LEATHER, Miss Rosamond Mary, Expeditionary Force Canteens. Coffee Hut at the Marlborough Details Camp, Boulogne. Rosamond Leather was the youngest of the four daughters of the Leather family of Middleton Hall Belford and The Friary, Tickhill, Yorkshire.[Note 1] She had six brothers who served in the Army and three older sisters all of whom married. In 1911 Rosamond was living at Ingram with her youngest brother Christopher, who had served in the Boer War but who had left the Army in 1904. When war broke out in 1914 Lt Christopher Leather (qv) rejoined his regiment and was attached to the 1st battalion Northumberland Fusiliers. He landed in France in August 1914. He was one of five officers of the 1st Northumberland Fusiliers killed in action on or about 27th October 1914 near Neuve Chappelle (WO 95 1430/1, October 1914 App VIII casualties at Neuve Chapelle). Rosamond Leather herself landed in France in April 1915 to work as a volunteer running a Coffee Canteen. Before going to France she had advertised in the Newcastle Daily Journal for gramophone records for a ‘Coffee canteen, France’ (eg. Journal issues of for 17th March 1915, p 3; 23rd March 1915, p 10; 27th March 1915, p3; 2nd April 1915, p 2). The address for donations was ‘The Friary, Tickhill, Yorkshire’.
The coffee canteen run by Miss Leather was located in the Marlborough Details Camp at Boulogne. One person known to have assisted Miss Leather, is Althea Hannay, the daughter of Canon James Owen Hannay who served as a chaplain in France and was best known as a writer under the pseudonym George A. Birmingham. Hannay has a chapter on Miss Leather and her canteen in his memoirs of his time as a chaplain in France (Birmingham, A Padre in France, Ch XV ‘My Third Camp’, pp 229-43). Hannay wrote that
James Hannay and Rosamond Leather became friends and maintained a correspondence. Hannay’s daughter Althea helped for a time in Rosamond Leather’s Canteen, and Rosamond wrote in a letter to Hannay that
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It is probable that Susan Staveley and Ethel Moore, whose names as E.F.C. volunteers are bracketed in pencil with that of Miss Leather in the medal rolls, also worked in the canteen at Marlborough Camp. Ethel M C Moore was a nursing sister with the St John Auxiliary Brigade, Dublin and worked at the Princess Patricia of Connaught Hospital at Bray, Co. Wicklow, but she also spent time in France. Her Red Cross VAD card shows that amongst other things she was responsible for the ‘care of linen’ at the hospital, and also records that she did ‘Canteen Work in France’ and ‘worked in Canteen B.E.F.’. Susan Staveley was the youngest child and second daughter of retired General Sir Charles William Dunbar Staveley and Lady Susan Millicent Staveley (née Minet). Lady Susan was also listed as an ‘E.F.Canteens’ volunteer in the medal rolls and was in France from 1st November 1915 to 5th June 1917. Also listed as an ‘E.F.Canteens’ volunteer was Martha Tackaberry, who had accompanied Lady Susan to France, and had been her lady’s maid and latterly was her nurse.[Note 2]
The interesting point about Miss Leather’s Canteen is that it was run by volunteers unlike other E.F.C. canteens which were staffed by Army Service Corps personnel. James Hannay commented in his book that
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Hannay described how inadequate was the hut that housed the canteen:
Hannay concluded his account:
Little is known of Miss Rosamond Leather’s life after the War. In 1939 she was living in Moorswood Cottage, Uckfield, East Sussex. The cottage was located near Heron’s Ghyll Gardens and Temple Grove School, Heron’s Ghyll. When she died on 26th January 1959 in Berwick on Tweed, she was living at West Lodge, Longridge Towers, Berwick (Berwick Advertiser, 29th January 1959, p3).
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