Crimean War: ‘A Woman of the Regiment’

Terence O’Brien recounts how some women served with their husbands in the Crimean War as cooks, laundresses and nurses to the Regiment.

Regimental magazines are rather like parish magazines; enthusiastic rather than literary, and often parochial. But now and then, there is a story or a description in them that comes alive just because it is so badly written. Take the story of Margaret Kerwin, a regimental ‘wife’; not a ‘lady’, because she was not married to an officer, and not a ‘woman’, because her husband was a corporal. But looked back at from today, an amazing wife.

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