Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Edith Butler (later Eadie)
1908-2012
SX3061
 
Key points[1]
·      Edith Butler (1908–2012), was the daughter of a decorated WW1 soldier, Colonel Charles Philip Butler, and the grand daughter and niece respectively of two South Australian premiers, Sir Richard Butler and Sir Richard Layton Butler.
·      She was matron of two Australian General Hospitals during WW2: 2/3AGH in Surrey, England (1940–41) and 2/11AGH in Alexandria (1941)
·      Invalided back to South Australia after a near fatal car accident near Jerusalem in 1941, she was the first matron of the new 105 Australian Military Hospital at Daw Park, Adelaide, then Principal Matron of 4 Military District (ie South Australia)
·      In May 1945 she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and held senior nursing roles in post war Germany and Austria from 1945 to 1947. She returned to Australia in 1948
·      Edith Butler married Dr Norman Eadie in 1950. She died in 2012, aged 104.
·      Edith Butler was decorated with the Royal Red Cross (1st Class) and made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM).
 
Before the war

Edith Dorothy Kate Butler was born on 25 February 1908, at Petersburg (Peterborough) in South Australia’s mid North, to Charles Philip Butler and his wife Eileen Mary (née Hayes). Her father had served in the 2nd South Australian Mounted Rifles Contingent in the South African (Boer) War and married a nurse Eileen Mary Hayes. He subsequently served in WW1, where he was decorated with a Distinguished Service Order for gallantry at the Battle of Passchendale. He was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1917.

Edith’s family circumstances during her father’s absence and ill-health in WW1 resulted in her attending several schools including Girton Girls School (Kensington) and Riverside School (Medindie).

At her mother’s suggestion Edith trained to be a nurse at the (Royal) Adelaide Hospital. She spent several years as a sister on the staff, ran a depot supplying nurses for private patients and was briefly matron of the Crippled Children’s Home in the seaside suburb of Brighton.
 
Edith was accepted into the Australian Army Nursing Service in the weeks after the outbreak of war in September 1939. Minor surgery prevented her from joining the first contingent of South Australian sisters who left Adelaide for the Middle East in early 1940.
 
She was called up and appointed temporary matron of the second contingent on 21 May 1940.
 
War service[2]

England

The second contingent of South Australian AANS sisters left Adelaide on SS Stratheden on 27 May 1940. A group of West Australian sisters boarded in Fremantle. After more than six weeks at sea they disembarked in Liverpool, England on 17 July. Italy’s entrance into the war had forced their ship and the convoy ahead of it with thousands of Australian troops aboard to divert from their planned destination in the Middle East.
 
A hospital for Australian troops camped on Salisbury Plain, 2/3AGH, was hastily set up at Milford in Surrey, south west of London. Edith was appointed matron, in charge of over 70 AANS sisters who were by then in England. Most of the nursing was undemanding, apart from an influenza outbreak. She and most sisters succumbed to the illness.
 
Edith Butler’s monthly reports to the AANS Matron in Chief in Melbourne showed that she dealt with numerous issues, many do with Australian army bureaucracy. She faced hurdles in securing uniforms for a snowy English winter. Personnel problems included forced resignation of several sisters who married and in particular overt discontent from Sister Ethel Bowe who felt she had been passed over as matron.
 
Middle East

In early 1941 thousands of British, Australian and Allied troops left Britain for the Middle East via Cape Town. Edith Butler’s 2/3AGH sisters left in March and arrived at the large staging camp at Gaza Ridge in May. They were soon posted to a new hospital in Alexandria, in a new unit, 2/11AGH.
 
The 2/11AGH took casualties from the fighting in Greece and Crete, and from the siege of Tobruk in Libya. It functioned as a casualty clearing station because most of the sick and wounded came directly from the fighting. The night Edith and her main group of sisters arrived the hospital was bombed and six patients were killed. Patients were admitted with terrible injuries from explosions and oil contamination, as well as illnesses such as dysentery, sandfly fever and hepatitis.
 
After Australian forces were withdrawn from Tobruk, 2/11AGH closed in November 1941 and the personnel returned to Gaza Ridge to await further orders. Few were allocated nursing duties and days were occupied sightseeing in Jerusalem and other biblical places.
 
In mid December Edith Butler was critically injured in a car accident when the unroadworthy jeep in which she was travelling to Jerusalem hit stones in a rainstorm. She recovered slowly and returned to Australia on a Dutch military ship in March 1942. Olive Kestel took over as 2/11AGH matron.
 
Adelaide
 
As it happened 2/11AGH, several other hospitals and the AIF’s 6 and 7 Divisions had returned to Australia following Japanese attacks on Darwin and other locations.
 
Butler’s injuries required ongoing treatment for months and ruled out strenuous duty which meant she could not return to 2/11AGH. In June 1942 she was appointed matron of 105AGH, the military hospital in the Adelaide suburb of Daw Park which had just opened. She held that position until April 1943 when she was appointed Principal Matron for 4 Military District (ie South Australia).
 
The Principal Matron position, with an office at Keswick Barracks, was an administrative role. Butler managed records relating to South Australian AANS sisters, their locations, transfers, recreation and sick leave, and transfers. It was not dry paper work. There was great concern about nine sisters from the state missing after the evacuation from Singapore in February 1942. (Their fates, death and captivity, were not known until the defeat of Japan in August 1945.) She was present at various public patriotic occasions with the wives of the governor general and the state governor. Edith also attended regular conferences with the principal matrons from the other military districts.
 
Edith held the rank of lieutenant colonel and was awarded the Royal Red Cross (1st Class) decoration on 1 January 1945.

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)

The war in Europe ended with the German surrender on 8 May 1945. Edith saw an advertisement for nursing sisters to join the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, applied and was accepted. She left Australia for Europe on 27 May.
 
UNRRA had been established in 1943 in anticipation of the urgent need for economic, social and medical relief in countries ravaged by the war. Millions of people in Europe had been displaced from their homes – by bombing, forcible transfer to German labour camps or in Baltic countries fleeing from the Russian armies. Refugee camps were set up to provide shelter, food and medical attention, particularly for new mothers and babies.
 
After six months stationed in the American Zone in Berlin, Edith was appointed Chief Nurse for UNRRA’s British Zone in Austria. Her role included recruiting nurses, managing their placements and ensuring that the services provided in the refugee camps were as beneficial and effective as possible in the circumstances. UNRRA was an international organisation (United State, United Kingdom, Soviet Russia, China and 40 other nations), highly complex and competitive in its structure, and dealing with millions of displaced people and severe shortages in food, medical attention and supplies.
 
The scenes Edith faced were confronting. The physical destruction in German cities, the physical state of refugees and the appalling condition of the prisoners of war liberated from German camps left her reeling. None of her previous experiences – England during the Blitz, the injured casualties in Alexandria – had prepared her for what she saw in post-war Europe.[3]
 
Edith spent two years with UNRRA. After some months in England, she returned to South Australia in 1948. She was 40.
 
Return to Adelaide 

Edith’s injuries from the car accident in 1941 required follow-up surgery in Melbourne. Around 1949 while convalescing at Melbourne’s Repatriation Hospital she met Dr Norman Eadie – again. He had been in the medical contingent on Stratheden in 1940 and a senior medical officer at 2/3AGH in England. She was shocked at the change in his physical condition. He had been a prisoner of war on the notorious Burma Railway and was now a widower with a teenage daughter.
 
They married in 1950, and lived first in Melbourne then Adelaide. He died in 1984 aged 91.
 
In Adelaide Edith Eadie (as she became) was very active in the Returned Sisters Sub-branch of the RSL. Determined to promote the role and history of the AANS in WW2, she collected contributions from South Australian sisters. They were published in 1995, as With the A.A.N.S. 1939–1945, compiled by Edith D K Eadie.
 
Edith was honoured with the Medal of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2001. The citation reads: 'For service to the nursing profession, particularly in preserving and recording the stories of Australian Army nurses who served during World War II.' 
 
This account of her service shows how limited a description that is of Edith’s career and service. She served in the AANS for five years, as the matron of three military hospitals (including one under fire) and suffered an accident overseas that threatened and changed her life. After the war ended in Europe, she spent two years working to better the conditions of refugees – a different form of war casualty, perhaps more shocking – in Berlin and Austria. In later life she married a medical officer with whom she had worked a decade earlier and met again, almost by chance. Her final work, done in her late 80s, was to preserve the stories of members of the AANS in WW2 and prepare them for publication.
 
Edith outlived most of her contemporaries in the AANS. She died in 2012 at the great age of 104.
 
 

[1] Much of the information has been taken from Edith Butler’s interview with Joan Durdin on 2 November 1993 for the Royal Adelaide Hospital Oral History Program. For the transcript see OH172/6, State Library of SA.
[2] The information on Edith Butler’s service in England and Alexandria is from Janet Scarfe, Her Great Adventure: Dorothy ‘Puss’ Campbell WW2 army nursing sister, Janet Scarfe, 2024. Edith Butler was Puss Campbell’s matron in the 2/3AGH and the 2/11AGH.
[3] Edith Eadie, ‘Now in Retirement’, transcript of a recording of an interview conducted by the A.B.C … Appended to OH172/6.