Vera Deakin and the Red Cross

 

When war broke out in 1914, Vera Deakin, daughter of Alfred Deakin,  former Prime Minister of Australia, urgently wanted to do something beyond knitting socks and balaclavas for soldiers, but Australia saw little role beyond that for Australian women in the war.   She joined the newly formed British Red Cross (later renamed the Australian Red Cross) in Melbourne, and did a home nursing course, but the VAD auxiliaries then being trained would not leave Australia for some time.

She cabled to Norman Brookes, then one of two Red Cross Commissioners in Egypt, to see if he had something she could do.   Norman was the brother of her brother-in-law Herbert Brookes, married to her older sister Ivy.  Norman immediately cabled back that she should 'Come at once and bring as many like yourself as you can find'.  To the strong objection of her father, Vera booked a passage to Cairo with her friend Winifred Johnston, and thus began a very strong working partnership between Vera and Winifred for the Australian Red Cross. 

The Australian Red Cross Society (ARCS) had been working in Egypt with the British Red Cross in running an enquiry service covering the Gallipoli and Egyptian campaigns, but Norman Brookes wanted to form an Australian bureau to concentrate exclusively on Australian wounded and missing soldiers.  He wanted Vera and Winifred to undertake the leadership.   At the time Lady Barker was in charge of the British Red Cross operation in Cairo, and she helped them to set up their service and trained them to run their Bureau.  Vera became the Secretary, and Winifred Assistant Secretary.  

Mere weeks later the ARCS intended to replace Vera with a man, but Lady Barker defended the two women vigorously, and Vera was allowed to remain in place.  Vera's whole life to this point had prepared her well to undertake a leadership role, and she did it will verve, skill and compassion.

Families back in Australia whose relatives had been reported missing were in anguish about their fate, and wrote letters to the Red Cross and the Army to discover what had happened to them, and if deceased, had they been decently buried.  Searchers went out to the hospitals and army bases armed with lists of missing men to see if they could find someone who knew what had become of them.  Volunteer staff then compiled the reports and letters were written to families on the results of their searches.  Although the British used male and female searchers, the Australian Bureau used exclusively men, as it was felt the men would answer the searchers' questions more openly.

After the evacuation of Gallipoli, the BRCS and ARCS shifted their operation to London, which followed the shift in the Australian troops from Egypt to France and Belgium.  The horrendous numbers of wounded and missing troops meant that the ARCS Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau had to put on more volunteers and more searchers to handle the tens of thousands of enquiries per year.  Australian names were added to the British searchers lists to try and make their enquiries as widely as possible.

The ARCS  made every effort to trace missing soldiers, sometimes taking years to locate a soldier who could report to them what had happened.  On 23 March 1917 Private J D Robson was killed in action in France.  Vera's response to the family was reported (1917, September 25). The Wingham Chronicle and Manning River Observer.

True to her word, the Bureau kept making enquiries about Robson, and finally in 1919 they located a man who could provide details of his death and burial.

By the date on the above response, it would appear the ARCS had tracked the respondent down to his home in Sydney.   This was but one of tens of thousands of enquiries made to the ARCS Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau.

In order to track down as many of the missing as possible, the Bureau began seeking out lists of Prisoners of War coming out of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, and took it as one of their roles to maintain contact with those prisoners to keep their morale up, and to send them food parcels.  One of the airmen with whom the Bureau and Vera herself corresponded was a man whom she would later marry, Captain Thomas Walter White, whose next of kin, his mother, resided in Moonee Ponds.

Tom White in his aircraft at Point Cook,  1915.

One of the things that made Vera peculiarly suited to the work on the Prisoner of War records was that she had studied German, in Germany, prior to the war.  She was able to understand the reports of prisoners being sent to the ICRS from Germany, and interpret for the volunteers.  This was in marked contrast to the non-German speaking Army Officers who were required to send reports to the next of kin in Australia.  The Army became greatly exercised by the fact that Vera could get her Wounded and Missing enquiries responses back to Australia before the Army could make their reports, and they wanted her to stop it. Vera was not impressed. 

Apart from the massive amount of work going on at the Bureau, Vera and her friends entertained Australian soldiers coming to London on leave, taking them to the theatre, picnics, and sight seeing tours, and entertaining them to tea in their flat.  Many of these young men later turned up in casualty lists, to their distress. 

At the end of the war, the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiries Bureau prepared their records to be returned to Australia for the Australian War Museum, later part of the Australian War Memorial.  These records were digitised a few years ago and can be searched by name at the AWM website.

Captain Thomas White's correspondence can be seen here.

All the remaining Bureau records can be searched here.

Vera was awarded an OBE for her war service with the Australian Red Cross in the Great War, but it was not the end of her work with the Red Cross, nor other community work that she took up after her marriage, such as with the Royal Children's Hospital and other charitable causes.  In WW2 Vera and her comrades put their Red Cross uniforms on again, and set to work to deal with further missing and wounded enquiries.  Hers was a life of extraordinary service to Australia.

Vera White, OBE, in her Red Cross uniform, 1946.

In 2020 the Royal Historical Society of Victoria published Carole Wood's book about Vera Deakin and the Red Cross.  

In full disclosure I report that I am a member and volunteer with the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.

Prisoners of the First World War - ICRC Archives

 

Wahn, Westphalia, Germany. French prisoners-of-war at work (Karl Rud. Bremer & Co., Cologne, Germany, n°205)

On 21 August 1914, the Central Prisoners of War Agency was created to collect information on prisoners held by the warring parties. Countries holding prisoners of war sent lists of their prisoners’ names – albeit not consistently – to the agency in Geneva. In this way, the agency collected around 400,000 pages of names.

Volunteers in many countries took on the herculean task  of receiving, recording and forwarding reports of prisoners of war to enable relatives in far away countries to know what had become of their soldier sons and husbands.   

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have digitised their records and made them available to be searched online by individual name.  Other resources on the website are postcards of prisoner of war camps, reports from inspectors on prisoner of war camps, and personal accounts of life in prisoner of war camps.  

Go to the ICRC website and search for information about a particular prisoner of war.  Take time to investigate how the website works to get the most out of it. 

The Call to Arms, 1916 digitised in full

I posted about this series of documents, B6525 in the National Archives of Australia back in 2014.  At the time, only some of the forms had been digitised.  Having another look at them today, I find the whole series digitised, as well as another series, B6526, which are the name index cards for Series B6525.   The cards are sorted alphabetically in four sections, according to whatever reason was, or was not given. Not too hard to match up with the folders in B6525.

Use the Advanced Search option and pop either number in the Series box.  In the results form, click on the number of records - ie, in B6525 you will see 29.  Click on that to get the full list.  B6526 shows 4 items.

James Boyne of 34 Eltham St, Flemington did not get away with a two line reason for not enlisting.   The Committee required a more detailed explanation.  His letter follows his form. 

Seeing that enlistment was still voluntary, these men could not be forced to enlist, but it all added to the pressure.

So if you are wondering why some people didn't enlist, the answer could be here.

Scotch College Commemorative website

Above two images are from the Scotch College commemorative website. 

Scotch College moved it's WW1 Roll of Honour while I wasn't looking, but I have lately relocated it, now with articles about those who died, and those who won honours and awards.  The above images come from a page about Australian Flying Corps Cadet George Robinson Johnston.  Johnston initially embarked with the 6th Infantry Battalion, but later transferred to the Australian Flying Corps.

He met  his death while still in training as an observer in a two seater aeroplane.  Johnston's pal from the Flemington Presbyterian Church, Driver Reginald Robert McLean, wrote home that the pilot was thought to have fainted at the controls, and George had no way of controlling the aircraft from his seat behind.

The pictured cross made from an aeroplane propeller, perhaps even the one from the crashed aeroplane, was made by the mechanics in his unit, and placed over his grave at Winchester (West Hill) Old Cemetery. 

Voluntary war workers' record / compiled for the benefit of the Australian Comforts Fund, 1918

This drab little volume holds a wealth of information about the myriad of patriotic organisations in Victoria - what they did, and who their volunteer workers were.  It has been digitised by the National Library  There is no index or contents page.  I can't quite see a way of searching through it, but it is roughly organised into alphabetical order by organisation and then by town. Very roughly.  I think the only way of being sure you have covered everything is a page by page scroll through the volume.  It is only 192 pages, so not an impossibly difficult task.

The pre-eminent position is given to the Lady Mayoresses' Patriotic League, and its list of voluntary workers at the headquarters, and then follows an account of each branch, beginning with Bairnsdale and Ballarat, but followed by the Peter Pan Club and the Scots Church Sub-Branch.  Evidently they could choose their own name, but worked in concert with the main organisation.

Other organisations included are the YMCA Snap-shots from Home League, Red Cross VAD Committee, YMCA Club for Soldiers and Sailors, League of Soldiers' Friends, and individual efforts from various schools collecting to support many other patriotic efforts, for example Parkville High School:

UPDATE

Jenny Coates has helpfully pointed out the presence of a little magnifying glass on the left side of the frame where the document appears, and you can search for names or places there, which produces a little green pointer to indicate where the page is with the result.  Thanks, Jenny!

And further to the matter of searching the document, it can be downloaded as a pdf and searched that way.

Female Relatives Badges

Female Relatives Badge, WW1

Female Relatives Badge, WW2

I have known for a while that the National Archives of Australia held the Registers for these badges, but only tonight have I had another look for them and found them digitised, which is a huge plus.  Unfortunately it will be a bit hit and miss as to whether you are likely to locate the recipient of a badge by the number on the back, in the sense that the coverage of these registers in this collection is incomplete. 

If you look under Series number MT1384/2 Registers of Issued Medals and Badges 1939/45 War - 1914/18 War  and click on "Items in this Series on Record Search" you will find a long list of records, not all of which are Registers of Female Relatives Badges.   It appears that the majority of available registers are from the WW2 period, with fewer available for WW1.  States have separate registers, and it was my impression that there were fewer registers for Victoria than other states, but that might be my natural bias.

I could not locate an appropriate register for the WW1 badge at the top, which was among my mother's things.  This is frustrating because I don't know any relative whom it might have represented.   The only close relative to my mother who served was her uncle Jim, but he was in the Royal Navy, and the Australian Defence Department would not have handed out badges men who did not serve in the Australian Forces.  In addition, the Naval version has an anchor in the centre, where AIF is shown in this one.  Unless some more registers come to light (could there be some in another series?) it will remain a mystery for now.

I was able to find a register entry for the WW2 badge using the registered number on the back.  I bought this badge on eBay many years ago, so it was not issued to our family, but I had the thought that as none came to light amongst my paternal grandmother's effects, I would like one to recognise HER sacrifice. There are stories of her distress when my father was called into service with the CMF when he was 18, and sent to New Britain with the AIF when he was 19 or 20.  It occurred to me only today that perhaps she never applied for a badge. (You had to fill in a form to get one).  She was Catholic, which may have influenced her thinking on patriotic display.  She was a young woman during WW1 when Archbishop Mannix spoke out against conscription.

I had a look at Ancestry to see if I could see the original recipient's family, but it is a little too recent for anything to appear.  I will bide my time and check back from time to time.

The Registers record the name and address of the applicant, and the relationship to the member.  It also gives the name, rank and unit (I found the VX number rather than a unit), the number of the application form, and a few other details, not necessarily the same as the column heading would suggest.

Australian Naval & Military Expeditionary Force Nominal Roll

Detail from cover of the nominal roll of the ANMEF to New Guinea, 1914-1918, military component.  AWM AWM190 [4]

Yesterday I had cause to have a look at the WW1 Nominal Roll for the AIF, but noticed while tracking it down that a new roll had been added to the digital records - the ANMEF Nominal Roll which I had gone looking for about 4 years ago, but it was not then available on the AWM website.   I originally sought to find local men who had embarked in 1914 with the ANMEF.  I found a newspaper article naming the 104 men from Victoria who had departed with the Force, but they are not included in this nominal roll, presumably because they were Naval reservists.


The details included in the ANMEF nominal roll are Regimental Number, Rank, Full Name, Birthplace, Place of Enlistment, Date of Enlistment, Date of Embarkation, and Disposal (usually discharged at end of agreement.)  The record also contains annotations of subsequent AIF service.

Here is a link to the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force [Military Component] Nominal Roll, 1914-1918.

WW1 Projects recognised in the Victorian Community History Awards, 2016

I completely forgot I was going to do a post on the WW1 projects which were recognised in the Victorian Community History Awards 2016 - so here they are:

We Remember: Honouring the Service and Sacrifice of Local Veterans and the Wangaratta Community During WW1.  This won the Multimedia Award. 

Westgarthtown and WW1, mentioned in an earlier post, received a Commendation in this category.

Home Front Ballarat WW1 won the Centenary of WW1 Award. 

The following entries received Commendations in that Award:

From the Top of the Hill, by Kevin Peoples.

The Game of Their Lives by Nick Richardson.

Sons of Williamstown: a Labour of Love   Hobson's Bay City Council

Arthur Kenny Avenue of Honour Re-creation, Child and Family Services, Ballarat Inc

Scotch College - The School at War

The State Library of Victoria now has a digitised copy of the Scotch College memorial booklet The School at War.  A feature of the booklet are the photos of the former Scotch pupils who died in the war.  Quite a few of the Essendon-Flemington boys went to Scotch, and the photos have been very useful on the Empire Called website.

South Australian Red Cross Information Bureau, 1916-1919

 While browsing through the B2455 file of Harry Nightingale Kersey of Moonee Ponds, I noticed a note written at Broadmeadows to the effect that Kersey had married the day before, and another Attestation had been made up showing his new next of kin.  I noticed that the day of the marriage, 16 July 1915, was the day before Harry embarked on the Orsova with the AAMC Hospital Transport service on 17 July 1915.  

I idly wondered whether the last minute marriage had lasted the distance, and went to Ancestry for a quick result.  Of course there is never a quick result.  All of the available trees listed a different, presumably second wife, not the Eva Evelyn mentioned in the B2455.  I went to the online index of BDM for Victoria and found that Harry Nightingale Kersey had married Eva Evelyn Swindells in 1915.  By the same means I discovered Eva had died in 1931.   Turning to Trove with the intention of seeing whether there had been children of the marriage, I found that the death notices and 'In Memoriam's' indicated there had been no children.  But I did find that Harry had been a devoted husband.

KERSEY. — In loving memory of my dear wife,

Eva Evelyn, who passed away on 30th No
vember, 1931. Sadly missed.
— Inserted by her loving husband, H. N.
Kersey.

KERSEY.— In loving memory of my dear
auntie, who passed away on the 30th No
vember, 1931. Peacefully sleeping.
—Inserted by her loving niece, Florrie.

KERSEY. — Our loved and devoted friend,
Eva E., dear Auntie Birdie to Jean and
Gwenda, who passed away after long suf
fering on 30th November, 1931.
Sadly missed.
With love to-day and through the long to
morrow
We will remember you.
— Inserted by Mrs. Williams and family, 22
Orlando-street, Hampton.

Family Notices (1932, November 30). The Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), p. 1. Retrieved August 26, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article204304496

Harry put an In Memoriam in the paper in the next two years.  In 1936, five years after Eva's death,  he remarried.

Thinking I would like a photo of him, I did a general Google on his name, and to my surprise up popped the website at the top of this post, the South Australian Red Cross Information Bureau, 1916-1919.

This came up because Harry had made a witness statement about a South Australian comrade in the 5th Field Ambulance unit who had been killed by shellfire.   The witness statement was contained in the usual Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiries Bureau Correspondence available through the Australian War Memorial website. The South Australian Information Bureau has a different set of documentation held at the State Library of South Australia, and the volunteers who prepared and digitised the records also indexed the other names, particularly witness statements.  Otherwise I would never have found Harry's witness statement.

So while the records pertain particularly to South Australian soldiers, there is the chance that a soldier from another state was a witness for an enquiry made on behalf of South Australians, and would be worth a look.   Witness statements are a useful eye-witness account of the conditions at the time, and may be the only contemporary information you will find.

Mont Park Military Hospital photo collection

Patients playing cards, 16th Australian General Hospital, Mont Park ca 1918 (Alice E. Broadhurst Collection, Yarra Plenty Regional Library)

The Yarra Plenty Regional Library has announced the acquisition of a unique set of photographs taken by Red Cross Nurse Alice Elizabeth Broadhurst from 1918 to 1920, probably while working with the Voluntary Aid Detachment at Mont Park Hospital, McLeod.

The photos have been digitised and can be accessed at Yarra Plenty Local History Flickr and via Trove Pictures.

The Yarra Plenty Local History Flickr also includes other albums with WW1 photos and postcards, and well worth a visit.

British Red Cross Volunteers

Over 90,000 people volunteered for the British Red Cross in Britain and overseas during the war.   Search for your family’s personnel records, and discover what Red Cross volunteers were doing in your local area 100 years ago.

Red Cross volunteers did a wide range of jobs, from the Voluntary Aid Detachments, pictured above, to nursing,  cooking, cleaning, searchers trying to discover the fate of missing men and so on, so the database includes men as well as women.

I find that if you pop 'Australia' into the location search box, it will bring up volunteers who gave an Australian bank as their address, or sometimes Australia in their address.  You can try other local names.  For instance, I found the following British Red Cross volunteer by putting 'Moonee Ponds' in the location:

Mrs Ivy Wilson Jenkins, nee Graham, is in the database, giving 2 Normanby St, Moonee Ponds, Australia as her address.  Ivy served from 01/09/1916  to  01/06/1918 as a VAD, engaged in Ward work, medical Surgical work, for twenty pounds per annum. She served at the following locations: Exeter War Hospitals Sept 1- 1916 - Aug 30; 1917 1st Southern General Hs Nov.5.1917 - June 7. 1918 Birmingham.

There are no Jenkins' at the Normanby St address in the Empire Called database, but further research may reveal more about Ivy Jenkins at a later date.

Victorian unit war histories

The original link I gave some while ago to the Victorian Veteran's Virtual Museum which included a link to digitised unit war histories has become such a convoluted affair with various changes at the State Library of Victoria, I thought I would repost a more direct link to them.

Not all of the infantry history books have been digitised, some are more recent histories, still subject to copyright, which have had only the covers and list of contents digitised, but still useful for discovering what books are available.

AIF stripes,chevrons, patches, badges etc

I have just noticed an extremely useful article on the Australian War Memorial website by Dianne Rutherford explaining the stripes, chevrons, patches, buttons, titles and badges. 

Australian Nurses in World War 1

Sister Elizabeth Gertrude Fleming,  The Penleigh Magazine 1919, p.24. Circa 1896. 

Courtesy of Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School Archives.

Another tip from Vicki's blog Exploring Military History is contained in a post on Locating a World War 1 Nurse.    This article contained a reference to the website Australian Nurses in World War 1, which provides an annotated, and sometimes illustrated list, not only of Australian Army Nursing Service women, but also Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service.

Another piece of good news is that the website has a search engine and you can search by place as well as name. 

A Great War Reading List

A recent post on the Exploring Military History blog on "World War 1: selection of non-fiction books" which included a list of junior non-fiction, and a previous post on "World War 1 through children's fiction", I thought worth passing on. 

One of the books mentioned by Vicki on her blog was the one above, "And the Band Played On: how music lifted the Anzac spirit in the battlefields of the First World War" by Robert Holden.  This is a book I have read recently, and can also thoroughly recommend.

There is a booklist contained on the Empire Called and I Answered website, called "Sources", which covers all the material I have looked at for any mention of the local volunteers.   This list doesn't have as much current material as Vicki's list, but may suggest some less well-known material published a bit closer to the war which may be useful for research.

And just for fun, I keep a Pinterest group of covers of   WW1 Australian history books.

The Spirits of Gallipoli: a Centenary of Anzacs, by Kim Phillips

Anyone who has had a good browse through The Empire Called and I Answered website will know that Kim Phillips has been very generous in sharing her research into the young men who died at Gallipoli.  Kim has lately launched a book and CD: The Spirits of Gallipoli: a centenary of Anzacs, the details of which you can see at her website.

Kim has also arranged for Ancestry to make her research and images available as a collection.  There is a 14 day free trial (scroll to the bottom of the page).  I was pleased to see the first memorial stone image on the Ancestry blog was for J K Adams, an Essendon lad.

I commend both to your attention.

Battle to Farm: WW1 Soldier Settlement Records in Victoria

Public Records Office Victoria has released a new series of document online from the post-war Soldier Settlement Scheme.


On this site you can access the individual records of thousands of  World War One returned soldiers who leased farming land across Victoria between 1919 and 1935. Enter a settler’s name in the search box or search by geographic location through the digital map.

You may need to be patient in the initial phases while the site is swamped by searchers.  Good luck!

UPDATE:  Found one!  The answer seems to be to search by surname only.  Searches with a first name or initials seemed got no result.

New Zealand Online Cenotaph

Welcome to the enhanced Online Cenotaph website - our digital social space where enthusiasts, families, and researchers can share their interconnecting experiences of New Zealand servicemen and women.

To coincide with the First World War Centenary commemorations, Online Cenotaph has been redeveloped in collaboration with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, with new content contributed by Auckland Libraries.

British Red Cross Volunteers A-D online

If you have family members who volunteered with the British Red Cross in WW1, the British Red Cross have started to load up records for them, with A-D being currently available.