Violetta Thurstan

Violetta Thurstan
Violetta Thurstan before 1917
Born	Anna Violet Thurstan (1879-02-04)4 February 1879 Ore, Sussex, England
Died	13 April 1978(1978-04-13) (aged 99) Penryn, Cornwall, England
Nationality	English
Occupation	Nurse Author

Violetta Thurstan, MM (4 February 1879 – 13 April 1978) was an English nurse, weaver, and administrator whose work included help for refugees and prisoners of war. She knew several languages, travelled frequently and wrote a number of books. The first was about her experiences of nursing in dangerous troublespots during the First World War. She was honoured by three countries for her courage while nursing in the war, and was awarded the Military Medal.

Anna Violet Thurstan was born on 4 February 1879 in Ore, Sussex. She was the eldest child of Anna (née Reid) and Edward Paget Thurstan, a doctor, and had three younger brothers. The family moved often and the teenage "Vi", who would later call herself Violetta, went to boarding schools including a German Catholic school and the Ladies' College, Guernsey. She started nursing in the UK in 1897 and trained at the London Hospital, Whitechapel under matron Eva Luckes. From 1905 to 1914 she nursed at the Bristol Royal Infirmary while simultaneously building on her language skills and studying history and geography. This led to an external degree from the University of St Andrews: an LLA in modern languages and fine art.

Thurstan joined the British Red Cross in 1913. In August 1914, with the start of the First World War, she was sent as leader of a group of nurses to a hospital in Charleroi, Belgium. Soon the occupying German army ordered all British nurses to leave and forced her to go to Copenhagen under armed escort. From there she travelled north through Sweden and Finland to reach Russia, where she joined the flying column, or mobile medical unit, headed by Prince and Princess Peter Volkonsky. As part of this unit she tended to the wounded in Łódź after it was bombarded, and then nursed in and around Warsaw. She was wounded with shrapnel, and also became ill with pleurisy. Unable to work, she wrote her first book, Field Hospital and Flying Column, which described the previous few months of her life. This book ran to a second edition in London and New York and was translated into French. During her convalescence in England Thurstan gave lectures in various cities about her experiences. In her book she argued that properly trained nurses were essential for nursing work and pressed the case for state registration of qualified nurses. For some years she was organising secretary for the National Union of Trained Nurses (NUTN).