Emily McManus, Matron of Guy’s, OBE, CBE.
My only meeting with Emily McManus was back in the 1960’s. I was a
member of the ICA at the time and she was the guest speaker at our meeting.
A slim, wiry, energetic woman, she had been Matron of Guy’s Hospital in
London. I had just returned from living in London and was in awe of the fact
that here, living near Pontoon, was this famous lady, who had played a key
role in nursing circles during WW1 and WW2. She was Matron of Guy’s
Hospital from 1927 to 1946. For her work with the Red Cross in the
battlefields of France she was awarded the OBE in 1930 and later the CBE
for services rendered to nursing.
Emily Elvera Primrose McManus, what a lovely name, was born in 1886,
into a distinguished Mayo family. Her brother Dermot and sister Lottie were
key figures in the Irish Literary Revival. Although Emily was born in
London, her roots were forever deeply embedded in Mayo, and especially
the family’s ancestral home, Killedan, a few miles from Kiltimagh. She
said that her father had drilled into her young heart that no matter where she
lived or lodged, Killedan was home.
In 1908, age 22, she entered Guy’s Hospital in London as a trainee nurse,
starting a close association with the centuries old hospital that would last
almost 40 years.
In the Spring of 1915, as the First World War began to disgorge its litany of
maimed, she headed for Northern France as Nursing Reserve Sister. She
spent her next three and a half years nursing behind the trenches. Her base
station, at Etaples, grew into a giant hospital city. Nearby, day by day, row
by row, a vast military cemetery advanced across the countryside.
Her memoirs give an insight into the situations in which she worked. Such
as, one day, a French regiment marched past her nursing station on the way
to the front. Days later the few survivors were carried back. Another was of
an Australian band unit stationed nearby and how their music lightened
everyone’s spirits. “Then, one night” she wrote “they were no more - a
direct hit on their band hut had finished them all.”
On returning to England she rose up the nursing ranks. In 1927 she became
Matron of Guys, in charge of a staff of 800. Her reputation as a pioneering
leader grew, honours followed, in 1930 the Order of the British Empire.
And all the time Mayo was calling. Her beloved Killedan was now closed.
So she began to build a little fishing lodge some 20 miles away at Pontoon.
She was there, amongst the mountains and trout lakes, when news reached
her of the outbreak of World War Two. Duty called.
Guy’s suffered traumatically during the terror of the London blitz. In 1940
the hospital had to be evacuated for the first time since it opened in 1725.
Bombs continued to tear through the night sky over London. The casualties
were brought in day and night. One surgeon recalled seeing Matron
McManus on her knees in the operating theatre wiping up blood to make
way for the next serious cases.
By war’s end Miss McManus was exhausted. She had been a participant in
every raw sense in the theatres of two world wars. She longed for Mayo, its
peace and healing.
In 1946 she retired as Matron of Guy’s and in time moved permanently into
her Mayo lakeside lodge, to fish, read and write her memoirs.
She drove around Mayo in her Morris Minor car. She was likened to Miss
Marples – the Agatha Christie detective – having an upper-crust accent, the
tweed outfits, her little green Morris Minor bobbing along the country roads.
She loved poetry, especially the War Poets. She loved the birds and all sides
of nature but, unusually, goats became her abiding passion!
She wrote her memoirs “Matron of Guy’s”. Not many copies of the book
survive. It includes photographs of France in World War One, of Red Cross
ambulances grinding through the mud, of rows of bandaged soldiers in vast
tented hospitals, of surgeons around a makeshift operating table and a young
Miss McManus assisting.
Before her death she had one last request – that locks of her hair be cut off
and entwined through the branches of shrubs and trees around Killedan. So,
come Spring, birds would use the wisps to build and upholster their nests.
In the end she chose to die in Mayo, in the Sacred Heart Hospital, having
turned down Guy’s offer to end her days in their care. She died in 1978,
aged 92, and is buried in the cemetery adjoining St. Michael’s Parish Church
in Ardnaree, Ballina. Finally at rest.
Information used was from the writings of Tom Rowley, Parke, Castlebar
who knew Miss McManus, and from Brian Hoban, Newtown, Castlebar,
writing about Miss McManus for the Castlebar website.
Sheila Kilkelly, Soroptimist, Castlebar. April 2013.