Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Ruby Millie Hornsey

Ruby Millie Hornsey (1885–1969) is commemorated on the honour board of Great War nurses who were parishioners at St Peter’s Church Eastern Hill East Melbourne.

A Tasmanian, she trained at Launceston General Hospital and enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1915. She served in Egypt, in France and in England as well as on transport duty. Initially a staff nurse, she was promoted to sister in 1918.

Hornsey spent several years in Melbourne in the early 1920s but returned to Tasmania in 1925 where she nursed at the Launceston General Hospital. She married in 1929 and lived the remainder of her life in Launceston until her death in 1969.

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Ruby Millie Hornsey (1885-1969) was the fifth of six children (2s, 4d) born to John Hornsey (c1845–1918) and his wife Mary Ann (nee Thorne) (1847–1918).

Both John and Mary Ann had been born in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Mary Ann’s mother’s maternal forebears included four convict great grandfathers, three of whom had come to Tasmania via Sydney and Norfolk Island (information from family connection Ann Knight). Samuel Thorne, a grandfather on her mother’s paternal side, had been part of the failed settlement in Victoria before resettling in Tasmania. Her father, Robert Thorne was identified as a ferryman in Sorell on Mary Ann’s marriage certificate, but in fact had at one time made and lost a fortune in whaling and owned considerable land (Examiner, 5.9.1931, p10).

John and Mary Ann had six children: Charles Robert (b1874), Elsie Mary (b1877), Algernon John (b1879), Stella Thorne (b1882), Ruby Millie (b1885), and Jean Estelle (b1888). The family were well known in the Dover area, not always for the best reasons. John Hornsey was associated with illegal trading by his brother-in-law George Hayton (Mercury, 13.4.1874, p3), so not surprisingly questions were raised when he was appointed constable in Bothwell (Mercury, 8.12.1883, p3). Between 1911 and 1917, he appeared in court on various charges – theft of a bag of apples, allowing a horse to stray and setting fire to Crown land (Mercury, 55.11.1911, p7; 13.6.1913, p6; 22.2.1917, p6). Ill-health may have been a contributing factor; he died in January 1918 (Mercury, 8.1.1918, p4).

John Hornsey was not the only member of the family who came to public attention. Ruby’s older sister Stella had married David Hay Ralph Moss in 1901. The bride was 19, the groom 39. The following year, Moss (sometimes Moses) was charged with bigamy when his aggrieved wife arrived from India seeking a divorce. The case dragged on for months, regularly reported in the press, with Stella suffering the unedifying description ‘a woman named Thorne’ (e.g. Mercury, 27.8.1902, p4, 28.11.1902, p4, 29.4.1903, p2). Moss’s first wife was granted a divorce leaving Moss free of the title ‘bigamist’. He and Stella moved to Sydney where he died in 1911.

It was a family with troubles and sadnesses. In addition Ruby’s oldest brother, a school teacher, had died aged 22 in 1896 after a ‘long and painful illness’ (Mercury, 22.9.1896, p1).

About 1911, Ruby began four years of nursing training at the Launceston General Hospital. The hospital had a fine reputation for its training and attracted women from around Tasmania and the mainland, a number of whom enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (Kirsty Harris, ‘In the “Grey Battalion”: Launceston General Hospital nurses on active service in World War I’, Health and History: bulletin of the Australian Society of the History of Medicine, v.10, no.1, 2008, p.21-40). She qualified for the hospital’s certificate and registration with the Australasian Trained Nurses Association. Her training was followed with four months as sister in charge of male surgical wards (Ruby Millie Hornsey, Service Record [NAA]).

War Service

Ruby Hornsey formally applied to enlist in the Australian Army Nursing Service in August 1915. She was the first and only member of her immediate family to do so; her surviving brother did join up.

Hornsey had already spent six weeks at the 12 Australian General Hospital in Launceston nursing wounded troops (soon to be a prerequisite for nurses before they went on active service abroad). Conditions were not ideal: 12 AGH was housed in an ‘old-fashioned, forbidding’ bank building located near a tannery (Mercury, 21.8.1915).

On 24 August 1925, Hornsey embarked with a contingent of nurses who were designated as reinforcements for 2 Australian General Hospital in Egypt. They arrived on 22 September 1915. Hornsey’s service record is almost silent on this period but it appears she nursed at  2AGH until the unit was relocated to France in March 1916.

2 AGH in Cairo was located in facilities never intended to be a hospital, first at Mena House and then the Ghezirah Palace Hotel, situated on an island in the Nile. Nonetheless, with its sister hospital 1AGH, 2AGH treated thousands of sick and wounded from the Gallipoli campaign. One of Hornsey’s colleagues, Lyla Ferguson from Terang, described 2AGH in a letter home. There were hundreds of patients in 45 wards. As well as wounded Australian soldiers, some of whom were 'almost cut to pieces', there were 'crowds of medical cases', mainly British troops with dysentery, jaundice and typhoid. The patients in Ferguson’s ward (presumably like Hornsey’s) were looked after by 2 orderlies, 2 Arabs, 2 nurses and one or two convalescent patients (Terang Express, 7.1.1916).

There were lighter notes in Ferguson’s letter however suggesting the nurses’ lives off duty. The daily street scapes with camels and donkeys were just like familiar bible pictures. And there was having to rush for a tram (from sight-seeing?) so as not to be late on duty. 

In early 1916 as the war and Australians moved to the Western Front, medical units followed them. 2 AGH medical staff, including Ruby, packed up all the equipment and arrived in Marseilles in April. Its main role there was as an infectious diseases hospital, for patients with diphtheria, typhoid and smallpox.

Nurses were often transferred between the hospitals, Australian and British, when the need arose. Ruby was sent from Marseilles for duty in a hospital in the coastal town of Le Treport. Two months later she rejoined her unit 2 AGH which by then had moved to Wimereux near Boulogne. There were a number of British hospitals there, staffed by Australian nurses and British doctors. 

All hospitals in the area were often overwhelmed by the volume of casualties from battles in the area, and then by the notorious 'Somme winter' of 1916-17.

The official war diary of 2 AGH in late 1916 and 1917 indicated that in the midst of an 'exceptionally heavy workload', patients (and therefore medical staff) were in tents that were subject to the vagaries of the appalling weather, that water pipes froze and later burst, and that at least one nurse was severely affected by the cold.

Hornsey’s service record shows her suffering from influenza in 1916, although there are no precise dates or details.

Having nursed in these near-impossible circumstances through the winter at 2AGH, in March 1917, Hornsey was sent for duty first with the 10 British Stationary Hospital and then 1 Australian Casualty Clearing Station where she spent several months.

1ACCS was at Estaires, 300 kilometres north east of Rouen. It was housed in a Catholic boys school which continued to function as such, with patients also in tents in the grounds nearby. The patients came straight from the nearby front, often with their original dressings applied in the field. The influx of casualties from the battle at Arras in May 1917 during her time there was very high.

Hornsey arrived in late March. In early April, 1ACCS endured rain, wind, snowstorms and blizzards (1ACCS, War Diary [AWM]), but by the end of the month the weather fine and mild. The commanding officer described his hospital as being as much a stationary hospital as a clearing station, with a daily bed counts of between 130 and 180 patients, but that changed dramatically in June.

Patient admissions during June numbered 2862, varying from quiet days with no new admissions to 6 and 7 June when 1342 wounded and sick men arrived at the hospital. Most were evacuated within a day. There were 132 deaths that month in the hospital. The nearby town was also regularly bombarded with artillery.

In late June 1917, Hornsey was abruptly sent to England to report to the AIF headquarters. She was not on leave, nor apparently ill, perhaps utterly exhausted. She was also immensely fortunate: a week later, 1ACCS was bombed, the occasion that led to the award of the Military Medal to Sister Rachel Pratt for nursing under fire while wounded.

The following month she left for Australia with patients from 2 Australian Auxiliary Hospital near London, many of them amputees. Transport duty although dangerous because of potential attacks from German Uboats was a way of providing lighter duties, compassionate leave and/or a visit home for nurses.

Hornsey spent several months in Tasmania, probably nursing again at 12 AGH in Launceston.

She did resume active service overseas, reapplying for the AANS in December 1917 and sailing from Adelaide on 5 January 1918. Sadly, her father died in Tasmania two days later.

Hornsey reached England in March 1918. During that year she moved between two of the Australian Auxiliary Hospitals near London, 2AAH at Southall and 1AAH at Harefield. Her patients at 2AAH had lost one or multiple limbs, whereas those at 1AAH suffered from a range of injuries and/or illnesses. Both hospitals focused on rehabilitation and readying their patients for repatriation to Australia.

Hornsey was promoted to sister in October 1918, while serving at Harefield.

Ruby Horney returned to Australia in early 1919, as part of the nursing staff on the Osterley which was carrying repatriated troops. After delays in Australian coastal waters because of influenza quarantines, she disembarked in March 1919 in Tasmania.

After the War

Ruby Hornsey was discharged from the AANS in good health on 1 April 1919. She was 34 years old.

Sister Hornsey was prominent in Hobart’s welcome home parade for returned troops in March, where the crowd heard of the unstinting efforts of nurses from battalion commander Colonel Crowther: ‘Only those in the field knew what they had done for the soldiers. He had seen the sisters work until they had irrevocably ruined their health’ (Mercury, 18.3.1919, p5). She was also welcomed in her local community (Huon Times, 1.4.1919, p3) on a fleeting visit home.

Ruby Hornsey’s movements immediately after the war are not clear. Her mother had sold her home and lived with Ruby’s brother Algernon in their home town of Dover. Her sisters Elsie and Jean (widowed in 1915) were in still in Tasmania. Her other widowed sister Stella Moss (Moses) moved to Melbourne about 1921 and worked as a nurse It was not surprising then to find Stella, Ruby and their mother living together in Caulfield in Melbourne in the early 1920s (Australian Electoral Rolls). Ruby may well have worked at No 11 Australian General Hospital/ Caulfield Repatriation. This may also have been the time when she attended St Peter’s Eastern Hill in East Melbourne.

In 1925, Stella’s life changed dramatically when she married the German vice-consul, Dr W. R Rohde (Argus, 30.3.1925, p1). She soon moved overseas, and within a few years had lived in Germany, Africa and Japan (Brisbane Courier, 10.9.1932). Her mother returned to Tasmania and lived with her daughter Jean who had also recently remarried (Examiner, 5.9.1931, p10; Mercury, 16.4.1924).

At the time of Stella’s wedding, Ruby was appointed to the staff of her old hospital, Launceston General and returned to Tasmania (Examiner, 20.3.1925, p5). Her name appeared from time to time in the Launceston press, as an invited guest for Prime Minister Stanley Bruce for example and at Victoria Women’s league functions (Examiner, 25.8.1927, p10; 21.9.1928, p9).

In 1929, Ruby Hornsey married William John Connell of St Leonards, Launceston (Examiner, 11.12.1929, p12). Connell was a widower, comfortably off, and thirty years older than Ruby. They lived in his home until his death in 1945 (Launceston Examiner, 17.4.1945, p4).

Ruby Millie Hornsey died on 30 December 1969, aged 84. She was cremated and her ashes buried in the Carr Villa Cemetery Crematorium Rose Garden.

She is commemorated at St Peter’s Church Eastern Hill, East Melbourne on the honour board listing nurses from the parish who served in the Great War.

This essay originally appeared on the East Melbourne Historical Society website, emhs.org.au