Edith Cavell
A nurse who helped 200 soldiers escape occupied Belgium and was shot for it
Edith Cavell grew up in a Norfolk vicarage where the family was expected to share Sunday dinner with poorer neighbours. She worked as a governess, including for a family in Brussels, and only began nurse training at the London Hospital in 1896, when she was thirty. Her matron there described her as clever but unpunctual and not quite up to the mark, a verdict Cavell spent years quietly disproving.
In 1907 a Belgian surgeon invited her to run a new training school for nurses in Brussels. She built it from almost nothing, and by 1914 its nurses were staffing hospitals and schools across the city.
When Germany occupied Belgium that autumn, she turned the school into a Red Cross hospital and treated wounded from every side. In November two stranded British soldiers were brought to her door. She hid them, and over the next nine months she became a link in an underground network that passed around two hundred Allied soldiers and Belgian men of military age across the border into the Netherlands.
She was arrested in August 1915, made a full confession, and was tried by a German military court. On the night before her execution she told the chaplain who visited her that standing before God and eternity she realised that patriotism was not enough. She was shot on 12 October 1915. The outrage that followed became a recruiting cry, which she would probably have disliked; her body was brought home in 1919 and buried at Norwich Cathedral.