Nurses & VADs

Nurses were keen to enlist and serve their country, 600 women volunteering in the first eight months of the war. Not wanted for overseas service at first, it wasn’t until April 1915 that the first fifty New Zealand Army Nursing Service nurses left for Egypt under the leadership of Hester Maclean, the first nurses to officially accompany New Zealand troops.

New Zealand nurses served in hospitals in Egypt, Salonika, France, and Britain, on hospital ships, front line casualty clearing stations, hospital trains, convalescent homes, and troopships. The first New Zealand Hospital ship Maheno left for Egypt in 1915 with 69 nurses and 20 orderlies under the charge of Sister Ida Willis, who later was one of 76 New Zealand nurses to receive the Royal Red Cross. Nurses faced physical dangers, suffered illness (including trench foot) and exhaustion, as well as the prejudices of male beliefs. The Prime Minister had assured nurses they were to be ranked as officers and treated as such. However, with no visible signs of rank on their uniforms, New Zealand Officers refused to recognise them as such throughout the war.

Nurses were not immune from tragedy and one of the most notable was the sinking of the hospital ship Marquette, where New Zealand nurses were aboard tending the wounded from Gallipoli. The ship was torpedoed in the Aegean Sea, ten New Zealand nurses and twenty two orderlies drowned.

On the home front nurses served in the training camps, military hospitals for returning soldiers, and worked tirelessly through the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Voluntary Aid Detachment groups (VADs) were established in Britain for women to do nurse aid and other work. No such organisations existed in New Zealand until Ettie Rout formed her New Zealand Volunteer Sisterhood in 1915, and as the government seemed reluctant to set up similar organisations here many New Zealand women went to Britain to serve with British VADs. They came under the jurisdiction of the British Red Cross or the New Zealand War Contingent Association, but later in 1918 were all under the New Zealand Red Cross.

Finally in 1918 VADs were established in New Zealand, many women offering their services to help the war effort. Although VADs were not qualified nurses their contribution was enormous, the work often gruelling and as skilled as those they worked alongside.