Background
Thomas was born on 4 February in 1865 in Swardeston, Norfolk, England. The daughter of Frederick Cavell, vicar of Swardeston (Norfolk), Edith Cavell was a governess in Brussels before training as a nurse.
Thomas was born on 4 February in 1865 in Swardeston, Norfolk, England. The daughter of Frederick Cavell, vicar of Swardeston (Norfolk), Edith Cavell was a governess in Brussels before training as a nurse.
Edith was educated at Norwich High School for Girls, then boarding schools in Clevedon, Somerset and Peterborough (Laurel Court).
Edith was raised in the traditionally prim, strict atmosphere of a small-town vicarage in 19th-century England. She returned to England in 1896 to enter nurse's training at the London Hospital. In 1907 Dr. Antoine Depage, a celebrated Belgian surgeon, brought her to Brussels to modernize his school for nurses after the fashion of the one founded by Florence Nightingale. There were no such institutions in Belgium at that time and few in all Europe. On August 20 the German army marched into Brussels.
As the war went on, and the Belgians continued to suffer increasingly at the hands of the enemy, Cavell felt morally compelled to compromise her nurse's status of noncombatant inviolability. On Aug. 5, 1915, she set up escape routes for hundreds of Belgian, then she was arrested by the Germans, and just two months later her trial and that of 34 other defendants began. They were accused not of spying but of "causing harm" to the German forces by allowing Allied soldiers to escape, and related crimes. Intervention by the American Legation was ineffectual. They were executed by a firing squad on Oct. 12, 1915. Her body was returned to England in 1919, and services were conducted with military honors in Westminster Abbey. A memorial was erected to her in St Martin's Place, off Trafalgar Square, London.