EDITH CAVELL ‘rises again’ in the names of Cape Breton children

the name of EDITH CAVELL “rises again” in the name of a recently departed Margaree woman

I really resent the time I spend away from my Dawson book to spend on the Wortman mystery, and yet...

And yet, sometimes the two interconnect.

Here’s an example.

Edith Cavell was once a name universally known around the world.

In 1915, she was executed by the Germans (with some moral support from the Allies) for aiding Allied prisoners (British, French & Belgian) to escape from occupied Belgium into neutral Netherlands.

You might see the legal problem here.

Imagine if somebody home-invaded your house at midnight and then murdered you when you tried to resist and escape.

At their trial, they get off when the judges says the matter of the home invasion was beyond the court’s oversight, but that the home invaders, once successfully inside your home have a legal right - in fact a duty - to maintain law and order by force.

The Allies all practised this kind of reasoning in their own repeated home invasions to obtain their vast overseas empires.

Civilians saw it differently and the huge huge worldwide outcry made the Foreign Office quickly change its tune - at least in public.

The day that the news of Cavell’s execution reached North America, Martin Henry Dawson changed his ultimate career path from lawyer to doctor.

Henry as a lawyer would have been a great one but nevertheless, he would never have given us the twin priceless boons of cheap abundant penicillin and DNA testing in identification matters.

Dawson, in his own way, also honoured Cavell by delivering history’s first ever needles of a life-saving antibiotic on October 16th 1940 - exactly 25 years to the day that he first entered the medical field.

Now sadly the memorials to Edith Cavell are dwindling annually : schools and libraries and hospitals once named after her are being torn down and replace with new bigger structure that forego her name. Streets and roads remain, but even the first generation of children directly named after Cavell are almost all gone.

We all know at least one, still. Famous chanteuse Edith Piaf was named after the martyred Brit : that is how Edith came to be a fully naturalized French name today.

Just today, I came across a recently departed child, a baby named “Edith Cavell” a year after the nurse was executed ;  a woman from Margaree, Cape Breton.

One of the last of the originals I suspect : and she was proud of her name, too : her tombstone has her middle initial as C, after Cavell, not M, after her maiden name.

So every time I meet someone named Edith, I always ask how they got their name.

Often they say, ‘after a grandmother or great aunt’.

I ask them to roughly guess when do they think their grandmother or great aunt was born.

If they think it was roughly in the ten years after 1915, I thank them and then I walk away.

Grinning. From ear to ear. Because the memory of Edith Cavell still lives : lives on and on in the names of our children and of our children’s children.... Rise Again indeed !