[BITList] War and weaving

[John Feltham]

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Thurstan,  Anna Violet  [Violetta]  (1879-1978), nurse and weaver, was born at Claremont, Ore, Sussex, on 4 February 1879, the eldest child and only daughter of Edward Paget Thurstan (1851-1941), surgeon, and his wife, Anna, nee Reid (b. 1851). Her grandfather was Joseph Thurstan (d. 1887), a canon of the Anglican cathedral in Colombo, Ceylon. Her father moved his medical practice from Hastings to Croydon, and then to Tonbridge, Kent. She had three brothers: Edward William Paget Thurstan (1880-1947), who made a career in the consular service; Norman Malet Colquoun Thurstan (1882-1959), a naval officer; and Denzil Robert Thurstan (1888-1919), an officer in the Royal Naval Air Service who died in the influenza epidemic at the end of the First World War. The family spent some years in Tenerife in the Canary Islands (1888-94) before a brief return to Herne Hill, London. After leaving the children in various boarding schools, and returning thereafter solely for holidays, her parents emigrated to Western Australia, where her father became medical officer of health in Perth and Busselton.

From the age of twelve Thurstan was considered 'wild and wilful' and in need of strict education. Later she recalled being 'dumped in Germany' in 1891, in a Catholic school. Her skill with languages was also nurtured there. In 1897 she returned to Britain and took up nursing. She held a number of short-term hospital positions until she undertook formal training at the London Hospital, Whitechapel, under the guidance of the exceptional matron Eva Luckes, and gained her nursing certificate in 1905. She held a string of hospital appointments, including at the Bristol Royal Infirmary from 1905 until the outbreak of war in 1914. Meanwhile parallel studies in modern languages, history, and geography by correspondence and external examination from 1907 showed her grit and determination, and gained her the qualification of lady literate in arts (LLA) from the University of St Andrews in 1914. During this period she assumed the name of Violetta, one of a series of modifications to her identity during her career; she regularly understated her age, probably due to her determination not to be excluded from anything.

Having joined the British Red Cross Society in 1913, Thurstan was called up on 4 August 1914 and sent to Brussels as matron of the hospital at Marcelline. Cut off by the German advance, she was expelled from Belgium by the Germans in October 1914, and transported by them under armed guard through hostile territory to Denmark. She volunteered to serve with the Russian Red Cross, joining Prince and Princess Volkonsky at the front in the flying field ambulance surgery service, working as both a nurse and a driver in a flying column of motor ambulances at the front. She dealt with casualties in the aftermath of the German bombardment of Lodz, and then joined the Russian withdrawal to Warsaw, treating hundreds of casualties before returning to England in March 1915 after sustaining a shrapnel wound while dressing a wounded soldier. During her convalescence she wrote her first book of wartime experiences, Field Hospital and Flying Column, which appeared in April 1915. She emphasized that nurses should be properly qualified, and became secretary of the National Union of Trained Nurses.

Thurstan went back to Russia at the end of 1915 to organize hospital units for 5 million refugees from the German advance on the eastern front, describing the scale of the problem in The People Who Run: the Tragedy of the Refugees in Russia, published in June 1916. In November 1916 she became matron of a hospital at La Panne, Belgium, only 5 miles from the front, dealing with severe cases straight from the trenches. In 1917 she moved to a dressing station in a farmhouse at Coxyde. When this was shelled she evacuated the wounded, for which she was awarded the Military Medal, having previously received Russian and Belgian decorations. The attack left her badly concussed, and she returned to Britain, but by the end of 1917 she had recovered sufficiently to travel to Macedonia, where she joined a hospital unit at Ostrovo on the Salonika front, and remained there until June 1918. Her achievements were featured in an account of women's contribution to the war effort: 'Only her spirit and pluck have carried her through and enabled her to do the hardest work under the roughest of conditions'  (McLaren, 77). Ill health pursued her throughout her long life, requiring furloughs for recuperation, but always she rapidly returned to work, almost fanatically volunteering at every opportunity.

After the war Thurstan embarked on learning handcrafts and especially weaving, acquiring diplomas in Sweden at the August Abrahamson College of Arts, then in Italy, Paris, and Berlin. Together with her facility with languages, these diplomas represented her sustaining skills, and were the basis of future achievements at home and abroad. Her first major appointment, in about 1923, was to supervise Arab refugee camps as director of Bedouin industries under the Egyptian government. Located in the Libyan desert west of Cairo, her work was to supply and select textiles, and oversee Bedouin workshops where women were employed in carpet making. In her own estimation, the seven years spent in this role were her most fulfilling years. In 1924 her 'Articles on dyeing' were published by the Egyptian Horticultural Review. Her best-selling book, Use of Vegetable Dyes for Beginners, which remains a standard text, was published in 1930. In subsequent years, living in Somerset, she lectured, taught languages and weaving, and in 1934 published A Short History of Decorative Textiles and Tapestries.

In 1937 Thurstan went to Spain, where she supervised the universities ambulance and worked for prisoner release in Almeira until expelled after the end of the civil war. As war loomed again in Europe, the now sixty-year-old joined the WRNS, understating her age by eleven years. She was recruited for naval intelligence, where her knowledge of languages could be employed. She had converted to Roman Catholicism and in 1945 joined in the Catholic Relief Programme, evacuating and resettling children, working with prisoners of war and displaced persons in Italy, Egypt, and Austria, for which she was made a companion of the Vatican by Pius XII. From 1946 to 1948 she continued this work under the auspices of the allied commission in Austria. Her novel Foolish Virgin (1966) drew on her post-war relief activity. She was also made an honorary fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (having been a fellow from 1924 to 1930).

From 1950 until her death Violetta Thurstan lived in Cornwall, near Falmouth (at Flushing and Penryn), and continued her teaching, weaving, writing, and frequent travelling, leading the Catholic Women's League of Cornwall on a pilgrimage to Rome (1958), advising on crafts in Greece (1966) and the Dye Garden at Probus (1976). After attending the World Crafts Council inaugural meeting at the Victorian and Albert Museum in London in 1967 she promoted the formation in 1973 of the Cornwall Crafts Association. She died at her home, the Old Mill House, The Square, Penryn, Cornwall, on 13 April 1978, and after a funeral at St Mary's Roman Catholic church, Falmouth, was buried on 19 April in the Roman Catholic section of Falmouth cemetery. She was unmarried.

Melissa Hardie-Budden 

Sources  M. Somerfield and A. Bellingham, Violetta Thurstan: a celebration (1993) + Violetta Thurstan archive, Hypatia Trust, Penzance, Cornwall + Royal London Hospital, archives + V. Thurstan, diaries, Magd. Cam. + The Times (17 April 1978) + British Journal of Nursing (March 1937), 79 + WWW + B. McLaren, Women of the war (1917) + J. Potter, Boys in khaki, girls in print (2005) + LLA calendars, U. St Andr. L. + b. cert.
Archives Hypatia Trust, Penzance, Cornwall + Magd. Cam., diaries
Likenesses  bronze bust, 1945, Jamieson Library, Penzance, Cornwall · photograph, Hypatia Trust, Penzance, Cornwall [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in McLaren, Women of the war · photographs, Hypatia Trust, Penzance, Cornwall
Wealth at death  £8706: probate, 22 Sept 1978, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




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