Woman and her Sphere

Nurse Pine’s Medal ‘For Duty’ sold at auction on 26 April 2024

Very nearly 8 years ago – on 26 May 2016 – I published a post titled The Mystery of Nurse Pine’s Medal. I knew that Nurse Catherine Pine, who had for many years attended Emmeline Pankhurst, had been given a medal by the Women’s Social and Political Union and I knew that she had bequeathed it to a now defunct nursing organisation but, as my post makes clear, I didn’t know what the medal looked like or what had happened to it.

Most satisfactorily, the mystery is now solved. The medal, resplendent with its bars, was given to Nurse Pine ‘For Duty’ (rather than ‘For Valour’, as denoted on the Hunger-Strike Medals). She did indeed leave it in her will to the ‘History Section’ of the British College of Nursing, who had it in their possession until the BCN, a charity, dissolved in chaos in 1956. It would seem that the contents of the ‘History Section’, along with the furniture and fittings of the BCN building, were sold off to any member interested – perhaps at a valuation set by Harrods, who had been appointed as valuers.

The medal resurfaced in 1990 when put up for sale at Sothebys, where it failed to sell, reappearing at a specialist medal sale in 2008 when it was bought by an American dealer. He sold it to an American collector of suffrage memorabilia, who has since died and whose collection was auctioned yesterday in Dallas, Texas, by Heritage Auctions.

I have known since the beginning of this year that the medal was coming up for sale and tried to interest various institutions in this country, but none had sufficient funds to consider acquiring it. However, for the last couple or so years I have been in touch with a US academic, Hope Elizabeth May, who has taken a legal, philosophical, and personal interest in the fate of Nurse Pine’s medal. She and I recorded a podcast about Nurse Pine and her medal a few days ago – on 21 April. You can listen to it here:

I am pleased to say that Hope Elizabeth May is now the ‘steward’, as she rather delightfully terms it, of Nurse Pine’s medal. She has interesting plans to use it for educational purposes, not only to promote interest in suffrage history but also to discuss philosophical questions about autonomy and its implications for estate law.  I think we can be assured that the intention behind Nurse Pine’s bequest to the BCN will now be honoured.

Since being able to view the medal so clearly (thanks to the auctioneer’s image) I researched the dates on all the bars and established (thanks to the information contained in the entry on Emmeline Pankhurst in my The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, in which I had carefully noted from the Home Office papers the precise dates on which she was released from prison) that all except the first represented a date in which Nurse Pine had taken over the care of Mrs Pankhurst. Hope Elizabeth May suggested, and I am sure she is correct, that the first bar – engraved ’25 March 1913′ – refers to care taken of Sylvia Pankhurst, who was released from Holloway on 21 March after being forcibly fed for several weeks while on hunger-and thirst-strike.

For an article about Nurse Pine, written in the centenary year of 2018, see the City University’s City Magazine Although the nature of the medal was still then unknown to the writer – and to me – it does tell something of the life of Nurse Catherine Pine.

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