Ann Mitchell Wishart was the third of nine children of John Wishart, a mechanical engineer, and his wife, Margaret Able Lundie. She was born on 24 May 1876 at 144 Caledonian Road in Glasgow but by 1881 was living with her family in Kilbrandon. Her father had found work with a slate company, however, ten years later he had returned to Glasgow where he was employed as a foreman at locomotive engineers. Ann, now aged 14, had left school and was working at home as a tambourer, which meant she was skilled at embroidering garments made of either fine cotton or muslin. By 1901 she had begun nursing and lived in Edinburgh before transferring to King’s College Hospital, London in 1904, where she completed her training in 1907.

In 1911 Ann lived in Hampstead, London and was employed as a sick nurse in the household of Alfred Edward Gostling, a veterinary surgeon from Norfolk. On 14 September 1914, she was called to the Territorial Force Nursing Service and assigned to No.4 London General Hospital which was at Ann’s old training hospital in Denmark Hill. Seven months later, and with her father’s health failing, Ann decided to resign from service and returned to Scotland to help nurse him. Her resignation was duly accepted, and she left on 4 May 1915. John died from chronic gastroenteritis a month later on 9 June. She eventually returned to London after the war and went back to nursing in 1923.

In 1939 Ann was working as a private nurse and continued to be listed in the registers of the Royal College of Nursing until 1943, when she retired. In 1949 Ann left London for Folkestone, Kent, where she eventually settled at 17 Christ Church Road. Ten years later on 10 December 1959, she died in Hythe aged 83. She never married and left her estate to her younger sister Maggie.

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