Chemistry Race
Five of our top Chemistry students; Ethan Abbate, Scarlett Basquil, Leo Dhunnoockchand, Nathan Kuhn and Adrianne Yu-Mason were selected to attend the prestigious Chemistry Race held at the world-renowned University of Cambridge.
This Chemistry Race is a new chemistry competition in the UK for teams of 3-5 Sixth Form students organised by students at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. The race originated as a Czech competition Chemiklání at the University of Pardubice in 2015.
The teams race against each other in solving chemistry problems; whoever gets the most points within the time limit wins! Our Year 12 students competed against Year 13 students and attained a respectable position on the leader board.
Dr Numbere, Chemistry Department
During the first weekend of half-term, a team of Sixth Form students, including myself, went to the University of Cambridge to take part in the annual Chemistry Race that was also taking place in Oxford as well. It was very exciting being in the lecture halls competing against other teams who were just as passionate about Chemistry - and winning! The BGS team worked hard to compete as many questions as possible in the two-hour time limit, helping each other along the way. And although we didn’t win, we had a fantastic time solving questions and having fun together. Overall, it was an amazing experience.
Scarlett Basquil, Year 12
During the half-term holidays, I, alongside four other Year 12 students, had the privilege of attending the Chemistry Race in Cambridge where we would compete against around 60 teams of 4–5 people. The venue for the competition was in a science lecture room, which really gave me an insight into what it is like doing a science course at Cambridge University. The competition lasted two hours in which we had to answer as many questions as possible, but had to get a question correct in order to move on to the next one, which certainly was a challenge despite our combined knowledge of chemistry. All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience and I especially appreciated being able to meet people from other schools who were also looking to further their knowledge of science. I hope that BGS will get to compete in the Chemistry Race next year as it is a superb opportunity for any keen chemist.
Nathan Kuhn, Year 12
The BGS Young Enterprise team has been working hard to create our business product. Our dedicated team of young innovators have developed high-quality candles. However, our candles are not like any other candles…
The Young Enterprise team has been busy creating more candles for their upcoming market stalls. If you’re in the area, pop in and see them at Old Spitalfields market on Tuesday 27th February or Greenwich Market on Wednesday 13th March.
The team has been lucky enough to benefit from the guidance of their business advisor, ex-BGS student Henry Wong. Henry was once the Managing Director of a Young Enterprise team here and is now a Developed Markets Equity Analyst at HSBC. He has been meeting with the team on a regular basis to get updates, help with goal setting and guide the team. Henry is pictured below with some of the team at one of their team meetings.
Women were not allowed in military service at this time and their contributions and experiences in the conflict, whether in terms of working in munitions factories, helping wounded soldiers or taking an active part in other aspects of war work, has often been neglected.
Born in 1893, Vera Brittain in Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire would have a distinguished career as a writer and feminist during the 20th century, with her ideas and beliefs being very much shaped by the experiences she had as a young woman during World War I which she wrote about in “Testament of Youth”.
In 1915, Vera took the decision to delay her studies to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, which was disapproved of by her parents in the same way as her desire to go to university had been and, over the course of the next three years, she served in hospitals in Buxton, London, Malta, and France. Part of the reason for Vera deciding to leave Oxford and join the VAD was the fact that her younger brother Edward had enlisted in the armed forces along with his friends from school, Roland Leighton (to whom Vera became engaged), Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, all of whom she developed close emotional ties.
Tragically, in December 1915, Roland Leighton was killed by snipers on the Western Front while attempting to repair barbed wire on the front line in France and, as a strategy of dealing with her grief, Vera concentrated on her work as a nurse and helping wounded soldiers, especially as her brother Edward was going to France. Over the course of 1916, Vera kept in touch with her brother Edward, who was injured at the Battle of the Somme, and Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, who were also injured out of the conflict, before Thurlow died in military action in April 1917 and Richardson as a result of his injuries in June of the same year.
During all of this time, Vera continued to serve with the VAD, being stationed in France and Malta, keeping in touch with brother Edward on a regular basis through letters, particularly as he was moved from the Western Front in France after the battle of Ypres (Passchendaele), to the Italian Front. In June 1918, Edward Brittain led his men on a counterattack against enemy Austrian forces on the front line after suffering heavy bombardment, but was shot through the head by a sniper & died instantaneously after having survived so many other attacks in the war.
As a result of her experiences as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment & the deaths of her brother, fiancé and two close associates (Edward, Roland, Victor, and Geoffrey), Vera became a committed pacifist following the end of the war in 1918, writing up her experiences of this time in “Testament of Youth”. After the war, Vera returned to Oxford to complete her studies and, although she switched from English Literature to History, she went on to become an acclaimed writer, although the poem “Perhaps” which she wrote following the death of Roland Leighton in 1915 & dedicated to him remains a powerful epitaph to all loss in war.
Although Brittain did get married and have children during the 1920s, it is widely believed that the tragedies of the deaths of Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow remained with her all her life until her death in 1970, especially the death of Roland Leighton as indicated in “Perhaps”.
Eliza “Elsie” Inglis was born in 1864 in India, which at the time formed part of the British Empire, where her father was a magistrate who worked for the Indian Civil Service and, over the course of her life, would qualify as a doctor and become a medical surgeon, both of which were highly unusual for women at this time.
Although Elsie was over 50 by the time the conflict started, this would be the part of her life to which she would make the greatest contribution, setting up the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service Commission to provide medical support for the British Armed Forces fighting in Europe. In spite of considerable opposition and a lack of financial support from the British authorities, Inglis was able to send 14 all-female teams of doctors, nurses and technical support teams to Belgium, France, Serbia and Russia, which was very remarkable after originally being told “my good lady go home and sit still”.
Elsie herself went to support the war on the Serbian Front in Southeastern Europe, working to improve hygiene amongst the soldiers, resulting in outbreaks of typhus and other epidemics being reduced significantly, although she was captured by German and Austrian forces and repatriated to Britain in 1916. The experiences Elsie faced in Serbia did not deter her from entering conflict zones and, in the same year, headed for the Russian Front in Eastern Europe and set up a hospital at Braila in Romania in which just 7 doctors, including herself, came to be responsible for treating 11,000 wounded soldiers and sailors.
In 1917 Elsie was forced to return to Britain, having contracted bowel cancer and died shortly after arriving back in the country, although by this time her efforts in the war had been recognised by politicians in Britain and Serbia and in the latter she became the first woman to hold the Serbian Order of the White Eagle. After the death of Inglis in 1917 a memorial fountain was constructed in the town of Mladenovac in Serbia where her hospital had been set up during World War I and had helped save the lives of many Serbian soldiers fighting for the Allies against Germany and Austria in the conflict.
After she had completed her formal education at school, Flora trained with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), which was founded in 1907 as an all-women mounted paramilitary organisation in which its members learned first aid as well as horsemanship, together with military aspects such as signalling and drill. In 1910, Flora left the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry and helped establish a new organisation called the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps with its purpose being to assist soldiers in war zones, and in 1912 it saw service in Bulgaria and Serbia during the First Balkan War.
With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Flora volunteered to become a nurse, but she was rejected because of a lack of qualifications and instead joined a St John Ambulance unit and left Britain for Serbia on 12th August with 36 women to try and assist the crisis which had developed in this part of the war. On arriving at Kragujevac in Serbia, which was a base for the Serbian army which was attempting to prevent the Austrian army from conquering the country, Flora joined the Serbian Red Cross and became a nurse and ambulance driver providing medical assistance to injured soldiers in the conflict.
Inspired by some of the Serbian soldiers whom she met, it was suggested to her by them that she was wasted as a nurse and that she should enlist as a soldier and during the course of 1915 she attempted to get to the front line and eventually joined the ambulance of the Second Serbian Regiment at Babuna Pass. Following a Serbian retreat through Albania as a result of an Austrian offensive, all the other ambulance staff either fled or were killed and, as Flora could no longer make herself useful as a nurse, she was enrolled as a private in the Serbian army and before long proved herself effective, being promoted to corporal.
In 1916, Flora was seriously wounded by a grenade during a Serbian attack after displaying considerable bravery for which she was rewarded with the Order of the Karadorde’s Star, which was the highest decoration of the Serbian military, and was promoted to the rank of sergeant major, receiving a number of medals. As Flora was unable to fight, she wrote her autobiography on her experiences and helped raise funds for the Serbian Army as well as running a hospital for injured Serbian soldiers, and after the war, a law was passed in Serbia making Flora Sandes the first female commissioned officer in the army.
After the war, Flora married a Russian émigré from the Revolution of 1917 and the couple lived in France for a time before returning to Serbia, which was now part of the new country of Yugoslavia, although after the death of her husband in 1941, Flora returned to live in Britain, where she died in 1956. Flora Sandes is unique in the sense that she remains the only British woman to officially serve as a soldier during the First World War, breaking all the rules and protocols of the time regarding the role of women in society and in conflict and successfully challenging the British government, which did not want her to serve.
Harold Gillies:
It was during his time in France that Gillies was introduced to the ever-increasing severity of facial wounds sustained by those fighting in the War: an increase indubitably a result of the emergence of new forms of weaponry.
The Queen’s Hospital
Usually, most skin grafts involve taking a flap of skin elsewhere (known as a “Pedicle”) and wrapping it around the wound without severing the flap’s connection to the body. This traditional technique was successfully performed in 1917 on Walter Yeo (right), a naval officer who had lost both eyelids in 1916 at the Battle of Jutland.
