Yesterday, during my Reading Hour, one of the chapters was from Emily Mayhew’s Wounded. It told the story of Ambulance Trains through the lives of nurses and an orderly. Obviously, I’ve heard of Ambulance Trains but had no idea what they were like during WWI. As is usually the case with Prof Mayhew, the chapter was very moving.
Then, this morning, I researched Charles Robert Brede, a soldier who used one.
He was wounded badly at the Front and went through the whole shebang to get to a hospital. He was, what was known as, a Blighty, in that he had to transfer home to a British hospital. Sadly, his brother, Arthur George Brede had died two months earlier; killed in action, fighting at the Somme.
The Brede brothers were the only sons of Alfred Robert and Mary Ann Brede of Teddington. They also had three daughters, bookended by Charles (the eldest) and Arthur (the youngest). The reason I was researching them was because they both attended the Tiffin School in Kingston on Thames.
(Tiffin School was formed by brewers. That sounds like an excellent basis for a school if you ask me.)
The wounded Charles would have been taken from the Front by bearers to a Casualty Clearance Station (CCS) then onto a Hospital Train where he would have made a gradual trip to the coast. He was then put onto a ferry back home.
He would have been met at a London station where a nurse and an ambulance would have been waiting for the trainful of wounded men. These were volunteers from the London Ambulance Column (LAC).
Created by two remarkable people, Mr & Mrs Lancelot Dent, the LAC worked through the night, ferrying the wounded around London, dropping patients at hospitals. It was an extraordinary operation.
Charles was met and whisked off to the 1st London General Hospital, Camberwell where medical teams would have worked to try and save him.
Sadly, they didn’t succeed, and Charles died of his wounds shortly after arriving home. He was buried in Teddington Cemetery.
Then, during today’s Reading Hour, I read the chapter on the LAC.
