Dominic Sandbrook

They're not attributes that I look for in a conversationalist, frankly, but anyway.

Anglicanism at its best.

Obviously, she has this very, very sort of Christian sensibility.

She wrote to her cousin, someday I'm going to do something useful, something for people.

They're most of them so helpless, so hurt and so unhappy.

I think there's just a trace in her conversation of the Grantham grocer shop, no?

Of the Grantham grammar school girl who's going to lecture you about God's plans for you.

Anyway, in the 1890s, she comes home from Brussels and she ends up training as a nurse.

And she rises to become the assistant matron of a hospital in Shoreditch in 1903.

Now, on the issue of her as a dinner party companion, I mean, I didn't think this would be such a theme of the episode, but there we are.

She's very good at running this hospital, but she's not a bundle of laughs.

So these are the reports of her from the late 1890s and 1900s.

A very strict person who demands obedience from others.

Orderly, methodical, and of kindly and gentle disposition.

Unbelievably unselfish, with an almost fanatical sense of duty.

Rather withdrawn, uninterested in superficial friendships, but thoughtful, pleasant, and sympathetic to all her patients.

Does that tick your boxes, Tom?

Yeah.

But anyway, in 1907, she is recruited to go back to Belgium.

Now, she'd been working, remember, as a governess for the Francois family.