The Other Anzacs (3 page)

A boy was pulling one of my boots on one side of my chair and another boy on the other side was tugging at my other boot and yet I had them tucked as far under my chair as I could get them. They were beautifully polished before I left the ship and did not require cleaning. I had to keep shouting at them to be off.
¹

Another of the women was trying to ward off the attentions of a fortune teller and two annoying bootblacks on their knees who were trying to polish her shoes. Snake charmers, bead sellers and yet more bootblacks added to the pandemonium unfolding before Elsie’s eyes.

Then up came a conjuror, head corks and tins and started pulling chickens out of his shirt front, then began some marvellous tricks. Then the whole crowd started begging for money. I’d as soon go hungry any day as try to enjoy a cup of tea under such circumstances.
²

The city was at once mesmerising and bewildering. On board the Australian hospital ship
Kyarra
, anchored at Port Said, Sister Elsie Cook was discomforted for different reasons from her colleagues lunching in town. Elsie was in a state of high anticipation, preparing to meet her husband, Lieutenant Syd Cook, an architect and the son of conservative politician Joseph Cook, leader of the Liberal Party. Prime Minister when the war had started in the middle of a federal election campaign, Cook Snr had announced that ‘If the Old Country is at war, so are we’. Labor leader Andrew Fisher had promised Great Britain ‘our last man and our last shilling’ in any conflict with Germany. On 5 September 1914, Cook was defeated and Fisher became Prime Minister for the third time.

On the declaration of war, Elsie had immediately started a scrapbook. The second newspaper story she pasted inside the cover was from the Sydney
Sunday Times
of 9 August. Headed, ‘NURSES TO VOLUNTEER’, it stated:

One of the first nurses in New South Wales to volunteer from [
sic
] active service was Nurse Shephard [
sic
], of the Prince Alfred Hospital. She is just completing her term of training, and is a member of the ATNA [Australasian Trained Nurses’ Association]. She is also the fiancée of Lieut. Cook, son of the Prime Minister, who has also volunteered for active service.

Elsie and Syd’s marriage six weeks later was a high point on Sydney’s social calendar. The honeymoon that followed was short, as Syd, a platoon commander in the 2nd Battalion, was already in camp. He sailed for Egypt at the start of November. Elsie and Syd had not seen each other for nearly three months, and they were both excited at the prospect of meeting. ‘Up early and dressed waiting to go ashore, as I thought to meet Syd, who was at the Anzac camp outside Cairo, ’ Elsie wrote.
³
A telegram arrived with the news that Syd had been denied leave to travel to Port Said. A disconsolate Elsie went ashore, her normally warm smile replaced by a frown. She later harrumphed that Port Said was ‘the dirtiest, nastiest place imaginable’. The
Kyarra
left Port Said that evening and a day later docked at Alexandria, Egypt’s main port on the Mediterranean.

Everyone was restless and eager to leave the ship, not least Elsie, who was ‘fairly dying to get ashore’ to see Syd. ‘It is a very wearing thing to be tied up in port and not allowed ashore in a new and untrodden part, all its novelties and mysteries still untasted, more especially desirable is it when one’s brand new husband is contained therein, ’ she wrote. When they were finally permitted to disembark, the nurses were captivated by cosmopolitan Alexandria, with its wide avenues, fine buildings, French tea rooms and bohemian culture. After the filth of Port Said, the ancient city’s cleanliness and order were a relief.

Elsie travelled by train the 225 kilometres across the flat Nile delta to Cairo. With her were her colleagues from Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Kath King and Ursula Carter. Ursula’s brother, Lieutenant Herbert Gordon Carter, of the 1st Battalion, was based, like Syd Cook, at Mena Camp outside Cairo. The three nurses took a taxi there.

Ursula had not seen her brother since he left with the first Anzac convoy. Kath King may well have known Gordon from her life in Sydney, and they all got on famously that day, catching up with each other’s news. Gordon hired donkeys and took Kath and Ursula to the Sphinx. Kath fell off her mount, much to everyone’s amusement.

Upset to find that Syd was away on a route march in the desert, Elsie stood waiting at his tent. A passing colonel sensed her melancholy and sent his groom to fetch Syd back. ‘Soon on the horizon came two galloping specks. I watched them thro’ the glasses get nearer and nearer. Syd arrived looking very well and fit. Strange it seemed to meet him away there in a desert camp, after saying goodbye at Kensington [Sydney].’
⁴
Meeting again in an Egyptian desert camp with the ancient Pyramids looming nearby was the stuff of romance for a nurse born and bred on the other side of the world.

They drove into Cairo, through strange narrow streets, and found their way to the opulent Shepheard’s Hotel, the social mecca of British Army officers, where they took rooms. After dinner, they drove around Cairo, where the scent of incense gave a ‘weird oriental touch and feeling’. Returning to the hotel, they listened enchanted to the orchestra in the lounge before having supper at another popular venue, Gaults. They were in love and their senses were alive to the wonders of Egypt.

Shepheard’s was a vibrant centre of European life in Cairo, a city now buzzing with the rapidly expanding presence of the military. The elegant hotel had long been the place to be seen. Its great dining room overflowed during the social season with people of all nationalities and pursuits. The Australian nurses were awestruck. For clergyman’s daughter Daisy Richmond, who had trained at Sydney Hospital and worked for the Bush Nursing Association near Boorowa, New South Wales, the hotel was a ‘most glorious place’, with its magnificent drapes and a head waiter in flowing Egyptian robes. Elsie Cook loved the Victorian-era hotel’s broad stairways and wide halls, resplendent with divans, cushions and palms. ‘Dark Arabs gliding noiselessly about dressed in white, red fez and sash, the whole so different and fascinating and impressive to my Australian eyes.’
⁵
To Elsie, who had grown up in the leafy and wealthy Sydney suburb of Burwood and attended the local Methodist Ladies College, where she had excelled in physiology, these early days in Cairo were like living a fantasy.

Another Australian nurse, awed by the ancient history surrounding her, wrote home after visiting the Pyramids and the Sphinx, ‘It seemed almost incredible that we were there gazing at these wonderful works which we read of and viewed in pictures all our lives and never dreamt of seeing. I can’t tell how it makes you feel, that calm, wise face, gazing out over the desert, watching the passage of the centuries as we do the days of the week. It conveys such a sense of understanding everything.’
⁶

Six weeks earlier, 160 nurses had boarded the
Kyarra
in Australia, excitement and trepidation running high among them and those who had come to farewell them. While a small advance party of sisters had left with the first convoy of Australian and New Zealand troopships on 1 November, Elsie’s group was the first to leave on a hospital ship. The former coastal freighter— hurriedly requisitioned for war service and painted white, with a wide green band round its hull and a large red cross amidships—held two complete general hospitals, fully equipped to accommodate 1640 patients. Troops were also on board.

Elsie boarded the
Kyarra
at Woolloomooloo in Sydney, after it arrived from Brisbane. It was a sultry day, and ‘terrific claps of thunder echoed through the ship’, the
Australasian Nurses’ Journal
reported on 15 December.

We all thought of the more deafening thunder of the guns which roar unceasingly along the battle front, and we remembered that, notwithstanding the bright and festive air which surrounded us, we were bidding farewell not to an ordinary ship, carrying an ordinary body of Australians on pleasure bent, but a band of earnest trained men and women, who in a few weeks’ time would be at work in circumstances of hardship, and even perhaps of danger, and surrounded by pain and suffering indescribable.

Kath King noted prosaically in her diary: ‘The last of Sydney for a while. I had a crowd of friends see me off. Had a very rough night, three sailors were nearly washed overboard and were injured, one seriously, our first patients.’
⁷
The
Kyarra
sailed to Melbourne, where the remainder of the contingent boarded, among them Alice Ross King. The Melbourne surgeon she worked for had wanted to enlist but told Alice he would only go if she joined too. Alice agreed. The surgeon failed the medical checks. Alice, who passed, went anyway.

As the ship pulled away from the dock amid singing of
Auld Lang Syne
, streamers of red, white, rose, green and mauve were unfurled, joining passengers with the big crowd on shore. The sinuous ribbons strained and snapped, leaving family and friends waving and shouting as the ship steamed out into Port Phillip Bay. From the deck, Elsie Cook watched her father, Michael Sheppard, grow smaller. ‘Last sight of Father was to see him waving his handkerchief on his umbrella.’
⁸

For Elsie Eglinton, the streamers ‘made me feel very sad as I saw them all snapping as our ship got further and further from land’. She and several others had travelled to Melbourne by train to join the
Kyarra
. Their first farewell had been in Adelaide, where nursing colleagues organised ‘a beautiful tea-party and gave each a small gold swashtika [
sic
] for a mascot of Good Luck’.
⁹
Such charms were deeply appreciated and kept close. ‘Father came in to say “Goodbye” this morning, ’ Elsie wrote of the group’s departure from Adelaide, ‘but I hurried him off as I was afraid of breaking down and going away red-eyed. We are all ever so happy, Maggie Hay is my chum, we seem to pair off you know.’ Best mates would acquire special importance for the nurses during the years ahead.

As their train travelled through the countryside, Elsie and her colleagues were treated like heroines. ‘We are having a glorious time so far, ’ she wrote. ‘Our carriages were simply piled with sweets, flowers [and] flags. At one station women and children came on to the platform with hot tea, cakes and flowers. Oh! They did give us a good send off.’ Her friend Sister Olive Haynes noted that the carriage was full of gifts. They had supplied themselves with tea but forgot the milk. Drinking black tea from a vacuum flask would soon be the smallest of their inconveniences. Sister Ethel Peters (known as Pete) was upset because she didn’t kiss Olive’s brother, Dal, and ‘she mightn’t get another chance’.
¹⁰

On board the
Kyarra
, Olive and Pete were Elsie’s cabin mates. ‘We get along nicely together we take it in turns to get dressed as there is only room for one at a time, ’ Elsie wrote. She wondered what the principal matron, Jane Bell, would make of the various state uniforms. ‘The girls say that she is most particular. I’m wondering what she will think of the hobble skirts which a few of the NSW and Tasmanians are wearing, anyway they are not the thing for Active Service for they could never run if occasion occurred.’
¹¹
Hobble-skirted uniforms that narrowed at the ankles would be one of the first items to go.

Though well educated, these nurses came from fairly narrow backgrounds. Many had become nurses against their parents’ wishes. At the time, nurses had not long emerged from their 19th-century image of drunken promiscuity. The revolution in nursing that Florence Nightingale began during the Crimean War had been taken to Australia by Nightingale’s disciple Lucy Osburn in 1868. The young women on the
Kyarra
were all beneficiaries of the new system of nurse training, as were their New Zealand counterparts, who would soon follow.

But their position in society was still confined. Many had never travelled. Kath King, from Orange in New South Wales, displayed the same parochialism as the South Australians, caustically observing after her visit to the Melbourne bayside suburb of St Kilda, ‘Melbourne folk think a lot of St Kilda but it really is not any better than Botany Bay.’ But for girls with a sense of adventure, the war was a chance to visit places that they had only read about. As with the men, going to the war seemed the chance of a lifetime.

The excitement was palpable in the sea of new faces at dinner that first night after leaving Melbourne. The officers and sisters dined together, the sisters wearing grey frocks, white muslin caps and scarlet capes that contrasted with the officers’ navy and scarlet uniforms. But next morning seasickness brought an end to their delight. When Elsie Eglinton awoke she ‘heard groans all round our cabin . . . The others were all ill. So down I got and produced my flask of brandy and started to give each one a dose, but I don’t remember finishing for my legs seemed to give way under me and I had to lie on the floor as the ladder to the top berth was impossible for a time.’
¹²
No one got up that day.