Elsie Knocker, later Baroness de T'Serclaes, ( Elizabeth Blackall Shapter; 29 July 1884 – 26 April 1978) was a British nurse and ambulance driver in World War I who, together with her friend Mairi Chisholm, won numerous medals for bravery and for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers on the Western Front in Belgium. Dubbed "The Madonnas of Pervyse" by the press, the two were among the most photographed women of the war.
Biography
Early life
She was born Elizabeth Blackall Shapter in Exeter, Devon on 29 June 1884, the youngest of five children to Dr. Thomas Lewis and Charlotte Shapter (née Bayly). During her childhood she picked up the nickname, "Elsie". She was orphaned at an early age. Her mother died when she was four years old and her father died from tuberculosis two years later. She was subsequently adopted by Lewis Edward Upcott, a teacher at Marlborough College, and his wife Emily who sent her to be educated at St. Nicholas's, Folkestone, and then at the exclusive Château Lutry in Switzerland.
Hospital service and first marriage
After training at the Children's Hip Hospital at Sevenoaks, she married Leslie Duke Knocker in 1906, with whom she had a son, Kenneth Duke, a year later. But the marriage failed and, soon after she was divorced, she began training as a midwife at Queen Charlotte's Hospital. Since being divorced was a status frowned upon in Edwardian England, Knocker invented the myth that her husband had died in Java, leaving her a widow.
Being a divorcee/widow and single mother, however, hardly kept Knocker away from her passions. She became an ardent amateur motorbike enthusiast and when riding wore a dark green leather skirt and long leather coat buttoned all the way down with a belt "to keep it all together" designed by Dunhill. She earned the name "Gypsy" because of her love of the open road and membership of the Gypsy Motorcycle Club. She possessed a number of motorbikes including a Scott, a Douglas solo, and a Chater-Lea with a sidecar which would travel with her to the Western Front.
World War I
When war was declared in 1914, Knocker wrote to her friend and fellow motorcycle fanatic, Mairi Chisholm, that there was "work to be done", and suggested they go to London to become dispatch riders for the Women's Emergency Corps. When Chisholm was chosen to join Hector Munro's Flying Ambulance Corps she was able to convince Munro to accept Knocker as well, as she had some training as a nurse, was an excellent mechanic and chauffeur, and spoke both French and German. This meant that Knocker had to cancel a "ladies stiff reliability trial" with "plenty of hairpin bends" over 120 miles of Hampshire and Dorset countryside. The day before she was due to ship out she wrote in her diary:
"This time tomorrow night I shall be in Belgium… in the midst of all the terrors of war."
War service, 1914–1915
In the early evening of 25 September 1914, Knocker, Chisholm and the other volunteers (which included Dorothie Feilding and May Sinclair) followed Dr. Munro down the gang-plank of the S.S. Princess Clementine at Ostend, West Flanders. While visiting the town of Nazareth (8 miles south-west of Ghent where the corps was initially quartered) Knocker was witness to the aftermath of a massacre when she came across 26 Belgian military policemen who had been shot and mutilated by the Germans.
At the end of October, the corps relocated to Furnes in unoccupied Belgium, near Dunkirk, where the women worked tirelessly picking up wounded soldiers mid-way from the front and bringing them back to their field hospital at the rear. Knocker and Chisholm soon realised they could save more lives by treating the wounded directly on the front lines.
In November, the two decided to leave the corps and set up their own dressing station five miles east in a town named Pervyse, north of Ypres, just one hundred yards from the trenches. Here, in a vacant cellar which they named the "Poste de Secours Anglais" ("British First Aid Post"), the two would spend the next three and a half years aiding the wounded in the Belgian sector. Knocker gave most of the medical attention, while Chisholm transported the injured, often in terrible conditions and under fire, to a base hospital 15 miles away.