BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Hilda Clark
Queer Places:
4 Overleigh, Street BA16 0TP, UK
Religious Society of Friends Quaker Cemetery
Street, Mendip District, Somerset, England
Edith
Mary Pye (October 20, 1876 – December 16, 1965) was an English midwife and
International Relief Organizer.[1] She
worked in maternity hospitals for women refugees and was the president of the
British Midwives Institute. Along with being a member of Friends Germany
Emergency Committee, Red Cross, and the International Commission for the
Assistance of Child Refugees. In 1907, she became Superintendent of District
Nurses in London, following her lengthy career in international relief efforts
and as a midwife.
Edith Eckhard was a close friend of
Kathleen Courtney, a
suffragist, peace campaigner and internationalist. Eckhard and Courtney lived
together in London, some of the time with the pacifist doctor
Hilda Clark, and Clark’s partner,
the midwife and Quaker pacifist Edith Pye. Dr Hilda Clark met the midwife and
international relief organizer Edith Pye in 1907 when Clark started work for
her medical degree: ‘To this day,’ wrote Pye, 50 years later in another
love-at-first-sight memory, ‘I can see her as she came down the attic stair in
the old house in Westminster, the gold glint in her brown hair and eyes
lightened up by the flame of the candle she carried.’ The relationship was
sustained through many separations, as both Clark and Pye engaged in
war-relief work in Europe. They wrote to each other in the delightful ‘plain
language’ of the Quakers: hence Clark to Pye in Geneva from London: ‘While I
miss thee dreadfully here I know it is worse being away and alone ... I am
glad thou has good friends there ...’
Edith Pye was born on 20 October 1876 in London, to William Arthur Pye JP, a wine
merchant, and Margaret Thompson Kidston, daughter of James Burns Kidston of
Glasgow.[3][4] Her
siblings included Sybil Pye, the
bookbinder, the artist Ethel Pye and David
Randall Pye, the scientist and father of the sculptor, William Pye. Ethel and
Sybil belonged to a circle of friends of Rupert
Brooke, known as the Neo-pagans.
Edith Pye became a registered midwife in 1906 from Clapham School of
Midwifery.[5] She
became a member of the Society of Friends in 1908 and, with her friend Dr
Hilda Clark, a physician and
humanitarian aid worker, organized the Friends War Victim Relief in December
1914 at Chalons-sur-Marne.[6] They
organized a maternity hospital inside the war zone and helped women and
children war victims in France.[6] For
these efforts, Pye was awarded the Legion d'honneur.[7] In
1923, she traveled to China to continue relief work in association with the
Women's International League.[8] She
organized the Friends' work in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and was
involved with the International Commission for the Assistance of Child
Refugees and the Women's International League for peace and freedom.[6] During World
War II, she supported the lifting of the allied blockade in an effort to allow
food and medical supplies to be sent to starving people in Europe.[9] She
was a leading member of the Famine Relief Committee and she lobbied
the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Between 1941 and 1955 she worked in both
France and Greece while continuing her efforts for peace and war relief.[6]
Edith Pye retired to Somerset with Hilda Clark in 1952. She died
at her home at 4 Overleigh, Street, Somerset on 16th December 1965, ten years
after Hilda, and the two are buried in the Quaker burial-ground under the same
headstone.[1]
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