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L'hôpital irlandais de Saint-Lô: Mary Frances Crowley, The Matron Amongst the Ruins

The town of Saint-Lô in Normandy was a German stronghold in Northern France in the lead up to the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. Like many others towns in the region, it was all but destroyed by Allied bombings during the effort to liberate Northern France from German occupation in the weeks and months that followed.

Central to rehabilitation efforts in Saint-Lô was a small group of humanitarian missionaries from Ireland who set up a Red Cross hospital in the town’s remains, L'hôpital irlandais de Saint-Lô. Among these was nurse Mary Frances Crowley, who served as Matron of the hospital at Saint-Lô between 1945 and 1947. A pioneer of nurse education in Ireland, she later became the Foundation Dean of the RCSI Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery in 1974.
Mary Frances Crowley, painted by William Nathans for RCSI Women on Walls (2019)

To commemorate the anniversary of Crowley’s birth on 1 August 1906, Project Archivist Erin McRae tells the story of Mary Crowley’s role in the establishment of the Hôpital irlandais de Saint-Lô to shine another light on this fascinating chapter in Irish medical history during the Second World War.

Devastation of Saint-Lô

The ruins of Saint-Lô (RCSI/FON/1)

The opening verse of Samuel Beckett’s poem St Lô reads:  

‘Vire will wind in other shadows

Unborn through the bright ways tremble

And the old mind ghost-forsaken

Sink into its havoc’

Even just these first few lines seem haunting, but they take on a completely new meaning when one looks at photographs taken of the Normandy town of Saint-Lô after it suffered catastrophic aerial bombardment by the Allied forces which began on D-Day (June 6th, 1944). It was a fate that befell many towns in Normandy in the Allied attempt to eject the German forces and the town of St Lô suffered hundreds of casualties and mass devastation.

Shaky Beginnings

The Irish Red Cross Society was established in July 1939, with close links with the Irish Army Medical Service. The Society had been planning to send medical help to civilian casualties of the war in Europe since 1943.The first plan was to create a one-hundred-bed mobile hospital unit, but this ended up being unfeasible due to the resources needed and a lack of support from various officials. After the Allies’ arrival in June of 1944, the Irish Red Cross Society approached the French directly about the mobile hospital project. The response was very enthusiastic, but as plans evolved it was decided that the Irish aid would take the form of a one-hundred-bed hospital to be located in an area chosen by both the Irish and French Red Cross Societies.

Staff Recruitment

Matron Mary Crowley at her desk in Hôpital irlandais de Saint-Lô
In October 1944, while Allied and French troops were pressing East towards the German border in the final stages of the war, staff recruitment for the hospital was launched through advertisements in newspapers. By December, fifteen doctors, clerical and technical staff had been appointed, with Colonel Thomas J. McKinney as Medical Director. T.J. McKinney was already Director of the Army Medical Services as well as a member of the Society’s Central Council at the time he was seconded to the Irish hospital. In addition to McKinney, the hospital’s first physician to be recruited was Alan Thompson, who had graduated with an MB from Trinity College in 1930 and become a consultant to the Richmond, Rotunda and Whitworth hospitals in Dublin; from 1962 to 1974 he was Professor of Medicine at RCSI. Thompson was instrumental in recruiting his schoolfriend as a storekeeper and interpreter: Samuel Beckett, the future Nobel Prize winner for Literature (1969). 

The Matron of the new hospital was Mary Frances Crowley, who had previously been working as assistant Matron at the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin. As the new hospital’s Matron, she was also on the selection committee for recruiting nursing staff. 
The nursing staff at Saint-Lô, Mary Crowley pictured centre (RCSI/FON/1)

Fitting Out

Crowley was central to the enormous task of transporting the equipment and fitting out the departments for a complete hospital. Supplies that were required included beds, tables, chairs, screens, linen, bedding, clothing, cooking utensils, stores, refrigerators, fuel, medical appliances, dressings, medications, food, toilet facilities, etc. Meanwhile, there was still to be a decision made on the exact site of where the hospital would be set up. Before Saint-Lô was chosen, the other contender was Brest, a port in Brittany. The first of the doctors who left for France in late August 1945 were Arthur Darley, Frederick McKee (an alumnus of RCSI), and the pathologist Jim Gaffney. (The book Healing Amid the Ruins: The Irish Hospital at Saint-Lô (1945-46) by Gaffney’s daughter Phyllis has been very useful to my research). Other staff who arrived in late August were Michael Killick, the laboratory technician and Tommy Dunne, a storeman. On 14th of August 1945, the Menapia, a Wexford Steamship Company vessel set sail for Cherbourg, carrying the provisions and equipment for the Irish hospital. Mary Frances Crowley herself arrived in Saint-Lô in December.

Treating the Wounded

The building of the hospital ‘huts’ took ‘considerable time’, as Crowley later recollected. However, by September 1945, most of the Irish staff had arrived and an Out-Patients Department was running. Furthermore, as Crowley writes ‘[gradually] as the hutments were rendered habitable, the wards opened and the first in-patients were received in December, 1945.’[1] Once the hospital was fully functional it contained 115 beds and the ‘staff comprised a Medical Director, 10 doctors (3 medical, 2 surgical, 1 Anaesthetist, 1 Ophthalmologist, 1 Gynaecologist, and 1 Pathologist, Matron and 30 Registered Nurses, a Chaplain, a Chemist, 2 Laboratory Technicians, 2 Storekeepers and an Administrative Staff of 9.’[2] Crowley also explains that once the hospital was ‘completely equipped, the institution afforded all the treatment facilities available in the most up-to-date general hospital at that period.’[3] At its height, the hospital was treating as many as 200 outpatients daily. 
Hospital staff pictured in the grounds of Saint-Lô (RCSI/FON/1)
In 1946 the Irish hospital was handed over to the French Red Cross. Crowley returned to the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital and continued to raise standards and practice in nursing education in Ireland, culminating in the establishment of the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1974, which was the first of its kind in Great Britain and Ireland.

An Inspiration

Mary Crowley pictured on one of the wards at Saint-Lô (RCSI/FON/1)
While I have continued to appraise and catalogue this vast collection of material, I have been able to reflect on a great many things. For one, I find it so striking just how involved and dedicated Mary Frances Crowley was to her profession, and this inspires me in my own work as an archivist. Among the many narratives and stories I have found in the collection thus far, the story of Crowley’s time as Matron in the Hôpital irlandais de Saint-Lô is so special that it deserves to be celebrated on this, her birthday. I have also been reminded of the experiences of others during a time of war, brutality, violence and inhumanity wrought on innocent people, which continues to this day in other forms. One can so easily fall prey to feelings of desolation, uselessness and despair, but this Crowley’s story, I believe, helps one to feel hopeful, seeing a community rise up from the ruins and re-build as they did in Saint-Lô, especially when the focus shifts to healing and care. This narrative has also impressed on me the enormous contributions that Irish men and women working in the medical field made to the war effort during the Second World War, a narrative which has long been untold and is in much need of recognition. I’m incredibly humbled to be able to share here my account of Crowley’s work, and to have learnt so much  about this area of Irish medical history.

Sketch of Saint-Lô by a German POW who worked in the hospital (RCSI/FON/1)

To finish this blog post, I would like to share the opening verse from a poem written by a San Francisco nurse, Margaret Helen Florine, from a collection she published in 1917:

                ‘With magic touch to fevered brow,

                To ease your pain her only thought,

                Earnest, quiet, swift and calm,

                Divining wishes, praise unsought…’[4]


[1] RCSI/FoN/01: Mary Frances Crowley, personal papers. Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland: Dublin.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Margaret Helen Florine, “The Nurse,” Brought to Light: Stories from UCSF Archives & Special Collections, UCSF Library, May 12, 2016, accessed July 15, 2024, https://broughttolight.ucsf.edu/2016/05/12/songs-of-a-nurse/.References
  • Florine, Margaret Helen. “The Nurse.” Brought to Light: Stories from UCSF Archives & Special Collections, UCSF Library. May 12, 2016. Accessed July 15, 2024.  https://broughttolight.ucsf.edu/2016/05/12/songs-of-a-nurse/
  • Gaffney, Phyllis. Healing amid the Ruins: The Irish Hospital at Saint- Lô (1945-46). Dublin: A. & A. Farmar, 1999.
  • “The Hospital the Irish Shipped to France - Documentary On One.” RTÉ Radio 1. September 4, 2020. https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/0904/1163258-the-hospital-the-irish-shipped-to-france-documentary-on-one/
  • RCSI/FoN/01: Mary Frances Crowley, Personal Papers. Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin.