Motion: Dr Elsie Inglis and Her Scottish Angels

Dr Elsie Inglis and Her Scottish Angels

Lodged by Ian McKee Members' Business Motion 28 supporters

The motion

That the Parliament offers its wholehearted support to the campaign and trust to erect a permanent monument in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile to Dr Elsie Inglis and her “Scottish angels” and establish an annual bursary as lasting memorials to these 1,000 Scottish women; considers these women to be the most iconic volunteers of World War 1 who carried the lamp borne by nurses Nightingale and Seacole in the Crimean War into the nightmare world of trench warfare from France to Russia, acting as chief medical officers, surgeons, anaesthetists, radiographers, nurses, ambulance drivers, cooks, auxiliaries and administrators and, in performing such vital functions to the highest degree of competency, advanced enormously the role of women in all aspects of work and society; offers its welcome for the multimedia travelling exhibition, appearing at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, Les Invalides in Paris and in London and Belgrade, the first major art exhibition about women in war that has at its centre 40 new paintings by the Scottish artist, John Bellany, and which highlights this contribution, recognising the courage, determination and achievement of these “femmes écossaises” and their founder, Dr Elsie Inglis, and considers that British Government recognition of the wartime role of these Scottish women is long overdue.

Supporters (28)