Elsie Cameron Corbett

Elsie Cameron Corbett (1893 –1977) was a volunteer ambulance driver and major donor to the World War One Scottish Women's Hospital for Foreign Service in Serbia, She was a prisoner of war in 1916 and won medals from the Serbian and British governments. She was also a JP, a leading suffragist, temperance supporter, folklorist and diarist. Family and early life The Honourable Elsie Cameron Corbett was born in Chelsea, London on 4 February 1893. She was the only daughter of Archibald Corbett, 1st Baron Rowallan, Scots philanthropist and politician, builder and landowner, and her mother, Alice Polson, was the daughter of the founder of ‘Brown and Polson’ cornflour, also came for a liberal and philanthropic family. Her parents were married in September 1887 at Skermorlie near Gourock, a year later they moved to Chelsea where in 1893, their first child Elsie was born. At eight months old, Elsie Corbett had appeared at a political rally with her parents, which made the news. Elsie Corbett was at home in 26 Hans Place, Chelsea for the 1901 census. Her mother, Alice died of septicaemia in 1902 when her daughter was nine years old, and she was educated at home by a governess and later went to be educated privately in Brussels. Elsie Corbett was to inherit part of her maternal grandmother's (Mary Polson) estate in 1911, after a gift of £10,000 had already been made to the Glasgow Samaritan Hospital for building the 'Alice Mary Corbett Nursing Home' in 1902. She had two younger brothers: Thomas Godfrey Polson Corbett (19 December 1895 – 30 November 1977), who would inherit the Rowallan title, although Elsie was the eldest, and Arthur Cameron Corbett (8 March 1898 – 4 November 1916), who was killed in action at the age of eighteen, in World War I.