Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Among the latest arrivals in Oamaru from service abroad is Sister Edith Bell, who has been with the Australian Army Nursing Service for nearly four years. She left Melbourne in 1916 for India with 50 other military nursing sisters, and was appointed to the Victoria War Hospital, Bombay. After a few weeks work there she joined the hospital ship Ellora, and for eleven months nursed English Tommies, Indians and Turkish prisoners, who were being brought down from Mesopotamia to Bombay. The heat in the Persian Gulf was a times almost unbearable and the ship had to be turned round and round in an effort to get a little air down to the wards below. The summer of 1917 was exceptionally hot in Mesopotamia, and the Tommies died in hundreds of heatstroke. After leaving the Ellora Sister Bell was sent to a 3000 bed hospital at Deolali, about 150 miles from Bombay. Nine months later she joined the famous hospital ship Madras (the first hospital ship to reach Mesopotamia and the one in which General Townshend travelled to England while he was on parole when still a prisoner of war of Turkey). Her duties on this ship took her to many foreign parts, including Ceylon, Singapore, china, Japan, Canada and Siberia. The Madras had to plough her way through a sea of ice 10 to 12 inches thick to reach the port of Vladivostok, which is now in the hands of the Bolsheviks. After a stay of two weeks in this place the Madras sailed with 300 English Tommy patients and 350 Czecho-Slovaks, many of whom had been prisoners of war in Russia. The latter were disembarked at Alexandria, and the ship sailed for England with 1000 sick and wounded Tommies. Sister Bell is a daughter of the late Mr. E.G. Lane of this town and her husband was reported 'missing, afterwards believed killed' at Gallipoli.

The Omaru Mail Thursday 18 March 1920