Edith Cavell

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Edith Cavell

by Unknown photographer
photogravure postcard print, 1910s
4 in. x 2 3/4 in. (101 mm x 69 mm)
Given by V.M. Vincent, 1975
Photographs Collection
NPG x4185

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

This portraitback to top

These postcards, were circulated in very large numbers as part of the propaganda campaign in which Cavell became a martyr. Her execution was used to sway neutral opinion against the Germans, and Recruitment doubled in the eight weeks after the announcement of her death.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Moorhouse, Paul; Faulks, Sebastian (essay), The Great War in Portraits, 2014 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 27 February - 15 June 2014), p. 118 Read entry

    Nurse, shot at dawn, 12 October 1915. Edith Cavell was born in 1865 in Swardeston, Norfolk, and trained as a nurse at the London Hospital in 1896. Following a number of nursing appointments, in 1907 she became director of a nurses' training school in Brussels. After the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, the training school became part of a network sheltering Allied soldiers and assisting their escape to neutral Holland. In August 1915, Cavell was arrested by the Germans, placed in solitary confinement, court-martialled and sentenced to death. Remaining composed, her final words were, 'I am glad to die for my country.'

Subject/Themeback to top

Events of 1910back to top

Current affairs

George V succeeds Edward VII to the throne.
The Liberals win narrow victories after calling two General Elections following escalating tension between the Liberal administration and the Lords reached crisis point with the Lords' unprecedented rejection of Lloyd George's 1909 budget. The budget included tax reform intended to fund social reform and a rearmament programme, but was seen by the Conservative Lords as an assault on property.

Art and science

The critic and Bloomsbury group member Roger Fry curates a ground-breaking and, at the time, shocking exhibition in London's Grafton Galleries, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. The exhibition introduces the work of contemporary European artists to the London art establishment, including Manet, Cezanne, Gaugin and Van Gogh, and Fry became a champion of modern art, coining the term 'Post-Impressionism'.

International

Japan annexes Korea as a colony, an indication of Japan's ambitious imperialist aims and attempts to control trade and influence in East Asia. Japanese occupation of Korea lasted until 1945, after Japan surrendered to the Allied forces at the end of the Second World War and Korea was divided in two by the United States and the Soviet Union.

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