Sarah Phelps’s gripping new drama First World War drama comes to our screens tomorrow night, the 6th of April, and a University of Manchester academic has helped television producers recreate a 1915 field hospital.
The Crimson Field presents one of the Great War’s untold stories. In a tented field hospital on the coast of France, a team of doctors, nurses and women volunteers work together to heal the bodies and souls of men wounded in the trenches.
Professor Christine Hallett, Manchester’s Professor of Nursing History, was contacted by the drama-makers who saw her 2009 book ‘Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War’, published by Manchester University Press.
After an initial chat, Professor Hallett was signed up as a historical advisor for the drama. This involved spending several months reading and commenting on scripts and a week working with the cast and production crew filming on location in Wiltshire and rubbing shoulders with actors including Oona Chaplin, Hermione Norris and Suranne Jones.
The hospital is a frontier: between the battlefield and home front, but also between the old rules, hierarchies, class distinctions and a new way of thinking. Hospital workers face a daily battle to patch the men up and keep the war machine churning. Staff numbers are low and the volunteers are desperately needed.
Professor Hallett spoke to the lead actors about what work would have taken place at a field hospital during the war and demonstrated some nursing techniques including bed bathing, bandaging, bed-making and aseptic and antiseptic wound care, used at the time to prevent infection spreading between soldiers’ wounds.
She also briefed lead actors including Hermione Norris, Marianne Oldham, Alice St. Clair and Jack Gordon about their character’s likely career histories, and she participated in rehearsals, checking for historical accuracy.
Professor Hallett said: “The producers wanted to know what would have been going on in a busy field hospital during the first world war and I had to demonstrate wound dressing techniques from the time.
“I lot of the supporting actors had worked on Casualty and so they were very interested to see how medical practices had changed. One big change they noticed was the lack of any lifting equipment in 1915 to move patients.
The Crimson Field is a six part series and begins on Sunday 6 April 9pm on BBC One
