​65. Five Sisters Window, York Minster, York, 1925

World War I, 1914–1918
Extract from Tessa Dunlop’s book: Lest We Forget, War and Peace in 100 British Monuments

The execution of Edith Cavell proved an unexpected boon for the Allies. Germany’s decision to murder a nurse in the cold dawn light gifted Britain an ideal recruiting tool for their volunteer army, which they fully exploited. Men were the agents of war and Edith Cavell was one more reason to fight. Framed as an innocent victim, her posthumous mega-fame conveniently overshadowed the actions of almost all other women.

So who were those other women? And where are they remembered? It was Barbara Weatherill, a World War II veteran aged ninety-nine, who first told me about the Five Sisters Window, re-dedicated to all the women of the British Empire who lost their lives in the Great War. Amidst the jaw-dropping splendour of York Minster, it stands out; a staggering feat of early medieval art, five vast grisaille glass panels that shine with a dim and ancient allure. The stories attached to the thirteenth-century window sparkle with intrigue. Oliver Cromwell, Francis Drake,* Charles Dickens … few were left untouched by the Five Sisters’ iridescent appeal. It is hard not to marvel at a structure so impossibly old, that continues to inspire, shining its silvery light on the changed expectations of every age.

Barbara was deeply moved. Attending a Minster reunion in honour of World War II’s Auxiliary Territorial Service in the late 1990s, as the piper’s lament wended its way through the Great West Door, down the aisle and faded into the Chapter House, she gazed up at the Five Sisters’ Window with wet cheeks and new resolve. Its re-dedication as a memorial to the women of World War I spoke to Barbara directly.

Almost eighty years earlier, the north transept’s intricate lead-lined glass panels had likewise transfixed those who beheld them; in 1921, their ‘quiet dignity’ triggered a vision. The recipient of that vision was Helen Little, a colonel’s wife who had spent much of the Great War in Cairo where she was haunted by the human fall-out from the Gallipoli disaster.

Cairo was Britain’s military headquarters in Egypt and, by 1915, its temporary hospitals heaved with broken bodies, rampant disease and desperate overcrowding. The main enemies were gangrene and dysentery, and the makeshift medical defence manned by women, miles from home, on hospital ships and on shore. Vast numbers of dying men presented a horror scene against which neither a white uniform, nor a Red Cross, guaranteed survival.

Louisa Annie Bicknell was thirty-five and an experienced nurse; back in Australia she had run her own private hospital, but war was a different game. Washing, feeding and moving sick men proved difficult, dangerous work. The scratch was just a small one on the back of her hand, but within six days Louisa had died, sepsis her killer. Another female casualty of war.
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Handmaidens in hellfire, Louisa’s story and many like it were repeated across every conflict zone: on the western front against shrapnel that ‘tears through flesh and cuts off limbs’; in the east – Serbia, Russia, Romania – where typhus killed more indiscriminately than German bullets; and in Indian hospitals, up against intense heat and cholera. By the end of the war, 1,400 women who served in imperial Britain’s name as military auxiliaries and nurses were confirmed dead. These are the fallen that Helen could not shake from her mind’s eye on return to England. ‘Memorials on all sides were being erected to our brothers, I often thought that our sisters who also made the same sacrifice appeared to have been forgotten.’ Back in York, evensong is sacrosanct in the Minster; the early gothic setting, exquisite acoustics and a grand organ’s intensity insist on a moment of contemplation. Helen was at one such evensong, beneath the faded light of the Five Sisters Window, when she had her vision: ‘The window moved backwards as if on hinges’, revealing ‘wondrous flowers’ and women and girls, reincarnated, ‘gliding’ in ‘misty grey-blue garments’. They inched nearer and nearer, then suddenly, in a cruel mimic of death, ‘the window swung slowly back, blotting out the garden’.

In the vision, the sisters that could no longer be seen were the dead women who had answered the call of war. Helen stood, pulled from her trance, crying out ‘The Sisters’ Window for the Sisters!’ And with the same power of certainty, she started raising the necessary funds for the temporary removal and restoration of the ancient window. The project was a magnum opus, with the glistening result re-inserted into the northern transept, including an inspirational re-dedication, which took place in 1925 – a unique occasion when the Duchess of York (later to become the Queen Mother) began her life-journey of succour and commemoration.

Today, on the oak panelling adjacent to the window, Edith Cavell is a first among equals, just one woman among the 1,400 named who answered the call of imperial Britain and paid for it with her life. Australia’s Louisa Annie Bicknell also takes her place in a story that asks fresh questions in the twenty-first century. Those named are predominantly white women who had the means required to travel and serve and die for empire. What of the other sisters of empire touched by a war not of their choosing? Where is their service remembered?

Nearly 800 years on, the Five Sisters window remains as important as when early medieval Cistercian monks created its timeless alchemy, gifting us centuries of eternal transparency. Today, more than one hundred years after World War I’s re-dedication, the half-filled commemorative panels are quietly biding their time.

Extract from Tessa Dunlop’s book: Lest We Forget, War and Peace in 100 British Monuments

* The eighteenth-century antiquarian, not to be confused with the sixteenth-century explorer.