Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Introduction

Katie Brooke served in India from 1917 until 1919 after training at the Homeopathic Hospital in Melbourne. Following the war, she was matron and/or owner of several private hospitals around Victoria. She also spent fours years as matron of the hospital on Ocean Island in the Pacific Ocean.

Brooke died in 1939.

She is commemorated on the honour board of WW1 nurses who attended St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill in East Melbourne.

Before the War

Katie Winifred Brooke (1876–1939) was born in Richmond, Melbourne in Victoria, the youngest daughter among seven children (4s, 3d) born to Edward Brooke (1834–1881) and his wife Elizabeth (nee Higgins) (1845–1928). All but one of the children survived to adulthood.

Her father Edward Brooke had come to Victoria in 1861, following his older brother James to Beechworth in the north east of the colony (Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 10.9.1881, 13.9.1881). Their brother William also emigrated, first to Victoria and then to Forbes in NSW where he became a newspaper owner and prominent citizen (Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 21.12.1903 p 2). They were the sons of the Reverend James Brooke, a Methodist minister in Manchester, reportedly at his death the ‘oldest minister connected with the Wesleyan denomination’ (Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 10.9.1881).

Initially a produce merchant and agent in partnership with his brother, about 1864 Edward bought a business in Beechworth and set himself up as a ‘Chemist, Druggist and Perfumer’ (Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 7.5.1864, p4). He sold prescription and patent medicines, medicines for horses and cattle, and his own concoction ‘Brooke’s eye drops’ whose effectiveness was vouched for in various testimonials (e.g. Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 10.4.1866, p1).

In 1865, Brooke married Eliza, daughter of the late Thomas Higgins of Beechworth (Argus, 27.2.1865, p4). Over the next 16 years, Edward and Eliza had seven children: Anne Mabel (b1866), Arthur Edward (b1868), Alfred Henry Broadbent (b1870), Ethel Beatrice (b1872), Oswald James (b1875), Kate Winifred (b1876) and Norman Leslie (b1879). The first four were born in Beechworth, the remaining three around Melbourne.

Edward Brooke was a ‘prominent and earnest member’ of the Methodist church throughout his life in Victoria, at Beechworth and later in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond (Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 10.9.1881, 13.9.1881). He was a local preacher, class leader and benefactor, as well as a committee member for the Beechworth school (Victorian Government Gazette, 1869, p370). A man of ‘unassuming and gentlemanly demeanor’, he was ‘respected and esteemed by all classes of the community’ (Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 10.9.1881).

In the mid 1870s, Edward, Eliza and their four children moved to Melbourne and Edward set up a dental practice in Collins Street East. Anyone could hang up a shingle as a dentist at the time, registration only coming into force in 1887. The work was primarily extractions and construction of dentures (Dental Board of Victoria, A History of its First Hundred Years, 1993). Three more children were born to Edward and Eliza between 1875 and 1879, including Kate in 1876.

Despite declining health, Edward was active in the Richmond Methodist church. He was a devout man: ‘indefatiguable for the spiritual welfare of the young ... his delight [was] to labour for his master’ (Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 13.9.1881). In 1881 he returned to Beechworth hoping for recovery but it was too late: Edward Brooke died ‘after a long and painful illness’ on 9 September 1881.

Brooke’s widow Eliza was left with six children, the oldest 15 and the youngest 2. Katie was aged 5. His obituarist noted that ‘all necessary arrangements for the carrying on of Mr Brooke’s business for the benefit of his widow and family have been made’ (Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 10.9.1881). In fact Eliza was in straitened circumstances. Probate showed that the business was a ‘very poor one’ with longstanding debts. Somehow Eliza managed to keep the practice open until 1892 when their son, a fully registered dentist, took it over. Her inheritance from her mother in 1887 – the pianoforte and around £100 – would have provided some relief.

By the early 1900s, the family’s circumstances had improved. They congregated in Kew, the now adult children living with their mother Eliza or nearby once married. One son was a dentist, another a public servant and a third a clerk. Katie and her unmarried sister Ethel lived with their mother, their occupation on the 1903 electoral roll ‘home duties’. Ethel married in 1903, leaving Katie as the sole single daughter. Presumably she kept house for her mother.

About 1914, Katie began training as a nurse at the Homeopathic Hospital in Melbourne. There she may well have met Erica Edgcumbe, also in training and a parishioner of St Peter’s Church Eastern Hill in East Melbourne. St Peter’s had a number of nurses in the congregation because of the surrounding hospitals, and encouraged them through its St Barnabas Guild which provided devotional and social activities specifically focused on nursing. Katie, the daughter of a devout Methodist, joined an Anglican parish known for its high church rituals and teachings, and its guild for nurses (St Peter's Eastern Hill, Address Book 1914 - [ancestry.com.au]).

Brooke and Edgcumbe both completed their training and then the registration requirements of the Victorian Trained Nurses Association (Argus, 7.6.1917 p 3).

War Service

Brooke formally enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service on 14 June 1917 (Katie Brooke, Service Record [NAA]). She may have been inspired by the example of other nurses from St Peter’s and its St Barnabas Guild, and/or by the several hundred young men from the parish who joined the AIF.

She was the only member of her immediate family of five to enlist.

After the mandated ‘home service’ nursing repatriated Australia soldiers at 11 Australian General Hospital in Caulfield, Katie Brooke left Melbourne on RMS Somali on 30 June. There were nearly 60 other nurses, bound for India. (Some 20% of the AANS served in India.) Among them was Eileen Newton, also a parishioner at St Peter’s. They disembarked in Bombay (Mumbai) a month later, on 30 July 1917.

The nurses were dispersed through the various British military hospitals in Bombay and the hill stations. Brooke was posted to the 1000 bed Deccan War Hospital in Poona, 150 kms from Bombay. The matron and 50 or so nurses were Australian, the doctors and orderlies were English. The patients were casualties from the fighting between the British and Turks in Mesopotamia (Iraq) brought by hospital ship to India. They were suffering from battle wounds and a range of illnesses including malaria, dysentery, cholera and the effects of severe heat stroke (M. Barker, Nightingales in the Mud: The Digger Sisters of the Great War (1989), p76).  

The climate (summer, monsoon and winter) was palatable rather than extreme, though some found it trying. Mosquitoes were rife as was malaria, to which Brooke succumbed.

Photographs of the hospital (Australasian, 2.6.1917) show a substantial building with the new tented wards which had brought the hospital’s capacity to 1000 beds in mid 1917. Brooke was part of the expanded nursing establishment. The photographs also showed nurses enjoying the grounds of the residence of the Governor of Bombay, which they used for recreation.

Florence Grylls from Bendigo nursed at the hospital in mid 1917, and described conditions there (Bendigonian, 1.11.1917, p5):

We all have to use mosquito nets, and never sleep without them. Poona is considered a good summer climate. The Governor is in residence in the town, three miles from here … We have a galvanized iron room, with wide tiled roof and verandah, back and front. There is rush matting on the floor, as the snakes can’t crawl on it … There is tennis, golf and boating in Poona, three miles away.

Brooke developed malaria in late 1917 and again in August 1918 (Katie Brooke, Application, Edith Cavell Trust Fund, Box M290 [NAA]). After the second attack, she was transferred to the Station Hospital in Bangalore, 1000 kms south of Bombay, reached via a two day and two night journey by train. She reported for duty there on 4 September.

Initially a small hospital for 150 convalescents, the hospital in Bangalore was much smaller than the Deccan War Hospital. The relatively easy nursing requirements changed dramatically however with the arrival of the influenza epidemic in 1918. The number of beds expanded to 500 and working conditions at the hospital deteriorated rapidly (Barker, Nightingales in the Mud, p76) Many among the ‘floods’ of cases were dangerously ill. The nursing staff were also stricken – the ‘diphtheria throat’ Brooke later reported probably occurred during this time (Brooke, Application, Edith Cavell Trust Fund, Box M290 [NAA]). She also had another attack of malaria.

The war ended with the Armistice on 11 November 1918. Brooke did not return to Australia for at least 8 months despite the malaria attacks and severe throat infection.  In July 1919 she was transferred briefly to the small 19th British Stationary Hospital in the very remote town of Rawalpindi on India’s North West Frontier of India where tensions between the Afghan hill tribes and British troops were escalating. Her fortnight there was undoubtedly very hot and wet.

On 3 August 1919, Brooke embarked for Australia from Bombay, arriving home on 30 August (Brooke, Service Record).

Brooke was awarded the British War Medal. She was ineligible for the Victory Medal as India was not deemed a theatre of war.

After the War

Brooke returned to Australia suffering from another attack of malaria, her fourth, but recovered  (Brooke, Katie, B73 R87455 [NAA]; Katie Brooke, Application, Edith Cavell Trust Fund [M290, NAA]). She was discharged from the AANS ‘not permanently unfit’ in February 1920. She received a small grant of £10 from the Edith Cavell Trust Fund for sick and needy army nurses to tide her over while she recovered. 

On her return Brooke did midwifery training to boost her employment prospects, like many returned army nurses who did not take up repatriation nursing. She completed the certificate at McKellar Hospital in late 1920. From there she was appointed matron first of Ararat Hospital (c1920–22) and then Castlemaine Hospital (1922) in country Victoria.

Perhaps living in country towns did not appeal after the exotic excitements of India, because in 1922 Brooke was appointed as the nursing sister/matron with the British Phosphates Company on Ocean Island, part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands just south of the equator.  She was there for four years, returning home to Melbourne on three month furloughs in 1924 and 1926.

Her four years there were idyllic in terms of lifestyle and amenities, fascinating in the presence of the British administrators and managers, Chinese and Kanaka labourers and the Gilbertese locals, and occasionally disrupted because of unexpected events such as labour unrest in 1925 (resulting in a death and some injuries) and a shipwreck in 1926 (no casualties) (Albert F Ellis, Ocean Island and Nauru, 1935, pp118, 199–200).

In a lengthy interview with the Argus newspaper as she returned to Australia, Brooke described her professional and home life on Ocean Island (Argus, 7.1.1927, p12; see also Ellis, Ocean Island and Nauru, p229). She managed a well-equipped hospital which had separate facilities for the British, Chinese and locals and did district nursing for the company’s white employees. There were two doctors, a dispenser, and native orderlies, There was no malaria but considerable interest in other tropical diseases such as filariasis and hookworm.

Postwar demand for phosphate meant a booming industry and conditions and despite Ocean Island’s remoteness, daily life was not primitive. Brooke enjoyed ice supplies, electricity, sewerage, fresh and salt water, access to a flood light tennis court, ‘in fact most of the comforts and conveniences of modern life’ (Argus, 7.1.1927, p12). The climate was very pleasant if monotonous. There was ample social life, the island being the headquarters of the colonial administrator. Brooke spoke of hosting five course dinner parties which were like ‘sitting down to dinner at the Menzies’ [Hotel].

Key to her life on Ocean Island was her native servant Ateura, ‘a pearl above price’. At his request, she taught him to cook her recipes including gem scones and mayonnaise. He cooked not only for Brooke but for her (white?) patients (a responsibility she was pleased to reliquish) and her guests. He speared fish fresh for her table.

While two years was a typical stay for whites on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Brooke was there for four, from 1922 to 1926. She was returning after furlough in Australia late in 1926, when she accepted the position of matron at St Andrew’s College, a men’s residential college at the University of Sydney (Argus, 7.1.1927, p12). She was there 12 months.

Brooke returned to Victoria in 1928 and purchased a private hospital in Heywood in south west Victoria (Portland Guardian, 9.1.1928, p3). That June, the hospital’s (unnamed) matron was fined for failing to report the birth and death of an illegitimate child, and the following May, the hospital was fumigated on the orders of the local doctor (Portland Guardian, 4.6.1928, p2, 13.5.1929, p2).

Around 1931, Brooke purchased St Leonard’s Private Hospital in Berwick, east of Melbourne, from the previous matron, Sister Sheedy. She remained matron there until her death on 3 July 1939.

St Leonard’s formed part of Brooke’s estate. It was at the time of her death dilapidated and in serious need of repair and updating. It proved hard to sell given its condition but it was eventually purchased by the local council, renovated and converted into the Berwick bush nursing hospital (Age, 22.9.1939, p18; Dandenong Journal, 13.3.1940, p15; Eileen McWilliams, Bush Nursing in Berwick, The First Fifty Years [1991], pp16–22).

Brooke was cremated and her ashes scattered at Springvale Botanical Cemetery, Victoria. She is commemorated on the honour board of nurses who attended St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill in East Melbourne.

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