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McLaren, Eva Shaw; Holme Vera Louise;
[Important Archive of suffragette Vera “Jack” Holme] A History of Scottish Woman's Hospitals.
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, London;
Date of Publication: 1919
Stock Code: 9532
Association copy. First edition. VERA HOLME’S OWN COPY, inscribed by the editor, with MS material by Holme. Octavo, pp. xv, [1], 408. 57 illustrations to 40 plates, including frontispiece. Publishers’ grey cloth with black title to spine and upper board and black crest to upper board. Housed in a grey cloth solander box with black titles to spine, with MS material underneath a loose board within. Importantly the MS material includes a 5 page transcript in Holme’s own hand of the message Holme and Miss Ethel Francis Robinson committed to memory and brought back to England from Serbia during WWI. The message was sent from ‘General Givcovitch’ (Mihailo Zivković-Gvozdeni, commander of the Serbian Volunteer Army in Russia) to Lord Derby, the Secretary of State for War. Vera "Jack" Holme (1881-1969) was an LGBT+ trailblazer, music hall performer, male impersonator and central figure in the militant suffrage movement the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). She also acted as a chauffeur to the Pankhursts, served as an ambulance driver for the Scottish Women's Hospital in WWI, and successfully executed a dangerous espionage mission.

Holme lived anything but a conventional life. A radical suffragette (she was imprisoned in Holloway for five days) Sylvia Pankhurst described her as "a noisy, explosive young person, frequently rebuked by her elders for lack of dignity". Holme was known to her friends as "Jack" or "Jacko”. The name taken both from the male character she played as an actor, and no doubt from Victorian slang for a lesbian. Holme radically took gender-fluidity off-stage, adopting traditionally masculine dress in her day-to-day life. With short hair and a masculine uniform, the "only liveried girl chauffeur in London" excelled in male dominated career paths. She also formed a secret lesbian society the "Foosack League" with her long-term partner Evelina Haverfield and other lesbian Suffragists.

The book is Holme’s personal copy of a scarce work chronicling the history of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, written by the indomitable Elsie Inglis (1864-1917) the pioneering female gynaecologist and suffragette and founder of the hospitals. It contains Holme’s self-illustrated bookplate to front paste-down and a manuscript dedication written in the year of publication pasted to ffep: “Dec 25th 1919, Dearest Vera, Please accept this book with very best love, Yours Ever, Eva S. McLaren” i.e. the author/editor Eva Shaw McLauren (1866-), and youngest sister of Elsie Inglis.

As a colleague of Inglis, Holme served as a Major in the 1st London Battalion Women’s Volunteer Reserve in Serbia from 1915-16 with her partner Evelina Haverfield, and her portrait features as one of the plates in the book. Indeed, a full chapter is dedicated to the collective efforts of Holme, Inglis, and E. F. Robinson in memorising and transmitting a front-line report from Serbia to England which saved the lives of hundreds of Serbian soldiers.

The most significant item in the collection is a manuscript copy of the famous report, written in Holme's hand, with additional annotations by Holme on the mission "At the Hotel de France E. F. Robinson learned the report by heart and we then burnt the original papers", "I made notes in needle book, hidden behind needles". In all previously published accounts Ethel Robinson is credited with memorising the report but this transcript makes in plain that Holme memorised the report too. Both Holme and Robinson then committed the nearly 2,500 word report to memory and travelled home across war torn Europe to deliver it successfully to the War Office. Holme would later be awarded the Samaritan Cross and a Russian medal by the King of Serbia for her service.

Also within the box is a presentation photograph in sepia of a young woman inscribed "Souvenir affectueux à ma chère Vera; de Mileva. Belgrade 4.2. [1]921"; a leaf calling for donations to Dr. Inglis's National Memorial Fund to develop the Women's Hospitals; two newspaper clippings relating to the Hospitals and their history; a ticket for Trustees of Victoria History of the County of Durham social evening with Kate Adie as guest, and two typed copies of a satirical feminist ballad about at protest at Usher Hall Edinburgh, relating to the running of women's hospitals, dated 1957. Finally there is a folded sheet of note paper with a MS pencil eulogy written in Holme’s hand to one Mrs Jack Orr or Peter “as she was known to her friends”. She goes on to describe “Pete” as “one of the youngest drivers in the transport division” and that the “ranks of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals who worked in Serbia, Corsica, Rumania & Russia... are getting very thin”.

As a stage performer and member of the suffragette Actresses Franchise League, Holme challenged pre-existing gender norms before the idea of the modern ‘masculine women’ came into being. The heated socio-political climate of the pre-WWI years allowed her to challenge social conventions and shift her stage persona onto the street. An 1911 article in The Chauffeur magazine of commented that “Anybody who has seen Miss Holme starting up, changing gear, and steering in and out of traffic, will freely acknowledge her right to call herself a chauffeur”. A fascinating historical archive of a brave and ground breaking women.

Cover cloth a little rubbed with minor wear to edge and bruised corners.


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