Frances Ashlin, 1917
Frances Ashlin was a VAD nurse who worked alongside Clarice Molloy and Molly Evans at No 2 General Hospital, Le Havre and First Western Hospital Birkenhead. Like Clarice Molloy she was Catholic and Irish, but was born in Cork and did her first nursing service in Cork. She was born on 3 Jun 1880. Her uncle was the well known Irish architect, George Coppinger Ashlin, close associate and follower of Augustus Pugin.
Clarice Molloy writing to Molly in 1967 recalls how the three clearly got on well and worked closely together. Frances Ashlin, however, did not go with the others to Queen Alexandra Hospital, Dunkirk. Instead she seems to have returned to work part time in Cork for the rest of the war. She married John Francis Walsh in 1919 in Cork. She died in 1961.
Sources
- Molly Evans’s Pocket Diaries and Scrapbook
- Red Cross VAD database