Her father was a coal merchant and a Justice of the Peace. Tanner trained as a nurse and, as an army reservist, was called up at the outbreak of war. Her wartime was spent in France, and she nursed in several hospitals, ambulance trains and hospital barges.
For some months in and she kept a diary. Her diary is a wonderful mixture of snippets of daily life and information about the War. Image: Beatrice Tanner right in uniform. From to , Tanner was a probationer and staff nurse at the Clinical Hospital in Manchester. She then moved to London to continue her training, working as a staff nurse at St Mary's hospital, Paddington. In she went to the nearby General Lying-In hospital for her midwifery training. By the end of the month she was nursing behind the front lines near Rouen, France.
She makes no mention of her emotions at the outbreak of war, only recording the practical steps she took to make herself ready. Above image: St. From the RCN archive, Ref. Background image: Britain at War with Germany newspaper headline. Getting to France was not smooth sailing. She went with 43 other nurses to Preston, where there was not enough accommodation.
The mobilised army were attempting to make their way to the front too. When Tanner and her fellow nurses finally left for France it was on a troop ship they shared with two cavalry regiments, the 11th Hussars and the 5th Dragoon Guards, and over 1, horses.
She does not complain about the conditions on board, except about the lack of food other than biscuits, so it seems sharing the ship with hundreds of horses was not as bad as could be expected. On 16 August Tanner reached France.
