Elizabeth (Lizzie) Rothery

1882 - 1918

The former Rothery family home which still stands on the corner of Myrtle and Albert Streets, Myrtleford.

Long ago there was a Kurrajong tree which stood in Myrtleford's memorial square. It was a gift to the people of Myrtleford by Joseph Rothery and his wife Mary as a living memorial to their daughter, Lizzie Rothery, a WW1 nurse.

During the Rothery's marriage, death had cast its all too frequent shadow across their familial landscape. Of their seven children, only their second child, Hannah, survived to bear witness to the death of a much loved daughter and sister.

Born in 1881 at Whitehaven on the west coast of Cumberland, England, Lizzie, arrived in Victoria with her parents in August 1883 on the Macduff . The family lived in various Victorian regional and metropolitan localities until Joseph was appointed Secretary of the Ovens Pottery Company at Hurdle Flat, near Beechworth in December 1889. However by 1894, Joseph Rothery had established a business specialising in drapery, groceries and hardware in Myrtleford. Lizzie however, still attended Miss Appleton's private school in Loch Street, Beechworth and in December 1898 she was awarded Dux of the school. On leaving school she worked in her father's shop until in the late winter of 1909, aged twenty-seven she returned to Beechworth to begin her new life as a probationary nurse at the Ovens District Hospital.

Apart from developing influenza in May 1911, Lizzie's time as a probationary nurse was unremarkable. She passed her final exams in June 1912 and several months later relocated to the Winfield Trained Nurses Home in East Melbourne.

The Melbourne Trained Nurses' Home in High Street, Prahran was the first such home in Victoria. Trained Nurses' homes were often located close to private and public hospitals and offered not only food and board but also acted as an employment agency for both private and public hospitals as well people wishing to hire nurses privately. For this service, the nurses paid a retaining fee of about six shillings a week.

Melbourne's Women's Hospital offered general nurses who were members of the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses' Association (RVTNA) a six month training course in Gynecology and Midwifery for a fee of £15. Lizzie took advantage of this opportunity and was awarded a midwifery certificate in September 1915.

Australia's involvement in the First World War began when Britain and Germany went to war in August 1914 and by March 1915, general, stationary and convalescent hospitals were established in each of the six Australian states. Over 5,000 beds were made available for the treatment of the sick from the Army’s training camps and returning AIF servicemen. To staff these hospitals over 500 nurses were required.

To join the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS), a nurse had to be of British parentage or a naturalised British subject, be three years trained with medical and surgical experience in a recognised civil general hospital of at least eighty beds, aged between twenty-one and forty years and be either single or widowed. Despite the single or widowed ruling, a small number of married women, such as Sister Elsie Cook (Sheppard) did manage to enlist.

Documentation such as a birth certificate, the original copy of a general nursing certificate, a written recommendation from the matron of the hospital where the nurse trained and a medical certificate stating that she was in good health and physically fit for duty were all required as part of the application process.

Once accepted as a member of the AANS, a nurse was then eligible to apply for service in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).

Perhaps to assist in acquiring the nursing staff required for 5,000 beds, the army in 1915 insisted that all AANS members do home service before being eligible for active service.

Lizzie joined the AANS in June 1915 and began her home service at the 5th Australian General Hospital (AGH) in St. Kilda Road, Melbourne. She was on a week’s leave from the 5th AGH in January 1916 when word was received that her only surviving brother, twenty-year-old Henry Norman, had been buried alive by shell fire in the trenches of Lone Pine, Gallipoli. Of his death, a friend wrote, ‘It is indeed hard to leave the spot where he lies buried with eight others. Poor, poor chap he rushed there for safety only to be trapped like a rat. ... Poor little Rothery.'

Myrtleford Mail & Whorouly Witness 24 August 1916

The Australian government in the winter of 1916 after a receiving direct request from the Viceroy of India for another one hundred nurses called for volunteers from the AANS to serve in India.

Lizzie along with forty-nine other nurses from Victoria volunteered their services. Lizzie left Victoria on 22 August 1916 on the RMS Mooltan bound for Bombay via Adelaide, Fremantle and Colombo. Two other nurses from north east Victoria, Alma Bennett and Julia Marum, were also on board. Their matron, Gertrude Davis, was an experienced campaigner who had seen service in Egypt and Lemnos.

At the eastern port of Colombo, (now known as Sri Lanka) Lizzie and her colleagues watched tiny katermarangs dancing about on the water. They feared, that at any moment, the vessels would be swamped and their occupants drowned. They disembarked late in the afternoon and spent the next two days exploring the delights of the scenic and ancient hill city of Kandy, before embarking on the Yore for their three day trip to Bombay (now known as Mumbai) on India's west coast.

Amidst pouring rain on the morning of 13 September, the nurses boarded a small boat and landed at Bori Bunder where the embarkation staff allocated them to various hospitals. Lizzie was ordered to report for duty to the Victoria War Hospital at 10 a.m. the next day.

Infectious diseases such as cholera were a constant threat to nurses and patients alike. When the first batch of Australian nurses arrived in India in July 1916, cholera was rampant. Sadly two of the new arrivals, Amy O’Grady and Kilkenny born Kathleen Power contracted the disease and died at the Sister’s Isolation Hospital on the island of Colaba. Before reporting for duty, Lizzie and her colleagues were inoculated against the disease.

The 600 bed Victoria War Hospital was originally the offices of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway but had been commandeered by the British and converted to a hospital to accommodate British wounded troops from Mesopotamia where the advance on Kut (Al-Kut, a city in eastern Iraq) had already begun. Hundreds of British sick and wounded were pouring into Bombay together with prisoners of war, many of whom were too emaciated and exhausted to recover.

The hospital was powered by electricity and gas with plenty of punkahs (fans) which were vital in a climate like Bombay’s.

Approximately 560 Australian nurses, most of whom were Victorians, served in India between 1916 and 1919. They were not treated particularly well; although their salaries and allotments were paid by the Australian Government, the Indian government wanted them to pay income tax. Their own government paid them inadequate travelling allowances and salaries which were lower than their Indian Nursing Service counterparts. Also, the number of light uniforms provided was not sufficient, leading to the purchase of additional light dresses at the nurses’ own expense and at a higher cost than in Australia.

Bagthorpe Military Hospital - Nottingham

Source: Nottingham Hospitals History

Lizzie nursed at the Victoria War Hospital for eight months before being transferred in May/June 1917 to the Bagthorpe Military Hospital, formerly a workhouse and an infirmary, in Nottingham, England. During World War One, wounded soldiers were transported by rail and brought into the hospital from the hospital’s own railway station.

She later worked at the Fairfield Hospital in London before joining the nursing staff on the transport ship, the Nestor in late July.

Transport ships returning to Australia brought with them wounded and convalescing troops. Nurses were part of the medical team charged with their care.

Nursing on a transport ship was not easy. In certain waters, there was always the threat of attack from enemy gun ships and submarines. Often patients were in hammocks situated in stifling lower decks, workspaces were cramped and a rolling sea meant sputum cups, bowls of hot water and other loose objects would clatter their way to the floor. And of course, there was the inevitable sea sickness.

Frequently the accommodation allocated to the nurses was on the very lowest decks and when, for the greater part of the journey, the port holes had to be closed, the atmosphere became miasmic. Whilst in the tropics, the heat and stuffiness in the cabins was so intolerable that the nurses decamped and slept up on the top deck.

Sisters' Quarters, Caulfield Military Hospital - State Library of Victoria.

No. 1 Australian Hospital Ship, A63, Karoola - BirtwistleWiki

After arriving home in Melbourne in September 1917, Lizzie nursed for several months at the 11th AGH also known as the Caulfield Military Hospital. Built in the grounds of the old grey stone mansion, Glen Eira, in Kooyong Road, Caulfield, its sole purpose was to care for the never ending stream of sick and wounded arriving at Melbourne’s wharves on hospital ships.

The house was used as accommodation for the forty nurses who staffed the hospital’s twenty-two wards.

January 1918 saw Lizzie permanently appointed as staff nurse on the No. 1 Australian Hospital Ship, the Karoola.

Under the watchful gaze of the highly experienced hospital ship Matron, Alice Cooper, Lizzie and five other nurses on the return trips to Australia helped to care for the crippled, the wounded, the legless and armless, the blind and the insane.

Hospital ship nurses knew only too well that many of the men in their care were suffering from shell shock; some to the extent that a self-imposed watery grave was a welcome relief from the demons that inveigled them day by day, hour by hour. To prevent such episodes of self harm, the nurses spent many hours with these poor damaged souls – sadly their actions were interpreted by some as inappropriate fraternisation.

In the late autumn of 1918, Lizzie, after a return trip from South Africa and Egypt, disembarked the Karoola at Port Melbourne. After three months of nursing in often stifling conditions on the ship’s lower deck she was very much in need of a rest.

Granted almost three weeks leave she first visited her parents and her only surviving sibling, Hannah, at Myrtleford before going home to her beloved Beechworth where she was the guest of her close friend, Sarah Wilson. Their delight in their reunion was short lived when Lizzie suddenly became ill with appendicitis.

When Lizzie’s condition seriously deteriorated, her parents and Hannah journeyed to Beechworth to be by her side. Their love and devotion however did not prevent the inevitable. Lizzie died on Saturday 15 June from appendicitis and septic peritonitis.

The townspeople plunged into mourning with the sorrowful news that one who they considered their own had passed – a woman who the Ovens and Murray Advertiser described ‘as a most beautiful character in every sense of the word and her devotion to the work of alleviation of the suffering of soldiers had not only earned the gratitude of the soldiers and their friends but the admiration of all.’

On an even quieter than usual Sunday afternoon, people left the comfort of their cosy fires to line the route from Christ Church to the cemetery on the northern edge of town. Their eyes, fixed by grief and shock, on a coffin wrapped in the Union Jack on which lay a military nurse’s uniform.

When the cortege reached the massive iron gates at the cemetery’s entrance, the coffin was taken from the hearse and placed on the shoulders of six returned soldiers.

Their footsteps crunched on the gravel path as they made their way past the Turkish style fountain and then swung to the right towards the rotunda. At the rotunda, the coffin bearers turned right and took the first pathway to the left. A little way along, many mourners stood quietly awaiting their arrival by an open grave

Lizzie's refurbished grave - September 1914

After the reading of the Anglican Church burial service, the band played Abide with Me. A party of soldiers then fired three volleys over the grave and marched in single file around the open grave, each depositing a handful of earth on the coffin as he passed.

Finally the haunting notes of the Last Post penetrated the chill air. Staff nurse Elizabeth Rothery, her duty done was free to rest in peace alongside her little brother, Henry.

Lizzie, believing she would be returning to the Karoola at the end of her leave left some of her possessions, both professional and private, on board. After her death, her father Joseph wrote to the Officer-in-Charge at the 3rd Military District, Melbourne asking for their return. His anguish over the tragedy which had befallen his family was not lessened when twelve months later he wrote to the Army again, still seeking the whereabouts of his daughter’s possessions:

‘When my daughter died, she left on the Karoola all her linen and portable bed etc. I wrote to the department at the time and I was promised attention to the matter.

It is rather hard as I have given my only son and one of my daughters to the cause ... and yet from neither of them, was anything belonging to them ever returned to me.’

He finally received a reply in September 1919, unsatisfactory as it was, from an un-named Major who in part said:

‘I have to advise that although exhaustive enquiries have been made from the Staff Officer, Invalid and Returned Soldiers, Victoria Barracks, Melbourne, also the Principal Matron, no trace of the late Sister’s effects has been obtained. Miss Hill, (late Principal Matron) states that the articles were not received by her ...’

In March 1923, the Rothery family received a memorial plaque honouring Lizzie’s service to the nation. Perhaps it helped to assuage the family’s frustration at the Australian Army’s inability to locate and return their daughter's possessions.

SOURCES

Alma L. Bennett, Nurses Narrative, Australian War Memorial, AWM41/942, p. 3.

Death Certificate - Elizabeth Rothery, Victorian Registry Births, Deaths & Marriages, 1918/3862.

Minutes of the Ovens District Hospital House Committee - 30 August 1909 & 12 August 1912.

ODH Inpatient Register, 1 January 1906-28 April, 1925..

Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 19 June 1918.

Myrtleford Mail & Whorouly Witness, 20 June 1918.

Public Record Office of Victoria (PROV) Index to Unassisted Inward Passenger Lists to Victoria 1852-1923.

Rothery family History compiled by Anne Hanson

Service Record, National Archives of Australia (NAA) B2455, Rothery, Elizabeth.

John Taylor, Myrtleford & District Historical Society.

Una - The Journal of the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses' Association:

General Register, Vol X, No. 7, 30 September 1912
Special Register, Vol XIII, No. 9, 30 November 1915
Vol XVI, No. 4, 29 June 1918