Mary Ellen Mugridge was originally born in Chile around 1877, and by 1911 had moved to Oswestry and was working as a nurse at the local Cottage Hospital. She may have moved from Chile due to the civil unrest in the country, with the government opening fire on protestors at the Meat Massacre in Santiago, the protestors where campaigning against the lack of rights and low pay. This may have caused her to emigrate and search for work in Britain.
The Cottage Hospital was a civilian hospital used during the First World War to treat minor injuries which couldn’t be treated on the Western Front. She remained working as a nurse until 1946 and was accepted onto the Nursing Register in 1924. She passed away in Oswestry in 1963.