Cecily Jane Georgina Fane Pope RRC (1862 - 1938)

Born 1 Jan 1862 in Charlottetown Royalty, Prince Edward Island, British Colonial America

Ancestors

Died 6 Jun 1938 at age 76 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Canada Project WikiTree [send private message] and Jane Dyment [send private message]

Georgina Pope RRC is managed by the Canada Project. Join: Canada Project Discuss: canada

Biography

Georgina Pope RRC is Notable.

Cecily Jane Georgina Fane Pope, military nurse and nurse administrator was born 1 January 1862 at her family's Ardgowan estate, on the outskirts of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; she died 6 June 1938 in Charlottetown. Her father, William Henry Pope, was from a prominent shipbuilding and political family, and her mother Helen Desbrisay descended from some of the Island's oldest families.

Articles about Georgina Pope state that she could have gone into society and married well, but with her father's sudden death in 1879, the family was not in a financial situation to entertain and socialize. A few years earlier, they had moved from the capital, Charlottetown, to Summerside with her father's appointment as a judge, and she and her mother and sisters were being supported by their brother Joseph. Her older sister Amy was starting to make her own living as a writer.

In addition, Georgina later wrote that her desire to become a military nurse and “go to the front” began when she was a young girl and read about Florence Nightingale's work during the Crimean War.^[1] This desire shaped the rest of her life.

She entered the Nightingale-inspired Bellevue Training School for Nurses in New York in 1885, graduating two years later. Georgina wrote about her experiences as a young nurse-in-training. ^[2]

She worked in hospitals in New York and Washington, serving as the superintendent of the Columbia Hospital for Women from 1891- September 1894, establishing a training school for nurses there, and updating the facilities. Either from stress or exhaustion, she left the hospital and nursing for a couple of years.

Royal Red Cross

After traveling in Europe, she returned to the United States taking a position at a hospital in Yonkers, in 1899. ^[3]

The opportunity to fulfill her dream of becoming a military nurse came in late fall of 1899, when Canada sent a volunteer contingent to support Britain in the South African war. Georgina was the first nurse appointed, and the first Canadian nurse to lead a small contingent of nurses overseas; she also designed their uniform. ^[4] After the war, she was the first Canadian nurse to be awarded the Royal Red Cross 1st class.

Georgina Pope was also the first nurse appointed to the nursing reserve of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, the first permanent nursing sister in the Canadian Army Medical Corps, and the first Matron of the CAMC nursing service, in 1908, a position she held for the rest of her nursing career.

Georgina Pope is credited with establishing Canadian military nursing as a fully-integrated role for women in the armed forces. Nursing sisters were the first, and with few exceptions, only women in the Canadian armed forces until 1940–1941.^[5]

Research Notes

Georgina was generally believed to have graduated from nursing school in 1885, as stated in the Canadian Encyclopedia, because she celebrated 50 years of nursing in 1935. She must have been counting from the date of entry into the training program, as Bellevue annual reports show that she graduated in 1887.

Georgina remained in her position as Matron of the Canadian Army Medical Corps until her retirement; Margaret Macdonald was Matron-in-Chief of the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the first World War. Macdonald's appointment to Matron, CAMC was made in 1917, retroactive to 1914.

Sources

1. ↑ G. Pope, Nursing in South Africa During the Boer War, American Journal of Nursing vol 3(1) October 1902 on the JSTOR website
2. ↑ G. Pope, Bellevue Hospital Past and Present, American Journal of Nursing vol 5 (1) 1904, downloaded from JSTOR
3. ↑ The name of the hospital wasn't in contemporary sources, and based on an interview with Miss Pope in 1925, it was generally believed that she was at St. John's Hospital in Yonkers. However, there was no suitable position there for her in 1899, the position of matron being filled. There had been an opening at St. Joseph's Hospital in Yonkers, with the death of Mrs Margaret K. Barry, the superintendent of nursing. Trained Nurse and Hospital Review October 1899 vol 23 no 4 page 233. Miss Pope would only have been in Yonkers for a few months.
4. ↑ Letter from Pope in South Africa, Saturday Night vol 13 10 March 1900, pg 5; G. Pope, Nursing in South Africa During the Boer War, American Journal of Nursing vol 3(1) October 1902 on the JSTOR website; Georgina Pope, Reminiscences of Service in South Africa during the Boer War, Canadian Nurse vol 21 (11) 1925.
5. ↑ https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/georgina-fane-pope/

• The Islander – Jan 3, 1862 Birth. On the 1st instant, at Ardgowan, Charlottetown Royalty, Mrs. W.H. Pope, of a daughter.
• The Canadian Encyclopedia.
• Wikipedia contributors, "Georgina Pope," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Georgina_Pope&oldid=709869938 (accessed March 29, 2016).
• Canadian War Museum
• Find A Grave: Memorial #175399754
• Georgina Pope, age 19, in the household of Helen Pope. Year: 1881; Census Place: Summerside, Prince, Prince Edward Island; Roll: C_13162; Page: 24; Family No: 103
• Chapter 5, "The Effects of Constant Strain", Those Splendid Girls, the Heroic Service of Prince Edward Island Nurses in the Great War, by Katherine Dewar, Island Studies Press, 2014
• Called to Serve, Georgina Pope Canadian Military Nursing Heroine by Katherine Dewar, Island Studies Press, 2018
• Canadian War Museum, The South African War, 1899-1902 - Nursing Sister Georgina Fane Pope
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgina_Pope