Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Daughter of Robert Octavius and Mary Eleanor TUCKER

Did not marry

Before the War

Beryl May Tucker was born in 1890 in the Melbourne suburb of Canterbury to Robert Octavius Tucker (1852–1937) and his wife Mary Eleanor (‘Ella’) (1859–1941).

At the time of Beryl’s birth, her father Robert was a teacher at the Brighton Street School in Richmond, the Melbourne inner area popularly known as ‘Struggletown’ (Teachers Record of Service, Public Record Office Victoria). Robert had been on the Education Department payroll since 1868 when he was 17. He taught first in the town of Mortlake where his father James Tucker was a watch-maker and jeweller.

Robert’s service record with the Department is somewhat checkered. From the 1870s on, he taught in schools in country Victoria and Melbourne, including Richmond, possibly Yarra Park, Buninyong, Williamstown and back to Richmond. Remarks from inspectors on his teaching skills and reliability ranged from critical to praiseworthy and many points in-between. The absence of robust health seems a liability.

In 1880, when living and teaching in Buninyong, he married Mary Hyde, daughter of the late Robert Hyde of Docker’s Hill, Richmond, previously the owner of a marine supply store in Albert Street, East Melbourne (see East Melbourne Historical Society, Catalogue number: emvf0092). The couple presumably met when he was teaching and/or living in Richmond.

After nearly 35 years in State schools, ill-health prompted Robert to retire from the Department in 1902. From then on, he drew a pension of £173.3.5 per annum, considerably less than his previous salary of around £305 per annum.

Robert was 50 when he retired. He and Mary had had nine children between 1882 and 1895, all but the first surviving into adulthood. Beryl was the sixth born and fifth eldest. She grew up in Balwyn/Canterbury when Robert was teaching in Richmond, and was 12 when he embarked on his new venture and investment, a private school for boys.

Robert named the establishment Canterbury Grammar School. It opened in 1902, first in the Tucker home in Canterbury and then in bigger premises as enrolments grew quickly. He secured a property for boarders, ‘the home Mrs Tucker and myself are prepared to give boarders’ (Reporter [Box Hill] 22.10.1905). From his speeches at the annual prize givings and letters to the press, it is clear that Tucker believed firmly in Christian values underpinning education, and cadets and military drill as a source of discipline. He was highly critical of current government education policy which he believed promoted “rigid secularity … [and] the further mixing of the sexes [which] will further intensify the dangers which are now sufficiently evident” (Argus, 23.10.1910).

In 1912, Tucker again retired, selling his school to nearby rival Camberwell Grammar. He moved further out to Belgrave, and briefly relocated some of the family to Queensland where two of his three sons had taken up land. He wrote occasional letters to the press on topics ranging from tomato pests to youth centres, took an active interest in land sales. He died in 1937.

It is not surprising that the children of Robert and Mary Tucker ‘did well’. Their sons followed careers as selectors (Ewan and Roy), solicitor (Ewan) and doctor (Clifton Eric), spending all or part of their lives in Queensland. Their daughters trained for careers. Ethel was a teacher before marrying a dentist, Olive a typiste, and Marcel a ‘dental mechanic’. Hazel trained as a nurse at Melbourne Hospital but died in 1918 before completing her training. She had hoped to be an army nurse, like her elder sister Beryl.

Beryl like her brothers went interstate to pursue her profession but south to Tasmania, possibly because of family connections (Advocate [Burnie], 27.1.1933; she stayed with the wealthy William Tucker of Derby on returning from the war). She trained as a nurse at the Launceston General Hospital, completing registration requirements in 1915 [Kirsty Harris Database].

War Service

Beryl’s interest in military nursing may have been sparked by any one of several factors. Her father’s school boasted a senior cadet unit. Her young brother Ewan enlisted in the citizen’s military force in 1913, and then in the AIF in 1915 (Ewan Tucker, Service Record, naa.gov.au). Perhaps the most immediate and compelling reason was the number of her colleagues from Launceston General Hospital who enlisted (Kirsty Harris, ‘In the “Grey Battalion”: Launceston General Hospital Nurses on Active Service in World War 1’, Health and History, January 2008).  

Her payment in the Australian Military Forces dates from late 1914 according to her file. In early 1915, she did some private nursing in Melbourne. Later that year and 1916, she worked in the No. 9 Australian General Hospital in Hobart and the No 12 Australian General Hospital in Launceston.

Both hospitals had been established in 1915 as part of a system of facilities in each state to treat wounded soldiers returning home from overseas. Neither the Hobart of Launceston hospitals had been purpose built. The No 12 AGH was housed in an ‘old-fashioned, forbidding’ bank building located near a tannery (Mercury [Hobart], 21.8.1915), and No 9 AGH was a family residence which the fine views notwithstanding, had numerous limitations as a hospital (Mercury [Hobart], 28.10.15, 1.8.1917, 15.3.1919).

Beryl Tucker was one of a number of nurses from Tasmania to serve overseas. She signed the oath of allegiance at No 9 AGH (‘Austin’s Ferry’) on 7 December 1916. Her address on the embarkation roll on RMS Mooltan on 26 December was ‘East Melbourne’, a commonly used and convenient reference because of the nurses’ homes/depots there. 

She was 26½ when she enlisted for overseas service. Her service record describes her as 5’4½” and 137lbs (163 cms, 62 kgs), fair, with grey eyes and brown hair. She gave her religion as Methodist. Her rank was Sister.

Tucker was one of 49 nurses (11 sisters, 38 staff nurses) who left Melbourne on RMS Mooltan on 26 December 1916, bound for India.  She disembarked in Bombay (Mumbai) on 1 January 1917, and was posted to the Colaba War Hospital. (see also entries on Eileen Marriott and Constance Jessie Brooks, emhs.org.au). Colaba was a 550 bed hospital that typically had around 400 patients, mainly officers and troops from the British garrison in India. It was near the water, 'just the quaintest looking place with the native huts along the edge' according to another Australian nurse there (Gippsland Mercury, 21.11.1916). Staff Nurse McLean, one of her colleagues there, told her family that they were not overworked at the time. Swimming was hazardous because of the water, she continued, and she did not particularly like the food which was 'rather sour' and indeterminate in nature, with cholera an ever present fear. Native boys looked after their rooms, drew their baths and prepared afternoon tea for the nurses Warwick Examiner and Times, 3.10.1917). (For a group photo of the medical staff at Colaba see awm.gov.au/collection/P04046.001).

After a year at Colaba, Tucker was posted for several months temporary duty on the Hospital Ship Delta (see Delta photo awm.gov.au/collection/J05782), then sent briefly to No 56 Station Hospital in Dera Ghazi Khan, some 2 000 kms north of the Colaba Hospital. Weeks later she was transferred back to British hospitals in Bombay (Mumbai), first the Victoria War Hospital and then the Gerard Freeman Thomas Hospital. They received sick and wounded troops from the front in Mesopotamia, and were staffed mainly by Australian nurses and British medical officers. Both were civic buildings converted into hospitals. Many of the patients suffered from heat stroke, malaria or dysentery. There is no written record of Beryl’s experience there but another Victorian nurse at Freeman Thomas wrote she 'liked it fairly well', adding 'some of the sisters are Eurasian but they are mostly nice women' (Lilydale Express, 21.6.1918).

In her time off duty, Beryl and the other nurses undoubtedly explored the sights of Bombay and its surrounds in the fifteen months she was there - the Victoria Gardens, zoo, bazaars, Bandra Point and native villages. There was no evidence on her service record of ill-health during her service in India. Her service record does show however that she spent relatively brief periods in each posting in 1918.

In September 1918, she was again posted to a hospital ship, this time the British Hospital Ship Madras. This was a different scene of the war entirely – the Allied intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution.  Several Allied countries including Britain, America and Japan sent troops to defend the large build up of their supplies in and near Vladivostok and to support the anti-revolutionaries there. HS Madras travelled between Hong Kong and Vladivostok bringing back wounded officers and men from the Czech army and British forces – which included a small number of Australians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Intervention).

According to her service record, Tucker returned to Colombo in March 1919 to return to Australia. She was ill when she left HS Madras in March 1919. The nature of the unspecificed illness which rendered her 'unfit for general service' may have related to winter conditions in Vladivostok, and/or influenza. The Singapore Straits Times newspaper described the 'Madras' on that voyage as a 'sad ship'. Its Czech and British passengers 'poor fellows who who have gone through terrible hardships, and who are travelling homeward maimed and stricken' (Straits Times, 7.3.1919). 

Sister Beryl Tucker was discharged from the AANS on 7 May 1919.

After the War

Beryl Tucker returned to Tasmania shortly after arriving in Melbourne. She reported to a medical board in Launceston for assessment of her health before discharge, and may well have returned to nurse at the Launceston General Hospital. Her forwarding address and base were in Derby, 100 kilometres away, at North Holme, the estate of William T Tucker, a wealthy landowner and family member.

She sought assistance from the Repatriation Department in 1923. 

The electoral roll for 1924 shows her living with her family in Belgrave, outside Melbourne.

However, for a number of years in the 1920s and 1930s, she and a Sister Regan ran the Maroondah Private Hospital in Sea Lake, an isolated rural community 400 kilometres north west of Melbourne (Argus, 8.1.1935). Sister Regan (probably Elizabeth Regan) was also an army nurse. They left the hospital in 1935, and again Beryl moved back to the family homes in Mordialloc, then Sandringham.

Tucker suffered ‘a nervous breakdown’ in 1937 and again in 1939 and received small grants from the Edith Cavell Trust Fund which supported sick and needy Victorian army nurses towards recuperative holidays (Beryl Tucker, Index Card, Edith Cavell Trust Fund, Box M291, NAA, Melbourne). In 1939, she was living in Stansbury, a small remote fishing village on Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. 

Beryl Tucker died in Stansbury on the night of 5-6 October 1941. The coroner determined the cause of her death was ‘suicide by drowning’. She was 52. Statistics on the prevalence of suicide among returned service men are difficult to determine, though the rates may be higher than among civilian men (Marina Larrson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War, 2009, p.241). Little if anything is known of figures for returned sisters.

Beryl is buried in the Mitcham cemetery, South Australia. Her restored grave bears the rising sun emblem and the words ‘Beryl Tucker Sister Australian Army Nursing Service 5 October 1941 Age 52’.

Beryl Tucker featured in the East Melbourne Historical Society's 2015 exhibition, 'Gone to War as Sister: East Melbourne Nurses in the Great War'. Her panel can be seen at Gone to War as Sister - exhibition panel 15

This essay was originally published in 2013 as part of a project by the East Melbourne Historical Society researching those who served in WW1 who had an East Melbourne connection. The original and around 55 others on nurses, researched and written by Janet Scarfe, can be found at emhs.org.au

References: 
Kirsty Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army Nurses at Work in World War 1, Big Sky Publishing, 2011