Florence Farmborough (1887–1980)

Abstract

Farmborough, an Englishwoman teaching English privately in Russia in 1914, immediately offered her services as a nursing sister at the hospital established by Princess Golitsin in Moscow. By 1915, she was at the front in Poland, then Austria and Romania. Soon she found herself part of the Russian retreat and in the end witnessed the outbreak of the revolution. She fled Russia to Siberia, then the United States. After her return to Britain, she went on to become a university lecturer in Spain, where she remained during the Civil War, coming back home to London just in time for the Battle of Britain. Her diary, Nurse at the Russian Front, originally intended for her family, was published in 1974.