Katherine Storr

Shining While the Lamps were Out Katherine Storr

In her lifetime Grace Charlotte Vulliamy was famous, having unique war-time experiences similar to those of Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell. The newly-discovered archive material used here shows that Grace was involved in smuggling information and people, including escaped prisoners of war, out of occupied Belgium and back to England. She fought against the class system which left ordinary soldiers out of agreements to exchange or release prisoners. As a mental nurse, Vulliamy recognised that being a prisoner exacerbated detainees' mental suffering. Civilians - non-combatant men, women and children - were often detained in internment camps. She helped Quakers in civilian camps, met prisoners as they were exchanged at frontiers and accompanied them across the Channel. This study reveals information about Grace Vulliamy's early life, her training as a mental nurse, her work in the Women's Emergency Corps on the outbreak of World War One and then in the Netherlands for the Government Commission for the Transportation of Belgian Refugees to England. It touches on her life of relief work in various countries including in Poland after the Russian Revolution, ending in South Africa where she settled in 1937.