Mary Shannon Webster, canteen worker.

Mary Shannon Webster was born on 2 November 1895 to Arthur Gordon Webster, a professor of physics at Clark University and a founder of the American Physical Society, and his wife Elizabeth Townsend Webster. She graduated from Smith College in 1917. Webster sailed for France in November 1917 to take up canteen work with the Red Cross. In 1918, the Syracuse [NY] Herald published a series of letters she wrote that dealt with her work.

[Syracuse Herald, 18 April 1918, p. 25] …General Pershing, Secretary [Newton] Baker and their respective staffs and correspondents came to make their inspection of the camp, being a most important one. … I was making sandwiches; we all rose when he came in and then he (Pershing) ate a sandwich and talked to Gertrude [surname unknown] and me! He asked how we liked it here and I used slang as usual and said, “Crazy about it!” … Pershing said it was fine to see us here and when they left the camp we all lined up at attention. He was much pleased at our “military discipline” and said it would make the soldiers better to see us.

….We had quite an alarm for an air raid of the camp the other night. It was the night of a Paris raid, and they also came very near here. Every light was out here, and we sat and waited for the sound of the Boche engines and the signal to scatter, but nothing came to bother us. …We all enjoyed the novelty and the excitement. Signals were seen at the German prison camp and fifteen arrests were made. A man was marched past us in his shirt sleeves. I don’t know where.

[Syracuse Herald, 5 May 1918]…Four months of my first enlistment are up and there is not a doubt in my mind as to re-enlistment. In two more months I shall have earned a service stripe on my sleeve. I can hardly believe it. To-day I am taking my first day off in three months and am spending it in bed and I surely am appreciating it. This working seven days a week is no joke, when you never work less than eight and some times twelve and thirteen hours a day. It is much better now for they sent us more workers and we can keep to our schedules when no one is ill or away.

….I am on officer’s mess. I wait on five tables at every meal. There are nine at a table and usually they all fill up at once and have to be served at the same moment. Our mess hall holds 150 officers comfortably, but one day last week we had nearly 100 extra officers come in at once and for two days we had to wait on all of them beside the others. Those were hectic meals for us, for we had to set the tables up twice and repeat the process of serving everything.

…I can now carry five plates full of dinner on one trip. It was a great moment when I achieved that success. I have not yet achieved perfection, for sometimes I spill gravy down the officers’ necks or on their trousers. If they are khaki trousers, I always tell them “That’s all right. Gravy and coffee are the same color. It won’t show.” If they are the blue trousers of my French officers it is disastrous, for we have no blue gravy.

….My tables are always filled up way ahead of time and they say I give the best service. It is really lots of fun and I don’t mind it at all. I am in the dining room all the afternoon setting up the tables for dinner and I have to serve all the teas beside.

[Syracuse Herald, 19 May 1918] … I have been under fire at last. The big gun had not been heard for several days when yesterday afternoon—a heavenly sunny day—we were walking down the crowded Rue de la Paix when “BOOM” it sounded. It kept on all the afternoon at intervals of about twenty minutes. So now I am in “the battle of Paris,” and it doesn’t seem any different than when I was in Worcester [MA] and blasting was going on.

It went on to-day and I suppose it will begin again early to-morrow morning. […I] merely turned over in bed and went to sleep again when the bombardment started again this morning. Getting prepared for the front, that is all. Fatalism is the only belief to have if you want any peace over here.

Yesterday afternoon that gun hit the Maternity hospital and killed some mothers and young babies and wounded nearly forty of them. That is what makes my blood boil.

Webster returned to the United States in January 1919. She experienced tragedies in her life: first, her fiancé, Croix de Guerre recipient Captain Henry H. Worthington, was killed in action at Soissons in July 1918 (she stated in the 30 Mar 1919 Syracuse Herald, “I did not stop work … there was no time to let personal things enter. Indeed, I was thankful for the work which made me forget my own sorrow in helping others.”) Second, Webster’s father committed suicide in 1923 after writing in a note to her brother that he was a failure.

From June to September 1924, she traveled abroad. In June 1925, Webster married advertising salesperson Harold Flint Thomas. She died in 1985.

Mary Shannon Webster serving chocolate to Private H. Rouvoldt, Evacuation Hospital No. 12, Meurthe et Moselle, France, November 1918. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Helena Clearwater, WWI and WWII nurse.

Helena Clearwater, from the Army School of Nursing Annual, 1921

Kingston, NY, native Helena Clearwater (1879–1956) was the daughter of laborer John W. Clearwater, who was blinded while serving as a private in Company C, 80th New York Infantry, during the Civil War. According to Military Medicine (vol. 119, 1956, p. 218), she graduated from the Kingston Free Academy in 1897 and taught in Kingston schools before joining the US Student Nurse Reserve in 1917. In the 18 Feb. 1919 Kingston Daily Freeman, she related some of her experiences at USA Debarkation Hospital No. 2 on Staten Island (where men wounded overseas received care until they were moved to other hospitals. Clearwater also was listed as working at Fox Hills Base Hospital, also on Staten Island, in the Army School of Nursing Annual, 1921):

The rules are very, very strict. One is reprimanded for the first offense, but the second one means dismissal from post. …. There are 42 wards and about 72 beds to a ward. [S]ome have more. I am in a “doubledecker” No 35, where there are convalescents from gas attacks. They are a brave bunch, and I have become very much attached to them. We have some dreadful cases here, too dreadful to speak about! Death would be a blessing. One cannot be here without feeling the bitterest kind of hatred toward the people who caused these wrecks. Yet I haven’t heard one of these boys complain, even when they know how hideous they are.

We are evacuating this place fast, so by next week we expect to be pretty well cleared. It has been turned into a Reconstruction Hospital, and we expect about 1,000 patients tomorrow. The transport is in now. That means some dreadful litter cases and they will stay here.

The bugle call is 5:30 a.m. Then our beds must be “unfrocked,” even to the mattress and we must be at mess hall at 6:15 a.m. Then we will rush back to our rooms, make the beds up to pass inspection, which we have every morning; then dust, and we must be in the ward at 7 a.m. Now my ward is at least a mile from my room, so there’s some hustle for me. There are over five miles of corridors here. I leave the ward at 10 a.m. for class and am in class until noon, when we have lunch. Then there are classes in the afternoon except when I am in the laboratory. … The first year here will be really spent in study and when this course is finished it will be my own fault if I don’t know something. (6)

She also noted the following regarding food and recreation:

Our meals are splendid, I never ate better cooked food and when one thinks of two-hundred nurses eating at one time, they can imagine the fun. …. We have a fine Recreation Hall, prettily furnished, with a piano, 2 victrolas, lots of books, etc. We can go there at any time. Then the Red Cross Hostess House is just across from us, where we can get fine “eats” for mere nothing. Every Tuesday afternoon we have movies or a show. Tuesday is a very hard day so we have the afternoon off. (6)

Clearwater worked in pediatrics, obstetrics, and gynecology at Bellevue and graduated from the Army School of Nursing in June 1921, receiving her diploma from General Pershing, and was assigned to Walter Reed. In 1923, she was appointed superintendent of the Frances Warren Pershing Memorial Hospital (named for Pershing’s wife, who died in a 1915 fire) in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in a civilian capacity and returned to the army and Walter Reed in 1925. She served in the Philippines, China, Shanghai, Colorado, West Point, Louisiana, and Texas, and was promoted to captain in 1942. Clearwater received the Legion of Merit for, as the citation noted, “exceptionally meritorious service in the performance of outstanding service as the Chief Nurse, North Sector General Hospital, at the time of the Japanese attack on Hawaii, 7 December 1941 and in the months that followed. Captain Clearwater displayed unusual courage, fortitude and devotion to duty during this period and thereby rendered a service of great value.” She retired from the army in 1944. After Clearwater’s death from cancer in 1956, she was buried with full military honors in her hometown.

Further resources
• Helena Clearwater in October 1942 (photo)

• Helena Clearwater on Detroit radio program “In Our Opinion” with individuals from Battle Creek’s Percy General Hospital, 14 March 1943

What some US women did after WWI.

Allison S. Finkelstein’s book Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials: How American Women Commemorated the Great War, 1917–1945 (University of Alabama Press, 2021) delves into efforts by U.S. women to commemorate World War I service by themselves and their loved ones. This sometimes took the form of contributing to the construction of memorials or establishing organizations where the women could continue their service to former servicemen and others as well as maintain ties with each other and seek to be remembered and recognized. Some stories are sad ones, such as accounts of indigent and disabled former women workers and the group of occupational therapists and physical therapists who did not succeed in obtaining veterans’ status during the lifespan of the organization. African American mothers could not join white chapters of an organization of war mothers, and they could only visit foreign cemeteries where their loved ones had been laid to rest on separate trips from white women. Frustrating is the lack of awareness that female WWI workers could bring skills to the U.S. conduct of WWII. The book underscores the need for continued discussion and recognition of U.S. women’s varied roles in World War I.

May Margaret Egan, canteen worker.

May Margaret Egan, ca. 1919.

Born in St. Paul, May Margaret Egan (1887–1976) was the daughter of Illinois engineer and railway executive John Myers Egan and his wife Susanna. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1911. After working as a secretary in Connecticut, she sailed for France in November 1917 to serve in Red Cross canteens in Chalon and St.-Pierre-des-Corps. In December 1917, she wrote this letter to her mother that was published in the 11 Jan 1918 Dixon [IL] Evening Telegraph:

“A big weight hanging on our hearts”: Beth Satterthwaite, nurse.

Beth Satterthwaite, from her 1917 passport application

Margaret Elizabeth “Beth” Satterthwaite (1890–1978) was born in Tecumseh, MI. Her father, John Newton Satterthwaite, operated the Satterthwaite Brothers Hardware Store in Tecumseh with his brother, E. Newbold Satterthwaite. Her brother, Joseph C. Satterthwaite, served in the army in World War I and later as US ambassador to Sri Lanka, Burma, and South Africa.

She attended Oberlin College in 1909 and graduated from the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses in 1915. In December 1917, she sailed to France to perform civilian relief work at l’Hospital du Chateau, Sermoize les Bains, Marne, as part of the Friends’ Unit of the American Red Cross. A letter from Satterthwaite addressed to “Dear Old Friends” appeared in the 8 July 1918 Marshall [MI] Evening Chronicle:

If I don’t hurry, your little afghans will be showing wear before you know how welcome and useful they are. They have done hours and hours of active service already. We especially like them for wrapping up the kiddies out doors. There is so much tuberculosis that we try to use every bit of sunlight and fresh air. I decided to put one … on a bed in the nursery and save the other for an especially poor child to take home but my small Paul saw it under my arm and raised such a howl … that I put it on his bed for the sake of peace. They adore bright colors after all the terror and hardships and poverty that has filled their small lives. They all know the American flags now. … Our chateau was also used by the Germans for a hospital while they occupied the town. They left in such a hurry that they left their patients and one of their soldier-nurses left his diary. …. He said that even to an enemy, these ruined towns were pitiful because you [sic] could picture the same thing same thing happening to their own dear German home towns. It makes you so thankful that little Tecumseh isn’t suffering like so many of our allies’ homes. It makes me shiver to think of Tecumseh burned and treeless, with you all living in your cellars or in new shacks, with graves of our own boys and our enemy’s boys all over your lawns and fields, and every man who could carry a gun on duty, leaving the old men and boys and women to do all the work (without whimpering or heroics) and a lot of our brothers and fathers in German prisons and no word from a lot of others at the front for weeks—and a lot of very comfortable people not owning a handkerchief—and most of our women in mourning. I’m so proud that the Stars and Stripes are taking a real part now. We have reason to believe that American soldiers are at the helm in the new offensive just starting. The old guns are booming more heavily again, and we all feel a big weight hanging on our hearts. We are not near the sectors of great activity, but we are near enough to realize part of the agony the world is going through. …. We are so glad we came and that we can be used a little, but just imagine how good it will seem to see you all again and get back on the Raisin [R]iver, and the peaceful shade of our beautiful old elms and maples, and to the fine spirit that lives there. (1)

After Satterthwaite returned to the United States in February 1919, she worked as a nurse in the Tecumseh area.

Leah Tapper Cadbury, relief and canteen worker.

Leah Cadbury, from her 1918 passport application

Born in Haverford, PA, in 1892, Leah Tapper Cadbury was the daughter of banker Richard Tapper Cadbury and his wife Helen, who were part of the US branch of a family famous in Britain for its chocolate. A cousin was Henry J. Cadbury, a Haverford College professor who cofounded the American Friends Service Committee and caused a stir when he wrote an antiwar letter to the editor. Leah Cadbury graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1914 and served for three months in 1916 as a nurse at American Red Cross Hospital No. 1 in Neuilly, France. She then worked in Uffculme Hospital in Birmingham, England. The Red Cross sent her to the canteen serving French servicemen in Bar-le-Duc, France, and she provided this description of its August 1917 operations in the November 1917 Bryn Mawr Alumnae Quarterly:

A very good canteen is running at Bar-le-Duc, and I worked for a week there in order to learn the details of the system…

Bar-le-Duc is a junction for troops passing to and fro, there are barracks in the neighborhood (within 15 to 20 miles) and one of the main military high roads passed through the town, so there is a steady stream of soldiers of all nations.

The canteen is always open except for one short hour in the morning, 5–6, when the “platon,” as we call the man of all work, hoses the whole place and cleans out the rubbish. The canteen undertakes to give the soldiers hot and cold food at any time….We sold at cost price, coffee (hot and cold and au lait), tea (the same), chocolate, boullion, syrups, limonade—no wines of any sort—bread in all sizes of chunks, “tartines” [toast], ragout, steak, rosbif, potatoes, salad, eggs (fresh cooked or hardboiled), ham and eggs, confitures, miscellanies such as stamps, paper, petits gateaux, tobacco, smoked meats, and chocolates.

We worked under very primitive conditions, and there were many faults in our methods, but we fed the men and cheered them a bit before they passed on. ….

Of course we often made mistakes in order of serving and some poor fellow would remonstrate. But the poilus [French soldiers] were always nice, even the drunk ones who carried off the coffee jug one night!

At rush hours we generally had three workers, one at the caisse [checkout], one at the jugs, and one at the kitchen end of the counter! As the entrance to the officers’ room was also at this end, the third worker had to look after them too! We had one woman to cook and another to wash, but frequently we had to do a bit of both ourselves. To do all the cooking, we had one feeble stove and six gas burners, two of which were always in use for coffee and chocolate. Nevertheless we fed innumerable men. ….

The night shift from ten to five was the most interesting. Only two of us worked then, with two servants. About four or five rushes of men kept us busy, you may be sure, and they were always shivering with cold. Unfortunately we had no decent dortoirs [dormitories] for them, but soon some old hospital sheds will be fitted up with brancards [stretchers] and a douche so the men can sleep and have a bath.

The day is divided into different shifts but as we were very shorthanded we had to work overtime. …. We wore large overall aprons with sleeves, dark brown preferably, to hide the dirt (!), and caps of any style, to keep our hair clean. The air is always blue with smoke. Strong, comfortable shoes are most important as one is always standing or running (never walking) about. ….

The work is hard and your hands are very soon in a pretty mess, and it’s very easy to scrap with the other workers. …. [T]he work is wonderfully interesting. You should see a man’s face light up when he hears you are American, or see the relief with which he pockets his precious sous when you ask only “2 sous” for a piece of bread instead of 10. . . . You are asked to do many queer things, bind up a dog’s foot, or a boy’s finger, or “spik Inglish, avec.” Every night gives you a variety of experiences, so that you hurry to take your turn and are slow to leave. (113–15)

This diagram of the Bar-le-Duc canteen with Cadbury’s account shows a separate entrance for officers.

From December 1917 to March 1918, Cadbury was in Naples assisting the Red Cross with refugees. After the war, she was executive secretary for the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston and served as a field representative for the Birth Control League. As Christopher Isherwood’s diaries make clear, she also was a volunteer English as a second language teacher at a Quaker refugee hostel in Haverford, and one of her students was Vienna-born psychologist Carl Furtmueller. Cadbury married Furtmueller in June 1942; he died in 1951. She passed away in 1990.

Ida W. Pritchett, lab researcher.

Ida W. Pritchett, 1908. Pritchett photo album, Bryn Mawr College Scrapbook and Photo Album Collection.

Ida Williams Pritchett was born in 1891 to astronomer Henry Smith Pritchett, president of MIT and the first president of the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, and his first wife and cousin Ida. Pritchett earned a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1914 and a doctorate of science in hygiene from Johns Hopkins University in 1922 (her dissertation was on the pathological effects of diphtheria toxin in the guinea pig). As a laboratory assistant at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1917, she worked with Dr. Carroll G. Bull to develop and distribute an anti-toxin for gas gangrene, which had resulted in amputated limbs and death for many wounded servicemen. Pritchett published a number of scientific articles and eventually turned to photography. She died in 1965.

Virginia Osborn Sanger, relief worker.

Virginia Sturges Osborn was born in 1882 to Henry Fairfield Osborn, paleontologist and president of the American Museum of Natural History, and Lucretia Thatcher Perry Osborn, a writer. She married banker Ralph Sanger in November 1904. Their only child, Fairfield Osborn Sanger, died in 1917 at age 10. Ralph Sanger was killed in a flying accident in France in August 1918.

Virginia Osborn Sanger, ca. 1909. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

During World War I, Sanger worked for the French Heroes Fund in Paris, which assisted French wounded and their families, as well as bought the childhood home of the Marquis de Lafayette to serve as a school for war orphans and refugee children, a medical facility for children, and a museum commemorating Franco-American friendship. Sanger also worked at American Red Cross Hospital No. 1 in Neuilly. In July 1918, she wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson (Wilson had been a professor at Princeton University at the same time as her father):

My work is at Neuilly Hospital and I have helped to nurse the boys, for they are mere boys, who have been brought in from the Somme, Chateau Thierry and Cantigny. With their poor shattered bodies and amazing courage in the fearful pain they are called upon to endure one is filled with a great gratitude in knowing that controlling the destinies of our people you fully understand the horrors of war and will not prolong it one hour longer, than is necessary to realize the peace which will unite the world in such a way as to make impossible a repetition of such agonies. (1–2)

She returned to the United States in September 1919. She married investment banker Robert McKay in August 1923 and died in 1955.

Marjorie Kay: nurse, Yeoman(F), actress, singer, theatrical agent.

Born in Detroit, Marjorie Griffin Kay (1897–1949) was the daughter of Canadian-born jeweler Richard Day Kay and his wife Margaret. She appeared in Sherlock Holmes (1916, filmed at Essanay Studios in Chicago; see below) as the love interest of William Gillette’s Holmes and studied voice with Gioacchino Baralt in New York, participating in a recital of Baralt’s students at Carnegie Chamber Music Hall in May 1916. In early June 1916, Kay sailed for France intending to study languages, which she needed to pursue opera professionally. Instead, spurred by her Canadian aunt Amy Eaton, who was involved in relief work, she served as a nurse at the American Ambulance Hospital (aka American Red Cross Hospital No. 1) in Neuilly. She returned to the United States in September 1916 for a rest break, and it is unclear when she returned to France.

Marjorie Kay, right, assists in a facial reconstruction procedure for a wounded French soldier, ca. 1917. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

According to Kay’s Hartford Courant obituary, she served as a model for a World War I poster, but the title of the poster and the name of the artist were not identified. The only clues provided: she was in a nurse’s uniform, and the word give was on the poster. A candidate may be a 1917–18 poster by Albert Herter; compare it with a 1916 photo of Kay in the Library of Congress (see below).

The 9 January 1918 Jeweler’s Circular-Weekly reported Kay singing at the New Year’s 1918 open house of the Detroit YMCA. She spoke at the June 1918 meeting of the Dental Assn of Massachusetts, as the attendees were interested in learning about newly developed facial reconstruction techniques for wounded soldiers that Kay had observed as a nurse. Reported the 2 June 1918 Boston Sunday Globe:

Men were frequently brought to the hospital with their faces entirely gone below the eyes. Then it was that the American dentists went to work to reconstruct their faces.

Jaws were made from the small bones of the knees; these bones formed the sides of the jawa and were caught togther across the chin by aluminum wires, which held together composition in which the teeth, made separately, were imbedded.

She told about the making of brand new noses, in which operation the third finger of the hand was slit open and fastened upon the place where the nose belonged. There it stayed until the flesh had knit, and the finger was severed from the hand, and a presentable nose was formed. Skin, grafted from the leg, was used to form the surface of the new faces.

She saw a baby, only a few days old, who had been cut in two by a German officer and thrown at the feet of a Belgian mother. She saw babies whose eyes had been gouged out, and others with hands cut off by German soldiers. . . . .

“If I could only talk,” she said, “and could tell of the things I have seen, I should be the happiest girl in the world.” (“Ambulance Driver and Nurse” 56)

Kay enlisted in the Navy on October 22, 1918, serving as a Yeoman (F). The abstracts of World War I service for New York list her as working 20 days (Oct–Nov 1918) at the Cable Censor Office, Third Naval District Headquarters, New York. According to the Veterans Administration Master Index, she was discharged from the Navy on April 30, 1919.

Kay married Holbrook V. Bonney in November 1919. The marriage appears to have soured quickly, as the 1920 census (dated early January 1920) reports Kay residing with her parents in New York without her husband. The 26 September 1920 New York Tribune listed her as a member of the cast of the musical comedy Honeymoon Night (written by Mabel Keightley under the pseudonym M. de la Chambeaux); it played in Sag Harbor in September 1920 and in Hartford in October 1920. Kay obtained a divorce in December 1922 and relocated to Hartford, where her parents were living. She established the Marjorie Kay Studios (for theatrical preparation), the Marjorie Kay Dance Studio, and the Marjorie Kay Entertainment Bureau (a booking agency for performing artists). There is a touching letter to the editor in the 30 April 1927 Vaudeville News that mentions her kindness to a down-on-his-luck vaudeville performer.

Kay’s second husband was a man with the surname of Ford. Her third husband was William Anderson, whom she married in October 1936. She died in June 1949 and is buried at Northwood Cemetery in Windsor, CT.

Further resource:
Marjorie Kay paper dolls

“In the Name of Mercy, Give!” by Albert Herter (1917–18). Library of Congress

Marjorie Kay, Sept. 1916. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

William Gillette and Marjorie Kay in Sherlock Holmes (1916)

Catherine Bancroft Haviland, nurse.

Catherine Haviland, ca. 1919.

Catherine Bancroft (1887–1966) was the daughter of William Amos Bancroft, who served as a general in the Spanish American War; as a representative in the Massachusetts House of Representatives; and as mayor of Cambridge, MA. In 1905, she married Harvard graduate William David Haviland, whose father, Theodore Haviland, founded a china manufacturing firm in Limoges after a family heritage of involvement in china. They had three children. The 14 May 1916 Boston Globe characterized Catherine as “a wholesome, sensible type of girl, fond of outdoor life and of horseback riding” (70).

During World War I, Catherine served as a nurse in a small hospital situated in the Limoges home of her sister-in-law, Renee de Luze, and a nearby apartment, with room for 40 patients. She later founded Auxiliary Hospital no. 137 in France. An account in the 4 Mar 1916 Cambridge Chronicle provides a glimpse of her experiences:

I have a new man—a baby—poor thing. His left arm was torn off at the shoulder, two fingers of his right hand are gone, and he has a huge wound which goes almost to his elbow. His lips and face were burned. He can do nothing for himself. Two of my old soldiers have been reoperated, and I have another new one with a bad wound on his back.

I had thought of stopping the ambulance [hospital]. I cannot now. I must go on until the end. I have learned so much and we do so much good in this little ambulance.

We were talking over today our Christmas of last year at the ambulance. Out of the eighteen patients there four have since been killed, two officers and two soldiers.

You cannot know what it is to work calmly and to be perfectly sure of one’s self. There is much more order than last year. The badly wounded are all taken care of near the front. More than 5,000 wounded have arrived in Limoges recently, and they have put the very slight cases in the barracks. . . . .

Three soldiers from the north came today to see me. They are leaving for the third time. Just think what that means, twice wounded and returning, and I have seen some lately who have come with six days’ permission, who have been at the front since the beginning. (10)

In 1923, William was inducted into the Legion d’Honneur (included in the same honors list as Edith Wharton), as his family’s firm had hosted a hospital in one of its factories during the war, that William stated had cared for “1,200 French wounded . . . and we served over 200,000 meals” (Supplementary Report Twentieth Anniversary Celebration, Harvard College Class of 1902, 48). Catherine, reported the 29 Nov 1919 Cambridge Tribune (“Catherine Bancroft Haviland Comes to Spend Winter Here” 8), received the silver medal of the Reconnaissance Française (awarded to civilians for service to the injured and refugees). The citation for the medal, stated the newspaper, noted her “great devotion” as a nurse.