Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Lorna Winifred Tippett (1909-1987)

Summary

Lorna Tippett was a South Australian nurse who enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service soon after the outbreak of war in 1939. She served in England and the Middle East before returning to Australia in 1942. She worked in a hospital in Warwick, Queensland nursing troops who were sick and wounded during the campaign in New Guinea before returning to Adelaide to run the camp hospital at the showgrounds in Wayville, site of SA’s main recruitment and mobilisation centre.

She was awarded the Associate of the Royal Red Cross decoration for military nursing in 1945.

In 1945, Tippett joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration which had been established to meet the most immediate needs of millions of people displaced by the war in Europe and elsewhere. She worked in camps in the British occupied zone in Germany, and then in 1947 was appointed Chief Nurse in Italy, responsible for nursing arrangements in camps throughout the country.

Tippett returned to Adelaide in 1948, and resumed nursing. She died in 1987.

Before the war

Lorna Winifred Tippett was the youngest of four children (2s, 2d) born to Herbert Bonamy Tippett (1871-1948) and his wife Mary Winifred (nee Harry) (1879-1951). Herbert Tippett, son of one of South Australia’s early colonists John Tippett, was a stock salesman and auctioneer, and Mary was a daughter of journalist Thomas Harry. The Tippett family lived in and around the suburb of St Peters.

Like her old sister Mary, Lorna attended St Peter’s Collegiate Girls’ School in North Adelaide for at least part of her education. She trained as a nurse at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital (1929-32) before being appointed to the staff there (1933-36). She followed this with further work at the Queen’s Hospital in Rose Park, then went to Sydney to train in midwifery at the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington and infant welfare at Tresillian Mothercraft Home in Vaucluse.[1]

The war

Tippett was nursing privately in Adelaide around the time war broke out in September 1939. She enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service and embarked for overseas on 27 May 1940 in the unit made up of South Australian and Western Australian nurses led by Matron Edith Butler. The fall of France and the entry of Italy into the war resulted in the unit being diverted from the Middle East to England.

Tippett was among the medical officers and nurses who formed the 2/3 Australian General Hospital that had been hastily set up in the grounds of a sanitorium near Godalming in Surrey. Their patients were not battle casualties but sick Australian troops from the large contingent camped 100 kilometres away on Salisbury Plain awaiting instructions for deployment. There were influxes of patients on several occasions with respiratory illnesses, and many air raid alerts during the heaviest bombing of the Blitz in 1940. Generally however the nursing work was straightforward, to the extent that the commanding officer and matron expressed concern about the potential impact on professional practice. There were also many opportunities for sightseeing around the local area and as far away as Scotland.

Tippett suffered several respiratory illnesses during this time as did her colleagues, and was also slightly injured in an ambulance accident.

In March 1941, Tippett’s unit moved to the Middle East, initially to Gaza and then to Alexandria where it reformed as the 2/11 AGH, located in a modern well-equipped facility on loan from the Greek government.

Frequent air raids made Alexandria a dangerous location, and the hospital was damaged on at least one occasion. The nursing work was heavy. The patients were sick and injured troops evacuated  from Tobruk, transported by ship under cover of darkness and arriving at the hospital in the early hours of the morning. They suffered from severe blast injuries, bad burns and/or illnesses such as malaria and dysentery. At times the hospital was desperately busy and severely overcrowded, and the churn of admissions and discharges was relentless. Air raid warnings and evacuations added to the fatigue of patients and personnel alike. There were however many opportunities for Tippett and the other nurses to enjoy some of the exotic sights and sounds of Alexandria as well as to travel further afield to Cairo and Jerusalem.

In February 1942, most Australians serving in Europe and the Middle East were brought home as the Japanese army swept through south east Asia and fear of an invasion took hold in Australia. Tippett and many nurses from 2/11 AGH were sent to southeastern Queensland to another hastily constructed hospital, this time at Scots College in Warwick. They treated men who had been shot or afflicted with tropical diseases such as malaria and dysentery during the campaign in New Guinea, and who had been brought by hospital ship and train. The hospital held 600 patients in the school buildings and a sea of tents in the grounds. There were various inconveniences and bitterly cold nights but most patients recovered. Both the hospital and the limited social life were a very different experience compared with the facilities and excitement of England and Alexandria.

The 2/11 AGH left Warwick in early 1943, in anticipation of moving north. Tippett remained at Warwick in 1943 with other nurses from 2/11 AGH who were now attached to 2/12 AGH.

Tippett returned to South Australia in charge of 52 Camp Hospital, situated in the showgrounds at Wayville. The showgrounds, which had been taken over as the state’s main recruitment, staging and mobilisation depot, had a hospital made up of tented wards.

Tippett was awarded the Associate Royal Red Cross decoration for military nursing in the New Year’s Honours List in 1945, indicating that she had a considerable skill for organisation.

After the war

The war in Europe ended in May 1945. In August as the war ended in the south west Pacific area, Tippett left Australia tor Europe to work with the United Nation’s Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).

The allies’ attention was now focused on the plight of people that the war had displaced, a population estimated at between 7 and 11 million. The potential health consequences of this situation were dire: the influenza epidemic after WW1 had killed millions. UNRRA had been formed late in 1943 in anticipation of the urgent need to solve the vast shelter, food and health problems of the displaced population awaiting resettlement in their homeland or elsewhere. One strategy was the provision of medical teams in the newly created assembly centres for ‘displaced persons’ made up of doctors, nurses, welfare officers and other personnel.

UNRAA began recruiting for the European situation as the war came to an end. Australia was a contributing nation to the organisation, and appeals were made to its medical personnel to join. Matron Edith Butler who had led Tippett’s unit to England in 1940 was one of the UNRRA appointments announced early in 1945.[2]

Butler’s appointment probably prompted Tippett to join UNRRA. She left Australia in August 1945. After a flight to London taking seven days and UNRRA’s required training in France, she was sent to the British Zone in northern Germany. She was one of at least six South Australian nurses appointed to UNRRA.[3]

Like fellow Australian UNRRA nurse Muriel Doherty, she was no doubt completely taken aback at the chaos and physical devastation of towns, roads and railway lines in the British zone, and the sight of people scavenging among the ruins.[4]

As an UNRRA nurse, Tippett’s work involved conducting medical checks and vaccinations of people arriving in the camps and assembly centres. Arrivals in the displaced persons camps had few possessions and more often than not suffered from malnutrition, respiratory diseases such as TB, and skin infections. A major part of the work was the massive delousing program to prevent outbreaks of typhus: men, women and children as well as their clothing and possessions were dusted with DDT. It was an intensive highly effective public health measure. Food distribution was also done by nurses: an immensely difficult task given the shortage of food supplies, the malnourishment of displaced people and at times their desperate attempts to source food by any means.

Working for UNRRA presented many challenges. Some related to the sheer weight of numbers, language barriers and cultural differences affecting both the displaced persons and multi-national staff, and adults and children traumatised by their recent experiences. Others involved administrative and supply problems within UNRRA itself.

There were compensations however, including professional satisfaction, financial reward and travel. Tippett visited Paris on leave. ‘The shops are perfect,’ she wrote home brightly, ‘but everything’s a price beyond imagination ... Can’t believe I am in this glorious city; it really is lovely.’[5] She holidayed in Switzerland with other Australians on UNRRA’s staff.

Tippett was appointed a field supervisor of several displaced persons’ assembly centres in Germany. She was commended for her work by Frances Udell, UNRRA’s Chief Nursing Adviser, as was Edith Butler, by then Chief Nurse in Austria. When UNRRA’s health role was taken over by the embryonic International Refugee Organisation in 1947, Tippett was appointed the IRO’s Chief Nurse in Italy, with senior responsibility for nurses and nursing in hospitals and treatment centres in displaced persons’ camps. The work involved constant travel between the camps scattered through Italy. ‘I had to supervise and lecture the Italian nursing staffs, whose training was shocking,’ she wrote. ‘All my work was directly concerned with preserving public health.’[6]

After twelve months in Italy, Tipppett returned to Adelaide. She travelled on the Misr, an Egyptian ship carrying nearly European immigrants to Australia, more than half of them from displaced persons camps.[7] The vessel, its captain and passengers, were the subject of considerable controversy in the press when it reached Australia in April 1948, to the extent that questions were raised in parliament.[8] There were tensions between passengers of different classes and nationalities, and some passengers complained about excessive charges and substandard accommodation on the voyage. There were even rumours of ’44 gangsters’ on board the ship.[9] For her part, Tippett maintained that the Jewish passengers on the ship were ‘not the best immigrants for Australia’; she believed that  ‘British and Baltic peoples who were willing to work their way in the new land’ were far preferable. She was not alone in her views on immigration.

The war had taken Lorna Tippett to England, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. On her return from Italy, she settled into relatively mundane life in Adelaide and resumed nursing. Initially she worked for the Mothers and Babies Health Association, following a speciality she trained in in the 1930s. She subsequently took over Edith Butler’s specialist dressing clinic when Butler gave it up to marry in 1950, and she was active in professional nursing associations.[10] In her later working life, she was nursing sister in the department store John Martins, on North Terrace.

Lorna Tippett died in Adelaide on 19 October 1987. She was buried in Centennial Park Cemetery. She is remembered on the WW2 Honour Board at St Peter's Girls' School, Stonyfell, SA.

[1] Nursing in South Australia: first hundred years 1837-1937, 2nd ed. 1946, South Australian Trained Nurses’ Centenary Committee, Part 2, p143.
[2] Advertiser, 21 May 1945, p3; see also the Age, 2 June 1945, p6.
[3] Nursing in South Australia, Part 2, pp142-44. Tippett joined more than a dozen Australian women working in the zone as nurses and welfare officers, including South Australians Edith Butler, Eileen Davidson and Dorothy Marshall, each of whom held senior positions.
[4] M.K. Doherty, Letters from Belsen 1945 : an Australian nurse's experiences with the survivors of war, edited by Judith Cornell & R. Lynette Russell, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2000, pp20-23. Doherty was Chief Nurse at the Bergen-Belsen Hospital, on the site of the Belsen concentration camp.
[5] News, 18 June 1947, p2.
[6] Mail, 8 May 1948, p4.
[7] Kalgoorlie Miner, 23 April 1948, p4.
[8] Mail, 8 May 1948, p4.
[9] Age, 8 May 1948, p1.
[10] News, 17 February 1950, p18.