The Other Anzacs (13 page)

Daisy Richmond, on the
Neuralia
, was at the Dardanelles as June drew to a close. The ship anchored off Cape Helles, very near where the fighting raged.

She watched as the Turks tried to destroy the Allied guns and was appalled by what she witnessed. ‘One can see where the trenches are and the movements of the troops, and one poor fellow after one big gun fire was seen to fall, rise, and fall again.’
²⁶
Injured men came aboard the next day, their wounds ‘very foul and dirty’ from the heat and filth. The
Neuralia
’s wards were soon full, and it left for Lemnos.

On board the
Sicilia
as it sailed back to Malta, with yet more badly wounded and the inevitable deaths, Kath King was in despair: ‘Have about six patients dying in my ward, it is dreadful, I get very tired and am very worried about them.’
²⁷
Arriving at Valletta four days later, Kath was reluctant to leave a dying patient. ‘I have such a nice boy too sick to be moved. I stayed with my patient and instead of dining relieved my feelings in my room. My patient died 10:10 p.m., ’ she recorded simply, adding: ‘I have had nineteen deaths in a fortnight and such bonser boys. Am heartily sick of the whole war.’
²⁸
She was not alone. Some of the sisters took to drink. When the
Sicilia
headed back to Lemnos, ‘one of our English Sisters was put off in Malta as she imbibed too freely’.

Around this time, nurse Evelyn ‘Tev’ Davies, was aboard the
SS Mooltan
in the Mediterranean. Hailing from Healesville, outside Melbourne, the thirty-one-year-old thought some of the young Australian troops on board, aged about eighteen, looked ‘such children, but they seem to enjoy life alright [
sic
]’.
²⁹
They had to endure a lecture by the ship’s doctor on ‘the Ideal Nurse’. Amused, Tev noted in her diary, ‘He spoke of a nurse’s duty to herself and said each nurse needed a sleep in the afternoon if she could possibly manage it. Matron was sleeping just at his side and several nurses were also asleep. I could hardly help laughing.’
³⁰
Such humour was all too scarce.

9
THE KIWIS ARRIVE

Hordes of people jammed verandahs and shop doorways, clapping and cheering, as nurses in full uniform marched through the streets of Wellington in a farewell parade. They were leaving for Egypt on the New Zealand hospital ship
Maheno
, and among them on that July day in 1915 was Auckland nurse Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Le Gallais. Her brother Leddra, known as Leddie, had left for the Dardanelles a few weeks earlier, and Lottie prayed she would see him again over there. As she waited, she wrote to him on 8 July: ‘Dear Leddie, ship leaves tomorrow. I wrote yesterday and sent you my address. It has now been altered so will send correct on.’
¹

Lottie was one of eleven nurses staffing the
Maheno
. With them were seventy passenger nurses, and together they made up the third contingent of New Zealand nurses to head to the Middle East. The women were keen to play their part. But unlike the country’s soldiers, who went abroad with their Australian counterparts shortly after the outbreak of war, the New Zealand Army Nursing Service had to overcome political and bureaucratic obstacles. The idea of women serving their country in war was one the government of the time found distasteful. Its position could be justified by the fact that New Zealand was not supplying a full division, for which it would be necessary under Army regulations to provide a fully equipped hospital. So there was no necessity to send nurses. It was further argued that there would be enough nurses available in England. Many nurses refused to accept this. By the end of 1914, with casualties in Europe soaring, the government’s opposition crumbled.

In December 1914, at the urging of the New Zealand Trained Nurses Association, the government agreed to contact the British War Office. A cable was sent to the Secretary of State for the Colonies on 7 January 1915, informing him that New Zealand nurses were anxious to serve, and that the government was prepared to send fifty. A telegram was also sent to the Australian Prime Minister asking that New Zealand nurses be considered for inclusion among Australian nursing reinforcements being sent to the front.
²
The reply reflected complacency and a tragic underestimation of the need for nurses: ‘Not anticipated any nurses as reinforcements will be required for some months. If reliefs sent will endeavour to include some New Zealand nurses.’
³

Britain, however, accepted the offer. The nurses were required to have completed a full three years of training in a general hospital, and were to be treated as officers. In reality, they would have to fight for recognition of their rank. Hester Maclean, as the first New Zealand matron-in-chief, made up the quota of fifty nurses from as many different hospitals as she could. With most people still believing the war would be short, Maclean was given six months’ leave to accompany the nurses to England or, as she put it, to take them ‘Home’.

As the party was being selected, on 25 March the Australian government suddenly cabled Maclean asking for two sisters and ten nurses to join a contingent of Australian nurses travelling to Egypt. Hurriedly selected from the reserve and volunteer lists, they left Melbourne on the
Kyarra
on 13 April. The England-bound group of fifty left shortly afterwards aboard the SS
Rotorua
. The two groups were the forerunners of more than 500 New Zealand nurses, about a quarter of the nation’s nursing workforce, who served overseas during the war.

When the second party embarked, the Red Cross provided them with deck chairs, torches and books, and crowds of friends and relatives saw them off. A representative of the Patriotic Society handed Hester Maclean a basket of flowers as a band ‘played cheerful airs’.
⁴
Another seven nurses went to England on their own account; they later had their fares reimbursed by the New Zealand government. Several more, who had been in England when war broke out, had already joined the Imperial Military Nursing Service, the Red Cross, or the French Flag Corps.

The
Rotorua
reached Plymouth on 19 May 1915, and the contingent travelled by train to London, where they were reassigned to Egypt. The decision to send it eastward via the longer Cape Horn and the Atlantic Ocean route rather than west via the Suez Canal, had been costly. The delay in sending the New Zealand nurses to Egypt meant they were not there to care for their compatriots wounded in the Gallipoli landings. As Hester explained, the commander of the New Zealand forces ‘cabled to have us sent direct to Egypt, but too late, for we were on the high seas in another direction . . . So much time lost, so much more expense!’ She and her colleagues felt the wasted time keenly: ‘Had we gone direct to Suez, we should have arrived just when the rush of sick and wounded was most acute.’
⁵

When the nurses arrived in Egypt, some stayed in Alexandria at the British 15th and 19th General Hospitals. The rest went to Cairo’s Citadel Hospital or the 250-bed Egyptian Army Hospital at Pont de Koubbeh, in the desert between Cairo and Heliopolis. A month later, this hospital became No. 2 New Zealand Army Stationary Hospital. As Pont de Koubbeh was already set up as a hospital, the New Zealanders started on a far better footing than the Australians had done.

But they still had to contend with prejudice from the Imperial male hierarchy. Hester later recalled a visit from a War Office inspector.

He thought that the sisters should supervise only, and that the actual work of nursing should be done by male orderlies, as was the custom in the regular military hospitals. I argued that men, especially the untrained men retained for orderly service at that time, could not possibly nurse the patients as they should be nursed, and I held to my point that we needed every one of the sisters. I remember saying to him, ‘New Zealand sent the nurses to care for the men themselves, to work, not to simply supervise.’ I am glad to say our nurses were not taken from us.
⁶

When Lottie Le Gallais and her colleagues arrived two months later on the
Maheno
, Matron Maclean met the commanding officer and was ‘surprised to be asked regarding the status of the nursing service’. She ‘informed him that the Minister of Defence had announced that the nurses were to rank as officers’.
⁷
This seemed to greatly annoy the officer and his adjutant, and ‘they actually refused to believe me . . . I had nothing with me to confirm my statement and it was only later that I found out the cause of their incredulity. Much to my indignation, I found that the passenger nurses had been treated with the greatest lack of consideration and courtesy, so much so, that they were expected to wait entirely upon themselves, even to getting their meals from the galley, cleaning their bathrooms, etc.’

One of the nurses, Ida Willis, who was in charge of the passenger nurses, had refused to continue under these conditions. She threatened to land at Adelaide and report to headquarters until the colonel on board allocated stewards to the party.

Soon after arriving and settling down, Ida went to Heliopolis to visit Hester. She found her with Australian matron Jane Bell, and joined the pair for a journey to the Pyramids. ‘The two Matrons-in-Chief had taken with them tea and cakes, sandwiches and fruit and we sat and had supper in the never-to-be-forgotten place—our eyes drawn to the moonlight-drenched Sphinx with the pyramids in the background against the blue sky. We were so captivated by the scene that we missed a tram and had to wait an hour for the next.’
⁸

There was little organised entertainment at Pont de Koubbeh, except for occasional visits from British music-hall-style concert parties. One evening the New Zealand nurses were invited to a French silent-film screening. A New Zealand doctor, Sir Fred Bowerbank, who was also there, recounted how Matron Bertha Nurse abruptly ‘rose to her feet, made animated gestures to the sisters to follow her, and walked out of the marquee, the picture of outraged dignity’.
⁹
Bowerbank thought the film harmless, but the incident underlined the strict mores matrons were expected to observe.

When New Zealand No. 1 Stationary Hospital arrived at Port Said on the
Maheno
, a former mission school was requisitioned for its use. With just one large room that could be used as a ward, the majority of patients had to be housed in tents on the sand. No sooner were things in working order than a shipload of sick and wounded arrived from Gallipoli. Stretchers and mattresses were everywhere, and the tents were soon filled. For the next few days the staff worked night and day. In the various hospitals where they were assigned, the New Zealanders were soon working the backbreaking hours to which their Australian colleagues had become accustomed. Sister Fanny Speedy noted that there was no such thing as time off duty, with nurses working ‘from 7 a.m. till 11, 12, 1 and perhaps 2 a.m’.
¹⁰
The hard floors of the former school buildings made their feet ache, the heat was oppressive, and bugs infested the beds and got into the women’s long hair.
¹¹

For Waimate nurse Mary Gorman, her introduction to Alexandria’s No. 17 British General Hospital was easier. ‘We have been taken out a good deal for rows on the Harbour and drives to all the interesting places, and am having the best time I have ever had although the work is hard, ’ she wrote home. And hard it was. ‘The heat is so great and the perspiration just flows off you while you are doing the work. The Australian and NZ sisters will work here but the English were regular shirkers and are just out for a good time. The men say unless they are officers they won’t do anything for them, ’ she added on 1 August.

The nurses struggled with military hospital red tape and the necessity of working alongside male orderlies. British Army officers, not matrons, organised hospital routine, and relations with New Zealand doctors failed to improve. Hester Maclean was caustic in her assessment of them. ‘More than one of the New Zealand medicos, when dressed up as soldiers, ignored the claims of the nurses, and refused to associate with them on the terms of equality to which their professional, as well as social status, entitled them. It seemed a case of being afraid to lower their great dignity.’
¹²