Almeric Paget Massage Corps, 1917 (c)

Photograph, World War One, 1917 (c).

Almeric Paget, made 1st Baron Queenborough in 1918, was the grandson of the distinguished Field Marshal, Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey and Earl of Uxbridge, who fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Almeric, a businessman and politician, married the American heiress Pauline Payne Whitney in 1895. In 1914 Paget and his wife founded and financed the Almeric Paget Massage Corps, offering physiotherapy to wounded soldiers in military hospitals. In 1916 the expanding corps of masseuses was renamed the Almeric Paget Military Massage Corps and its activities enhanced with additional government money. The Corps was disbanded in 1919 when an official Military Massage Service was established.

From an album associated with the Military Convalescent Hospital, Woodcote Park, Epsom, 1917 (c).