Edith Cavell born - December 4, 1865

On this day in 1865, Edith Cavell - a nurse who helped Allied soldiers escape Belgium during World War I - was born.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio Welcome Back. I'm your host Eves and you're
tuned into This Day in History Class, a show that
takes history and squeezes it into bite size stories. Today
is December fourteen. The day was December four Edith Louisa

(00:28):
Cavell was born in England. Cavil was a nurse known
for hiding Allied soldiers from Germans during World War One.
Cavil was the oldest of four children. When she was young,
Edith was educated at home, mostly by her father, who
was the vicar in Swardeston, where she was born. She
later went to boarding school, then worked as a governess

(00:50):
for an Essex family. Edith spent time traveling in Switzerland,
Bavaria and Saxony, gaining an interest in hygiene and medicine
and Brussels. Cavil worked as a governess, but when her
father got sick, she went back to England to care
for him. Cavil soon began her nursing education and started
gaining experience in hospital work. She worked in different hospitals

(01:14):
in the London area, and she took jobs as a
private nurse. Belgian surgeon Antoine Depage invited Cavil to Belgium
to help with the direction of his new nursing school,
which would be influenced by the model developed by Florence Nightingale.
As an English trained nurse who was fluent in French,
Cavil foot the bill for who he was looking for.

(01:36):
She became the director of nurse training at the Birkendale
Medical Institute and within a few years was working as
a nurse trainer at several hospitals and schools. Cavill also
began publishing the nursing journal La Firmiere. But as the
First World War began Germany invaded Belgium and entered Brussels.
Her clinic and nursing school were turned into a Red

(01:57):
Cross hospital. She cared for did German soldiers. When a
couple of injured English soldiers ended up in her clinic
in November of nineteen fourteen, she hit them and helped
them escape to the neutral Netherlands. As more Allied soldiers
began showing up at her clinic, she continued to shelter
them and assist them in escaping to the Netherlands. Many

(02:18):
of the soldiers she helped were British in French She
began working with an underground network of people who supplied
the Allied soldiers with food, money, clothes, and fake documents.
Soldiers were moved from location to location in the network,
and Caval's clinic was one stop. The network also assisted
French and Belgian men who were of military age that

(02:40):
feared being imprisoned by the Germans. Caval's resistance work in
harboring Allied soldiers and helping them escape was against German
military law, but the system broke down when members of
the network were caught in linked to unlawful activity. Cavl
was under suspicion and she was arrested on August fifth,
nineteen fifteen. She spent weeks in solitary confinement and she

(03:04):
signed depositions admitting her guilt. She was charged with war
treason and helping soldiers escape to Britain, which was at
war with Germany. That meant she was aiding an enemy.
Caval went on trial and was found guilty. She was
sentenced to death and executed by firing squad on October twelve.

(03:24):
After her execution, Germany used her death to discourage resistance.
The British, on the other hand, used her execution as
propaganda to encourage enlistment in the British army. People around
the world denounced that the Germans had executed a nurse
and believed the punishment was too harsh. After the war
was over, Cavil's remains were exhumed and transported to England.

(03:48):
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(04:08):
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(04:29):
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