Special Evensong remembers Norfolk nurse Edith Cavell

Norfolk Nurse and First World War heroine Edith Cavell was remembered at a special Evensong service at Norwich Cathedral on Wednesday 15 May to mark the anniversary of her burial.

Nurse Cavell’s story of self-sacrifice has inspired people around the world and her final resting place is at Norwich Cathedral.

The service sung by Norwich Cathedral Choir on Wednesday 15 May included a procession to Nurse Cavell’s grave where the hymn Abide with me was sung, just as it had been at Nurse Cavell’s funeral at Westminster Abbey on 15 May 1919 before her final journey back to Norfolk.

Born in Swardeston in 1865, she become a pioneer of professional nursing training in Brussels and nursed soldiers from both sides during the war in occupied Belgium. For nine months she worked with the Belgian underground resistance to shelter over 200 Allied soldiers, helping them escape to neutral Holland. For this she was shot by German soldiers on 12 October 1915 and the night before her execution, she famously said: “Standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”

Nurse Cavell’s body was returned to England in May 1919 and, following a funeral in Westminster Abbey on 15 May 1919, her body was brought home to Norfolk and laid to rest at Life’s Green, next to the Cathedral’s St Saviour’s Chapel which was built as a memorial to Norfolk’s fallen in the First World War.