How a French Cook Landed Among Scottish Women Doctors at Royaumont Abbey
A Tale of Heroic Suffragettes From World War I
In this photo, heroic Scottish women doctors who cared for the wounded during WW1 at Royaumont French Abbey are looking at us.
Thanks to my genealogical research, I discovered that my great-grandmother was one among them. Not as a doctor, but as a cook, and the only French woman working with the Scottish doctors, nurses, and orderlies in this hospital run entirely by women.
These were brave women and I would like to honor their memory by telling the little-known story of these feminist icons.
An abandoned French abbey turned into a war hospital
Situated 30 kilometers north of Paris, the Abbey of Royaumont was a Cistercian abbey founded in 1228 by Louis IX and his mother Blanche de Castille. The abbey was dissolved in 1791 during the French Revolution. Later it was used as a factory, before being abandoned for some time.
From January 1915 to March 1919, the Abbey was turned into a military hospital, Hôpital Auxiliaire 301, operated by Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), under the direction of the French Red Cross.
Scottish suffragettes at work
We should remember this tireless team of Scottish suffragettes who turned the neglected abbey of Royaumont into a five-star war hospital!
They were well-educated, high-society suffragettes who wanted to play a part in the war effort. As the British government told them to “go home and sit still”, they turned to France, a less advanced country concerning women’s rights, that nonetheless accepted their help.
The French government granted them the abbey of Royaumont, a then desolated, dirty place, without running water, heat, or electricity, to turn it into a war hospital.
They went quickly and courageously to work and in a few weeks transformed the derelict premises into a top-notch hospital that admitted its first patients in January 1915.
The hospital was run by Frances Ivens (the third woman to obtain a Master’s degree in Surgery) and her all-female team of Scottish surgeons, orderlies, radiologists, and ambulance drivers.
Let’s not forget that before the First World War, women didn’t have the right to vote and the few female doctors only tended to women. These Scottish women were pioneers who opened the way for women’s rights.
Women’s right to vote was obtained in 1918 in the UK, but only in 1944 in France.
Other women-run hospitals would be deployed by the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Services in Belgium, Serbia, and Russia. The idea came from Dr. Elsie Inglis, the Honorary Secretary of the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies who thought that if these hospital projects were successful they would push the women’s movement forward “by a hundred years”.
Women doctors are best!
The staff at Royaumont treated over 10,000 patients during the War and reported better mortality rates than its military-run equivalents. For their outstanding contributions, Frances Ivens and thirty of her SWH colleagues were awarded the Croix de Guerre medal in 1918.
The SWH movement gave women a unique opportunity to widen their expertise. Doctors at Royaumont Abbey made significant advances in the treatment of gas gangrene using a combination of radiology, bacteriology, and surgery to diagnose and treat wounded soldiers.
Dr. Weinberg, from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a frequent visitor to Royaumont, said he had seen hundreds and hundreds of military hospitals, but none, the organization and direction of which, won his admiration so completely. He added that he could not imagine any activity that would so effectively further the cause of the women’s movement as the work of the Scottish Women’s Hospital.
In addition to its excellence in the medical field, Royaumont became widely known as the best-fed and best-managed hospital in France.
“Best fed”, was it because Jeanne Desborbes, my great-grandmother was a cook there? 😉
And what was this Auvergne villager doing there anyway?
I don’t know how she landed there!
Jeanne Desborbes was born in 1884 in a small village in Auvergne in the center of France. Married at seventeen, she had three children when she became a widow at 27. She had been running a small restaurant with her husband. After he died in 1912, she was alone with three children. And, oops, a fourth one arrived just a year after her husband’s death: Albert, the illegitimate child. She never said who his father was. Jeanne’s father didn’t like that and would not speak to her again.
With Albert she went to Paris to flee the scandal, leaving her other children to her sisters’ care. Somehow, with the war raging, she was employed as a cook at Royaumont. And she had to send Albert back to Auvergne. Surely, a war hospital wasn’t a great place for a toddler!
But how did she begin to work at Royaumont, I have no idea. Of course, she didn’t speak English, but the Scottish Ladies, if not all theScottish staff, spoke perfect French.
In her well-documented book “The Women of Royaumont — A Scottish Women’s hospital on the Western Front”, Eileen Crofton mentions that the Scottish women didn’t like working with French women. For example, when a former patient, chef Michelet, made his way to the kitchen for the greater pleasure and benefit of both patients and staff and managed to stay at Royaumont’s kitchen after he had recovered and should have been going back to the Front, a staff member wrote:
“There is a very happy and hopeful spirit prevailing in the kitchen just now with Michelet at the helm. There is no doubt that our cooks and orderlies prefer working by themselves with a capable chef at the head to having these French women of a different class from them.”
Yet my great-grandmother still worked as a cook there, probably the only French person with Michelet. She is mentioned once in Eileen Crofton’s book as “Madame Jeanne” (a French cook trained by Michelet)”.
So, how did “Madame Jeanne”, a simple uneducated woman, find favor in the eyes of the Scottish Ladies, these pioneers of aristocratic feminism? I am still wondering to this day.
One way or another she proved worthy of working with them. And she stayed there until the end of the war, away from her children, amid all this turmoil, in this old abbey amid sick and dying soldiers, with bombings occurring sometimes so close that they had to evacuate.
After the war ended the Scottish Ladies didn’t forget “Madame Jeanne”. It is said in the family that they helped her to establish herself. She ran boarding houses, first on the Mediterranean coast, then in Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Basque coast. It seems the Scottish Ladies returned to France on vacations after the war and stayed at my great-grandmother’s guesthouses.
It was only when she was 13, in 1923, that my grandmother went back to live with her mother Jeanne in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where she had to help as a cleaner and waitress in the guesthouse.
Everything I found out about this story was long after my grandmother’s death. And there is no one anymore to answer the questions I still have. That’s why we should not wait too long before enquiring about our ancestors’ past.
Today, the abbey of Royaumont has become a tourist attraction and serves as a cultural center.
This was my tribute to these forgotten heroines from a troubled past.
Don’t you think they deserve to be better known?
Sources :
The Women of Royaumont — A Scottish women’s hospital on the Western Front by Eileen Crofton https://amzn.to/3ZlKG36 (affiliate link: If you click on this, I get a small commission at no additional cost to you).
Some interesting links :
https://rcogheritage.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/pioneers-ruth-nicholson-frcog-1931/
https://archive.org/details/cihm_65037/page/n3/mode/2up
https://www.royaumont.com/decouvrir-labbaye/histoire-de-labbaye/
Very insightful history, thanks for sharing, very timely for IWD!
I love everything about this story - thanks so much for letting me start my day with your great-grandmother’s memory!