Showing Russian album, 1908-1918 by Florence Farmborough

FLORENCE FARMBOROUGH (1887-1978) Florence was born in 1887 at Steeple Claydon in Buckinghamshire and was named after Florence Nightingale. She first went to Russia in 1908, at the age of 21 to teach English and work as a governess first in Kiev and later in Moscow, teaching the daughters of a leading heart specialist, Dr. Pavel Ousov. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Florence passed several examinations in Russian and qualified as a surgical hospital nurse at a military hospital organised by princess Golitsin. She then enrolled as a Red Cross Field nurse and she remained on active service in Russia until her medical team was forced to disband by the Bolsheviks in the late autumn of 1917. Florence had kept a photographic record of her years in Russia, travelling with her tripod through the war fields when she was working as a nurse, and taking a unique photographic record which survived under the most difficult conditions. She also kept a diary of her experiences through such historical times. Her experiences were like Doctor Zhivago seen through the eyes of a heroic Englishwoman. Through the long Russian winters, the fighting was brought to a standstill by ice and snow; but then, as always, there was the host of homeless refugees, starving and freezing, whose claims on the Red Cross were just as urgent and impossible to refuse as those of the military. But there were also, from time, opportunities to use the camera on colleagues, patients, soldiers, the landscape and the ravages of the battlefield. Nothing could express more vividly the nature of being at war, with its horrors, its contrasts, its paradoxes, than the story Florence Farmborough tells through her photographs and her diaries. When the Bolsheviks forced the Red Cross division to disband she made the journey back to Moscow alone under dangerous circumstances and when compelled to leave for England, spent six months trying to reach home via the Trans-Siberian railway and an unhealthy assortme