Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Ruby Adelaide Catchlove (née Carman)
1903–64
SX10643
 
Key points
·       Ruby Carman served with the 2/9 Australian General Hospital from 1940 to 1943 in very trying conditions in Palestine and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
·       She suffered bouts of illness in Palestine and Port Moresby
·       She transferred to 105 Australian Military Hospital, Daw Park in 1943
·       She married Major William Catchlove MC, a patient at Daw Park, in 1944 and was retired from the AANS six months later
·       Three of her older brothers were killed in WW1. A fourth, younger brother served in WW2 but survived.
 
Before the war
Ruby Carman was born at Tickera near Port Broughton, South Australia in 1903. (Note: the dates 1904 and 1905 on her enlistment papers were incorrect). She was one of the nine children (5s, 4d) born between 1894 and 1911 to David Carman and his wife Elizabeth (née Whittingham).

The Carmans were a farming family in the Ward’s Hill area southwest of Port Broughton. They were very active members of the local Ward’s Hill Methodist Church and Sunday school.

Ruby attended Ward’s Hill Public School and completed her Qualifying Certificate (the standard educational qualification of the day) in 1917.

Three of her older brothers enlisted in WW1. They were all killed in action while she was a teenager: Clement in 1916, Roland in 1917 and David (William) in 1918.

Ruby’s decision to train as a nurse may have been motivated by her brothers’ deaths in the war, and/or the death of her twin brother George in infancy.
She trained at the Memorial Hospital, North Adelaide. It was a fitting choice: the hospital had been established by the Methodist Church in SA to honour the state’s service men and nurses who served in WW1.

Ruby passed the state Nurses Board examinations in 1935 and the midwifery qualification in 1938.
 
War service
Ruby signed her enlistment papers for the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) on 21 August 1940, weeks after her younger brother Kenneth (‘Jack’) Carman joined up. At almost 37, she was above the age limit for the AANS (35) so she amended her date of birth, first to 1904 and then 1905 so as to be not quite 35 (Catchlove, Ruby Adelaide SX10643, Service Record, NAA).

By mid 1940, around 35 AANS sisters from South Australia had left for service overseas, in two contingents. Five of them had trained or worked at Memorial Hospital and so were known to Ruby personally or by name.[1]

In October 1940 Ruby was posted to the 2/9 Australian General Hospital (AGH). The unit comprised medical officers, the matron and nursing sisters, plus personnel in other ranks who would be cooks, drivers, clerks and orderlies. They assembled at Adelaide’s Wayville Showgrounds.[2]
 
Egypt
On 5 February 1941 the 2/9AGH left Fremantle on the troop transport Mauretania. The unit disembarked in Bombay. The AANS sisters enjoyed accommodation in luxurious hotels and sightseeing. A Dutch ship SS Indapoera, took the unit to the Middle East. The ship was smaller than Mauretania but comfortable. Joan Crouch, the 2/9AGH historian, noted the seas were smooth and dances and concerts occupied the evenings. The war became more of a reality when three warships appeared on 18 March to escort Indapoera through the Arabian Sea to the Gulf of Aden where enemy ships and submarines patrolled.

The unit reached Port Suez on 23 March 1941. The men and some sisters were sent on to set up the hospital at Abd El Kadr near Amiriya, a windswept sandblown desert location in Egypt, 40 kms from the city of Alexandria (Bassett, Guns and Brooches, p127).
 
Carman and the other sisters were staged (ie awaiting further orders) at the large 2/2 AGH in El Kantara, Egypt near the Suez Canal. Conditions were an unpleasant shock: cold showers, one hot bath a week, lanterns for light, and primus stoves to heat the irons to press their uniforms (Crouch, A Special Kind of Service, p14). The sisters undertook rudimentary military training including daily route marches (which created considerable mirth) and respirator drills (Bassett, Guns and Brooches, p126).
 
Palestine
Ruby was fortunate to miss the appalling conditions in the desert at Amiriya. She was posted to the 2/2AGH and nursed there for nearly six months. In that time she suffered a bout of diphtheria and tonsilitis and was evacuated to 2/1AGH at Gaza Ridge in Palestine. Her service record showed she was still unwell when she was sent to rejoin her unit 2/9AGH, now at Nazareth, on 26 September 1941.
 
The 2/9AGH had been relocated to Nazareth in Palestine in late July 1941 to treat casualties from the campaign in Syria. The unit was housed in a monastery, convent and school previously occupied by Benedictine monks and Italian nuns. The site and buildings themselves made for hard nursing. The buildings were scattered over a large area, had drainage and water issues, and had no lifts between the floors. Wards were set up in small rooms, a more onerous arrangement than nursing in traditonal wards. As the medical unit closest to the fighting in Syria, 2/9AGH was constantly busy with around 500–600 patients at any one time. There was some consolation: the sisters’ quarters in the convent were comparatively comfortable with furniture and electric fans.
 
Ruby spent the month of October in the 2/9AGH hospital suffering from sinusitis.
 
The hospital personnel did as much sightseeing as possible when they were off duty or on leave. Ruby and her colleagues would have well acquainted with the ‘Holy Land’ from Sunday school and church.  She undoubtedly visited Jerusalem (which, unusually, was covered in snow that winter) as well as Nazareth, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem and many other sacred sites. Snow fell on Christmas Day and again on 2 January 1942, adding to the festive atmosphere and celebrations at the hospital (Crouch, A Special Kind of Service, pp30–32; Bassett, Guns and Brooches, p120).
 
Return to Australia
In early 1942, the AIF's 6 and 7 Divisions and several hospital units left the Middle East to go to 'The East' (South East Asia). On 16 January 1942 the 2/9AGH was ordered to cease admitting casualties and prepare for departure. Ruby and her colleagues worked hard to prepare patients for discharge. They packed up the wards, their mess and their quarters – always a hectic and tedious time of rolling mattresses, storing supplies and equipment, checking inventories and dealing with their own uniforms and kit.
 
The destination was thought to be Java in the Netherlands East Indies (present day Indonesia). The 2/9AGH left Port Suez on the Strathallan on 17 February  1942 and arrived at Adelaide on 17 March 1942. Singapore had fallen to the Japanese two days on 15 February. The journey was hot and ship crowded. The final destination was unclear until after leaving Java when the personnel were told they were headed home to Australia.[3] The Australian Prime Minister John Curtain had prevailed over British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, persuading him that most of the AIF, ships and planes must return to defend Australia.
 
Back home in Adelaide, Ruby and the 2/9AGH were temporarily ‘staged’ at the Northfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, awaiting further orders. Unlike some sisters who returned home, they were allocated nursing duties. Their patients were Australian and American troops stationed in and around Adelaide who fell ill. The exceptionally wet winter resulted in the nursing and living conditions being, in the words of one, ‘as bad if not worse than any we experienced’ (Bassett, Guns and Brooches, p160).
 
Most of the sisters were South Australian and could spend their time off with family, friends and each other. They were undoubtedly taken aback by the defences erected in Adelaide against feared attack. Blackout regulations were enforced in homes and streets, while sandbags and trenches were a common sight in the city and suburbs.
 
The military situation to Australia’s north changed by the day. Army authorities scrambled to identify suitable places for military hospitals to take battle casualties and sick troops from the fighting along the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea (July–November 1942). Australian hospitals were set up in Port Moresby and Queensland. For months Port Moresby was regarded as too dangerous a place to send women in the services; some had been sent but withdrawn.
 
Papua New Guinea
 
By mid 1942, army authorities decided a large base hospital was essential in Port Moresby to take casualties from the fighting along the Kokoda Track. In August the 2/9AGH’s male personnel  – medical officers/doctors, and medical orderlies, drivers, cooks etc – were ordered to move from Adelaide to Port Moresby. Their task was to set up the 2/9AGH as a 600 bed hospital at ‘Seventeen Mile’, a bare site 27 kms (17 miles) from Port Moresby. Ruby and the other sisters remained at Northfield for several weeks, attached to the 101 Australian General Hospital which relocated there in July to replace 2/9AGH.
 
Army authorities quickly deemed the situation in Port Moresby sufficiently secure for the 2/9AGH sisters and physiotherapists. Ruby and the group left Adelaide on 6 September. Seven weeks elapsed before they finally reached Port Moresby. They spent over a month in Melbourne, billeted at the 4 American Hospital (the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Carlton while the sourced their tropical uniforms and kit. They led a march of women’s services in Melbourne and took tea at Government House with the Victorian governor’s wife, Ruby, Lady Dugan. (She had been a voluntary Red Cross nurse in WW1 and lived in Adelaide from 1934 to1939 when her husband was the SA governor.)
 
Ruby and other 2/9 AGH sisters travelled by train to Brisbane where they embarked on the hospital ship Manunda on 22 October. They disembarked in Port Moresby on 29 October 1942 and began work at the newly opened hospital. (See Goodman, Our War Nurses, p215).
 
The 2/9AGH was still incomplete. Conditions for both patients and personnel were uncomfortable at best, primitive at worst. Clean water, electricity and refrigeration were in short supply for weeks. When Ruby and her colleagues arrived there were around 1000 patients, mainly from the Kokoda Track and its furthest point Buna. Most had fevers, dysentery, malaria and skin conditions.
 
Patient numbers nudged 1250 on 30 November 1942 and reached 1900 by the end of the year. The arrival of the wet season in November with torrential rain made nursing and living conditions difficult in the extreme. They often nursed in gum boots.
 
Reinforcements brought the number of sisters to 112. Despite the increase, the sisters did not have a day off until January 1943 (Bassett, Guns and Brooches, p160).
 
The hospital was under the flight path between a major aerodrome and Port Moresby harbour. Fly overs by Japanese planes and anti-aircraft flack were a regular occurrence around 9pm on moonlight nights. The site suffered one direct hit but there were no casualties.
 
Every ten days or so, 400–420 patients were evacuated from 2/9AGH onto the hospital ship Manunda which took them to Brisbane. Preparing that number of walking and stretcher patients with clean pyjamas, their kit and medical documentation, was complex and arduous. The work was often done at night, to take advantage of the cooler temperature. Other patients had to be readied for discharge to a new convalescent depot at Sogeri, 40 kms east of Port Moresby.
 
In December 1942, the hospital’s commanding officer Colonel A H Green expressed concern that his staff were ‘so heavily overtaxed, that the organisation will break down unless reinforced’ (Crouch, A Special Kind of Service, p85).
 
Nursing staff were rostered on to the hospital ship. Ruby’s turn came in early 1943, 27 January to 6 February. It would have been a great relief.
 
In March 1943, Ruby was diagnosed with furunculosis (boils), a painful bacterial skin infection common among personnel in Papua New Guinea. It was brought on by the climate, vitamin deficiency in the rations issued, and living conditions. Ruby was hospitalised for ten days (10 March–20 March). During that time – more likely before that – she applied for a transfer home, back to Adelaide. It was her third major bout of illness during her overseas service. Her health was clearly affected by nursing in extreme conditions.
 
Adelaide
Ruby was officially transferred from 2/9AGH to 105AGH at Daw Park in suburban Adelaide on 23 March 1943. She left 2/9AGH at Seventeen Mile on 11 April, and was officially ‘taken on strength’ at 105AGH ten days later.
 
Ruby’s transfer coincided with a major change in the status of AANS sisters. From March 1943 they were officially part of the AIF. Military rank replaced the ambiguous honorary rank sisters had held since the formation of the AANS in 1902. Ruby, a staff nurse, was officially designated lieutenant that month. In December 1943 she and other sisters who had enlisted in 1940 were promoted to captain on the basis of their length of service and seniority.
 
The 105AMH (Miliary replaced General in 1943) was a new, purpose built hospital. It had opened in 1942 at Daws Road, Daw Park nine kms south of Adelaide’s centre. The modern buildings were joined by covered walk ways and fronted on to landscaped planted gardens.[4] When Ruby joined the staff it was operating at full capacity with 450 patients and around 200 medical and general staff.
 
Ruby’s previous experience had been in general hospitals where patients were treated and transferred as quickly as possible, to another hospital or hospital transport or back to their unit. Some patients at 105AMH were patients with long-term health issues and disabling injuries. Physiotherapists and occupational therapists played a more significant role than in general hospitals.
 
Most patients had medical conditions such as malaria but there were some surgical patients. Some were battle casualties whose injuries required further repair. One of these was Major William Edward Laurence Catchlove (SX9947) who had suffered a serious gunshot wound to his leg fighting in Papua New Guinea and before that, a head injury in Tobruk where he had won a Military Cross. He was hospitalised in New Guinea, then Melbourne and finally in Adelaide, his home state. He was undoubtedly one of Ruby’s patients. Although both had served in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea, their paths did not cross until they met at 105AMH.
 
Ruby and William (an Anglican) married on 22 January 1944, at St Paul’s Anglican Church, Pulteney St, Adelaide.
 
Ruby remained on the staff at 105 AMH until 27 July 1944, when she was placed on the Retirement List and her appointment in the AANS ceased. 
Ruby and William had two daughters, Margaret (b1944) and Helen (b1945).
 
Ruby Catchlove died on 21 August 1964, aged 59. She was buried in Centennial Park Cemetery, Pasadena, Adelaide, Derrick Gardens Path 29, Grave 951.
 
William Catchlove died on 23 September 2010, aged 96. His ashes were interred in the Garden of Remembrance, Pasadena, Wall 29, Row C.

 
[1] The first Memorial Hospital AANS sisters sent on overseas service were Mavis Riggs, Ruth Treliving, Mary Dunn, Thelma (Sally) Umpherston and Nan Boully.
[2] The information about the 2/9AGH has been taken from Joan Crouch, A Special Kind of Service: The story of the 2/9 Australian General Hospital 1940–46, Chippendale, N.S.W.: Alternative Publishing Co-operative, 1986, and Jan Bassett, Gun and Brooches: Australian army nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992.
[3] Rupert Goodman, Our War Nurses: The history of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps 1902–1988, Boolarong Publications,p141.
[4] Peter Last, The Repat: a biography of Repatriation General Hospital (Daw Park) and a history of repatriation services in South Australia, Repatriation General Hospital, Daw Park, Adelaide, 1994

Ruby Adelaide Catchlove nee Carman's three older brothers were all killed in France in the 1st war.

Roland Clarence Carman born 20th January 1894 died Somme France 8th April 1917

Clement Claud Carman born 13th April 1894 died 5th November 1916

David William Carman born 18th October 1898 died 25th April 1918

Her youngest brother enlisted in the second war and served in New Guinea and  Islands.

Kenneth John Carman (Jack) born 12th March 1911 died 21 October 1980 Port Lincoln