On 26 October 1914, the Australian Voluntary Hospital moved to Wimereux, where it established a 200-bed hospital.
At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he was commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps and served at the Anglo-American Hospital at Wimereux in France from 1914 to 1915, the Belgian field hospital at Veurne in 1915, and then in Egypt.
Subsequently they moved, in 1882, to the Château d'Honvault on a hill between Wimereux and Boulogne.
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Smythe and his wife Alice made frequent trips to France and eventually settled in Normandy in 1879, in an old Napoleonic fortress on the coast at Wimereux - until the building was inundated by the sea.
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He was also partly educated in France and spent holidays there at Wimereux in Normandy with his stepfather William Morrison Wyllie and family.
It was used by Guglielmo Marconi during his work on radio waves, receiving the first ship-to-shore message from the East Goodwin lightship, the first ship-to-shore distress message (when a steamship ran into the same lightship, and the lighthouse relayed the message up the coast to the Walmer lifeboat), and the first international transmission (from Wimereux, France, in 1899).
He caught diphtheria and was sent back to England to recover, following which he spent the remainder of the war as a medical officer at ‘‘No. 8 Stationary Hospital’’ at Wimereux in northern France.
Wimereux |
Idotea balthica has a broad geographical distribution, having been recorded from the Belgian Exclusive Economic Zone, Great Britain, Cobscook Bay, Dutch Exclusive Economic Zone, European waters, Greek Exclusive Economic Zone, Gulf of Maine, Knokke, North West Atlantic, Red Sea, Voordelta, West Coast of Norway, Wimereux and the Black Sea.