Britannic Voyage

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Edward Henry Penrose was born in 1853 at Portsea Island, Hampshire, into a dockyard family whose roots lay deep in the traditions of the Royal Navy. Educated locally, he apprenticed at 16 to a naval surgeon attached to the Portsmouth Hospital Ship Service, where he developed a fascination with tropical medicine and naval discipline.

At eighteen he entered the Royal Navy as a Surgeon’s Assistant (Probationer) and was posted to the cruiser HMS Thetis on the East Indies and China Stations. In 1873–74 he was temporarily transferred to the West Africa Station, where he assisted in treating fever and dysentery cases among sailors during the Ashantee Expedition. For this, he was awarded the Ashantee Medal (1873–74) with clasp “Coomassie.”

After leaving the Navy in 1875, Penrose completed his formal studies in Edinburgh, earning his M.B., Ch.B., and returned to Southampton, where he founded Penrose & Brother, Chemists & Surgeons with his younger brother Edwin. For nearly four decades, Dr. Penrose was a well-known and respected physician-apothecary, beloved for his calm bedside manner and immaculate sense of order.

By 1913 he had retired from regular practice but continued to teach first aid and sanitation classes. When war broke out the following year, the sixty-one-year-old doctor volunteered immediately with the British Red Cross Society (B.R.C.S.), bringing his lifelong professionalism and naval experience to the service of a new kind of war.

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The V.A.D. Commandant

Penrose was appointed Commandant (Officer Commanding) of the Hampshire Voluntary Aid Detachment HANTS/126, composed of male orderlies and female nursing volunteers. He trained his personnel with quiet authority, stressing cleanliness, punctuality, and calm under strain. His watchwords were “Order saves lives.”

His reputation for steadiness led the Red Cross Joint War Committee to assign him to sea service. Late in 1915, he was posted to the new hospital ship HMHS Britannic as Commandant in overall charge of all V.A.D. personnel aboard—both male orderlies and female nursing volunteers.