Clodagh Finn: Discovering a Longford woman who was a decorated veteran of three wars

The British government of the time didn’t want them, but it was shamed into opening its borders after harrowing testimony on the horrors of war and the aerial bombardment of Guernica prompted a public outcry.

Aileen H Moore was quick to sign up to the National Joint Spanish Relief Committee, even though she was in her seventh decade. The committee, unlike the war office, did not have an age limit and she had ample experience to deal with what lay ahead.

She was a nursing veteran of the First World War, she could speak Spanish and despite a fleeting qualm about entering another war zone, she was happy to climb aboard a tiny monoplane and fly from an airfield near Biarritz in France towards the Basque city of Bilbao.

“As the plane flew south, Moore saw below her, ‘on the corrugated gleaming blue surface’ of the sea, a fleet of destroyers. Inland from the long yellow line of coast, she could also spot the fighting units of nationalist troops and the Basque armies,” historian Dr Sarah Lonsdale writes, quoting a particularly evocative article Aileen wrote for the Nursing Mirror and Midwives’ Journal.

In it, she also describes eating dishes of meat (“once cat, and once, we’re sure, a donkey steak”), but it’s a passing detail in a powerful story of how the relief committee’s agent in Bilbao, Mrs Manning, succeeded in “beating down insuperable obstacles and obstructions in her path” to get 4,000 children out of Franco’s way to safety.

On May 20, 1937, against the odds, Nurse Moore and several other volunteers helped the “eddying masses of children” squeeze on board the SS Habana, an old steamship built for 800, as a “thick black mass of parents” defied bombs to gather on the quayside to say goodbye to their children, as one account put it.

Her duties included examining the children for signs of infectious diseases before they left Spain. Once aboard, she tried to comfort them: “The children are wonderfully good when one thinks of the horrors they have known. They are high-spirited, lovable and intensely home-loving — like their parents. They respond to affection. 

It brought a lump to my throat when one tiny girl of six clung to my neck and kissed my hand. 

"One longs for the day when they may safely be repatriated to their lovely country.”

They arrived in Southampton 48 hours later, after a rough, choppy crossing, where a team of volunteers had set up a camp in three fields in Eastleigh to offer temporary accommodation. By mid-September, all 4,000 children had been relocated to residential homes throughout the UK, with help from volunteers, church groups, trade unions and others.

That’s the kind of impressive record that puts governments to shame—then and now.

Her description of what faced the children also shows why the focus in times of war must be on keeping people safe, indeed alive, rather than on totting up the numbers in need of help.

These children were in imminent danger of dying in bomb strikes. Some were orphans, or half-orphans—as the Americans termed children who had a missing parent—while others were the daughters of tearful parents who pleaded with the volunteers to save them from “outrage”. Then, as now, rape was a weapon of war, and “no idle fear”, as Nurse Moore noted.

Dr Lonsdale’s account of Aileen Moore’s hair-raising rescue mission to Spain came into my inbox a few weeks ago from John Morgan, a member of the Basque Pyrenees Freedom Trails’ Association with a long-standing interest in Basque history. In an attached note, he wrote: “With a name like that, she must have Irish connections?”

Aileen H Moore's origins

She does. Indeed, Aileen Henrietta Moore was Irish and the journey to discover more about this dedicated and decorated veteran shows that some things never change. War is a constant, as are the refugees it makes. Likewise, there will always be those unwilling (or unable) to help them just as, thankfully, there will always be others, often volunteers, who move mountains to keep them safe.

It is also heartening to see that there is a largely untapped appetite to toast not just the soldier-heroes of war, but the thousands of often-unheralded nurses who tended them.

Historians Dr Sarah Lonsdale and James Doherty could not have done more to cast light on this Longford woman. The latter located her file in the British National Archives which is how we know that she was born in Tully, Co. Longford, on 23 March, 1875, to clergyman William Moore and Elizabeth Blanche Wale.

The archive also traces her journey from Victoria College in Belfast to nurse training in Manchester and later the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. It details her five years of army nursing service during the First World War and her desire to volunteer to help in the Second World War at the age of 63. Her request was turned down on the basis of her age, but her family would later uncover a war diary showing that she was not prepared to sit by idly during the Blitz.

Wartime heroics

But let’s take the world wars in the right order.

When the First World War broke out, she already had a decade’s experience and spoke Spanish fluently as she had worked as a private nurse in Barcelona from 1907 to 1909. She was posted first to Cape Town, South Africa, then recalled to London before serving again in Salonika in Greece and later Constantinople (now Istanbul) with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve.

She arrived in Salonika on 22 May, 1917, and served at the 49th General Hospital at Hortiach where she would have nursed some of the 600,000 Allied French, British and Serbian troops fighting in mosquito-infested areas.

The conditions were atrocious. Nurses lived in tents and had to cope with sweltering summers when mice, lizards, scorpions, or the occasional snake might venture into the tent, but the most dreaded creature was the malaria-causing mosquito. 

On the challenges of winter, Nurse Lucy May Pitman—serving at the same time as Aileen—wrote in her diary on 12 October, 1917: “Water racing thru wards & reached halfway up bedsteads, haversacks, boots, socks, pants floating down road…”

Nurse Moore not only managed, but thrived. A confidential report from her matron at the time described her as “a diligent and hardworking sister, a capable experienced nurse—whose patients get every attention. Her knowledge of several languages was also most useful.”

She was awarded four medals—Royal Red Cross medal; a 1914-15 Star and British War and Victory medals—for her service, but that service was only just beginning.

• Next week: The discovery of Aileen H Moore’s World War Two diary and her time spent on the Thames River Emergency Service during the Blitz.