Gwendoline Madge
During the First World War, Shoreham rallied round in all sorts of ways to help the troops – some of whom had been pupils at the village school just a few years before. The school headmaster appealed for villagers to donate wool so that socks could be knitted for “our Old Boys” at the front. People were asked to leave eggs outside village shops as part of the National Egg Collection for the Wounded. Meanwhile, a list of the dead posted in the church porch grew alarmingly. And for most of the conflict, Gwendoline Madge was in charge of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) Hospital, a facility for injured soldiers.
Gwendoline was the sister of the vicar, David Madge, and lived with him at the vicarage (which is today’s Old Vicarage, opposite the George Inn). The VAD Hospital had originally opened at Church House, just along from the lychgate. Five wounded Belgians, “straight from the firing line”, as the parish magazine put it, were the first patients. Later it moved to Myrtle Cottage across the river, and then to rooms in Shoreham Place, the Mildmay family’s mansion.
Dorothea Wilmot, the wife of mill owner Albert Wilmot, had been in charge of the Hospital before Gwendoline. Dorothea was remembered as a somewhat high-handed figure, so it may have been just as well that she passed job of Commandant to the vicar’s sister. In August 1916, the Hospital found its permanent home in the vicarage, taking over most of the house. |
Twenty-six soldiers could now be accommodated. Gwendoline clearly realised that mental well-being was as important as physical recovery and put together a magazine to capture the soldiers’ writings. It was called The Iodex and was full of stories and poems and caustic military wit. (Iodex, perhaps appropriately, is an antiseptic.) Shoreham artist Harold Copping provided an illustration for the cover: it showed a soldier wearing “hospital blues” and leaning on the bridge over the Darent. A typical short story, “The Invitation”, tells of three soldiers asked to supper at a slightly forbidding cottage up on the western hill. “I know what these country suppers are,” one of them mutters darkly when the invitation arrives. “Pork, and all that sort of thing; and they always expect you to eat tons of it.”
By the end of the war, 512 patients had passed through the Hospital’s hands. In the spring of 1920, Gwendoline was awarded “membership of the British Empire” – likely to be an early version of the British Empire Medal – for her war work. That April, she married and moved to London with her husband, Dr Herbert Gibbins, after 11 years in Shoreham. |
But she seems to have stayed in touch with the village. In 1932, she helped find a hospice for the dying Samuel Cheeseman, the church sexton who worked with Revd Madge to create the Cross on the Hill. Sadly, Gwendoline herself died that September at her brother’s home in Kemsing, aged about 56. The parish magazine called her death a “great loss” and noted that “many will gratefully remember the skill and care” she gave to all the soldiers at Shoreham’s VAD Hospital.