Heroines of the Great War: Mabel Stobart & The Retreat from Serbia in 1915

11 February - 22 February 2015

Opening times: 12:00 - 19:00

The Serbian House
7 Dering Street, London W1S 1AE

Opening of the exhibition: 11 February 2015 at 19:30

Organized by Zvezdana Popović in cooperation with the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia

Curator Dušanka Marsenić

Courtesy of Dorset County Museum

The exhibition tells the story of an courageous Dorset woman, Mabel Annie St Clair Stobart, who made up her mind to "try to provide proof of women's national worthiness", as she said. Her response to Edwardian Britain was her determined support of suffrage movement, founding of the Women's Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps in 1910 and being actively involved with her all-women team of doctors and nurses in the First Balkan War and in the Great War.

In autumn 1914 Stobart was in Belgium setting a hospital. She was arrested by the Germans, but escaped Edith Cavell's fate. In 1915, when the epidemic of typhus broke out in Serbia, Mabel Stobart fundraised for ambulances, X-ray machines and medical supplies, went to Serbia with her seven female doctors, eighteen nurses and a large general staff, including her husband John Greenhalgh, and set a tented hospital in Kragujevac. When the combined forces of the Austrian, German and Bulgarian armies forced the Serbs to retreat, Stobart was put in charge of a flying field hospital and joined the Great Retreat.

These tragic events were recorded in Stobart's eloquent and powerful photographs presented in this exhibition.