Catherine Roy

Catherine Murray Roy was a Scottish military nurse who served at the front in the First World War and later led the army nursing service. Born in 1883, the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister at Drymen, she trained at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow and joined the regular army as a staff nurse in 1909. She was among the first fifty British nurses sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, served in France and Belgium, and received the Military Medal in 1917 for gallantry during air raids on casualty clearing stations. After the war she was awarded the Royal Red Cross and stayed in France to nurse victims of the Spanish flu. She held postings in Hong Kong, Syria and China, became Principal Matron at the War Office in 1934, and was Matron-in-Chief of Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service from 1938 to 1940. She died in 1976.