Evelina Haverfield

Evelina Haverfield (9 August 1867 – 21 March 1920) was a British suffragette and aid worker. In the early part of the 20th century, she was involved in Emmeline Pankhurst's militant women's suffrage organisation the Women's Social and Political Union. During World War I she worked as a nurse in Serbia. After the war, she returned to Serbia with Vera Holme to set up an orphanage in Bajina Bašta, a town in the west of the country.

Evelina's birth is recorded as 'Honourable Evilena Scarlett' (with her first name spelled thus) born on 9 August 1867 at Inverlochy Castle, Kingussie in Scotland. She was the third child of the 5 daughters and a son of William Frederick Scarlett, 3rd Baron Abinger and his wife Helen (Eileen) Magruder who was the daughter of a United States Navy Commodore. Her childhood was divided between London and the Inverlochy estate. In 1880 she went to school in Düsseldorf, Germany. On 10 February 1887, at the age of 19, she married a Royal Artillery officer, Major Henry Wykeham Brooke Tunstall Haverfield, in Kensington, London, and the couple went to live in Dorset. Her husband was 20 years her senior. The marriage was a happy one producing two sons, John Campbell Haverfield (born 1887) and Brook Tunstall Haverfield (born 1889) but Henry Haverfield died eight years later.

Haverfield enjoyed a lifestyle not yet commonplace for women, for example, she rode a bicycle she called Pegasus. Cycling was embraced by the suffragists as it was vehicle for 'fresh air' and freedom. The sense of liberation was dynamic during the Great War, when mobility was at a high premium and engendered equality. On 19 July 1899, she married John Henry Balguy, another Royal Artillery major, later a brigadier-general, and a friend of her late husband. The ceremony took place in a Dorset hamlet called Caundle Marsh. The bride soon reverted to the name Haverfield and kept her home in Sherborne. During the Second Boer War, she travelled to South Africa for two years to act as assistant to her husband who was stationed there. She enjoyed being involved in the military zone and even took part in rifle practice. While there she formed a retirement camp for horses.

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