An excellent photographic record of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) taken by Marjorie M. Thomson, who served with the 23rd British Stationary Hospital during the First World War. As the great majority of Mesopotamian Campaign albums were compiled by male soldiers, different perspectives, and especially those of women, are extremely rare.
Thomson was on the nursing staff of the 23rd Stationary Hospital which was initially situated at Amarah on the banks of the river Tigris. The hospital made up part of the medical infrastructure that supported the British troops who had been active in Mesopotamia since November 1914 — consisting of field ambulances, hospital ships and general hospitals. Sometime after Maude’s entry into Baghdad in March 1917, the 23rd BS Hospital moved to the city, taking over from No.20 Combined Field Ambulance. The building had previously housed a Turkish Military Hospital and was described by one nurse as “‘filthy and verminous’” (Juliet Piggott, Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps, 1990, p.60). The nurses did however like their new environs, having traded tents for “flat-roofed French-style houses” and gardens (ibid., p.60).
Thomson’s photographs cover her time at Amarah and Baghdad, and numerous other locations from Basrah to the northerly city of Mosul. They even stretch to cities in Iran, showing that she accompanied the British forces tasked with filling the vacuum left by departing Russians. Somewhat surprisingly, only two images capture the staff of the hospital and none show the nurses at work.
Although some images cover the same ground as other campaign albums (such as General Maude’s grave and the remains of Babylon) the majority look elsewhere. Her camera focuses instead on landscapes, local people and architecture. There are several portraits of Arab women (which do not appear in the albums of male soldiers for obvious reasons) and a fascinating series on agriculture, documenting date groves, irrigation, dairy farms and monumental haystacks. Among the most valuable are two images of a Corpus Christi procession through Baghdad on the 22nd of June 1919. This was the first and last procession of its kind in the city, in which its remarkably diverse Catholic population passed through peaceful crowds of onlookers. Visual evidence of the event is rare, with an album by William Leighton (the priest who organised the procession) at Ushaw College Library, Durham University and a glass slide at the University of Exeter the only surviving examples we can locate.
