The Vindication of Lady Hadfield: how I got a hospital in Sheffield to acknowledge my great-great-aunt

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My great-grandmother’s sister, born Frances Belt Wickersham (1862-1949), married the Sheffield steel man Sir Robert Hadfield (1858-1940) in 1894. The Hadfields had no children, but informally adopted my grandmother (after her own mother’s early death).

Sir Robert and Lady Hadfield on a cruise on the Nile in 1909.

Frances, known as Bunnie to the family, was very active in wartime nursing. In the first world war, she established the Anglo-American Hospital, also called No.5 British Red Cross Hospital or just “Lady Hadfield’s Hospital”, at Wimereux in northern France in December 1914. It provided 100 beds, and closed on 10th of January 1919 having treated over 16,000 patients. She was appointed a CBE in the 1919 Birthday Honours.

Bunnie Hadfield in nursing uniform.

In the second world war, she again established the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit, which started work in France in 1940 but ended up travelling with Free French forces in the Middle East, North Africa, Italy and finally France again in the course of the war. In both cases, Sir Robert put up the money but Lady Hadfield did the actual setting up, and she was reputedly fairly hands-on in running the Wimereux hospital.

Portrait of Bunnie Hadfield by Jan Juta, an artist friend of my grandmother’s; and photograph of Juta actually painting it, from the collection of Christopher Scholz. We do not know where the portrait currently is, or who took the photograph.

Lady Frances is buried together with her husband Sir Robert, her sister, her mother and her niece (my grandmother) in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking. I found them in 2022.

In April last year I visited Sheffield for David and Fred’s belated wedding celebration, and went in search of the Hadfield legacy. The Department of Metallurgy and related bits of Sheffield University are housed in a building which is named after Sir Robert, which is fair enough given that he invented manganese steel and so on. There’s a portrait and a rather striking bust in the Sir Robert Hadfield Meetings Room.

With Jennifer M of the School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering, in the Sir Robert Hadfield Meetings Room of the Hadfield Building

I noticed also that there is a Hadfield Wing at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, so I ventured out to look at it. I was really quite shocked to see that only Sir Robert was commemorated in the building; there was no mention whatsoever of his wife.

There are in fact nine distinct buildings of the Northern General Hospital, all of them named after men, of whom I find precisely one whose professional career had any connection with medicine (Bev Stokes, a former Chairman of the hospital’s Board). I find no record of Sir Robert Hadfield ever taking a direct interest in medicine, other than his own health and supporting his wife (their marriage was rocky, but he was ready to help here).

So I wrote directly to the Chair and the Chief Executive of the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the Northern General Hospital, and requested that they consider renaming the building, or at least acknowledging Lady Frances’ work. (Incidentally, both the Chair and the Chief Executive are women.) This eventually got me into courteous correspondence with the Chief Nurse, Professor Morley, who politely pointed out that renaming a building cannot be done casually or quickly, but added that they would look into the options.

In the last few days, I have heard that the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust will install a permanent display about Lady Frances Hadfield in the atrium of the Hadfield Wing. So at least there will be one woman commemorated across the various buildings of the Northern General Hospital, and my great-great-aunt’s efforts will be recognised in her husband’s home city. It’s always worth raising your voice.