Two Saints and a Border

The Secession of 1882, the Concordat of 1908, and the Making of St John Scotland

Abstract

The Priory of Scotland of the Order of St John, erected in 1947, is the only establishment of the Order in the British Isles that does no first aid work, and the reason usually given is an agreement of 1908 by which the Order and the St Andrew's Ambulance Association divided Great Britain between them at the Anglo-Scottish Border. I argue that the agreement was the second act of a longer story whose first act has been forgotten. The testimony of Sir George Beatson, who lectured for St John in Glasgow from 1879 and sat on the first executive of St Andrew's, shows that the Scottish first aid movement of 1879 to 1882 was St John's, and that the founding of St Andrew's at Glasgow in June 1882 was a secession from it, opposed at the founding meeting by Beatson himself. The concordat of 1908 is then read as a legal instrument from the two contemporary descriptions of it, in the Order's Annual Report and in the Glasgow Medical Journal, which fix its date at February 1908 and place it between the Order's Supplemental Charter of 1907, a St Andrew's petition to the Privy Council against that charter, and the War Office's reorganisation of voluntary aid, which assigned England to one certificate and Scotland to the other. The Order foresaw in 1908 that a Scottish Priory would one day be revived "with other objects distinct from ambulance work", and the Priory of 1947 was made accordingly. The text of the agreement is unprinted. Its negotiation, announcement and execution can nonetheless be followed in print: the positions from which the parties treated were reported in April 1907, the President of the Board of Trade told the House of Commons of the agreement on 3 March 1908, within weeks of its execution, and the ambulance press reported its working out at Dundee and welcomed it as a truce before the year was out. I identify the records at St John's Gate, at the National Archives and among the Association's own surveyed papers in which it and the petition of 1907 should survive, and I show that the parties were still construing its words in 2012.

I. The Received Account

Every short history of St John in Scotland tells the same story, and tells it in the same order. The St John Ambulance Association reached Scotland in 1879. A Scottish body, the St Andrew's Ambulance Association, was founded at Glasgow in 1882 and did similar work. The two coexisted until 1908, when they agreed that each should keep to its own side of the Anglo-Scottish Border, and the Priory of Scotland, established in 1947, has in consequence never done the first aid work by which St John is known everywhere else.¹ None of that is false. My contention is that the story has been told back to front, and that in the telling the most interesting part of it has dropped out of sight.

The received account treats St Andrew's as a parallel foundation, a Scottish counterpart which happened to grow up beside St John and which was in the end accommodated by treaty. The evidence of the man best placed to know, Sir George Beatson, who had lectured for St John in Glasgow for three winters before 1882 and then sat on the first executive of St Andrew's, points another way. What happened in Glasgow in 1882 was a secession. A body of work which St John had built up in Scotland, under its own certificates and in its own centres, was taken over and re-established under a Scottish saint with a Scottish headquarters. Beatson, who opposed the name at the founding meeting and proposed instead that Glasgow become a centre of the St John Association, could not find a seconder.² Seen in that light the concordat of 1908 is no longer a tidy division of territory between strangers. It is the settlement of a schism, and it was concluded a generation after the schism had opened.

I want to do three things in what follows. The first is to set out the secession of 1882 from Beatson's testimony, which has been in print since 1910 and which no historian of the Order, so far as I can discover, has ever cited. The second is to examine the concordat of 1908 as a legal instrument: when it was made, what it bound, what the contemporary and the later accounts say of it and where they disagree. That examination takes in the Order's Supplemental Charter of 1907 and the Scottish petition against it, the Order's own constitution, and the War Office's reorganisation of voluntary aid in the same years, which, as the official medical history of the war shows, assigned England to one certificate and Scotland to the other. The third is to trace the consequence, which fell upon neither ambulance body but upon the Order itself. Its Scottish Priory had in 1947 to find a vocation outside the field that 1908 had closed, very much as the Order had foreseen in 1908, and it has since 2012 been reopening that field by construing the old agreement clause by clause. The Priory in the United States, the only other establishment of the Order without ambulance work, supplies a comparison at the close.³

II. St John in Scotland, 1877 to 1882

The St John Ambulance Association was founded by the Order in 1877, at a time when the Order was still a private body without recognition from the Crown, in order to teach first aid to the public. The uniformed Brigade followed in 1887, and the royal charter of 14 May 1888 made the Order an order of chivalry.⁴ The teaching itself owed a good deal to Scots. The first public classes, inaugurated at Woolwich on 12 January 1878, were given by Surgeon-Major Peter Shepherd of the Royal Herbert Military Hospital, an Aberdeen graduate born at Leochel-Cushnie, who worked beside a fellow Aberdonian, Colonel Francis Duncan.⁵ Shepherd is credited with the first use of the phrase "first aid" in English. His lectures became the Association's manual of October 1878, and after he was killed at Isandlwana on 22 January 1879 the manual passed to a third Aberdeen man, James Cantlie, whose First Aid to the Injured remained the authorised textbook from 1901 until 1958.⁶

The Association crossed the Border almost at once. Beatson, who came to Glasgow in August 1878, recalled in 1910 that ambulance work in civil life was then "practically non-existent", that the movement "spread to Scotland" in the winter of 1879 to 1880, and that St John "established its centres in Edinburgh, Dundee, Falkirk, and other places". Glasgow, he said, "was never a centre, but detached classes were held in the city, and I was one of the first lecturers".⁷ Richard Waller, writing as Chief Executive of the Priory of Scotland a century later, adds Aberdeen in 1879, with Dumfries, Shetland, Hawick and Dingwall soon after.⁸ The Order's own roll of centres, printed as an appendix to its Annual Report for 1908, is more exact and runs a little later: Shetland and Perth in 1882, Dundee and Polmont in 1884, Dumfries in 1885, Deeside in 1892, and no Edinburgh centre until 1905. In the Order's bookkeeping, therefore, Beatson's centres of 1879 to 1880 must have been classes which had not yet been constituted as centres, which is what one would expect of a movement in its second winter. The Report itself allows that detached classes had been held in Aberdeen, Glasgow "and many other parts of Scotland" almost from the Association's foundation. The Association's own directory puts the matter beyond inference. Captain Gildea's handbook of December 1881, which prints the honorary secretary and address of every centre in the kingdom from Alfreton to Worsbro' Dale, Dublin and Berwick-upon-Tweed among them, has not one entry north of the Border. The same Report bears out what Beatson says of himself. The man who by 1908 was chairman of St Andrew's had, on the Order's own account, been placed on its examining staff for Scotland "in the early eighties, or even earlier".⁹

The Glasgow classes have been described by Wynter and Ewen from the newspapers. A group of ladies who had heard of the London classes arranged for instruction through the Glasgow School of Cookery at the St Andrew's Halls, and some 130 women attended in the winter of 1879 to 1880. Dr Robertson Renton taught first, under Professor George Buchanan of the Western Infirmary, and Beatson joined him.¹⁰ What the newspapers do not supply, and Beatson does, is the institutional frame within which all this went on. Home nursing was added to first aid, each winter brought large classes in both, and the Volunteer regiments took the work up, the 1st Lanark Rifles giving almost the first public display in Scotland at Burnbank in March 1880 and the 1st Lanark Artillery another at Irvine that July. Then comes the sentence on which this article turns: "all instruction in these subjects was given under the aegis of the St. John's Ambulance Association, either by the agency of local centres or detached classes".¹¹

I labour the point because the later accounts pass over it. The Priory of Scotland's handbook says that St Andrew's "was formed later and began similar activities", and St John Scotland's seventy-fifth anniversary history speaks of an agreement which "decided" the division of the island.¹² Neither says that the Scottish first aid movement of 1879 to 1882 was St John's movement, taught by St John's lecturers, examined under St John's certificates and organised in St John's centres at Edinburgh, Dundee and Falkirk, which is what Beatson, who taught in it, says that it was.

III. The Secession of 1882

"In 1882, however, a movement took place to establish an association in Glasgow for instruction in ambulance work generally, and for providing proper treatment and transport for the sick and injured." So Beatson opens the decisive part of his narrative, and his "however" carries its full weight, for what follows is a departure from the arrangement he has just described. The new body was to have Glasgow as its headquarters "but it was to labour all through the country", and "it was to be called 'The St. Andrew's Ambulance Association'". Beatson first heard of it at dinner from Mrs Mactear, whose husband, Lieutenant-Colonel James Mactear of the 5th Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, was "taking an active interest in it". The first public announcement took the form of a circular signed by Mactear as convener and Daniel Brown as secretary, of which Beatson kept his copy and which, with the other founding papers, he offered to the Association in 1910.¹³

The constitution was settled at an adjourned meeting in the Religious Institution Rooms on 2 June 1882, with Mactear presiding. Beatson and James Gilchrist were elected to the first executive, and the Marquess of Bute was chosen president.¹⁴ Beatson quotes the Glasgow Herald of the following day, and his quotation is to my mind the most important passage in the whole record, because it shows the name being contested at the very moment of its adoption. Beatson, the paper reported, "expressed warm approval of the formation of an ambulance corps in Glasgow" but "suggested that the name of the association should be 'The Glasgow Hospital and Accident Ambulance Service'". The adoption of "St Andrew's", he thought, "was calculated to mislead and to centralise the work in a way that would not be to the advantage of the society", since ambulance work "was a catholic thing, and the same all the world over". His motion "did not find a seconder".¹⁵

Beatson thought the report had misrepresented him and wrote to the Herald to say so. His 1910 summary of that letter, which was his first appearance in print on the subject, leaves nothing in doubt: "the gist of it was that we should form in Glasgow a centre of the St. John's Ambulance Association for instructional purposes, and have a separate hospital and accident ambulance service for removal of sick and injured, the wagons being stationed at the infirmaries".¹⁶ Here, then, is the road not taken. One of the two founders of Glasgow ambulance teaching proposed, on the record, that instruction should remain with St John and that a civic transport service should be organised separately, and the majority preferred a single Scottish body with a Scottish name and a national remit.

What the record does not give is the majority's reasoning, and I am careful not to supply it. Beatson says only that he held "divergent views from the whole body of my colleagues", that he "had lectured for three winters for the St. John's Ambulance Association, and I felt under some obligation to it", and that after three weeks' reflection he "decided that I would sink my own individual opinions and go in loyally with the majority", accepting office on 24 June 1882.¹⁷ That is the language of obligation and of loyalty, and it is the language of a man changing sides. Whether the majority were moved by national feeling, by impatience with Clerkenwell, by an ambition to run an ambulance service as well as a school, or merely by Mactear's energy, the Scottish press of April to June 1882 may one day tell us. What Beatson's account does establish is that it was a secession, and that at least one participant recognised it as such at the time.

The Association then did what Beatson had feared and the majority had intended, and centralised. Its first ambulance wagon, delivered in April 1882 and described in the Herald on the twentieth, was driven about the streets by an exuberant secretary until, in Beatson's phrase, "the Fire Brigade felt that it was being quite snuffed out". The business men on the June executive insisted on method. On 13 November 1882 the secretary was replaced by W. M. Cunningham of Cunningham and Henderson, writers, the offices were moved from 29 Bath Street to 93 West Regent Street, and Mactear gave up the chair to Thomas Johnstone, surgeon, remaining a vice-president alongside John Hamilton under Bute's presidency.¹⁸ A circular of early 1882 had set the first appeal at about £2,000, and Mactear's portable ambulance box was adopted as standard equipment.¹⁹ From Cunningham's appointment, Beatson says, the Association "made steady strides", and the figures bear him out, with 47,000 certificates issued by the time of the Royal Charter of 1899 and a national Corps in being by 1904.²⁰

IV. Two Jurisdictions, 1882 to 1908

A secession leaves two bodies where there had been one, and for twenty-six years Scotland had both. St John kept its centres and went on forming them, at Dundee and Polmont in 1884, at Dumfries in 1885 and on Deeside in 1892, and they were working centres rather than names on a roll. The Association's Annual Report for 1890 prints their returns. Dundee, under the Earl of Strathmore, had held sixteen classes in the season across Angus and Perthshire and had instructed 620 pupils, Perth was teaching the railwaymen at the General Station, and Dumfries sat under the Duke of Buccleuch with Sheriff Hope in the chair.²¹ St Andrew's grew faster, and grew into the same towns. A survey of Glasgow's medical institutions published in 1888 counts eighteen St Andrew's centres formed in six years, most of them with wagons, and 19,969 pupils taught since 1882.²² Edinburgh, Falkirk and Perth, three of the towns in which St John had opened the Scottish movement, had a St Andrew's centre within six years of the secession. The Association had also reached south, for Waller says that it "was operating in the north of England as well as Scotland", and the Glasgow Medical Journal identifies the outpost as a Local Committee at Bradford.

How the two bodies understood their position is best taken from their own handbooks. The St Andrew's handbook of 1933, still in print in 1954, could recall that the St John Association's sphere "speedily became national" and that for St Andrew's, "like the older Association, no limit was placed upon its sphere of work within the Empire, but, for the most part, it has confined its activities to Scotland". Beatson's own Hand-Book of 1891, reprinted without alteration until 1914, puts the point from the Glasgow side. St John, he says, extended its work to Scotland in 1879, but the formation of St Andrew's "with exactly the same aim and objects as the parent Society, really removed the necessity for further action on the part of the English Association, and has practically resulted in the former carrying on the bulk of the ambulance work in Scotland". He adds a public acknowledgment of "our indebtedness" to St John for the model. In Glasgow the partition was a fact before it was a treaty, and Beatson's book, in its twentieth impression of 1914, found no occasion to mention the treaty at all.²³

The two taught the same syllabus. J. Scott Riddell's Manual of Ambulance of 1894 was the work of an Aberdeen surgeon who styled himself on its title page lecturer and examiner to a third body, the Aberdeen Ambulance Association, and examiner to both the St Andrew's Association in Glasgow and the St John Association in London. He printed the syllabus of each in a single chapter for the guidance of class secretaries, from which it follows that the examining standard was interchangeable and that at the level of the individual lecturer the overlap was amicable enough. The Aberdeen body had vanished from his title page by the sixth edition of 1913.²⁴ At the level of the institution it was a different matter, for two bodies issuing certificates for the same course in the same towns under different saints is as good a definition of concurrent jurisdiction as one could wish, and concurrent jurisdiction does not last.

In the contest for standing St Andrew's also gained the faster. Queen Victoria granted it a Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1899, eleven years after the Order's own. In 1904 its scattered corps were gathered into a single St Andrew's Ambulance Corps, and its wagons, which had begun as two horse-drawn vehicles in Glasgow, had become by the early years of the century a national transport service answering thousands of calls a year.²⁵ The City of Glasgow Police, who had adopted ambulance instruction in-house in the 1880s, were by the early 1900s sitting the St Andrew's examination in order to compete for its challenge shield, a detail which Wynter and Ewen draw from the police returns and which tells us which body set the standard in the second city.²⁶

The South African War completed the Association's credentials. Beatson, as chairman of its council, reminded the annual meeting of 1910 that the Scottish National Red Cross Hospital had been raised chiefly by the Association's efforts, that some £48,000 had been subscribed, and that £9,000 of the residue had passed to St Andrew's for instruction in the care of the sick and wounded. When the British Red Cross Society was reconstituted in 1905, St Andrew's helped to found its Scottish Branch, and later resolved to transfer to it the bulk of its Red Cross fund.²⁷ From 1906 it had a journal of its own, the Red Cross and Ambulance News, whose first number carried Sir John Furley, founder of the St John Ambulance Association, on the need for a Red Cross Society, and Beatson on Red Cross organisation.²⁸ By 1908, then, the seceding body of 1882 had become a chartered national association with a uniformed corps, a transport fleet, an organ of its own and a recognised place in the military aid of the country. The Order's position in Scotland was much what it had been in the eighteen-eighties, a handful of centres and a scattering of classes under a corporation whose charter, as will appear, named England and nothing else.

That asymmetry is the context of 1908. The Order was not negotiating with a provincial rival but with the body which had taken over most of the field the Order itself had opened, and which now held that field under a charter of its own. The two were also entangled at the top. The Marquess of Breadalbane was at once a member of the Order, chairman of the St John Ambulance Association and, until February 1907, President of St Andrew's. Beatson, chairman of the St Andrew's council from 1899, had begun as the Order's examiner, and the Order could remind its readers in 1908 that leading members of the St Andrew's executive were on its own Roll, admitted "not in consequence of work done under its aegis, but as a general mark of appreciation".²⁹ A quarrel between bodies so connected is a family quarrel, and family quarrels, when they are settled at all, are settled by the head of the family, who in this case was the Grand Prior, the Prince of Wales.

V. The Concordat of 1908

No account prints the agreement or names those who signed it, and the later descriptions of it, as I shall show, do not agree with one another. Two contemporary descriptions do survive, however, one from each side of the Border, and neither has been used. The first is the Order's own, in the report of its Ambulance Department for 1908. "In accordance with representations made with the concurrence of H.R.H. the Grand Prior", the Chapter-General had resolved "that the Ambulance Department should no longer carry on its operations north of the Tweed". The Scottish centres and classes were to be disbanded, their local committees being left to take such steps as they thought necessary for affiliation with St Andrew's, and "similarly under the terms of an agreement which has been duly executed, that Association has undertaken not to form classes or centres in England".³⁰ The second is that of the Glasgow Medical Journal in October 1908. By "an agreement entered into in February of this year", the Grand Priory had "disbanded and terminated all its ambulance centres in Scotland" and referred their business to St Andrew's, which "has reciprocated with regard to its centres in England". The Order's Dundee committee became a committee of the Association, its Edinburgh committee merged with the Association's own, and the St Andrew's Local Committee at Bradford was disbanded. The Journal thought the two spheres "thus delimited" and expected that "overlapping and waste of effort will now cease".³¹ From these two accounts we learn that the agreement has a month, February 1908, that it was an executed instrument rather than an understanding, and that on both descriptions its operative subject was centres and classes.

The later descriptions widen it. The administrative history attached to the St Andrew's records at the Lothian Health Services Archive says that by formal agreement St Andrew's "discontinued all ambulance work in England" and St John "discontinued all ambulance work in Scotland", and the Association's own published history used the same words.³² The Priory of Scotland's handbook says that St Andrew's agreed "to cease first aid training south of the border, and St John north of it". St John Scotland's anniversary history speaks of "charitable first aid services", and Waller says that St John "undertook to stop any first aid activity north of the border".³³ The Association's own handbook, in a text whose preface is dated August 1933 and which was in its nineteenth edition by 1954, is the widest of all. Under the agreement of 1908, it says, the Order "undertook that its Ambulance Department should abstain from work in Scotland and the latter similarly undertook to abstain from work in England", and the two societies "thus work side by side and render incalculable service in their respective spheres of labour".³⁴ The same book practises what it describes, for its appendix reprints, by leave of the St John Ambulance Association, Major Humphreys's chapters on the protection of the civil population against gas, and its preface pays tribute to Beatson, whose own handbook it had replaced. Now "ambulance work" in 1908 was a term of art which embraced instruction, examination, uniformed public duty and transport, of which "first aid training" is one element and "classes and centres" the machinery. If the instrument bound classes and centres only, as the descriptions of 1908 would suggest, then "all ambulance work" is a gloss which the parties put upon it afterwards. If, on the other hand, the Order's phrase about ceasing "operations north of the Tweed" reproduces the instrument, the gloss is faithful. The subsequent conduct of both parties, in which the Order did no first aid work of any kind in Scotland for a century, supports the wider reading, as does the handbook's plain "work", and I adopt it, though provisionally. Conduct is evidence of how an agreement was understood rather than of what it said, and the first responder arrangement of 2012 shows the parties themselves still parsing the words.

How the parties came to the table can now be recovered, and the story begins with the Order's constitution rather than with any ambulance. In 1905 and 1906 the Order petitioned for a Supplemental Charter, among whose objects, as the Glasgow Medical Journal reported in March 1907, was power "to establish Priories in any part of the empire, Scotland, of course, being included". St Andrew's read that as a threat. A Scottish Priory "which would undertake ambulance work" would encroach upon its sphere, and so the Association petitioned the Privy Council against the grant "so far as Scotland is concerned", while offering in the same petition to act as the Order's ambulance branch in Scotland "provided its independence under its own Royal Charter is not impaired". The Order declined the offer. Breadalbane, who was caught between the two, resigned the presidency of St Andrew's by a letter from Taymouth Castle dated 9 February 1907. He told the council that he viewed the petition "with the greatest concern", that it must in the long run be detrimental to ambulance work in Scotland and probably to the Association itself, and that if it succeeded it would "merely prevent the Order of St. John establishing a Priory, but will not prevent the St. John Ambulance Association from starting as many centres or classes in Scotland as it may think fit". The Journal, which had the letter from the daily press, regretted its publication, did not share his fears, and did not care for "the minatory tone of his concluding sentence". The Scottish correspondent of The Lancet, writing in April, took the Association's side and added to the account. The counter-petition, he reported, submitted that "the power to establish priories in Scotland would, if granted, be detrimental to the interests of the public and unjust to the Association". Those who controlled the Order held that St Andrew's "should become merged in the Order as a department charged with ambulance work in Scotland". The Association refused "as being in derogation of its charter", though it had "gone so far as to offer to act as the Order's ambulance department in Scotland, it being understood that by so doing the charter of the Association would not be invalidated". He hoped that the Order would not press its claims "in any high-handed fashion", and warned that the grant of its petition "will be bitterly resented by those who have given their time and money to developing the St. Andrew's Ambulance Association".³⁵ The Supplemental Charter was granted nonetheless, on 22 May 1907. Breadalbane's successor as President was Lord Blythswood, and it was Blythswood, as the Journal recorded after his death, who brought the matter before the Prince of Wales as Grand Prior, to whose intervention "the present happy state of affairs" was due.³⁶ By January 1908 the ambulance press had heard, through the Bradford Telegraph, that the Order had approached the Association's council "with a view to the respective Councils combining for ambulance work", and that there was "considerable opposition on the part of the St. Andrews body to the entrance of the English Order into Scotland". The petition itself is to be sought among the Privy Council's papers at Kew, in PC 8/639. The two reports agree, so far as they go, on what it asked. The Association objected to the power to erect a Priory in Scotland as such, and not only to a Priory with an ambulance department, and it coupled the objection with an offer to serve as the Order's ambulance arm on condition that its own charter was left intact.

This explains a detail in Waller's account which had seemed to stand on its own. The two bodies, he says, "conferred together about entering into a close working relationship" and "in the event, they agreed to do the exact opposite".³⁷ The Order's report of 1908 describes the relationship it had wanted. The Director and Committee "had long hoped" that by reviving the Priory of Torphichen, "the Scottish Branch, now in abeyance, of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem in England", which the Supplemental Charter empowered it to revive, "a modus vivendi might have been discovered under which the St. Andrew's Ambulance Association would have been placed in a highly advantageous position as the Ambulance Department of the Grand Priory in North Britain". Negotiations "with this view" having failed, "there appeared no alternative but to adopt the course above referred to".³⁸ Read beside the petition of 1907, this was a negotiation in which each side offered the other a union on terms the other could not accept. St Andrew's would serve as the Order's ambulance branch provided its charter and its independence were left alone, while the Order would have St Andrew's as the Ambulance Department of a Scottish Priory, that is, as a department. Both positions were already in print in April 1907, and the Order's report of 1908 shows that neither had moved. What was agreed instead has a familiar shape to anyone who has read a Scottish boundary dispute. Neither party was absorbed, each kept its charter, name, patron and organisation, and each gave up its claims in the other's territory in return for undisputed possession of its own.

The Order was also answering a charge, and its answer is the fullest statement of its Scottish history that it ever made. The report regrets "a great deal of irritation in certain quarters in Scotland, caused by erroneous utterances and published statements in the press, implying that the Order of St. John had only recently endeavoured to obtain a foothold in Scotland, consequent on the success which has attended the operations of the St. Andrew's Ambulance Association". Such statements were "the very reverse of fact", and in proof the Order set out its roll of Scottish centres from Shetland and Perth in 1882 to Deeside in 1892, claimed detached classes in Aberdeen and Glasgow from 1877 to 1878, and recalled that the present chairman of St Andrew's had sat on its own examining staff before St Andrew's existed.³⁹ The roll omits one entry which the Report's own appendix supplies, a centre at Edinburgh formed in 1905. I take it, as a matter of interpretation rather than of evidence, that the Edinburgh centre of 1905 and the charter petition of 1906 were together the "foothold" that Scottish opinion had in mind. On the history the Order was right, and Beatson's testimony of 1910 is its best witness. On the grievance its critics had something of a case. A centre in the capital and a charter to plant a Priory, arriving together after twenty years in which the Order had formed a single Scottish centre, looked very like a forward policy whatever the earlier history might have been, and St Andrew's met it with the only weapon one chartered body has against another, which is a petition to the Crown.

There is a further reason for wanting the text, and it concerns the Order's standing to make the bargain at all. The charter of 14 May 1888 incorporated its members as "The Grand Priory of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in England", and the digest printed by Bedford and Holbeche in 1902 shows a charter which names no territory beyond that corporate style, confirms the Statutes, and empowers the committees of the Ambulance Department, the Ambulance Association, the Almoner's Department and the Jerusalem hospital to extend the Order's charitable works.⁴⁰ The Supplemental Charter of 22 May 1907, obtained after a petition prepared in 1905 and 1906 by the Secretary, Sir Herbert Perrott, with Edwin Freshfield as solicitor, revised the constitution and bye-laws. The Order's own account of it, in the Chapter-General's report for 1907, deserves to be read in its words. The charter empowered the Grand Prior "to establish Priories in any part of His Majesty's dominions where such a step may be considered conducive to the better expansion and development of the work of the Order", in place of the Commanderies provided for in 1888. As to why it was sought, the report is explicit: "the great success of the work of the Ambulance Department in India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia has been the raison d'être of the petition, together with the wish that the Grand Prior should be enabled, if expedient, to revive the Priory of Torphichen, the ancient Headquarters of the Order in Scotland, and the Priory of Kilmainham, its former chef-lieu in Ireland". The Glasgow Medical Journal, reporting the petition, understood it as a power to establish Priories anywhere in the Empire, and on the Order's own showing that is what it was. Scotland came into the design as a wish appended to an imperial purpose, which is some evidence, though not proof, that a Scottish Priory was not the object of the exercise, whatever Glasgow feared. The style "in the British Realm" arrived only with the Charter of 12 June 1926. In 1908, therefore, the Order treated with a chartered Scottish corporation under a charter which called the Order itself a Grand Priory "in England", and it did so having just acquired a power to plant a Priory in Scotland which it at once agreed not to use for the one purpose Scotland would have noticed. I do not say that the 1888 charter confined the Order's charitable work to England, for the Brigade had districts in Ireland and divisions across the Empire, and Rose Kingsley could describe in 1918 a Brigade of twelve districts, eleven of them in England and Wales and the twelfth in Ireland, with the laconic footnote that "Scotland has a separate association of St. Andrew".⁴¹ I say only that a body styled "in England", in conceding Scotland to a body chartered for Scotland, was conceding little that its own name had not already conceded, and that when the Order came to erect a Scottish Priory in 1947 it did so under the wider style of 1926. Whether the draftsmen of 1908 had the point in mind is something the instrument alone can tell us. So is the identity of the parties. The ambulance press, when it reported the settlement in September 1908, called it "the mutual agreement which has been arrived at between the Executive Committee of the St. John Ambulance Association and that of the St Andrew's Ambulance Association", a bargain between two ambulance societies, and the Board of Trade had spoken in March of "the St. John and the St. Andrew Associations". The Order's own report presents it as the Order's decision. Whether the Order itself or only its Association set its hand to the paper is one more thing the text would settle.

The timing calls for explanation, and here the official medical history of the war supplies what the ambulance bodies' own accounts leave out, with the Order's report confirming it. Macpherson records that the Army Council sanctioned in October 1906 a conference at the War Office with the volunteer medical officers and "representatives of the St. John and St. Andrew's voluntary aid organizations", that the conference met in December 1906, and that in order to bring the medical services up to war strength the War Office proposed "to enlist the agency of the St. John Ambulance Association in England and the St. Andrew's Ambulance Association in Scotland".⁴² The Home Hospital Reserve, which was to staff the military hospitals when the regular Corps mobilised, was sanctioned from 1 April 1908, the St John Brigade undertaking England and Ireland and St Andrew's undertaking Scotland, and the Order's report of 1908 cites the Army Order of 4 August 1908 to the same effect.⁴³ A War Office circular of 29 October 1908 then brought the Territorial medical units and St Andrew's into a relation of "mutual aid and support", each keeping "its own individuality".⁴⁴ The voluntary aid scheme of August 1909 directed the Territorial county associations to use the Red Cross and "the St. John and St. Andrew's Ambulance Associations" in raising detachments, and a separate Scottish scheme, sanctioned in November 1909, gave St Andrew's the preliminary training and the Red Cross the special training, Beatson resigning the chairmanship of St Andrew's after ten years in order to lead it.⁴⁵

Parliament had been asking the relevant questions earlier still. The Order had just arranged with the Marine Department of the Board of Trade for "the permanent instruction in First Aid work of the Officers and men of the Mercantile Marine", and the Board, as the Order's report for 1907 announced, was in future to "require the possession of a first aid certificate as a qualification for promotion to certain ranks in the Merchant Service". The Board had accepted St Andrew's certificates for the purpose as early as 1901, and a Scottish Member wished to know that it still would. Between 13 February and 5 March 1908 Major Anstruther-Gray, the Member for St Andrews Burghs, put five questions to the Board about the first aid certificate required of Scottish candidates for masters' and mates' certificates, and the answers show the agreement taking effect. On 13 February the Board said that the Order had told it that it had "centres at one or two Scottish ports only", and that the Board had therefore "arranged with the St. Andrew's Society that courses should be available at all the chief ports in Scotland". Asked whether St John was abolished in Scotland, the Parliamentary Secretary answered "Not at all", and then, "where it exists". By 27 February the issue of St John certificates to candidates in Scotland after the course then running was "not contemplated", and Glasgow, Dundee, Leith and Aberdeen were named as the Scottish ports of instruction. On 3 March Lloyd George, as President of the Board, told the House that the Board had taken no steps against the Order's classes at Dundee, "but I understand that an arrangement has been arrived at between the St. John and the St. Andrew Associations under which the former Association will cease to hold classes in first-aid in Dundee". That is the earliest public notice of the concordat I have found, and it was given to Parliament months before either party described the agreement in print. Two days later the Board disclaimed any "power to compel either of these associations to vary its course".⁴⁶ A Government department, that is to say, had been told of the agreement within weeks of its execution and was already treating the Scottish ports as St Andrew's ground, and the Association's own report for the year to May 1909 recorded 633 seamen certificated under the scheme since 1907.⁴⁷

The sequence can now be set out. The War Office conference of December 1906 named the two bodies by nation. The Order's charter petition and the St Andrew's counter-petition followed within weeks, the charter was granted in May 1907, and the agreement was executed in February 1908. The Home Hospital Reserve, the Army Order and the circular of 1908 then built the division of the kingdom into the military system. The State's wish is thus documented, and it ran in the same direction as the concordat. Whether the agreement was made to meet that wish or merely to end a quarrel which the charter had inflamed is something only the minute books can tell us. It can at least be said that by March 1908 a Government department had been told of the arrangement and already spoke of the Scottish ports as belonging to St Andrew's, and that the Order's report, written at the end of the year, could cite the Army Order as though the division of the kingdom had been in the natural order of things. The ambulance press watched the agreement take effect. In August 1908 First Aid reported that the Order's Dundee Centre had "handed over the whole of their property" to St Andrew's, which was arranging classes in the city for the coming winter, and that Chapter-General had enrolled five Dundee gentlemen as Honorary Associates for their services to the Centre. In September the same journal, which had more than once rebuked St Andrew's for planting centres in England, welcomed "the mutual agreement" between the two executive committees as "a truce, honourable alike, we feel sure, to both parties", under which "both Associations will now in their respective spheres work". Everything in the voluntary aid of the kingdom was being put on a new footing in those years. The British Red Cross Society, reconstituted in 1905 with a Scottish Branch that St Andrew's had helped to found, obtained its own charter in 1908, and by 1910 every Territorial county association in Scotland had asked the Red Cross committees to raise its detachments. The Royal Commission on Mines recommended in 1909 that colliery under-managers should hold a first aid certificate "from the St. John Ambulance Association or the St. Andrew's Ambulance Association", the two names standing together in a public document as the kingdom's two authorities.⁴⁸ The demarcation of February 1908 belongs to that general settlement quite as much as to the quarrel between the saints.

One sentence in the Order's report repays a second reading. Having explained why the Scottish Priory could not be revived as an ambulance body, the Committee added that "no doubt sooner or later the Scottish Priory will be revived by the Chapter-General with other objects distinct from ambulance work".⁴⁹ Here is the Priory of Scotland of 1947 described in 1908, thirty-nine years before it existed, and the sentence settles a point which the later accounts leave open. The exclusion of first aid from the Scottish Priory's vocation was neither an accident of the Second World War nor an afterthought of 1947. It was a consequence which the Order drew for itself in the same breath as the agreement, and when the Priory came it was made accordingly.

VI. The Long Shadow: 1908 to 1947, and After

For St Andrew's the concordat confirmed what the secession had begun. By 1920 The Hospital could describe it as "the civilian ambulance body in Scotland", to which the Scottish Branch of the British Red Cross had handed seventy-seven motor wagons after the war.⁵⁰ The two bodies pooled their ambulances in 1946, the joint service took the contract for Scotland when the National Health Service began in 1948, and the Red Cross withdrew in 1967, leaving St Andrew's as sole contractor until the reorganisation of 1974 brought the service within the NHS. Since 2006 the Association has traded as St Andrew's First Aid.⁵¹ Beatson's proposal of 1882, instruction under St John and a separate transport service under civic auspices, had thus been realised in substance by 1974, though under St Andrew's name and some ninety years late. For the Order the consequence was of another kind, and the Order's own reports for 1946 and 1947, read with Waller's account from inside the Priory, allow it to be followed. St John "withdrew from Scotland in 1908". "There were thoughts about doing things other than first aid but these were interrupted by World War I". The same thoughts "were revived after World War I but then World War II came along", and only "in the closing months of that war" did "three Scottish Knights of the Order" meet in Glasgow and set up a Committee for Scottish Affairs.⁵² The Priory's own first report names them. Colonel Sir Colin MacRae of Feoirlinn, Major John Forrest Hamilton and Captain W. D. Cargill Thompson met at the Royal Scottish Automobile Club in Glasgow in March 1945 to consider reviving the Order in Scotland, "the only part of the British Empire in which the Order was not functioning". By the end of May two thirds of the Scottish members, assembled in Edinburgh under the Marchioness of Bute and "meeting in council for the first time since the days of Mary, Queen of Scots", had commissioned the three to petition the Grand Prior, and Chapter-General appointed the Committee with MacRae in the chair. Its first full year, recorded in the Report for 1946, produced medical comfort depots, a travelling clinic rebuilt from a war ambulance, a house in Glasgow for the Order's Foundation Hospital, and a resolution of Council to raise the Committee to the status of "the ancient Priory of Scotland", with a Royal investiture at Holyroodhouse in 1947.⁵³

The instrument which followed is printed in the Report for 1947. Given at St John's Gate on 6 March 1947 and delivered by the Grand Prior's hand at Holyroodhouse on 26 June, it recites the Order's Scottish history from David I to the resignation of the temporalities in 1563. It records that the Order had "of late years" resumed "its beneficent and charitable functions" in Scotland through its Committee, and it erects that Committee "to the status of a Priory to be known as the Priory of Scotland", with the Earl of Lindsay as first Prior and with every member of the Order "permanently and exclusively domiciled in Scotland" transferred to it.⁵⁴ The Duke of Gloucester, as Grand Prior, installed Lindsay at Holyroodhouse the same day, MacRae was installed as Sub-Prior and made Preceptor of Torphichen, and Chapter-General gave the new Priory the sword made for the installation of the Prince of Wales as Grand Prior in 1888.⁵⁵ The Foundation Hospital in Glasgow opened that year, and there followed a nursing home at Aberdeen in 1949, the first home for the elderly in 1950 and a replacement hospital in Glasgow in 1956.⁵⁶

What was said at the founding tells us as much as what was done. At the civic luncheon in Edinburgh on the day of the installation the Grand Prior, having rehearsed the Priory's medieval charters, expressed "my sincere hope and my expectation" that the revived Order in Scotland "will work in complete harmony with the St. Andrew's Ambulance Association and the Scottish Branch of the British Red Cross Society, not invading spheres of work which are already adequately covered". The Sub-Prior of the Grand Priory, proposing the toast, said that it was now for Scotland to justify that confidence "by extending their work in Scotland in appropriate directions without infringing on spheres already covered by other bodies". Lindsay replied that the Order "was not, as many believed, a purely Sassenach affair", that the Foundation Hospital in Glasgow stood ready for its first patients and that travelling clinics would reach those beyond the range of any hospital. At Torphichen the Librarian of the Order, Professor Mackie, said that the revived Priory "endeavours to carry its work of healing to persons and to places not easily reached by the ordinary provision for medical aid".⁵⁷ No one named the agreement of 1908, and there was no need to. The two bodies whose spheres were not to be invaded were precisely the two which had divided the kingdom's ambulance work between them with the Order's consent thirty-nine years before, and the Grand Prior's "expectation", pronounced in public on the Priory's first day, comes closer to a republication of the concordat than anything the Order has issued since.

Two features of that account strike me. The first is the gap of thirty-seven years. Between the withdrawal of 1908 and the Glasgow meeting of 1945 the Order had Scottish members and, so far as Waller or any other source reveals, no Scottish work. The report of 1908 had consoled the Order with the thought that "the names of not a few" of its Scottish colleagues were on its Roll, and members were what Scotland was thereafter to supply.⁵⁸ The second is the shape the work took when it came. A hospital, comfort depots, a nursing home, homes for the elderly: this is the hospitaller vocation in its oldest form, the care of the sick in their beds, and it was chosen because the newer vocation, first aid in the street, was closed, and chosen, as the sentence of 1908 shows, in the knowledge that it would have to be. The Priory then adapted as the National Health Service absorbed the need, selling the Aberdeen hospital in 1995 and turning the capital to mountain rescue, with a vehicle for every one of Scotland's twenty-seven teams from 1999, purpose-built bases for ten of them, two rescue boats and support for the search and rescue dogs.⁵⁹ Patient transport for cancer and dialysis patients, palliative care units, the Eye Hospital in Jerusalem and St John Malawi complete the picture.⁶⁰

The latest development shows the agreement at work. Waller wrote in 2012 that with "the 1908 agreement with St Andrew's still in place we do not engage in the one activity for which St John is so well known", and that the Priory had begun first responder groups in Angus and Dundee "thanks to an open-minded and flexible stance by St Andrew's Ambulance in relation to the 1908 agreement". St Andrew's "acknowledged that first response, which is geared to heart attacks, is not the same as first aid", had no plans to enter the field, and recognised "ample room for many providers".⁶¹ The Priory's handbook now records community first responders throughout Scotland, public access defibrillators and free CPR training.⁶² A private agreement of 1908, then, whose text neither party has published, is still being construed in the twenty-first century, and construed strictly, so that a new activity is admitted only once the other party has agreed that it falls outside the words. I know of no better proof that the concordat is a living instrument, nor of any better reason for wanting to read it.

The two saints found a working partnership long ago, and since 1958 St John, St Andrew's and the British Red Cross have published a single first aid manual for the United Kingdom.⁶³ But the partition of 1908 has outlived whatever occasioned it, and it now governs the shape of an institution, the Priory of Scotland, which did not exist when it was made.

VII. A Comparison: the Priory in the United States

Waller remarks that Scotland, "like the USA, is exceptional in not providing St John first aid training or support".⁶⁴ The pairing is a fair one, and the two cases illuminate each other. The American body was incorporated in New York in 1957 as a charity in support of the Eye Hospital, and the Priory in the United States was constituted by the Grand Prior at Washington National Cathedral on 11 May 1996 as the Order's seventh Priory, with John R. Drexel IV as its first Prior. Its chief work has remained the Eye Hospital, to which it has given more than thirty-seven million dollars, together with a Volunteer Corps through which members serve in other charities, and it has never had an ambulance arm.⁶⁵

The reason in the American case, however, is statute rather than treaty. The Act of Congress of 5 January 1905 incorporating the American National Red Cross gave that body the exclusive right to the Red Cross name and emblem, together with the duty "to furnish volunteer aid to the sick and wounded of armies" and to act as the medium between the people and their armed forces. On that charter the American Red Cross built its first aid programme in the years before the First World War.⁶⁶ A St John ambulance body founded in the United States after 1905 would have entered a field already occupied by a federally chartered national society, and the Order, which did not organise in America until the 1950s, never attempted it.

The two cases are therefore opposites. In the United States the Order arrived late and found the field closed by public law. In Scotland it arrived first, opened the field itself, lost most of it to a secession of its own lecturers and pupils, and then closed what remained by private agreement. The American Priory has nothing to reopen, whereas the Scottish Priory, as the first responder arrangement of 2012 shows, has a door which is shut rather than locked. Whether it should be opened is a question for the two bodies in Scotland and not for a historian, though a historian may be permitted to observe that the agreement which keeps it shut is a hundred and eighteen years old, that neither party has published it, and that the Priory which it binds was never a party to it.

VIII. Conclusion

The agreement of 1908 has been told as a footnote, an explanation for an anomaly on the map of St John. I have tried to show that it is the second act of a longer story. The first act, the secession of 1882, has been forgotten because the only witness who described it did so in a medical journal which historians of the Order do not read, and the second is described, in the Order's own Annual Report and in the same medical journal, in words which no later account has quoted. Beatson's testimony establishes that the Scottish first aid movement of 1879 to 1882 was St John's, and that the St Andrew's Association was carved out of it by men who had taught and learned under St John's certificates. It establishes that the name was contested at the founding meeting, where the alternative of a St John centre with a separate civic ambulance service was put and lost, and that the one dissenter went over to the majority out of loyalty rather than conviction. The concordat of 1908 then settled, between two chartered corporations and under the eye of the Grand Prior, a schism which had opened twenty-six years earlier and which a royal charter had reopened in 1907.

I have also tried to show why the text of the concordat matters. Its surviving descriptions disagree on its scope. Its date, February 1908, is now fixed, and it fell between the Supplemental Charter of 22 May 1907, which St Andrew's had petitioned the Privy Council to resist, and the Army Order of 4 August 1908 which divided the Home Hospital Reserve by nation. It was reported to Parliament on 3 March 1908, before either party had described it in print, its execution at Dundee was reported in August, and the positions from which it was negotiated had been public since April 1907. Its terms have been construed strictly against the Order as recently as 2012. The catalogues show where the instrument lies. The Museum of the Order of St John holds the letter book of the Order's Edinburgh Centre from October 1906 to May 1908, which its catalogue describes as recording "the disbanding of the Centre, and the disbanding of St Andrew's Ambulance Association Centres in England", together with the minutes of the Ambulance Committee and of Chapter-General and the Secretary's copy letter books for the months of the negotiation. Its catalogued file of agreements, however, does not list this one. The Privy Council Office's file on the Supplemental Charter is at the National Archives, and the Association's petition of 1907, if it was lodged, should be in it. The Association's own records from 1881 to 1963 were surveyed by the National Register of Archives for Scotland and remain in private hands under restricted access.⁶⁷ Their recovery and publication would complete this account, and might well revise it, and I should be glad to be revised.

The last word belongs to Beatson, who closed his own account in 1910 by remarking that "some day when the history of our Association comes to be written, this short communication may come in useful", and who offered the Association the founding papers he had kept for twenty-eight years.⁶⁸ He was right about the first, if a century early. Whether the papers survive, and where, is the next question for anyone who takes this subject up, since the St Andrew's deposit at the Lothian Health Services Archive consists at present of two recent annual reports, and the founding papers, if they exist, must still be in the Association's own keeping.

Notes

1. Priory of Scotland of the Order of St John, Handbook and Member List, June 2026 (Edinburgh: St John Scotland, 2026), 4 to 5; St John Scotland, "St John Scotland celebrates 75 years of service" (2022); Lothian Health Services Archive, GD1/126, St Andrew's Ambulance Association, administrative history. ↑
2. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 27 to 30. The paper was read at the complimentary dinner given to Beatson on his retiral from the chairmanship of the Association's Council after ten years' service, and was reprinted as a pamphlet (Glasgow: printed by Alex. MacDougall, 1910), which I have read in the Wellcome Collection's digitised copy. For Beatson (1848 to 1933), surgeon to the Western Infirmary, the moving spirit of the Glasgow Volunteer medical units and later of the Scottish Branch of the British Red Cross Society, see the obituary in Glasgow Medical Journal 119, no. 4 (April 1933), 116 to 118. ↑
3. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", One St John 2 (2016), 19, 27. ↑
4. Priory of Scotland, Handbook, 4; Pearn, "Earliest Days of First Aid", 1718. ↑
5. Pearn, "Earliest Days of First Aid", 1718; Wynter and Ewen, "Choreographing Urban Ambulance", 83, citing Kentish Independent, 2 March 1878, 8. ↑
6. Pearn, "Earliest Days of First Aid", 1718 to 1719; Museum of the Order of St John, "The History of the First Aid Manual"; Wynter and Ewen, "Choreographing Urban Ambulance", 84. ↑
7. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 27. ↑
8. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 21. For Aberdeen, the Association's own pamphlet of 1882 reprints a notice from the Aberdeen Daily Free Press of 26 November 1879 commending "the work of the St. John Ambulance Society" in that city: Francis Duncan, First Aid to the Injured: The St. John Ambulance Association, its Aim and Objects (1882), appendix of authenticated cases. For the directory, James Gildea, The Order of St. John of Jerusalem in England, and the St. John Ambulance Association (London: Charles Cull and Son, 1881), 31 to 35, list of honorary secretaries, the preface being dated 1 December 1881. Both are in the Wellcome Collection's digitised copies. ↑
9. Order of St John, Report of the Chapter-General of the Grand Priory of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in England: Report for 1908 (London: Charles Cull and Son, [1908]), St John Ambulance Association report, 29 (chronology of Scottish centres and of Beatson's appointment) and Appendix B, 72 to 75 (nominal roll of centres: Shetland 1882, Perth 1882, Dundee 1884, Polmont 1884, Dumfries 1885, Deeside 1892, Edinburgh 1905). The Report is cited hereafter as Order of St John, Report for 1908, with the Association's own pagination; I have read it in the Museum of the Order of St John's digitised copy. The chronology at p. 29 gives Shetland and Orkney and Perth as 1882; the roll at pp. 72 to 75, as I have read it, enters Shetland. ↑
10. Wynter and Ewen, "Choreographing Urban Ambulance", 87, citing Glasgow Herald, 2 December 1879, 3, and Glasgow Evening Post, 23 November 1881, 4. ↑
11. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 28. ↑
12. Priory of Scotland, Handbook, 5; St John Scotland, "75 years of service". ↑
13. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 29, 32. ↑
14. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 29 to 30. ↑
15. Glasgow Herald, 3 June 1882, as quoted in Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 29 to 30. I have not been able to consult the Herald itself and rely on Beatson's transcription. ↑
16. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 30. Beatson's letter is the one cited by Wynter and Ewen, "Choreographing Urban Ambulance", 88 n. 43, as Glasgow Herald, 5 June 1882, 8. ↑
17. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 30. ↑
18. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 31 to 32. ↑
19. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 30 to 31; Wynter and Ewen, "Choreographing Urban Ambulance", 89, citing Glasgow Herald, 9 March 1882, 4. ↑
20. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 32; Glasgow Museums, "St Andrew's Ambulance Association", TheGlasgowStory; St Andrew's First Aid, "Our History". ↑
21. Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 29, and Appendix B, 72 to 75. For 1890, St John Ambulance Association, Annual Report of the Central Executive Committee, 1890 (London: Chas. Cull and Son, [1890]), Appendix B, 53 to 60 (nominal roll with dates of formation: Perth 1882, Shetland 1882, Dundee 1884, Polmont 1884, Dumfries 1885), and Appendix C, local reports, Dumfries at 156, Dundee at 157 to 159 and Perth at 297. Dundee's sixteen classes of 1889 to 1890 were held at Dundee, Brechin, Blairgowrie, Kirriemuir and Coupar Angus, the Lord Provost was among the centre's vice-presidents, and 343 of its 620 pupils took certificates. Perth was forming an ambulance corps from its railway class. I have read the Report in the State Library of Pennsylvania's copy digitised by the Internet Archive. ↑
22. [C. F. Pollock], "Ambulance Association", in "The Medical Institutions of Glasgow", Glasgow Medical Journal 30, no. 2 (August 1888), 105 to 107. The survey lists the centres in order of foundation: Coatbridge, Edinburgh, Dumbarton, Pollokshaws, Baillieston, Portobello, Annandale, Falkirk, Hamilton, North Berwick, Greenock, Ayr, Crieff, Kelso, Port Glasgow, Dunfermline, Grangemouth and Perth. In the year to 1888 the Association had held 241 classes in 81 localities and trained 6,655 pupils, and since 1882 it had held 501 classes and issued 10,409 certificates. ↑
23. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 21; "St. Andrew's Ambulance Association", Current Topics, Glasgow Medical Journal 70, no. 4 (October 1908), 296 (the Bradford committee); Eric G. Gerstenberg, John B. Gaylor and William C. Gunn, Ambulance Hand-Book: On the Principles of First-Aid to the Injured, 19th ed. (Glasgow: St Andrew's Ambulance Association, 1954), 3; George T. Beatson, Ambulance Hand-Book on the Principles of First-Aid to the Injured, 20th impression (Glasgow: St Andrew's Ambulance Association, 1914), 3 to 4, with the preface to the first edition dated Glasgow, September 1891, and the preface to the third edition, December 1893, recording that no change had been made in the subject matter. The book, which I have read in the Wellcome Collection's digitised copy, nowhere refers to the agreement of 1908. ↑
24. J. Scott Riddell, A Manual of Ambulance (London: Charles Griffin and Company, 1894), title page and 187 to 196 (chapter XVI, "Organisation and Management of Ambulance Classes", giving the syllabuses of the St John, St Andrew's and Aberdeen Associations, with the Aberdeen Association's secretary, William Smith, advocate, at 194). The sixth edition (London: Charles Griffin and Company, 1913) drops the Aberdeen Association from the title page and the chapter, styles Riddell an Honorary Associate of the Order of St John, and quotes at 200 the Scottish Red Cross scheme under which St Andrew's gave the preliminary training to Voluntary Aid Detachments. Wynter and Ewen, "Choreographing Urban Ambulance", 95 n. 76, record the title page of 1894. I have read the editions of 1894, 1897 and 1913 in the digitised copies on the Internet Archive. ↑
25. Glasgow Museums, "St Andrew's Ambulance Association"; St Andrew's First Aid, "Our History"; Lothian Health Services Archive, GD1/126, administrative history; "The St. Andrew's Association's Work", The Hospital 68, no. 1788 (11 September 1920), 601; The Lancet 172, no. 4444 (31 October 1908), 1332 (7,620 calls on the wagons in the year, 5,114 of them in Glasgow, against 372 in 1883; the motor ambulance presented two years earlier had run 8,924 miles). ↑
26. Wynter and Ewen, "Choreographing Urban Ambulance", 89 to 90, citing Glasgow City Archives, E2/1/2/2, 6 and 7. ↑
27. "Annotations: An Echo of the War", The Hospital 49, no. 1267 (5 November 1910), 155. The transfer was carried through by Provisional Order under the Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act 1899, confirmed as the St Andrew's Ambulance Association Order Confirmation Act 1911 (1 & 2 Geo. V, c. xxxiii). The notice of the application in the Edinburgh Gazette of 11 November 1910, 1172 to 1173, put the Red Cross Fund at £9,565 14s. 6d. "or thereabouts", of which £3,500 was to be kept back by the Association, and sought power to amend the Charter of 1899. ↑
28. "New Ambulance Magazine", Current Topics, Glasgow Medical Journal 66, no. 2 (August 1906), 116; "St. Andrew's Ambulance Association", Current Topics, Glasgow Medical Journal 66, no. 6 (December 1906), 433. The editor was Dr R. T. Halliday. ↑
29. "St. Andrew's Ambulance Association: Resignation of Lord Breadalbane", Current Topics, Glasgow Medical Journal 67, no. 3 (March 1907), 214 to 215 (Breadalbane "a member of the Order of St. John, and ... chairman of the St. John Ambulance Association"); Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 3 (Breadalbane as Director of the Ambulance Department and Chairman of Committee) and 29 to 30 (admissions to the Roll); British Medical Journal 2 (18 December 1909), 1777 (Beatson's resignation of the chairmanship "after completing ten years' service"). The Journal of December 1907, 68, no. 6, 511, styles him President of the Council; the British Medical Journal of December 1909 speaks of the chairmanship of its Council. The Association's Secretary, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry John Barnes, was himself admitted to the Order as an Esquire on 8 December 1908: London Gazette, 11 December 1908, 9465. ↑
30. Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 28 to 29, under the marginal heading "St. Andrew's Ambulance Association". ↑
31. "St. Andrew's Ambulance Association", Current Topics, Glasgow Medical Journal 70, no. 4 (October 1908), 296. ↑
32. Lothian Health Services Archive, GD1/126, administrative history. The deposit itself consists of two annual reports of 2005 to 2006; the administrative history is the archivist's narrative, not a catalogued instrument. St Andrew's First Aid, "Our History", formerly carried the same wording. ↑
33. Priory of Scotland, Handbook, 5; St John Scotland, "75 years of service"; Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 21. ↑
34. Gerstenberg, Gaylor and Gunn, Ambulance Hand-Book, 3 (chapter I, "Introduction"). The book was first published in September 1933 to replace Beatson's handbook, and the edition of 1954, the nineteenth, lists its predecessors on the verso of the title page and reprints the original preface, dated Glasgow, August 1933. That preface (iii to iv) records the authors' indebtedness to the Order of St John and the St John Ambulance Association for leave to reprint Major F. H. Humphreys's Protection of the Civil Population in Chemical Warfare, which stands as Appendix II (392 and following) "reprinted by the kind permission of the St. John Ambulance Association", and pays tribute to "the late Sir George Thomas Beatson, whose classical Ambulance Handbook has been our guide and inspiration". The printers were Robert MacLehose and Company. Whether the passage on the agreement of 1908 stood in the same words in 1933 I have not been able to check against the first edition, since the preface is the only part of the text which the edition of 1954 dates. I have read the book in the Internet Archive's lending copy. ↑
35. "St. Andrew's Ambulance Association: Resignation of Lord Breadalbane", Current Topics, Glasgow Medical Journal 67, no. 3 (March 1907), 214 to 215, printing Breadalbane's letter to Lieutenant-Colonel H. J. Barnes, Secretary, of 9 February 1907, and the Journal's comment; "Scotland: The St. Andrew's Ambulance Association", The Lancet 169 (13 April 1907), 1044 to 1045, from the journal's own correspondent, read in the Internet Archive's digitised copy. The correspondent's figures for the Association in 1907 were a corps of 2,500 officers and men, upwards of 400 classes a year, more than 72,000 certificates in first aid, over 20,000 medallions and 42 centres, with the whole ambulance work of Glasgow done by its wagons. ↑
36. Museum of the Order of St John, STJ/OSJ/7/1, "Supplemental Charter (dated the 22nd May, 1907)"; "St. Andrew's Ambulance Association", Glasgow Medical Journal 70, no. 4 (October 1908), 296. Blythswood had died by October 1908. The approach to the Association's council was reported, from the Bradford Telegraph, in First Aid: The Independent Journal for the Ambulance and Fire Services 14, no. 163 (January 1908), 104, which I have read in the Museum of the Order of St John's digitised volume for 1908 to 1909 and cite hereafter as First Aid. ↑
37. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 21. ↑
38. Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 29. ↑
39. Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 29, and Appendix B, 72 to 75. Appendix C, the local reports from centres for 1908, contains no Scottish centre. ↑
40. Bedford and Holbeche, Order of the Hospital of St. John, 202 to 204 (Appendix E, "Digest of the Charter"); Royal Charter of 1955, recitals; Museum of the Order of St John, STJ/OSJ/8/1/4, "Supplemental Charter February 1906" (petition, draft charter and Perrott and Freshfield correspondence), and STJ/OSJ/7/1, "Supplemental Charter (dated the 22nd May, 1907) and Regulations or Bye-Laws of General Application"; London Gazette, 25 October 1927, 6695 (Charter of 12 June 1926); Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 29; Glasgow Medical Journal 67, no. 3 (March 1907), 214. The Order's own account of the charter is in Order of St John, Report of the Chapter-General of the Grand Priory of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in England: Report for 1907 (London: Charles Cull and Son, [1908]), xvii, under the heading "Supplemental Charter", which I have read in the Museum's digitised copy and cite hereafter as Report for 1907. The Privy Council Office's file on the charter is The National Archives, PC 8/639, and the Home Office's, HO 45/16575. The 1888 Statutes and the texts of the 1907 and 1926 charters are not digitised. ↑
41. Kingsley, Order of St. John of Jerusalem, 147 and n., in the chapter "The English Order and its Work". The description of the agreement as one between the two executive committees is in First Aid 15, no. 171 (September 1908), 33; the Board of Trade's words are in Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. 185, col. 531 (3 March 1908). ↑
42. Macpherson, Medical Services: General History, 1:26 to 27. ↑
43. Macpherson, Medical Services, 1:30 (Reserve sanctioned from 1 April 1908; 2,200 enrolled from the St John Brigade and 82 from St Andrew's by 1911) and 1:55 (strengths on 10 August 1914, when the St Andrew's reserve reported for duty 113 strong); Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 11 ("Military Home Hospitals Reserve", Army Orders of 4 August 1908). ↑
44. "The St. Andrew's Ambulance Association", British Medical Journal 2 (21 November 1908), 1594, printing the War Office circular memorandum of 29 October 1908, whose object was "that, while each organization maintains its own individuality, mutual aid and support can be rendered by one to the other". Under it St Andrew's centres were to steer certificated pupils who could not join the Association's Corps towards the Territorial medical units, and the units were to send their time-expired men to the Corps. ↑
45. Macpherson, Medical Services, 1:31 to 32; British Red Cross Museum and Archives, "Voluntary Aid Scheme"; "Scottish Branch of British Red Cross Society", British Medical Journal 2 (27 November 1909), 1573; "The St. Andrew's Ambulance Association", British Medical Journal 2 (18 December 1909), 1777; "Red Cross Organization", British Medical Journal 2 (25 December 1909), 1819 to 1821 (Beatson "has resigned the chairmanship of St. Andrew's Ambulance Association, which he has held for the past ten years, in order to devote his energies to this development of Red Cross work"; preliminary training by St Andrew's, special training by the Red Cross). ↑
46. Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. 184, cols 205 to 206 (13 February 1908, "First Aid Certificates for Masters and Mates") and col. 981 (20 February 1908, "Master's First Aid Certificates"); vol. 185, cols 24 to 25 (27 February 1908, "Ambulance Certificates for Scottish Master Mariners and Mates", written answers), cols 531 to 532 (3 March 1908, "St. John Ambulance Association: Seamen's Classes") and col. 879 (5 March 1908, "St. John's Ambulance Lectures"). The questioner was William Anstruther-Gray, Member for St Andrews Burghs. Hudson Kearley, Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, answered on every occasion but 3 March, when Lloyd George answered as President and added that St Andrew's had "agreed to accept instruction in first aid given on board ship". The exchanges of 13 and 20 February, 27 February and 5 March were reported in The Lancet 171 (1908), 608, 686, 759 and 826. The Board's comparison was of four of five two-hour lectures under St John against eight of twelve lectures of an hour and a half under St Andrew's, at 12s. 6d. to 17s. 6d. against a guinea. The Order's arrangement with the Marine Department is announced in Order of St John, Report for 1907, xviii. The Board's acceptance of St Andrew's certificates in 1901 is the subject of The National Archives, MT 9/674/M5523/01, "First Aid. Acceptance of Certificates of the St. Andrew's Ambulance Society". ↑
47. "St. Andrew's Ambulance Association: Twenty-Sixth Annual Report", Current Topics, Glasgow Medical Journal 73, no. 1 (January 1910), 42 to 43. The seamen were certificated at Glasgow, Greenock, Leith, Dundee and Aberdeen. ↑
48. Royal Charter of 1955, recitals; British Red Cross Museum and Archives, "Voluntary Aid Scheme"; "The St. John Ambulance Association and the Voluntary Aid Detachments", The Hospital 49 (10 December 1910), 318 to 319 ("forty-seven Territorial County Associations in England and Wales, and all of those in Scotland, have asked the Red Cross County Committees to raise the detachments"); "An Echo of the War", The Hospital, 5 November 1910, 155. The Order's own Territorial Branch was framed for "the organisation of Voluntary Aid Detachments in England and Wales": Order of St John, Report of the Chapter-General: Report for 1909 (London: Charles Cull and Son, [1910]), Association report, 14 to 15, read in the Museum's digitised copy. The recommendation of the Royal Commission on Mines is quoted from its report at 26 to 27 of the same. The Dundee hand-over and the enrolments are reported in First Aid 15 (August 1908), 22 to 23; the editorial "The Ambulance Certificate" is in First Aid 15, no. 171 (September 1908), 33 to 34, with a further note under "Brevities" at 40 to 41, where the settlement is called "an honorable understanding" between "the recognised English and Scotch Ambulance Associations". The journal's notice of the Order's report for 1908, First Aid (August 1909), 22, records the Order's regret that in withdrawing from Scotland it would lose "the co-operation of the valued and able colleagues at its Scottish centres and branches". ↑
49. Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 29. ↑
50. "The St. Andrew's Association's Work", The Hospital 68, no. 1788 (11 September 1920), 601. ↑
51. "The St. Andrew's Association's Work", The Hospital, 11 September 1920, 601; Lothian Health Services Archive, GD1/126, administrative history; St Andrew's First Aid, "Our History". ↑
52. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 21, 29; Order of St John, Report for 1947, 119 (extract from the first report of the Priory of Scotland, under "Subordinate Establishments of the Order"). A Marquess of Bute had been the first President of St Andrew's in 1882. ↑
53. Order of St John, The Grand Priory in the British Realm of the Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem: Report of the Chapter-General for the Year Ended 31st December, 1946 (London: Chancery of the Order, [1947]), 55 to 57, "The Committee of the Order for Scottish Affairs" (Colonel Sir Colin MacRae of Feoirlinn chairman; the Glasgow depot committee under Lieutenant-Colonel Victor D. Warren; Major J. Forrest Hamilton's scheme for the Foundation Hospital). Cargill Thompson served the Committee as treasurer and secretary and Forrest Hamilton as Hospitaller. The members' meeting of May 1945 was held at the North British Hotel. The depots of 1946 were at Glasgow, in Lanarkshire, at Inverailort and in Skye, and the travelling clinic, for eye, nose, throat and ear work, was a Joint War Organisation ambulance rebuilt for the purpose. Cited hereafter as Order of St John, Report for 1946. I have read the Reports for 1946 and 1947 in the Museum of the Order of St John's digitised copies. ↑
54. Order of St John, Report of the Chapter-General for the Year Ended 31st December, 1947 (London: Chancery of the Order, [1948]), 24 to 25, "The Instrument of Erection of the Priory of Torphichen" (so headed; the instrument itself erects "the Priory of Scotland"), signed by Sir Edwin King as Chancellor. The instrument gives the Priory precedence over every other subordinate establishment of the Order "in respect of the date of the original establishment in the reign of King David I". Cited hereafter as Order of St John, Report for 1947. ↑
55. Order of St John, Report for 1947, 20 to 21, "The Revival of the Order of St. John in Scotland"; Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 21, 29. The Lyon Clerk read the Lord Lyon's grant of arms at the installation, and the Priory Sword was the one made by Wilkinson for the installation of the Prince of Wales as Grand Prior on 18 July 1888. The installation is on newsreel: Pathé News, issue 47/52, released 30 June 1947, "Knights of St John come back to Scotland" (Learning on Screen, News on Screen, story 101840). ↑
56. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 22. Twenty medical comfort depots were opened across Scotland in 1947 and eleven more in 1948, and the Aberdeen nursing home of 1949 had a nurses' residence. ↑
57. Order of St John, Report for 1947, 22 to 24. ↑
58. Order of St John, Report for 1908, Association report, 29 to 30. ↑
59. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 22 to 25. ↑
60. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 26; Priory of Scotland, Handbook, 5. ↑
61. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", 27. ↑
62. Priory of Scotland, Handbook, 5. ↑
63. Museum of the Order of St John, "The History of the First Aid Manual". ↑
64. Waller, "St John without the Ambulance", St John History 12 (2012), 15 (biographical note). ↑
65. Priory in the United States of America of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, "History" and "Chivalry", saintjohn.org. ↑
66. An Act to Incorporate the American National Red Cross, 5 January 1905, 33 Stat. 599. ↑
67. Museum of the Order of St John, STJ/SJAA/9/3/1, Edinburgh Centre letter book, 19 October 1906 to 26 May 1908, as described in the Museum's online catalogue; STJ/OSJ/1/5/1, minutes of the Ambulance Committee, 1877 to 1941; STJ/OSJ/1/1/2, minutes of Chapter-General, 1871 to 1940; STJ/OSJ/8/4, the Secretary's copy letter books, of which volumes 8 and 9 run from August 1905 to June 1908; STJ/OSJ/11/1, agreements, 1892 to 1940, three items, none of them Scottish. The National Archives, PC 8/639, Privy Council Office, "Charter: Supplemental charter: Order of St John", 1906, with the Council's Register for 30 April to 6 July 1907 at PC 2/397 and the Home Office's file on the Order's charters at HO 45/16575. National Register of Archives for Scotland, NRAS 1394, St Andrew's Ambulance Association, Glasgow, 1881 to 1963, access restricted. A letter book of the Association's Lochaber committee, 1904 to 1919, is at the Highland Archive Centre, CL/B/40/6. None of these has been cited in any account of the agreement. ↑
68. Beatson, "Formation and Early Days", 32; Lothian Health Services Archive, GD1/126, collection summary. ↑

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Craig Paterson, OStJ, PhD, FSAScot, AFRHistS