Beatrice Longmire

Introduction

Beatrice Longmire spent her war years training in City Hospital Edinburgh, before joining Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS). From the end of 1916 she worked in Aldershot Military Isolation Hospital. She had her scrapbook with her throughout the war. Its pages manage to capture just how popular and loved she was by friends and patients alike.

They talk about a woman’s sphere as though it had a limit.
There’s not a place in earth or heaven,
Not a task to mankind given,
Not a blessing or a woe,
Not a whisper ‘yes’ or ‘no’?
Not a life or death or birth
That has a feather’s weight of worth,
Without a woman in it.

Ochil Hill Sanitorium

Longmire was employed as a staff nurse at Ochil Hill Sanatorium, Kinrosshire in July 1916. This was a relatively new tuberculosis sanatorium. In the first few days there she let James Chisholm write in her scrapbook. He chose to write: ‘Being all fashioned of the self-same dust. Let us be merciful as well as just’, a particularly poignant quote to choose in war-time. After only a few months at the hospital, Longmire was promoted to Sister.

In November 1916 Longmire applied to work as a nurse in the military. On her application her mother, Beatrice Jane, is listed as her nearest relative, and as a widow. Her father had passed away in 1907 at the age of just 37. Interestingly, her mother is also listed as a nurse. She appears to have been training at the same time as Longmire, but at the Royal Maternity hospital in Glasgow. It is not apparent whether Beatrice Jane had been a midwife prior to her training, or whether after the death of her husband she felt the need to take up a profession. Most likely she was an uncertified ‘handy woman’ who assisted birthing in her local community. Until 1910 she would have been able to practice unregistered, but the law changed to forbid handy women to attend childbirth without the presence of a medical practitioner. Beatrice Jane is on the Scottish Midwives roll from 1917 until 1932, the year she retired.

Treating other nationalities

The patients recorded in Longmire’s scrapbook, like the South African B. Green, are an insight as to how widespread the First World War was. At this time Britain still had an enormous empire and commonwealth, and drew troops from almost every country. Longmire treated soldiers who had come to fight from Canada. One of them inscribed:

Violets may fade
Roses may die
Friends may forget
You but never will I

Touchingly, there are two New Zealanders named Ogle in her book. It is unclear how they are related – or even if they are at all. Both of them sign they are from the New Zealand Medical Corps, so perhaps they are not patients in the hospital, but working there. This would account for how two relations ended up in the same hospital, they had been shipped across the world to work together. Writing in the scrapbook within a couple of days of each other, they both leave beautifully poignant poetry for Longmire on the beauty of life and the unquestioning nature of death.

After the war

Where ever you may wander
High or low
Be true to your country
Where ever you go

The war ended on 11 November 1918. For Longmire this was not the end of her nursing duty, her patients continued to be sick. She remained at Aldershot until the 6th May 1919 when she wrote to Matron requesting to resign. Her subsequent reports suggest she was a very good and capable nurse who had worked as an assistant nurse for two years and 136 days, and that she had shown great application to her work.

Longmire was married on 28 October 1919 to James Duncan Campbell. On the marriage certificate he is recorded as a student of science. During the war he was a member of the Army Service Corps, who supplied food, equipment and ammunition from Britain to the soldiers on the front line. It is possible they knew each other before the war, as a ‘P. Campbell’, who may have been related to James, signed her scrapbook in 1912. In her scrapbook there is a beautifully written quote signed by James D Campbell, her future husband, on 18 June 1916. It seems to summarise what he expects of a wife.

As unto the bow the cord is
So unto man is woman
Though she bends him she obeys him
Though she draws him, yet she follows

At the time of the marriage Longmire’s mother, Beatrice Jane, was a sick nurse at Ruckhills Hospital, Glasgow. The marriage was witnessed by Longmire’s brother William.

Hopefully it went better than the gloomy prediction of marriage on the last pages of Longmire’s book which states:

When the honeymoon is over,
And they no more live in clover,
He exclaims, (unfeeling rover)
"That’s a nice sigh, dear!"

The Campbells had their first child, James Robert Duncan Campbell, in 1925, and three years later welcomed a daughter, Beatrice Ross Campbell. When Duncan was born his parents were living in the schoolhouse in Mid Calder. His father was the headmaster. Duncan remained at his father’s school until he was ten and then he moved to school in Edinburgh. During the Second World War Duncan was a motorcycle messenger making deliveries to various local organisations. In the early 1940s he started training as an RAF pilot. He later married and had three children, Longmire’s grandchildren.

Campbell, nee Longmire, died aged 83 in 1976 and James, her husband aged 86 in 1981.