GREIVE, Sophia Emma Magdalen 'Maud'

Biography:

When war broke out in 1914 Sophia Emma Magdalen Grieve, nee Law, saw an opportunity.

Sophia, known throughout her life as ‘Maud’, was born in Islington in May 1858, to a draper/businessman, who himself originated from Scotland, and Sophia.  

Maud was the eldest of four children.  When she was aged six, Maud’s father died.  Sophia was unable to care for her children and Maud, her two younger sisters, and younger brother were sent to live with their father’s family in Lewisham.  Aged twenty-one Maud finds herself independent: her guardian David Law having died, and left her a small inheritance.  For reasons unknown she travels to India circa 1880-1883.  It is whilst in India that she becomes the second wife of William Sommerville Grieve, the manager of a paper mill in that country.    

By 1906 the couple have returned from India and have settled in Buckinghamshire, in the village Chalfont St Giles, at a property called The Whins.  It is from here that Maud would contribute to the 1914-1918 war effort.  

By 1914 Maud had developed a passion for horticulture into a specialist knowledge of herb-growing, and the applications for herbs in the developing science of medicine.  

At the time many herbs were commonplace in medicines, antiseptics and painkillers: for example poppy seeds were the base ingredient for painkiller morphine, foxglove and belladonna were also common ingredients in the drugs of the day.  The outbreak of war in Europe naturally disrupted the supply of these herbs, in their raw and drug form.  Britain’s supply was from Europe and further East, so war with Germany created a barrier to their getting to the UK.  

As the conflict intensified, demand for drugs such as morphine for wounded soldiers in Europe and further afield intensified.  Maud Grieve was one of many herbalists, horticulturalists and pharmaceutical companies in Britain that set about making up this shortfall, so that drugs based on herbal components could be supplied.  

By 1916 Maud was running a School of Drug Growing at The Whins, with its garden of just over an acre.  Her pupils were well-to-do ladies who paid for their tutoring, as well as injured servicemen, such as Captain Albert Jacka, recipient of the Victoria Cross.  At the Whins herbs were grown and dried and sold on to pharmaceutical companies.  

Towards the end of the war, in 1918, Maud, reducing her growing and drying operations at The Whins, rented one of her drying sheds to war artists and brothers John and Paul Nash, as a studio.      

After the wear Maud continued her work as a herbalist, publishing A Modern Herbal in 1931 a colossal work of 888 pages.  

In 1939 Maud, now a widow, left Chalfont St Giles and was placed in Camberwell Asylum.  At the time of her death at age 83 in 1941 Maud had moved to a private care home in Royston, Hertfordshire.  

The main source for this biography was the books Maud Grieve: Now first let me tell you about that wonderful plant by Claire de Carle, published in 2017.