Mairi Lambert Gooden Chisholm of Chisholm, MM, OStJ (26 February 1896 – 22 August 1981), known as Mairi Chisholm, was a Scottish nurse and ambulance driver in the First World War. She, together with her friend Elsie Knocker, won numerous medals for bravery and for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers on the Western Front in Belgium. Dubbed "The Madonnas of Pervyse" by the press the two were among the most photographed women of the war. Early life Chisholm was born on 26 February 1896 in Buckinghamshire to Captain Roderick Gooden-Chisholm, Chief of Clan Chisholm, and Margaret Fraser. Her family was independently wealthy and owned a plantation in Trinidad. As a teen, she witnessed her older brother, Uailean, who owned a Royal Enfield 425cc motorcycle, competing at rallies and at the Bournemouth speed trials. Around this time, and against his wife's wishes, her father bought her a Douglas motorbike. Chisholm spent hours in the family stables stripping down the bikes and repairing them. She was just 18 years old when, while roaring round the Hampshire and Dorset lanes, she met thirty-year-old Elsie Knocker, a divorcee and mother of a young son. They became fast friends and soon began competing in motorcycle and sidecar trials together. World War I When war was declared in 1914, Knocker wrote to Chisholm that there was "work to be done", and suggested they go to London to become dispatch riders for the Women's Emergency Corps. Chisholm rode her motorbike all the way from Dorset to the capital. It was while acting as a courier in this way that she was spotted making hairpin corners in the city by a Dr. Hector Munro. Munro was setting up a Flying Ambulance Corps to help the Belgians who had been caught unawares by the German invasion and invited her to join his team, as she describes in a June 1976 interview: “[Munro] was deeply impressed with my ability to ride through the traffic. He traced me to the Women's Emergency Corps and... said, 'Would you like to go out to Flanders' and I said 'Yes, I'd love to'." Both she and Knocker ended up in Belgium as part of the corps which included Dorothie Feilding and May Sinclair. Initially quartered at Ghent, the unit relocated to Veurne at the end of October where the women worked tirelessly, picking up wounded soldiers mid-way from the front and transporting