STAFF NURSE NELLIE SPINDLER
QUEEN ALEXANDRA'S IMPERIAL MILITARY NURSING SERVICE
21ST AUGUST 1917 AGE 26
BURIED: LIJSSENTHOEK MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
LEEDS NURSE KILLED BY THE HUNS
Victim of Bombardment in France
Miss Nellie Spindler, who, from 1912 to 1915, was a nurse at the Leeds Township Infirmary, was killed in France on August 21st by a German shell during the bombardment on a stationary hospital where she was engaged.
She was 26 years of age, and was a daughter of the Chief Inspector of Police at Stanley Road, Wakefield. In November 1915, she left Leeds to take up duties as nurse at a military hospital in Staffordshire, where she remained until last June, when she proceeded to France.
[Leeds Mercury Tuesday 28 August 1917]
The Leeds Mercury published further particulars of Nurse Spindler's death in the following day's paper under the headline - THE MURDERED NURSE.
A letter has been received from Miss M. Wood, sister-in-charge of the hospital who states:-
"Your daughter became unconscious immediately she was hit, and she passed away perfectly peacefully at 11.30 a.m. - just 20 minutes afterwards. I was with her at the time; but after the first minute of two she did not know me. It was a great mercy she was oblivious to her surroundings, for the shells continued to fall in for the rest of the day."
The Germans had been systematically shelling the area round the Casualty Clearing Stations at Brandhoek, convincing the British that they were intentionally targeting them and forcing their temporary closure.
Nellie Spindler's mother chose her inscription, which comes from Santa Filomena, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's tribute to Florence Nightingale, which he wrote in 1857:
A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.