UPON the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Dr Elsie Maud Inglis founded the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH) for Foreign Service.

The SWH recruited women from Scotland and across the British Empire and is best known for operating hospital units in France and Serbia which cared for wounded soldiers and civilians.

A lesser-known chapter in the history of the SWH was its medical work in the Russian Empire and its eye-witness accounts of the Russian Revolution in 1917 which are held by Glasgow City Archives.

READ MORE: Secrets of Glasgow's first 'garden cemetery' revealed

In July 1916 the Serbian Government asked Dr Inglis if the SWH could supply medical units for the Serbian Division of the Russian Army. Overseen by Dr Inglis, the Russia Unit of the SWH was made up of 75 women and sailed from Liverpool to Archangelsk on August 29, 1916 and on to Odessa, where they were hosted at the opera by Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, cousin of Tsar Nicholas II. The Unit was then attached to the Serbian Division in Romania and established hospitals for Serbian and Russian soldiers.

Dr Inglis described how the hospitals were so close to the frontline that ‘enemy aeroplanes visited daily, dealing death and destruction everywhere’. Following the Bulgarian invasion of Romania in September 1916, the Unit retreated across the Danube to the Russian town of Reni. The situation for the Unit became increasingly difficult following the February Revolution which overthrew Russia’s Romanov dynasty.

Members of the Unit were initially optimistic: socialite turned nurse Yvonne Fitzroy thought it would boost Russian morale and Mary Lee Milne, a cook from Selkirk, even attended a revolutionary meeting. Soon, however, the nurse Agnes Murphy was arrested as a German spy and SWH personnel were kept prisoner at bayonet point by revolutionary soldiers. Only with the aid of Sister Kolesnikov, the Russian nurse and interpreter attached to the Unit, were SWH staff released. Yvonne Fitzroy anxiously noted growing support for the Bolsheviks among Russian soldiers and feared that ‘wholesale mutiny and desertion’ was possible. The Unit’s position was further complicated as Dr Inglis began to show signs of failing health and necessary medical supplies were scarce.

READ MORE: Amazing photos show what Drumchapel looked like in the 50s

As the political situation deteriorated, Dr Inglis’s priority was to get the Unit and the Serbian Division out of Russia safely. Both eventually left Russia from Archangelsk on November 14, 1917, a week after the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd. Dr Inglis died the day after she returned to Britain, having achieved her goal of escorting her Unit and the Serbians to safety. The Russia Unit was renamed the Elsie Inglis Unit in her memory and established hospitals in Skopje and Sarajevo.