbia. She was pleased however, to discover the original commemorative plaque dedicated to Dr Elsie Inglis.

Emslie sought permission to visit Vranja, but was told there is ‘nothing to see there’. With her usual ability to charm/persuade/coerce officialdom, she explained that it would be a pilgrimage, since she had spent two years there as Commanding Officer of the American Unit, so they capitulated.

Once there, she rediscovered many friends, living in the same little houses. They were thrilled to see her and took her to visit the new hospital that had been built.  Despite the concerns of her British friends, she felt perfectly safe and enjoyed an evening with the villagers feasting on roast suckling pig, laid on in her honour.

After visiting other old haunts, Emslie and her husband travelled on to Macedonia, Montenegro and Dalmatia. She visited hospitals and gave talks to the women doctors about the struggles of early women in medicine. She met many old friends, alone or in groups, unsupervised and no-one try to propagandise her. She felt totally accepted  and began to revise her thinking somewhat about the ‘Iron Curtain’. Her hope was that Jugoslavia would ‘continue to work out it’s own salvation’.

Conclusion

Of all theincredibly inspiring women of whom I have written so far, Isabel Emslie Hutton is the one I would most like to have met. While I admire all the others, I know that I would also have liked Isabel. Her acceptance of all kinds and conditions of people, her restless energy, her courage and her ‘can-do’ attitude and ability to see the positives in even the darkest situation all endear her to me. I wrote at the very beginning of the first blog on her that I felt I had spent so much time with her that I did not think of her as ‘Lady Hutton’. To me, she was just ‘Isabel’ as we had become friends. There can be no better way to end this series of blogs on her life than her own words.

People tell me that I have had such an interesting life…but all life is interesting, whether in royal palaces or in the slums of Glasgow. It is the same with people; and there may be more to learn from the simple peasant than from the great ones of the earth……try always to enjoy such treasures as lie around you, whether in art, in nature, or in humanity itself.