Edith Blake’s War: The Only Australian Nurse Killed in Action During the First World War by Krista Vane-Tempest

Abstract

Reviewed by: Edith Blake’s War: The Only Australian Nurse Killed in Action During the First World War by Krista Vane-Tempest Kirsty Harris (bio) Krista Vane-Tempest, Edith Blake’s War: The Only Australian Nurse Killed in Action During the First World War (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2021). ISBN: 978-1-7422-37398 (PB). B&W illustrations. xii + 353 pp. Reading a biography written by the subject’s family member can sometimes be an arduous duty with scant regard for fact or writing skills. Krista Vane-Tempest’s book about her great aunt is a welcome contrast. It is a pleasure to read, with careful contextualisation that will appeal to those interested in medical, nursing, and military history. Edith Blake was born in Sydney in 1885, and trained at the Coast Hospital in Little Bay, New South Wales, graduating in 1912. She enlisted with the British Army in April 1915 because 128 nurses who had applied to join the Australian Army Nursing Service were transferred by the Australian government to serve with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve (QAIMNSR). Thus, this story has a level of importance above many histories written about Australian First World War nurses as Edith Blake was not a member of the Australian Imperial Force but one of more than 260 Australian nurses serving with the British. Blake, via Vane-Tempest, provides a curious window into a different world. The book contains delightful vignettes as Blake was an observer of people as well as activities while she nursed both on land and at sea. The excerpts from her diaries and letters are full of descriptions of Australian soldiers and nurses, reflecting a keen sense of her own nationality in a working world full of British people and systems. It reveals the strong camaraderie between nurses and doctors at their training hospital and is, in part, a history of the Coast Hospital nurses at this time; Blake’s sister Queen began training at the Coast Hospital while Blake was at war. [End Page 199] As well as recording her tourist activities and contact with family in England, Blake was a great recorder of ‘awful tragedies’ and often commented in her letters about ships being sunk or torpedoed, perhaps prescient of her later fate. As her writing sheds light on life and loss at sea, it situates the medical war at sea in the British historical narrative. She amply describes life aboard ship and brings voyages to life, in some instances providing great detail such as when describing hospital ship policies and how to deal with submarine attacks. There is valuable material in Blake’s 1915 diary and her 136 surviving letters, which build on existing knowledge and fill gaps for researchers. Life as a QA nurse, as QAIMNSR nurses were often called, differed in many aspects to that of a nurse serving with the Australian Army Nursing Service. Importantly, Australian QA nurses were in demand as they would work ‘hands-on’ at patients’ bedsides and in theatre, whereas QA nurses from many other countries supervised, spending their time at the ward desk. Blake’s service ended abruptly in February 1918 when the hospital ship on which she served, Glenart Castle, was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank, leading to her death by drowning. Herein lies the premise of the book: that Blake was the only Australian First World War nurse to die on ‘active service’. This assertion is questionable. It is known that Winifred Starling from Sydney, who trained at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and was also a member of the QAIMNSR, died by drowning while nursing on the SS Leinster which was torpedoed in the Irish Sea in 1918. Likewise, Welsh born Margaret Dorothy Roberts went to the war from Australia to serve with the QAIMNSR. She drowned when the ship Osmanieh was sunk by mines in the Mediterranean Sea near Alexandria, Egypt in 1917. There may well be others. A feature of the book is its Australian-centric nature. For example, Blake was employed in Egypt in a British hospital in support of British troops that were fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The book does not concern itself with...