Katharine "Kate" Talcott Cooke, Childhood Home (1802-1937)

Katharine “Kate” Talcott Cooke served as a volunteer auxiliary helper at the American Hospital of Paris prior to and following official American combatant entry into the hostilities of the First World War. Over the course of three years, Cooke served roughly twenty-one months with the American Hospital in Neuilly, Paris, France, from April to October 1915 and from September 1916 to January 1918.

Born on 20 November 1889 in Norfolk, Virginia, Katharine Talcott Cooke was the daughter of Merritt Todd Cooke, Sr. and Mary Elizabeth Dickson. Named after her maternal grandmother, Katharine “Kate” Talcott Hale, Cooke primarily went by the shortened version of her first name, Kate. In her youth, she often spent her summers traveling in Europe with family and friends.

Following the outbreak of European hostilities during the First World War, Cooke volunteered to serve as a volunteer auxiliary helper with the American Hospital of Paris, a civilian hospital that had been organized and funded by influential and wealthy Americans for the care of wounded Allied soldiers from western front lines. Upon her arrival to France in April 1915, she would have been tasked with working in the linen rooms, kitchens, and laundries of the hospital as well as assisting medical staff when needed as they provided medical care to patients. As an upper-class societal debutante, Cooke was likely woefully unprepared for many of the duties that her new role demanded. Indeed, she often wrote to her mother about the “strain and disagreeable incidents” she faced during her service work. However, some of her complaints were not without merit. On many occasions, Cooke assisted medical staff in the operating room from eight in the evening until six the next morning; sometimes with only two hours rest from her dayshifts. In other words, the twenty-six-year-old frequently experienced strenuous sixteen-hour-workdays at the hospital. 

Upon her return home in November 1915, Cooke expressed to local newspapers that she would return to Paris in the spring if asked by the hospital. However, for almost a full year, Cooke primarily occupied her time as the newly elected president of the Equal Suffrage League of Norfolk. During her tenure as the league’s president, Cooke publicly campaigned with her sister, Elizabeth Aymer Cooke, and other prominent suffrage activists such as Lila Meade Valentine, for the right to vote for white Virginian women. 

In September 1916, newspapers reported Cooke would return to the American Hospital of Paris at “the urgent request of the head nurse.” Sailing for France on the SS Rochambeau, a French transatlantic ocean liner that regularly transported American citizens across the Atlantic during the war, Cooke indeed arrived in Paris that same month where she would remain for almost fifteen months. By all accounts, her services duties for the hospital largely remained the same, even after the American Expeditionary Forces took over the hospital on 20 July 1917 and designated the facility as American Red Cross Military Hospital, No. 1. Her letters home continued to disclose her “amusing” “bewildered” and sometimes “frustrating” interactions with the wounded patients (blessé), nurses, doctors and other auxiliaries. 

On 16 January 1918, Cooke returned to the United States from her service in France. It is unclear precisely why Cooke left the hospital at that time. However, her final letters strongly hint at an increasing state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion. In a letter to her mother, she details how “fearfully tiring” her work had become and that she would go “madly from one thing to another till [she] feels just like screaming.” She continued to write about “what a strain this work is” and states that while she felt “physically quite fit” her “mind is upset.” In another letter, Cooke expresses that she was “getting fearfully ill tempered” despite being actively told by the nursing staff that much of her work was “a pleasure of nursing” and that she “would get over it” if she would “stay long enough.” “I have my doubts” was her direct response. Whatever the case, Cooke had already served fifteen months by that time; longer than she had already planned as her passport application in August 1916 stated that she would return home within twelve months of that date. 

After the war, Cooke married Jules Pierre Lechaux in an intimate ceremony at her childhood home on Bute Street in Norfolk in August 1919. According to family lore, the pair met as Lechaux was convalescing from a war wound in Paris during Cooke’s service with the American Hospital. After their nuptials, the couple made their home in Le Havre, France, and eventually had three children together. Cooke passed away on 16 July 1981 and is buried alongside her husband in her family’s plot in Elmwood Cemetery in Norfolk. 

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