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110,000 people have signed a petition calling for Edith Cavell to be remembered by the Royal Mint - the nurse was shot for treason by Germany, despite treating German soldiers
Nurses and family of Edith Cavell delivering a 110,000 strong petition at HM Treasury calling for her to be commemorated on a £2 coin
The government is considering using a World War One heroine with links to Salford for a design of a new £2 coin.
Edith Cavell, who helped 200 Allied troops escape from occupied Belgium, was shot for treason by a German firing squad in 1915.
Now her relatives have delivered a 110,000-name petition to the Treasury after it was announced former war secretary, Lord Kitchener would feature on a coin.
Cavell’s name appears alongside those from the Salford Pals Regiment who fell during the First World War on a memorial in the grounds of the Sacred Trinity Church in Chapel Street.
A road, Cavell Way, in Pendleton, is also named after her.
In 1906 she took up a three-month post at the Manchester and Salford Sick Poor Private Nursing Institution - one of the Queen’s District Nursing Homes - which later became Salford Royal Hospital. It is believed she worshipped at Sacred Trinity.She became matron and extended her stay. At the outbreak of the First World War she was working in Brussels, where she had been appointed matron of a pioneering training school for nurses.
She heard of the German invasion of Belgium while visiting relatives in the UK, but she could not be persuaded to stay in England. She returned to Brussels, where her clinic and nursing school was taken over as a Red Cross hospital.
She treated soldiers from Germany and Belgium, encouraging others that their duty of care was to all wounded – regardless of nationality.
By September 1914, Belgium was under German occupation and Cavell was asked to help two wounded British soldiers trapped behind German lines by smuggling them out into the neutral Holland.
She eventually helped more than 200 British, French and Belgian soldiers to escape.
In 1915, she was arrested by the German authorities, charged with treason and sentenced to death. Despite international outcry, Cavell, 49, was executed in October 1915.
Barnsley MP, Dan Jarvis, made the coin request at Treasury questions in the Commons.
Chancellor, George Osborne, is to take it up the Royal Mint’s advisory committee.
Coins are due to be issued over the next five years to mark the Great War.
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