The first opportunities for women to find roles at sea during war, without resorting to disguise, were as nurses. Formal Healthcare for sick and injured seafarers began in the mid 18th Century. Each ship had to have a sick bay and a surgeon. Repeated skirmishes and campaigns had also made a network of hospital ships necessary in the heyday of British naval power.

During Nelson’s command of the Royal Navy 1794–1805 there is evidence of women being aboard the ships, despite it being frowned upon by the Admiralty and no provision being made for them aboard the vessels. Women and children are recorded as present on some of the vessels muster books. When the fleet reached Aboukir Bay, Egypt, during the Nile campaign 1801 many of the vessels were converted into hospital ships, and some of the women that had sailed with their husbands or ‘companions’ volunteered to stay with the vessels to tend the sick and injured. They were untrained and medical provision at the time was basic. These nurses also acquired, or took with them, a reputation for drunkenness, prostitution and helping their patients to desert. Despite this reputation the admiralty recognised the value in principle of nursing staff and allowed the women to be fed from the ships stores and encouraged more to volunteer.

Soldiers leave Southampton for the Crimean War

By the time of the Crimean War (1854-56), female nurses from among the middle classes began to be trained to assist on hospital ships. The most famous gentlewoman to sail to the Crimea is of course Florence Nightingale. She was made ‘Superintendent of the Female Nurses in the Hospitals in the East’ and arrived with 38 nurses on the eve of battle. A less well-known pioneer, Eliza Mackenzie, brought six nurses to a naval hospital near Constantinople at the start of the war.

The Royal Navy didn’t officially employ female nurses until 1883. The Public Record Office notes: ‘Regulations for the Staff of Nursing Sisters in the Royal Naval Hospitals were published in 1884 and a female nursing service was established initially at Haslar (Portsmouth) and Plymouth. In 1897 the service was extended to Chatham and Malta, and in 1901 to all Royal Naval Hospitals. The names of matrons and head sisters first appear in the Navy List of 1884.’

Female nurses first went to sea on official active service in 1897 when two sisters sailed on a hospital ship as part of the Benin Expedition, when British Soldiers were sent to Africa to quash a rebellion. This brought the notion of female nursing to Royal attention. In 1901, Queen Alexandra wrote to the first Lord of the Admiralty to suggest: ‘the great wish of my heart has always been to have the Navy Nursing Department also under my special charge, and that it may likewise bear my name and be amalgamated with the Army as soon as possible.’

The fact is, the Committee on Training of Medical Sick Berth and Nursing Staff had already debated in 1899 whether there should be an established Naval Nursing Reserve. It was decided instead that a civilian female nursing reserve would be established, used only in times of war. In 1902 the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service or QARNNS was born. In the First World War (1914-1918) they saw their first official active service, their places in hospitals being filled by Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs).

By the end of the First World War it was clear that a Nursing reserve was invaluable. The scheme worked on the principle that the QARNNS staff would work in civilian hospitals during peacetime, being called back to military service in times of war. In 1939 at the outbreak of World War Two the QARNNS were shipped overseas to troopships, hospital ships and land hospitals around the world. Often facing dangerous circumstances, women stationed in Hong Kong were captured by Japanese soldiers. Some died, some were raped and others spent the rest of the war suffering extremely poor conditions in internment camps. Nurses by necessity have to be close to the frontline and danger.

In 1977, along with the Wrens, QARNNS came under the control of the Royal Navy with the passing of the ‘Naval Discipline Act’. Up until this point they were still viewed as civilians attached to the Royal Navy. In 1982, during the Falklands War, the service changed again to allow men to serve in the QARNNS.

It has taken a long time for the QARNNS to evolve, only until relatively recently nursing has been viewed as a civilian occupation. Now as the Ministry of Defence recruits more nursing professionals to the service, they remind applicants ‘QARNNS Officers are part of the Royal Navy and you will be expected to maintain the same standards of behaviour and appearance as any other holder of the Queen's Commission’.

Nursing in the Royal Navy

Womens Royal Naval Service

War brides