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Edith Cavell Memorial

Frampton's white memorial to the nurse the Germans shot in 1915, outside the National Portrait Gallery, with her last words cut into it.

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Photo by Christian David, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Edith Cavell was a nurse from Norfolk who ran a training hospital in Brussels and, when the Germans occupied Belgium in 1914, nursed the wounded of both sides and helped some two hundred Allied soldiers escape to neutral Holland. She was arrested in August 1915, tried by court martial and shot on 12 October, and the killing of a nurse became the most effective piece of British propaganda of the war. Her body came home in 1919 for a funeral at Westminster Abbey and burial at Norwich, and the memorial, paid for by a public subscription led by the Daily Telegraph, was unveiled in St Martin's Place in 1920: George Frampton's marble figure in her uniform against a tall granite pillar with a mother and child at its top, and around it the words Humanity, Devotion, Fortitude, Sacrifice. The line that people stop for, added in 1924 after a campaign, is what she told the chaplain the night before she died: Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

Where
St Martin's Place, WC2N 4JJ
Nearest station
Charing Cross · 2 min walk

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