Sisters Flo and Mary MacKenzie

Mary and Flora Mackenzie were born in Lochinver in the Highlands. They were both working as nursing sisters, Mary in Glasgow and Flo in Inverness, when Dr Elsie Inglis issued the call for women to join the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.

Mary and Flo signed up. Mary was among the first of the 1500 Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH) personnel to arrive in Serbia in March 1915 at the height of an aggressive typhus epidemic, with Flo arriving a few months later.
When they arrived, the outlook in Serbia was bleak – there were tents full of patients, who sometimes lay among bodies as the disease took hold. Serbia had few doctors and nurses of its own, and it was up to the SWH to take control. They burnt bedding and mattresses, scrubbed everything down, and bringing a wealth of new equipment and supplies from Britain, set up new hygiene procedures and measures to prevent the Typhus from spreading.
Mary was more involved in infection control and general medicine, while Flo was more involved in the surgical side of things. Surgeries were carried out in tents in the light of lanterns – there were always two in case one should go out. Flo recalled a train on which the SWH staff would travel closer to the fighting fronts to collect wounded soldiers, who would be treated on the train as it travelled back to the hospital.

Following the October 1915 invasion of Serbia by the Central Powers, the Serbian army was forced to retreat through Albania in what was known as the ‘great retreat’. A team of women from the SWH accompanied them, one of whom was Mary. The conditions, combining extreme weather through steep and rocky mountains, were horrific and 240,000 Serbs died from cold, starvation or injury. When the march arrived at the coast of the Adriatic Sea, Mary had a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other, neither was her own.

Flo was based in a town called Ghevgli, near Serbia. As the Bulgarian army approached, her unit was ordered to evacuate. They gathered anything that could be used to the Bulgarian army’s advantage and burnt it. As they sat around a fire, Flo was recorded as singing a well-known Gaelic song, Fear a Bhàta, a sad song in which the singer wonders whether she will ever see her love again. It reflected the anxiety she was feeling about Mary’s safety on the retreat.

Artist Response

I got my inspiration from how the two ladies were travelling the world to help the wounded soldiers. They went to France, Greece, Malta, Paris and even America just to help these soldiers. The two of them were from Lochaber and received bravery medals for what they did.

I enjoyed going to the studio to make the plates because it was cool to see how the plates were printed and it was very hands-on, and I enjoy doing practical work. I put mountains in the background because at one point they had to walk across icy, slippy mountains for 500 miles to get to the wounded soldiers that they were trying to help. I also put the two women with their medals in the middle because I wanted to show that these women didn’t have to do what they did but they did and were rewarded greatly for their service with the medals pinned onto their dresses.

Lewis Craig
Inverness High School

Lewis Craig is studying S3 Art & Design at Inverness High School where he followed the story of Flo & MacKenzie.