A Cry in the Dark
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
On October 12, 1915, a British nurse called Edith Cavell was shot by a German firing squad at the rifle range in Etterbeek. Her crime: helping Allied soldiers escape from behind enemy lines.
Her execution shocked the world and, along with the sinking by a German submarine of the ocean liner Lusitania, was instrumental in bringing the US into the war. Brussels has a street named after her, and a statue of her stands in London’s St Martin’s Place, just off Trafalgar Square.
Now, 88 years after her death, Edith Cavell’s secret service file has been declassified. For the first time, the dramatic story of the urgent message she tried to send her mother—and how its delivery was held up by bureaucracy until it was too late—has been revealed.
Born in 1865 in Swardeston, six kilometres south of Norwich, Cavell was the daughter of the local vicar. At 26, she travelled to Brussels to work as a governess. She stayed for five years, before returning home when her father fell ill. In caring for him, she found her vocation, and moved to London to study at the Hospital Nurses’ Training School. After qualifying, she worked at infirmaries in St Pancras and Shoreditch.
When a Belgian surgeon, Dr Antoine Depage, invited her to run a new nursing school in 1907, Cavell returned to Brussels. Depage and his wife had set up the Berkendael Institute in Rue Franz Merjay after becoming frustrated with local medical practices. The doctor had been inspired by the methods of British nurse Florence Nightingale, and wanted to introduce them to Belgium.
By 1911, Cavell was training nurses for three Belgian hospitals, 24 schools and 13 kindergartens. But while visiting her by then widowed mother in Swardeston in August 1914, she heard that Germany had invaded Belgium. ‘I am needed more than ever,’ she is reported to have said. She left for Brussels immediately.
Although she was an enemy national, the Germans allowed Cavell to continue as matron at the Institute, whose teaching school was converted into a Red Cross Hospital. But by the autumn of 1914, Cavell had a new, secret role—helping more than 200 Allied soldiers trapped behind the advancing German front escape through northern France to neutral Holland.
The Institute became the Brussels safe house for an underground lifeline that began at the château of the Prince and Princess de Croy in Mons. Cavell and others sheltered the soldiers, provided them with false papers, and escorted them to Place Rouppe to meet the guides who were to lead them to the border.
But the Germans were closing in on Cavell. On July 20, 1915, her friend the Count de Borchgrave visited her home in Rue de la Culture. He was greeted by a man with ‘a reddish face, fair, short military moustache and a very Cockney accent’. The man was a German plain clothes policeman, and he and his colleagues were searching the house for documents that might incriminate the nurse.
De Borchgrave got a message to Cavell about this, and she recognised his description of the man—she had met him before, when he had told her that he owned a florist’s shop in London’s Forest Hill, and that he could travel to England whenever he wanted. De Borchgrave was then approached by a ‘friend of Cavell’s’ who asked him to deliver a message to the nurse’s mother, warning her not to speak to anyone about her daughter’s activities in Brussels.
De Borchgrave’s wife lived in Reading, so he immediately sent her a letter, and included a description of the mysterious red-faced Cockney. ‘If [Mrs Cavell] talks to people about her daughter, it might get known to the Germans and there would be no telling what her fate might be,’ he wrote.
On July 28, the Countess de Borchgrave sent her husband’s letter on to the police at Reading, asking them to forward it to their Norfolk colleagues.
But the Reading chief constable instead sent the note to the Berkshire Constabulary, whose Major Mills was mystified by it. Mills sent a memo to his superintendent Goddard the same day: ‘Would you please ascertain from the Countess de Borchgrave, a Belgian subject residing at Crowthorne, further particulars in regard to the enclosed, which has been sent to me by the Chief Constable, Borough Police, Reading, as I do not quite understand what she means.’
Goddard interviewed the countess on August 1, and sent a report to his chief constable that essentially repeated the contents of the original message. On August 3, Mills sent the letter to Vernon Kell, the head of the War Office’s Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence, otherwise known as M.0.(I).5, soon to be renamed MI5, Britain’s internal security service.
Kell didn’t send the letter to the Norwich constabulary until August 10. In the meantime, he instigated an investigation, with the help of Scotland Yard (MI5 having no powers of arrest at the time), into the ‘alleged German in a florist’s shop in Forest Hill’.
The investigation was a wash-out: there didn’t seem to be any florist matching the description known in that area of London, and MI5 concluded that the information had probably been false.
On August 19, Chief Constable Finch in Norwich finally wrote to Kell to report that Mrs Cavell had been handed the letter by Detective Sergeant Plumb, and that she had agreed to contact the police if anyone asked for her daughter’s address in Brussels. Of course, the ‘Cockney florist’ already knew where Edith Cavell lived—he had searched her house a month before. But, like Chinese whispers, the message had become diluted.
It’s not known if Mrs Cavell spoke to any strangers about her daughter while the letter from Brussels was being sent around England. But by the time she received the warning, it was already too late: her daughter had been arrested on August 5.
After being interrogated in Saint-Gilles prison, Cavell was tried in early October, along with Philippe Baucq, an architect who had also helped Allied soldiers escape. The trial lasted just two days. They were both sentenced to death and, despite vigorous protests from the Spanish and US ambassadors in Brussels, were shot at the National Firing Range in Etterbeek, at 02.00 on October 12.
The outcry over the execution of a female nurse was immense. In Britain, The Times printed letters about the noble Englishwoman spared no mercy by the monstrous Germans, and the Manchester Guardian headlined its account ‘Heroic Spirit Unshaken To The Last’. Public sentiment in the US was also aroused. The New York Herald wrote: ‘The official report received today will cause a wave of horror to sweep over the world at the possibility of a nation which will perpetrate such a terrible thing as a mere matter of military routine succeeding in this war and dominating Europe.’
The Allies successfully exploited Cavell’s death for propaganda: recruitment doubled in the two months following it. Posters of Cavell bearing the simple legend ‘Remember’ were particularly effective.
But MI5 took a more cold-blooded attitude, concluding that the Germans had been right to shoot her, and that Britain should alter its policy to do the same. On October 16, just four days after Cavell’s execution, MI5 opened a file entitled ‘Women Spies, Sentences on’. A Major Drake noted that a lenient sentence on a German spy the previous year meant that Britain was now threatened with ‘an influx of German women agents’. He added that Cavell’s case showed that the enemy had no such reluctance—and she hadn’t even been accused of espionage.
‘I agree,’ wrote Kell the next day. ‘It is high time we put aside all false sentimentality. A spy in war time wherever caught, and of whatever nationality, should be tried by Court Martial and dealt with expeditously... The employment of women as German spies in this country is on the increase, and one must consider the fact that the class of information they can acquire is very often of more value than the ordinary male spy can obtain, and just as effective.’ He concluded: ‘I am advocating no vindictive methods, but in a clear case of female espionage, we should not hesitate to apply the full penalty.’
Some of the other documents in Cavell’s file are equally gripping.
In December 1915, MI5 put out feelers about the Count de Borchgrave. It is unclear whether this was as a result of the public interest in the case or because they distrusted his story. It was established that he was about 55, had greying hair and wore a pince-nez, but nobody seemed to be able to vouch for or condemn him.
‘There are many counts of this name,’ one agent reported. ‘Some of them have turned out badly.’ Another added: ‘Agree there is so little to go upon. We shall probably hear no more about him.’
But they did eventually track him down—he was in Reading, with his wife—and seemed satisfied he had told the truth. He also revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the acquaintance of Edith Cavell who had asked him to deliver the message to her mother had, in fact, been the nurse herself.
The file then jumps forward to November 24, 1917, when Capitaine Béliard of the Grand Quartier Général des Armées du Nord et Nord-Est in Folkestone wrote to MI5. ‘Dear Colonel Kell, I am sending you herewith two photos, one showing the Tir National at Brussels used by the Germans as an execution ground, and the other showing the graves of several victims, notably that of Nurse Cavell.’
Béliard said he had been sent the photos from Brussels, and asked Kell to send them on to Mrs Cavell, ‘to whom they will doubtless prove a sad but precious souvenir’.
After making inquiries to see if Cavell’s mother was still living at the same address, Kell sent the photos on December 4. ‘I have been directed by the French Authorities to forward you the enclosed photographs which, they consider, you would like to possess in memory of your daughter,’ he wrote. He also included copies of the photographs.
Mrs Cavell replied to thank him, saying that she had sent the copies to her other two daughters, but would keep the originals for herself. ‘I very much appreciate your kind expressions of sympathy with me in my great loss.’
The file ends there. After the war, Edith Cavell’s body was exhumed and returned to Britain. A memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey, attended by the King. Cavell was then reburied in Norwich Cathedral.
The popular perception of Edith Cavell remains that of a young, patriotic nurse who had little idea of the danger she was facing. She certainly served her country courageously, although she is famously reported to have said minutes before her execution: ‘As I stand here in the presence of Eternity, I find that patriotism is not enough.’ She wasn’t that young, either: she died two months shy of her 50th birthday. And we now know that she was well aware what might happen to her if she were caught.
But perhaps even more fascinating is the glimpse into the workings of the British police force and fledgling secret service during World War One—and their bungling attempts to help a resistance fighter in peril.’