Evelina was born into a British aristocratic family in 1867. Yet she died a hero of the Serbian nation in 1920.
She was a Suffragette before the war. After war was declared she threw herself into organising women to support the war effort in Britain, and later, in Serbia.
Evelina was born in 1867 to an aristocratic British family. She had a privileged upbringing and was well educated.
She supported the campaign for women’s suffrage (the right to vote). In 1909 she was arrested for trying to force her way into the House of Commons with a petition. She appeared in court alongside the famous Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and was fined. But she continued to protest, despite further arrests and even imprisonment.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Evelina was determined that women would contribute to the war effort as equals to men. She helped establish the Women’s Volunteer Reserve, which carried out domestic and fundraising duties for the war, and the Women’s Emergency Corps. Both organisations were run on military lines, even wearing uniforms. Their success influenced the government’s decision to create women’s branches of the armed forces in1917.
‘She has all the qualities which make a womanly woman, and added to them magnificent courage and the divine quality of unselfishness.’
Obituary in The Daily News, 24 March 1920
In 1915 Evelina joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, which had been set up by Dr Elsie Inglis. They both worked in Serbia, bringing medical relief to people caught up in the turmoil of war, in hospitals staffed entirely by women. General Boїovitch of the First Serbian Army wrote to her in 1918: ‘… you have earned the deep and sincere gratitude of the whole Serbian Army and Nation’. After further work in Romania and Russia, Evelina returned to Britain to raise more funds, setting up the Serbian Red Cross in Britain, and a fund for disabled Serbian soldiers.
After the war was over, she continued her work for Serbia, which had been devastated by the conflict. In 1919 she returned to set up an orphanage in Bajina Bashta, near the Bosnian-Serbian border. She died there at the age of 52 from pneumonia. Her headstone reads, ‘she worked for the Serbian people with untiring zeal a straight fighter, straight rider and most loyal friend. RIP.’
Obituaries of the time reveal how much Evelina’s war work helped to change perceptions of what women could do.
‘With her death passed another pioneer woman, to whom the war brought the opportunity of magnificent service and self-sacrifice’ Obituary in The Star newspaper.
‘She has all the qualities which make a womanly woman, and added to them magnificent courage and the divine quality of unselfishness.’ Obituary in The Daily News newspaper.
The contribution to the war effort of women like Evelina, and the service of women in the armed forces, in industry and agriculture, helped to change women’s role in society. Women (over the age of 30) were given the right to vote in general elections for the first time in British history under the July 1918 Representation of the Peoples Act.
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