Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Helen Condon was the daughter of Patrick and Ann née Carroll, both born in Tipperary, Ireland. Until his death in 1893, her father ran the Tasmania Hotel which was in Lonsdale Street, between Spring and Exhibition Streets on the corner of the now-disappeared Leichardt Street. According to her attestation when she enlisted on 3 May 1917, she had been born in Parkville and had completed four years of nursing training at St Vincent's. For many years she had been living at Miss McGeachie's nurses' home at 31 Collins Place, an extension of Exhibition Street between Collins and Flinders Streets. In 1910 numbers 33 and 35 were also boarding houses. Her attestation states that at the time of enlisting she was 32 years old, which indicates a birth year of 1885. But in fact her mother had died in 1884 following the birth of her fifth child and, although no birth registration has been found, Helen is likely to have been born in 1882. With both her parents dead, she named as next of kin her brother James, some seven years her senior, who since 1911 had been licensee of the Great Northern Hotel at 646 Rathdowne Street, North Carlton, on the corner of Pigdon Street. Before that, he and his wife Annie née Larkin had run a hotel in Peel Street, Collingwood. Her family too had a tradition of hotel-keeping and were associated with several such businesses in Gippsland.1At the end of May 1917 Helen Condon embarked on the Khiva, no doubt never dreaming of how her life was about to change. By the middle of June she was in India where Australian nurses had been posted since September 1916. Over the following three years some 560 nurses served there, about 20% of the total overseas force. Many of them were unhappy about the posting as it was not considered to be a war zone and they would have preferred to be on the front line nursing Australian or at least Allied troops. But the placement was challenging nonetheless. Nurses found the tropical climate debilitating and encountered serious cultural and language problems with Indian orderlies and with the many Turkish patients, as many as 500 hundred at a time, evacuated from Mesopotamia (Iraq). There were other problems too. One nurse wrote that when electricity was finally connected to the hospital where she was, the nurses were "all delighted but each Sister still kept her hurricane lamp burning beside her bed at night, as snakes were very prevalent, many deadly ones such as Russell's Viper, Krait & Cobra having been killed, some in the Sisters' rooms. One Sister of our service was bitten at the Deccan War Hospital, Poona, but fortunately recovered.
Helen was posted to the 34th Welsh General Hospital at Deolali, five hours travel from Bombay. Large and rambling, this was the biggest of the Indian military hospitals with some 3000 beds. The matron made her inspections in a car provided by the Red Cross. Helen appears to have served more than 18 months in that hospital but her record tells us nothing of her personal experiences. By early 1919, with the war over, many of the nurses in India were preparing to return to Australia. Not so Helen Condon who resigned her appointment the day before she married an Englishman, Captain Cecil John Howell of the Buffs (East Kent) Regiment, in St Patrick's Church, Deolali on 12 February 1919. According to the official marriage record, the bridegroom was 35 and the bride 29, a discrepancy of five years compared with the age she stated on her attestation when enlisting. In fact she was probably a year or two older than her new husband, who was born about 1884.
The couple continued to live in Deolali, where a son Peter John was born almost exactly a year after their marriage. But Helen's happy new life was not to last. She died on 10 October 1925 at Madura, India, and in November her bereaved husband and five year old son returned to London from Rangoon, Burma, on the Warwickshire. In the same year her brother at the Great Northern Hotel received the army's standard letter about the delivery of war medals, his being the only address in their records. James continued as licensee there until 1936, after suffering the loss of his wife Annie in 1919, and died in 1952 at Burwood.

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