58697: Photographs of 44 Casualty Clearing Station

Photographs of 44 Casualty Clearing Station: the tented camp; groups of Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service; the Orderly Room staff; surgical / dressing teams of the Royal Army Medical Corps. One man wears Overseas Service Chevrons, dating this set of photographs to 1918 or later.

Part of the photograph and scrap album of Revd. Leonard Thomas Pearson, Army Chaplain's Department (attached No. 44 Casualty Clearing Station), discovered in a skip and deposited with the Bodlian Library. Revd. Pearson was interviewed by Lyn Macdonald for her book 'The Roses of No Man's Land', which contains two extracts and a photograph:

"I spent most of my time giving anaesthetics. I had no right to be doing this, of course, but we were simply so rushed. We couldn't get the wounded into the hospital quickly enough, and the journey from the battlefields was terrible for these poor lads. It was a question of operating as quickly as possible. If they had had to wait their turn in the normal way....... it would have been too late for many of them. As it was, many died............I did a lot of stretcher carrying and helped to strip the men of their filthy uniforms. We had to cut them off with scissors, and there were some nights that we cut until our fingers were raw. We had over a thousand beds and that simply wasn't enough. We had to keep the worst cases and send anyone who could possibly travel down to the base."

No. 44 Casualty Clearing Station was located at the following sites during the war: Puchevillers, August 1916 - March 1917; Brandhoek, March 1917 - September 1917 (possibly Colincamps, March - May 1917); Nine Elms, September 1917 - March 1918; Arneke, April 1918 - May 1918; Berque, May 1918 - October 1918; Brielen, October 1918 - November 1918; From November 1918 to December 1918 the Station was frequently moved from Belgium to Northern France and back again, before settling in Namur from December 1918, finally moving to Cologne in April 1919.