I have written before on aspects of the First World War, such as the Le Hamel offensive and the superb leadership of Sir John Monash. If those rambles gave the impression that the war involved mere males, it was not intended. That war involved many countries and races worldwide, both males and females. However, for me, I have always greatly admired the contribution of millions of women to the war effort, a role often not feted. Women mainly contributed to the war effort not by direct combat, but through their support of the combatants: industrially, agriculturally, scientifically, commercially, and medically. In the medical sphere, the contribution made by Australian nurses was exceptional and should in my opinion receive greater attention and recognition in ANZAC ceremonies.
During the First World War some 3,000 nurses left Australia to contribute to the war effort. Thousands more served in convalescent wards in Australia to tend the wounded, crippled, gassed, diseased, shell-shocked, and otherwise broken soldiers who had survived the trauma of combat and were being equipped to return to civilian life, as far as that was feasible. Nurses were essential to the war effort.
Today, we simply cannot comprehend what the nurses serving overseas in the theatres of war would have experienced. They tended to gunshot and horrific shrapnel wounds, shell shock, trench foot, typhoid, cholera, malaria, influenza, plague, and many other medical conditions, all in a time with no antibiotics and limited anaesthesia.
That so many who suffered wounds in the War (some 43 per cent of those mobilised) and despite the conditions under which medical staff often served, it is indeed, a testament to the care by stretcher bearers, orderlies, nurses, and doctors that so many survived.
I write this note in memory of those nurses who served in the Great War and, parochially, have selected two Queensland nurses on whom to focus, as their varied experience, achievements and disappointments were shared by many. Both trained before the war at Ipswich General Hospital and practised in Queensland hospitals before enlisting in the AIF. One is Ruth Maughan Robson and the other her first cousin, Elsie Jane Pollock, both of whom were raised on farms at Mt Whitestone / Ma Ma Creek not far from Grantham and Gatton in the Lockyer Valley. Elsie Pollock is my great aunt, her eldest sister, Janet Sarah Pollock, being my grandmother. Elsie was a strapping girl 5ft 10½ in. tall and large boned. Her cousin, Ruth Robson, was only 5ft 4 in. tall but strongly built. Both had brothers and were not upset at handling feisty or sometimes angry and irritable soldiers.
Both chose to join the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS). There were other nursing services with whom they could have enlisted, especially Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS) which was the main trained corps of allied military nurses. It was founded in 1902 at the time of the Boer war, had fewer than 300 nurses in 1914 but numbered over 10,000 in 2018.
Ruth was born at Mt Whitestone in the Lockyer Valley. She qualified as a nurse at Ipswich General Hospital, afterwards working at Ipswich, then as Sister at Cairns Hospital, followed by two years as Head Nurse at Gatton Private Hospital. She enlisted on 1 May 1915 as a Staff Nurse with the Australian Army Nursing Service of the AIF (AANS). She was single, 26 years old.
She embarked from Sydney on 15 May 1915 on the Mooltan with reinforcements for the 1st Australian General Hospital (AGH) in Egypt and served at the Auxiliary Hospital in Heliopolis, Cairo. With the increased need for nurses to cope with casualties from fighting in France, Ruth was detailed for duty in England on 23 September 1915 and served in hospitals in Lancashire, Epsom and Harefield. She returned to Australia on transport duty on the Ascanius on 17 March 1916. Her service with 1 AGH ran to 18 May and she was placed on the AANS Reserve from 19 May to 15 August 1916.
She re-enlisted on 16 August 1916 with 14 AGH, embarking on the Karoola on 19 August arriving at Suez on 20 September. The hospital complex was in Abbassia (in Cairo) with an Annex in Port Said.
She met Lieutenant Lesley Alexander Wilkie of Melbourne who had enlisted in March 1915. They were married in Cairo on 20 Jan 1917. As a married woman she was taken off strength the next day and shipped out on transport duty to Australia on HMAT Euripides on 22 January 1917.
Ruth Wilkie was discharged from AANS on 8 Mar 1917. For her service she was later awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal, the same as her husband. Ruth had four children and died in 1976 aged 87.
Elsie was born in 1889 to Robert and Jane Pollock (née Robson) of Ma Ma Creek. She also trained as a nurse at the Ipswich General Hospital.
Staff Nurse Elsie Pollock enlisted in the AANS on 1 May 1915 at Victoria Barracks in Brisbane, but the record of that enlistment is missing from her file. Her records are jumbled and incomplete. The first entry on her service file refers to her re-enlistment on 13 September 1916 to serve in the AANS Indian Service. At page 11 of the file, intermixed with other information, we find Elsie’s postings to Lemnos (13 Sept 1915), Mudros (14 Jan 1916), and with the evacuation of troops in the Dardanelles was transferred on the Dunvegan Castle on 21 January 1916 to Heliopolis, Cairo and on 13 March attached to 3 AGH. On 11 April she embarked at Suez on the hospital transport, Runic, taking badly wounded invalids home to Australia.
In a short interlude back in Australia she was transferred to nursing duty on transports operating in home waters plying between Sydney and Fremantle and ports in between. This posting commenced on 29 July in Sydney on Orsova for Melbourne, Miltiades on 1 August, Ballarat on 12 August to Adelaide, back to Melbourne on Orontes on 16 August, on to Sydney on Karoola 19 August, then Wiltshire on 22 August for Fremantle, back to Sydney on Mooltan on 28 August, back to Melbourne on Kashgar on 5 September, returning to Sydney on Kymettus on 12 September. So, in just over 6 weeks she had nursing duty on 9 transports. This sequence illustrates the pace.
Elsie re-enlisted for AANS Indian Service on 14 September 1916, embarked from Sydney on 16 September on board Kamarla which arrived in Bombay on 10 October. She was taken on strength at the huge Cumballa War Hospital in Bombay, with mostly British patients. Over a 2½ year period she served in five hospitals in India, commencing with Cumballa and then, in approximately six month stints, 15 Jan 1917 Deccan Hospital (Poona), 16 July Victoria War Hospital (Bombay), 13 December Hislop Hospital (Secunderabad), and 18 August 1918 Station Hospital in Bangalore.
Elsie was promoted to Sister on 1 October 1918 and then on 13 Nov, two days after the Armistice, made acting Principal Matron for a few months. Her substantive rank was Sister.
Australian nurses had given exemplary service in India, often under trying conditions, confusing administrative procedures and strange customs. At the end of the war the Indian Government was reluctant to let Australian nurses go (especially as they were being paid by the Australian Government), some serving until late 1919 before returning home.
But Elsie was not well. She embarked for Australia on 13 April 1919 and was discharged as medically unfit on 16 August 1919.
She received the 1914-15 Star, British War Medal and the Victory Medal. In 1925 she married John (Jack) McGarva of Grantham who had been a Squadron Quartermaster Sergeant in the Light Horse and incidentally had been nursed by Elsie when recovering from gunshot. Elsie never had children of her own so spoiled other children and was naturally a favourite with grand-nieces and nephews. I tried to wangle a visit to Grantham as often as possible. Elsie died in Grantham in 1973, aged 83 years and rests in the Ma Ma Creek Cemetery.
Some of the hospitals in India built by the British Raj were architecturally quite palatial, and two examples are given below, the Victoria War Hospital in Bombay (Mumbai) and Deccan War Hospital in the cooler beautiful upland station of Poona (Pune).
However, these examples should not be taken as being representative of all hospitals in which AANS nurses served. Some of the hospitals in Cairo were also striking. But others, including in England, were spartan by comparison or in casualty clearing stations close to the front lines just windy tents. Some were called on to cope with large numbers of patients; for example, the No 34 Welsh Hospital at Deolali, a hill station north of Bombay had over 2000 patients in September 1916 when there was a serious outbreak of plague. Rupert Goodman describes1 the patients at that time as ‘…a mixed lot —British Tommies, French Algerians, Mauritius Labour Corps and Turks.’ He describes the hospital as ‘…an enormous collection of bungalows, one and a half miles long by three quarters of a mile wide, a huge area for Australian Matron Davis to cover.’
The Deccan Hospital in Western Ghats where Elsie served located was enlarged to 1,200 beds with 50 AANS nurses under Queensland Matron T.J. Dunne.
Towards the end of the war, as elsewhere, the viral pandemic known as the Spanish Flu (H1N1), which is reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCAP) to have infected 500 million people and killed at least 50 million and probably many more as records were not kept in China and India. In Bangalore at the Station Hospital it hit patients and staff alike. A part of the CDCAP report is pertinent to the current pandemic with COVID-19: ‘With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.’ Almost déjà vu, but we are fortunate to have antibiotics which can diminish the effect of pneumonia and other bacterial infections associated with COVID-19.
Ruth and Elsie were nurses dedicated to helping those adversely impacted by war, as were thousands of other nurses. They wanted to help and did so often under trying circumstances. How grateful we should be to all medical personnel who, at considerable risk to their own lives, worked tirelessly to save the lives of others. In this respect I see little difference between the nurses of yesterday and today. For the nurses of the First World War, and all other wars and pestilence we should be most grateful and cherish their memory.
On 11 Nov 2017 the Queensland Times published an article by Helen Spelitis to honour fifteen nurses who trained or worked at Ipswich General Hospital and served overseas in WW 1. Other Ipswich nurses worked with wounded and convalescent soldiers in Australian hospitals, but because they did not serve overseas were not accorded war honours. A plaque with the names of those 15 nurses was mounted inside the historic Ipswich Hospital Museum.
The 15 honoured on the plaque were:
Some nurses on the Ipswich list do not have AIF files in the National Archives of Australia because they served in other nursing units, such as QAIMNS or its Indian Arm of QAIMNSI. There were many smaller nursing units which contributed their tenderness and attention towards the stricken survivors of war. Many nurses who trained elsewhere throughout the state answered the call to serve and some paid the ultimate sacrifice.
Wherever, whenever, and however they served, we honour them. Lest we Forget.
Compiled by Robert Thistlethwaite
No 4341, QFHS, April 2020
1 Queensland Nurses: Boer War to Vietnam, by Rupert Goodman, 2006, Boolarong Publications.
Photographs of Ruth Maughan Robson; 14th AGH, Abassia; 14th AGH Annex, Port Said; Australian War Memorial