(1896-1981)
First aid worker and ambulance driver during World War I. Mairi Chisholm and Elizabeth "Elsie" Knocker (who later married for a short time a Belgian pilot and became known as the Baroness de T’Serclaes) ran a first aid post near the front. They were the only two women officially allowed to work at the Belgian lines. Chisholm and Knocker were decorated by the Belgians as Knights of Leopold II and by the British with Military Medals and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
At the start of the war, Chisholm, who came from a wealthy Scottish family, rode her motorcycle to London and volunteered as a motorcycle dispatcher with the Women’s Emergency Corps. Another dispatcher, Elsie Knocker, whom Chisholm had met at motorcycle races, recruited Chisholm to join her in Hector Munro’s Ambulance Corps. The corps was sponsored by the Belgian Red Cross and began work overseas in September 1914.
The hectic ambulance work, in which many of the wounded were dead on arrival or soon after, inspired Knocker to establish a first aid post near the front lines to treat men for shock to improve their chances of surviving the traumatic journey to the base hospitals. Despite Munro’s disapproval of women living in close vicinity to soldiers, Chisholm and Knocker left the ambulance corps to establish their post in a cellar in Pervyse in late November 1914.
Chisholm and Knocker experienced immense difficulties when living on the front lines, including lack of supplies and funds as well as their cellar house being temporarily overrun by the Germans. Despite these obstacles, they ventured into the trenches to rescue wounded and provide them with medical care; the Germans agreed not to target them if they wore their nurse’s veils.
The Two, as they were known among the Allied troops in Belgium, continued their work until they were affected by a gas attack in 1917, which forced them to return to England for their health. Chisholm briefly joined the British Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) and after the war raced cars until the effects of her gassing forced her to give up strenuous activity.
