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Tented accommodation - 17th BGH, Alexandria - AWM H00871
When Staff Nurse Agnes O’Neill, reported for her first night duty at the 17th British General Hospital (BGH) in October 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, she was aghast when told that she and a medical orderly had 300 patients under their care. ‘But’, she protested ‘How will I know if someone is bleeding to death on the other side?’
In an effort to assuage Agnes’ panic, the matron explained that all the patients had clean bandages and dressings and should be asleep. If, when Agnes and the orderly walked through the tents, a patient raised their head, then it was more than likely they were uncomfortable or in pain.
The daughter of James O’Neill, a miner, and Frances Ahern, Agnes was born in March 1888 at Stanley, a rural village roughly five miles south east of Beechworth. The third youngest of eleven children, she attended the local primary school, leaving prematurely aged eleven to help support her family.
Many summers, with the ever-present threat of bushfires passed, before Agnes, in February 1912, boarded a coach bound for Beechworth. Her ultimate destination was the Ovens District Hospital where she would live and work for the next three years to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for a general nursing qualification.
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HMAT Wiltshire, courtesy of Victorian Collections
By the early winter of 1917, nearly two thousand nurses had left Australia for duty overseas. The greater majority of them were ‘loaned’ to the British Army Nursing Service with two hundred in India and the remainder working in British Hospitals in England, France, Egypt and on hospital ships.
Despite these numbers, the British War Office requested that 364 Australian nurses be sent for duty at Salonica. These nurses would form the entire nursing staff at four big British Hospitals. They were divided into four units, the last of which left Sydney on HMAT Wiltshire on 31 August 1917, bound for Suez, Egypt via Albany, Perth and Colombo.
Ovens District Hospital trained nurses, Sybil Newton, Agnes O’Neill, Maud Patton and Jane Priestley, were aboard the Wiltshire, along with fifty-seven of their colleagues, thirty personnel from the Australian Army Medical Corps (AAMC) and 30,000 mutton carcasses!
After boarding, the nurses were shown to their first-class cabins where they unpacked before enjoying 'a good dinner - we did not know at this juncture that it would be the last meal some of us would eat for the best part of a fortnight! ... As we went on the weather got worse and terrific gales were encountered; great waves washed the decks and the ship creaked and groaned till we thought it would go down. Many of us did not care what it did. ... The skipper told us that he had seldom seen such seas.'
After a brief stopover at Albany on Western Australia's south west coast, conditions improved markedly and apart from frequent boat drills, everyone was able to relax and enjoy the Indian Ocean which was like a mill pond.
Photo courtesy of lankapura.com
On their arrival at Colombo, amidst a heavy downpour they went ashore on small launches and arrived, soaking wet, at a waterfront hotel, the majestic Galle Face. Here they luxuriated in beautiful bedrooms each with an ensuite bathroom and an attendant to wait on them. Early the next morning they were 'awakened by a native bringing in tea, bread, butter, and strawberry jam, and a very nice dish of sugar bananas.’
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Staff nurse Jane Priestley, prior to leaving Australia in August 1917. Photo - courtesy of Bill Priestley.
Jane was particularly close to her father, Yackandandah bootmaker, Alex Priestley. Prior to Jane leaving Australia, he’d written her a lovely letter which she treasured for the rest of her life. He wrote:
Just a few lines to put in the Lucky Bag, I would not like when you put your hand in not to find one from Dad you know how I loathe writing letters but on this occasion I must not be a shirker. I feel proud of you in fact we all do, but you do not I am sure realize how hard it is for us to know that you are going so far away and on such an errand but I know full well that you will do your duty under any circumstances and that to us is a great comfort.
I know that you have thought this thing well out and that you do not look on it as a pleasure trip but as a very serious undertaking and going in that spirit you will feel a just pride in doing all you can in your capacity of service to relieve the suffering of any of the poor fellows who may come under your care. Remember that they all have either mothers, wives, sisters or sweethearts, praying for them, try and put yourself in the place of one of them and you will realize what a great privilege is yours in being competent to minister to and in some measure relieve the suffering of these poor fellows who are fighting for you, for us, and for their country.
There is just one thing more that I would like to say, in England it is much more easy for women to get positions as nurses for the front and in many cases you may find that they have not had the training that you have had, should you meet any of these do not ignore them but help them all you can when you find them worthy and now Dear Jane God be with you and keep you and bring you safe home to Mum and Dad and we will be proud of you and it will have to be something big that will keep me from meeting your boat when you return.
From your loving Dad, Alex Priestley.
Many years later, Jane, when sharing memories of her father with a family member, said:
I was terribly proud of my father … Being the first girl there is often a strong feeling between father and daughter and I feel there was for me - he expected me to be pretty well perfect. He was a bootmaker by trade and he was a very good bootmaker - it was the time of sluicing for gold round Yackandandah and during that time he made sluicer boots by hand from the very beginning. He had a big counter and paper patterns for the boots and on this counter, he would put the leather and trace it out and cut it out with a sharp knife. They made every bit of the boot in their shop by hand. Some of the men who had been sluicing in Yack [Yackandandah] went up to Queensland. They sent back foot marks from their friends to Dad for him to make them boots.
Jane's parents, Alex Priestley and Maud Burgis were married at the Burgis family home in March 1892. In December 1894, they, along with almost one-year-old Jane moved into a ‘commodious shop and residence’ in High Street, Yackandandah opposite the Star Hotel.
The Yackandandah Presbyterian Sunday School farewelled Jane at a social evening held in early April 1913. She was given some handsome presents including a travelling case and a writing case.
The following day, twenty-year-old Jane departed for Beechworth. Little did she know that this was the beginning of a journey which would ultimately see her living and nursing in faraway places, thousands of miles from her childhood home.
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Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 7 July 1917
Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 28 July 1917
The lives of Sybil Newton and her two siblings, Muriel and John changed irrevocably when their mother, Janet Orr Newton died of typhoid fever at Beechworth in May 1895. Sybil aged four, Muriel aged three and John only a baby, were now in the care of their father who proved to be a somewhat less than an ideal parent.
Research indicates that Sybil, until July 1912 lived with her maternal uncle, John Wilson, his wife Mary and their children at the One Mile, Beechworth.
Muriel and John were not as fortunate, as in September 1897 at the Wangaratta Police Court, they were committed to the Department for Neglected Children and subsequently taken to Melbourne.
They had been in the care of their father’s older brother, Frank Newton and his wife Rebecca. However, Frank told the court he could no longer afford to keep the children as their father had failed to provide any money toward their maintenance.
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The Wiltshire berthed at Suez, an Egyptian seaport city on the north coast of the Gulf of Suez in early October 1917. Before disembarking the nurses were told they 'were bound for Alexandria to be loaned to the British, as a big stunt was expected in Palestine, and the U boats were so bad in the Mediterranean that it was not safe to cross.'
The journey by train to Alexandria took about six hours and after leaving the desert country the train ran alongside the fertile banks of the Nile. From the train they could view 'miles of cotton plantations, ... fields of sugar cane, and lovely groves of date palms.'
On arrival at Alexandria, they were met by an ambulance and taken to the fashionable Khedival Hotel. After two days leave, Jane and Sybil were attached to the 19th BGH whilst Agnes and Maud were sent to the 17th and 15th BGH respectively.
The 15th BGH, formally an Egyptian government school, was opened by the British on the outbreak of hostilities in the Dardanelles. The school's large classroom dormitories and kitchen made it suitable for conversion to a hospital and as well as wards it had operating theatres, an x-ray department and administrative offices. Sick and injured officers were housed in a separate building whereas soldiers were accommodated in tents and marquees.
At around the same time, Agnes’ brother, Joseph, the baby of the family, was at the Lewis Machine Gun school at El Arish, on the Sinai Peninsula some 270 miles east of Alexandria. Agnes was, most likely, hoping to catch up with him as she hadn’t seen him since he joined up in October 1915. This wasn’t to be as Joseph was captured by the Turks during the Third Battle of Gaza and spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war.
Staff Nurse Gladys Hart was also posted to the 19th BGH. Of her time there, Gladys in June 1937, in a series of newspaper articles entitled 'Experiences of a War Nurse', wrote:
The hospital was a beautiful building shaped like the letter "H," and before the war had been built by the Egyptians and run by German sisters – later it was commandeered by the British for their use. It was a huge building, beautifully fitted up. The floors were marble and tiles, and it had lifts, lounges, and very nice furniture—small brass tables and so forth.
The whole building, wards — large and small — all corridors, balconies, etc., were packed with beds. ... Altogether the hospital contained about 2,000 beds. The matron and some of the nursing staff (English) lived on the premises, but we stayed at the hotel, and later moved to a flat nearer the hospital. From the hotel the ambulance used to call for us, but from the flat we had to walk. We were called at 6 o'clock, breakfast at 6.30, and on duty at 7—and woe betide any late ones. Dinner was at 8.15 p.m.
Cases were mostly surgical, although there were some medical wards ... I had ten weeks of night duty straight off, going on at 8 and off at 7. We would spend the night doing dressings, changing four hourly foments and by the time we had been the round it was time to start again. There was no time for much sponging, bed making etc., those things were left to the orderlies and Arab servants, except in extreme cases. As soon as the men were fit, they were sent to convalescent camps, then back to the line-very often we heard of our one time patients being killed later.
There were always plenty of fresh wounded to take the beds so soon as they were vacant. Sometimes there would be almost a general clearance, and we would start straight away with a fresh lot. At this stage all our wounded were coming from the Arabian sector.
How pleased the men were to get into hospital, away from the sand and the flies, to say nothing of the Turks, and into a clean bed. We were often startled at the way the patients would almost spring out of bed at the slightest sound when apparently, they were sleeping—they were just bundles of nerves. When first admitted they would often talk freely, but after a few days rest and good food, their condition would improve, and they would not talk of their experiences. They would sleep for days on end, having to be wakened up for food and treatment, and then straight off to sleep again.
There were a fine lot of British officers in the hospital, in need of longer rest than they were allowed, very often, and although not fit would move on again to their regiments into fresh dangers. The A.M.C. boys were a wonderful help, and such excellent nurses. ...
It was all so ghastly and all seemed such a futile business, getting men fit to go out and fight again, with almost the certain knowledge of not coming back. How often the men would say, "What is going to happen to me. Sister? What can I do with my life crippled like this?" To be in a war hospital is to really understand the horrors of the whole shocking business. And so, it went on day after day. ...
©Anne Hanson, 2023 E-mail: Anne Hanson
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