Britain and Serbia in the WWI: British policy, public responses and humanitarian aid to Serbia

jagged rocks that go right up and pierce the sky. Through them there’s
a narrow track only broad enough for a mule. If a man slipped he
fell down the rocks into the torrent below and was dashed to pieces.
Winter came upon us as we went, blizzards hid the path from sight.
At night we lay in the snow without even a blanket to cover us. In the
world there’s never yet been any who has seen such sights as we saw
there, nor was tormented with such torments. What Christ suffered
when they nailed Him to the cross, we suffered in Albania.
In the days of the military defeat of Serbia, the British-Serbian relations
were put to the test. In eager anticipation of the Allied troops
from Salonika, the Serbs decorated their towns. In place of the Allies,
the enemy troops entered these decorated and deserted places in
Serbia. Strained relations were soon to be repaired and reinforced in
many places of Serbian exile and in renewed fighting on the front lines.
The development of the dramatic events in the Balkans in the
autumn of 1915 was followed closely in Britain. Initially hesitating to
send troops from Salonika to Serbia until it was too late in the end, the
British government, when the Serbian resistance was collapsing, sent
to Italy the British Adriatic Mission for the relief of the Serbian army
and refugees on the Adriatic coast. Austrian submarines sank the first
Allied ships, carrying food and relief for the Serbian army, which were
sent without naval protection causing the Serbian army prolonged
starvation and death. Although late, this Mission delivered food and
rebuilt a 67-kilometre road from Medua to Durazzo and to Valona,
which enabled a safer evacuation of more than 150,000 Serbian troops
and refugees to the Greek island of Corfu and Bizerte in Tunisia.
Together with the action by the British government, there was the
ongoing initiative of the Serbian Relief Fund which, with the help of
the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee, sent their agents to the
Adriatic coast and Skutari (Skadar). During two months’ work under
the most trying circumstances, Teodor Rigg and Robert Tatlock, relaying
only on their own resources and initiative, managed to find
food and to organise help for around 10,000 refugees.
The second stream of Serbian refugees, mostly civil servants and
their families, escaped before the Bulgarians cut off the southern
railway to Macedonia and Salonika. Sir Edward Boyle, a Serbian
Relief Fund Committee member, together with many British doctors
and nurses from the evacuated medical units, organised the first
much-needed help for the Serbian refugees there. In cooperation with
the French Government, most of the Serbian refugees were sent to
Corsica, some to Algeria, and a minority to places in southern France.
Until the end of the war, excellent collaboration between the French
Government and the Serbian Relief Fund was achieved. The Serbian
Relief Fund agents escorted the refugees to their places of exile and,
having accommodated them, took care of their health and wellbeing.
On Corfu the Serbian Relief Fund, in close co-operation with the
Serbian authorities, delivered relief to Serbian soldiers and civilians
who arrived on the island in the most dire state. Dying on a mass scale,
milk was the only food that the shattered and exhausted soldiers could
take. By March 1916 a hospital with 200 beds was founded. This was
the sixth hospital of the Serbian Relief Fund to be sent to the Salonika
front in September 1916.
The Scottish Women’s Hospitals joined the French Government
and the Serbian Relief Fund in establishing a sanatorium for tuberculosis
in Corsica, which existed there for more than three years. Social
experiments with workshops from Serbia were successfully replicated
in all places of the Serbian exile and the convalescence of the wounded
soldiers. The Serbian Relief Fund opened a shop in London where
Serbian handicraft products such as sandals with turned-up noses resembling
little gondolas called “opanci” were sold. From one of these
workshops in exile, a one-stringed musical instrument, the “gusle”, a
Serbian national symbol, was sent to the British Queen as a gift.
The Serbian Relief Fund took over the responsibility for looking
after 65,000, out of a total of over 154,000, Serbian prisoners of war interned
in 50 POW camps in Germany and Austro-Hungary from May
1916. Unfortunately the Serbian Relief Fund unsuccessfully lobbied
the British government against the allied blockade of occupied Serbia
in a bid to relieve its plight and the famine in Serbia. In March 1916
the Serbian Government asked the Serbian Relief Fund to support the
education of some of about 3000 Serbian students who were exiled to
France. The Serbian Relief Fund accommodated 328 Serbian children:
33 university students, 258 secondary school students and 37 children
attended primary school in at least 12 educational centres in England,
Scotland and Wales. At the beginning of 1918 the British government
provided to the Serbian Relief Fund the annual grant of £25,000 for
the education of Serbian children in Britain. One of the most successful
public events in Britain for Serbia was the celebration of the
Serbian national holiday Saint Vitus’s Day, celebrated as Kosovo Day
in June and July 1916. Approximately 12,000 state and private schools
took part in cultural activities which included lectures, exhibitions,
literary events and public talks which generated a great deal of public
interest in over 400 newspaper articles. Separate publications about
Serbia were distributed across Britain in 220,000 copies. On the 7th
July 1916 at the St Paul’s Cathedral a “Memorial Service for the British
and Serbian Soldiers, Doctors and Nurses who have fallen in defence
of Serbia” was held. About 200 British nurses and voluntary orderlies
who served in Serbia attended the service and the Serbian students
performed their national anthem “God of Justice”.
The Scottish Women’s Hospitals, after their engagements in Serbia,
continued their work for the Serbs in Salonika, and after the establishment
of the Salonika front and the beginning of war operations, they
founded a hospital camp in Ostrovo at the rear of the front.
Another Scottish Women’s Hospitals unit led by Dr Inglis was attached
to the Serbian Volunteer Division, composed of Austrian pris
oners of war, mostly of Serbian origin. Dr Inglis stood by this Division,
which suffered heavy causalities in Dobrugea, on the southern Romanian
front, until the end of its deployment in November 1917. It was a
sad home- coming for this unit, as the sick Dr Inglis died on British
soil soon after her return, but a new hospital named “the Elsie Inglis
Unit” which had the honour of being inspected by the King and Queen,
was despatched for the Serbian Volunteer Division, now on the Salonika
front, in February 1918.
After the liberation of part of the Serbian territory in the autumn
1916, the first action was to bring relief to the villages in the battle area
in Macedonia. In the appalling misery of the battle zone population,
the British inoculated hundreds of people a day. The Serbian Relief
Fund sixth unit detachment, consisting of a doctor and five nurses,
maintained for 19 months a cellar-based first aid post of 45 beds at
the entrance of the heavily shelled and gassed Bitolj dubbed “the
second Reims”. In this “Anglo-Serbian Hospital” in Bitolj, 350 minor
operations were performed, medical care was given to 1400 patients,
and 28,000 out-patients were treated. In March 1917 Katharine Mary
Harley, who ran a shelter for children with her daughter Edith, died in
the shelling of Bitolj.
The Motor Transport Column of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals
which operated on the 1500 meters high front lines earned admiration
of the Serbs. The role of this Motor Transport Column in the Serbian
offensive was priceless as was its role in the liberated country without
railway or any transportation.
After the liberation of Serbia, before the Allied relief action of the
devastated country began, again the first ones to serve were the Serbian
Relief Fund and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals organisations at
their hospitals in Skoplje, Vranje and Niš.
One of the last activities of the Serbian Relief Fund on the invitation
of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the beginning
of 1920 was to take part in a programme of measures for between
175,000 and 200,000 disabled Serbian soldiers. The last resources were
invested in a Children’s Home opened in 1926 in Niš, the capital city
of the region which suffered the terror of a brutal occupation which
left high numbers of orphaned children. This home became a place of
remembrance of the splendid work of over 25 British medical units for
the Serbian people.
Some of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals stayed in Serbia after the
war. Dr Katharine MacPhail, who went out initially for six months,
spent about 25 years in Serbia running an Anglo-Serbian hospital for
children in Belgrade and later in Sremska Kamenica, while Margaret
MacPhail established the first school for blind people in Zemun. The
Scottish Women’s Hospitals London Committee’s remaining resources
were invested in the building of a hospital for women and children
in Belgrade.

Epilogue
In the First World War the British came into direct touch with the
Serbs for the first time. Their common experience of the war, the endurance
of hardships and the friendships which sprang up during the
retreat through Albania and until the final victory on the Salonika
front developed special associations between the two peoples. The
Serbian people were fortunate to receive such attention and good services
from some of the best public workers in Britain who were guided
by the ideas of love and service for others. Tens of thousands of Serbians
who passed through British hospitals were healed and nursed
back to health and special attention and care were provided for Serbian
women and children and disabled war veterans.
After the war Adriatic ports provided new opportunities for trade
and economy. The Yugoslav economy attracted British capital but the
influence of the British culture and language was the most significant
development in the relations between the two countries.
Anglo-Yugoslav clubs were formed in Ljubljana and Belgrade as
early as 1923 and 1924 respectively and later in Zagreb and in many
other Yugoslav towns. The Anglo-Yugoslav Club Library in Belgrade
held a special collection of over 3,400 English books and more than 46
English and American papers and periodicals. The Society of Great
Britain and America in Yugoslavia was formed in Belgrade in 1930 as
a purely Yugoslav Anglophile organisation. One of the aims of the Society
was to follow the political, literary, cultural and economic life in
Britain, and to promote these values among Yugoslavs.
In Yugoslavia there were more than 27 Anglophile societies, more
than in any other country, and the British Council in Belgrade attracted,
within nine months of its opening in 1936, no fewer than 750
students.
On 20th September 1939, these Anglophile societies immediately
began cultural, social humanitarian and political activities directly inspired
by and based on the experiences and contacts established in the
First World War, which was only stopped by the bombing of Belgrade
and the German occupation of Serbia in 1941.