The daughter of a Church of England clergyman, Edith Cavell (pronounced CAH-vell) was born on 4 December 1865 at Swardeston vicarage in Norfolk. She was educated at home and later at schools in Somerset, London and Laurel Court in Peterborough.

Cavell showed a talent for drawing and a certain streak of independence: she was caught smoking at the age of 16, and complained to her cousin Eddy of the interminable length of her father’s sermons. She also told him, ‘Someday, somehow, I am going to do something useful. I don’t know what it will be. I only know it will be something for people.’

After school, Cavell became a governess, first in Steeple Bumpstead, Essex, then in Brussels. After six years in Belgium she returned home to look after her ailing father. She determined to become a nurse and worked in the Fountains Fever Hospital in Tooting, south London, before entering the London Hospital School of Nursing in September 1896. Here, the matron Eva Luckes – who was never lavish with her praise – wrote that Cavell ‘had a very self-sufficient manner which was very apt to prejudice people against her’.

Upon qualifying, Cavell worked as a staff nurse at the London Hospital, after which she became night superintendent at the St Pancras Infirmary, then assistant matron at the Shoreditch Infirmary followed by St Leonard’s Hospital, where she improved the training of maternity nurses and inaugurated the practice of visiting newborns at home, which later became standard practice.

After a short spell as a matron in Manchester she returned to Brussels in 1907 to set up a nurses’ training school and clinic, the Berkendael Medical Institute, under Dr Antoine Depage, a Brussels surgeon. The school’s first certificates of competence were issued in 1910, and the state registration of nurses was introduced in Belgium not long after. In addition, Cavell became matron of a new hospital in the suburb of St Gilles. The role she played in raising nursing standards in Belgium has been increasingly recognised over recent years.

Cavell’s contemporary fame, however, was due to her activities during the German occupation of Belgium during the First World War. As part of a clandestine network, she assisted Allied soldiers caught by the rapid German advance to escape via neutral Holland.

Fugitive fighters were provided with fake identity papers and a place of refuge, of which Cavell’s hospital was one. Estimates of the number of solders she enabled to escape in this way vary from a few hundred to well over a thousand.

On 5 August 1915, Cavell was arrested by the German authorities shortly after Philippe Baucq, one of the resistance network’s leaders, had been captured. She was kept in solitary confinement at the prison at St Gilles, admitted the substance of the charge against her – that she had assisted the enemy – and signed what amounted to a confession.

Cavell was among nine people court-martialled on 7 October 1915, and one of the five sentenced to death the following day. She and Baucq were the only two not to have their sentences commuted, and were both shot at dawn on 12 October 1915.

After her sentence was handed down, Cavell – a devout Christian – took her final communion with the Anglican chaplain, the Reverend H Stirling Gahan, and said, ‘standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realised that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’

Gottfried Benn, the German medical officer present (later famous as a poet), stated that Cavell ‘went to death with poise and a bearing which is quite impossible to forget’. Her final moments were much mythologised: stories that circulated included that the Germans shot her at the dead of night; that she had swooned in front of the firing squad, and that her executioners had refused to carry out their orders.

The execution of a woman – a nurse, no less – sparked international condemnation, and was a propaganda gift to the Allies. The Kaiser himself acknowledged this by requiring that no death sentence could be carried out on a woman thereafter without his express permission.

One of Cavell’s biographers calculated that the number of UK army recruits doubled in the weeks following Cavell’s death. It has been cited, too, as a factor in shaping opinion in the United States, which entered the war on the Allied side in April 1917.

At the end of the war, Cavell’s body was removed from its burial place at the Tir National in Brussels and carried back to Britain. After a funeral service in Westminster Abbey, she was finally laid to rest in the precinct of Norwich Cathedral on 15 May 1919.

By this time George Bellows had depicted The Murder of Edith Cavell (1918) and her mass memorialisation was under way. One source counts eleven streets in London named after Cavell and reckons that there were ‘at least a hundred’ memorials to her in England by 1921. A network of rest homes for nurses was set up in her memory, and the London Hospital – which bears Cavell’s blue plaque – named its new nurses’ home after her.

Overseas, statues went up in both Brussels and Paris and similar memorials in major cities of what was then the British Empire. A mountain in Canada and a bridge in New Zealand were named for her, too. Early filmed versions of Cavell’s life were Dawn (1928), starring Sybil Thorndike, and Nurse Edith Cavell (1939), starring Anna Neagle. A steady stream of biographies has since kept her name and story alive.

Within a fortnight of Cavell’s death, the subscription for a memorial to her was launched in the Daily Telegraph. Sir George Frampton had already offered to undertake the memorial as ‘a labour of love’, although the press noted his gesture excluded younger sculptors from consideration for the work. Westminster City Council agreed to offer the site on St Martin’s Place a few days later.

However, the commission took five years to complete, with some delay caused by the difficulty in obtaining Carrara marble for the main figure. Frampton worked on the clay model in his studio at 90 Carlton Hill in St John’s Wood and presented a preliminary portrait bust in plaster at the Royal Academy in 1916 (now in the collection of the Royal London Hospital Museum). He was helped by Edith’s sister, Lillian Wainwright (née Cavell). Lillian resembled Edith and sat for the artist, and also arranged to lend him a London Hospital outdoor cloak for the modelling of the statue.

The most likely source for the form of the memorial is the monument to Mihály Munkácsy, Hungarian painter, in the Kerepesi cemetery in Budapest, by Hungarian sculptor Edward Telcs (1872–1948). Frampton would have seen this when it was published in The Studio in 1911.

Frampton designed a towering grey granite pylon, surmounted by a symbolic mother and child combined with a Geneva cross. Below this, an engaged column projects forwards, supporting a marble figure of Cavell, dressed in her nurse’s uniform. On the rear of the pylon is a large relief of a lion trampling a serpent. Incised text forms an important part of the memorial: ‘For King and Country’ beneath the mother and child; ‘Humanity’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Devotion’ and ‘Fortitude’ on the four faces of the main pedestal; ‘Faithful unto Death’ below the mother and child on the rear face; and the telegraphic ‘Edith Cavell / Brussels / Dawn / October 12th / 1915’ on the statue pedestal’s face. The later inscription of her last words was placed beneath this: ‘Patriotism is not enough / I must have no hatred or / bitterness for anyone.’

The impact of the monument is achieved through the contrast between the conventional, classically sculpted figure of Cavell and the austere, powerful pylon with its strong modernist and symbolist influences. This marriage of different idioms did not receive a positive critical reception.

George Frampton (1860–1928) was born into a family of stone carvers in London. He studied sculpture under WS Frith at Lambeth School of Art, attended the Royal Academy Schools, and was then exposed to European art in the studio of the sculptor and medallist Antonin Mercié in Paris. He became one of the leading British sculptors producing memorials and portrait busts, and was influential in helping the careers of others such as Charles Sargeant Jagger and Albert Toft. While his bold monument to Cavell received mixed reactions, his work on other memorials – Quinton Hogg in Portland Place (1906) and Queen Victoria in Kolkata and Leeds (1902 and 1906) – were far less adventurous. Peter Pan, in Kensington Gardens, is today his best known work.

Draped in the flags of the United Kingdom and Belgium, the Edith Cavell monument was unveiled on 17 March 1920 by Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother, before a crowd reported to number in the thousands, including a large number of nurses. There was a delegation from Belgium, and members of Cavell’s family were also present, despite her mother’s earlier reported aversion to a statue.

Thereafter, floral and evergreen wreaths were laid at the memorial on the anniversary of her death on 12 October (Edith Cavell Day). Wreaths are still laid at the statue on that day in Edith Cavell’s memory. In more recent years, the site has played host to peace vigils.

In the early days, a flag day was held to raise funds for the Edith Cavell Rest Homes for Nurses – in 1922, Cavell’s sister was reported to have run a stall at the foot of the monument.

At its unveiling, The Times called the monument ‘a noble and worthy addition to London’s links with the glorious past’; the British Medical Journal thought it ‘a very fine conception’. Other commentators begged to differ: ‘toad-like’ and ‘a very ugly curiosity’ were two other early press responses.

A story has been repeated over recent decades – by, among others, the writer Bernard Levin, who thought the Cavell monument ‘a hideous lump’ – that at the moment of its unveiling, a wag called out, ‘Good God, they shot the wrong woman’. It is almost certainly apocryphal.

One particular objection was the absence from the inscription of the words of forgiveness that Cavell dictated to the visiting chaplain before her execution. With more critical views of the First World War gaining traction as time wore on, her statement that ‘patriotism is not enough’ resonated strongly with many. It may be that Sir George Frampton’s record of anti-German sentiment spurred objections to this omission.

The National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland were active in urging that the words be added, as was the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wrote in the preface to St Joan (1924) that for the omission ‘and the lie that it implies’, those responsible would ‘need Edith’s intercession when they themselves were brought to judgement’. By the agency of Fred Jowett, the First Commissioner of Works in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government, the words were added to the plinth in the late summer of 1924.

Criticism of the Cavell memorial continued to appear in the press throughout the interwar years, with its sheer size the focus of most objections. Some defences were also offered – ‘appropriate, dignified, and impressive’, thought one correspondent – but a 1924 article in the Westminster Gazette suggesting its replacement with a simple stone was not alone in suggesting it should be scrapped.

The House of Lords erupted in laughter in July 1934 when Lord Snell suggested that Edith Cavell was ‘suffering her second martyrdom in St Martin’s Place’. Five years later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the statue was even cited in a Times editorial about wartime conservation measures as among those not worth saving.

Among the cognoscenti, the art critic Roger Fry was uncomplimentary towards the monument’s artistic worth in his 1926 essay, Art and Commerce. Two years later, a survey of London statues by Edward Gletchen praised the figure as ‘strikingly fine’, but was less positive about the overall composition. In the post-war era, reaction has been more muted. A 1991 book on war memorials calls it ‘massive and unsatisfactory’ but admits the striking quality of Frampton’s marble figure. An article about the memorial from 2004 calls it ‘a restrained and decorous representation’.

The memorial is in St Martin’s Place, at the junction of St Martin’s Lane with Charing Cross Road, on the plot of land earmarked by Westminster City Council for the purpose when it was first proposed. It lies just north of Trafalgar Square – one early report anticipated that Cavell would be ‘looking towards Nelson on his column’.

During the later 1920s it was suggested that the memorial might have to be moved to allow the construction of a new high-level bridge over the Thames at Charing Cross, which would have sprung from near this point. This project foundered after the government withdrew its support in 1931.

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SM Barney, ‘The Mythic Matters of Edith Cavell: Propaganda, Legend, Myth and Memory’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 31, no. 2 (2005) 217–233 (access via public library membership: accessed 5 April 2023)

J Döring, E Schütz, Benn als Reporter: ‘‘Wie Miss Cavell erschossen wurde’’, universi - University Press Siegen (2007)

N Ireson, “George Frampton, the Art Workers’ Guild and ‘The Enemy Alien in Our Midst.’”, The Burlington Magazine, 151, no. 1280 (2009) 763–67

A Jezzard, The Sculptor Sir George Frampton, PhD thesis, (1999, University of Leeds)

K Pickles, Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (Basingstoke, 2007)

R Ryder, Edith Cavell (London, 1975)

D Souhami, Edith Cavell (London, 2010)

P Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster, 1 (Liverpool, 2012) 245–48