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Photograph album of staff entertainments (6 pages, pdf, 991KB) 

Photograph album of staff entertainments (6 pages, pdf, 806KB) 

Photograph album of staff entertainments


Ellinor Caldwell nee Walton's photographs of the Saint John's Ambulance Brigade Hospital at Etaples


While working as a nurse at the Saint John’s Ambulance Brigade at Etaples, Ellinor Caldwell nee Walton collected together a series of photographs which documented her war-time experience. According to her family, she was a keen amateur photographer and it some of the photographs in her albums were her own work. Others seem to have been taken by professional photographers and some are duplicated in the album of Veronica Nisbet:

http://museumstjohn.org.uk/research/projects/st-john-first-world-war/

This selection from her collection, which has been arranged into two “albums” and attached to this page, show the entertainments that staff at the hospital put on for their own amusement. There are some fabulous costumes, a certain amount of cross-dressing and some outfits which would be seen as inappropriate today for their reference to people of races other than their own. The photographs also show a number of performances, probably of sketches and songs. Ellinor can be seen in a black cat pierrot outfit as part of a chorus line. What appears to be a sketch set in a hospital ward or operating theatre hints at a rather dark sense of humour.

Please click on the red “Download” button to see a pdf of the photographs.

Contributed by John Yuille Caldwell

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