Abstract
In May 1918 an inquiry was held into the conduct of several Australian Army nurses based at a hospital at Deolali, India. An English doctor had charged that the women had been engaged in inappropriate familiarities with British officers and, in the case of one, in intimate relations with both patients and an Indian orderly. The ensuing investigation found the charges to be mostly false, but the Deolali Inquiry reflected the ways in which anxieties about Australian women’s intimate contact with non-white men were intensified during the Great War. Young unmarried single women travelled as nurses to far-flung places, including India, where the nurses of the Australian Army were not only brought into close contact with Indian people but were required to nurse Turkish prisoners of war. Exploring the complexities of the this curious (and, at the time, suppressed) case highlights how such volatile wartime international cross-cultural encounters served to both threaten colonial hierarchies, and to strengthen the Australian identification with the privileges of global whiteness, played out as a struggle over the honour and respect due to the nurses as white women.
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Notes
- 1.
R. Fetherston, Confidential Minute Paper, 13 December 1918, MP 367/1, 527/27/531, National Archives of Australia, Canberra (hereafter cited as NAA). Unless otherwise specified all further archival references come from this file.
- 2.
Ruth Rae, “Reading between Unwritten Lines: Australian Army Nurses in India, 1916–19,” Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 36 (4 May 2002), accessed 24 June 2013, https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/LIB100001424?search.
- 3.
Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (1992; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 78–80; Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31; Rae, “Reading between Unwritten Lines,” and see also Ruth Rae, Scarlet Poppies: The Army Experience of Australian Nurses during World War One (Sydney: Ruth Rae, 2004), 183–99. Drawing on this work, the Deolali incident has been mentioned briefly in other works, including Ruth Rae, Veiled Lives: Threading Australian Nursing History into the Fabric of the First World War (Sydney: College of Nursing, 2009), 234; Alison S. Fell, “Nursing the Other: The Representation of Colonial Troops in French and British First World War Nursing Memoirs,” in Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 172ff; Christine E. Hallett, Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 152.
- 4.
Kirsty Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army Nurses at work in World War One (Sydney: Big Sky Publishing, 2011), 3.
- 5.
Ibid., 128, 142–3.
- 6.
Ibid., 44–5.
- 7.
Ibid., 50–1; Scates and Frances, Women and the Great War, 27.
- 8.
Sandra M. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 197–226, 209–11; Margaret H. Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 133–68; Alison S. Fell, “Fallen Angels? The Red Cross Nurse in First World War Discourse,” in The Resilient Female Body: Health and Malaise in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Maggie Allison and Yvette Rocheron (Berne: Per Lang AG, 2007), 33–48.
- 9.
Darrow, French Women and the First World War, 146–9; Katie Holmes, “Day Mothers and Night Sisters: World War I Nurses and Sexuality,” in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, ed. Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 43–59. See also Angela Woollacott, “Sisters and Brothers in Arms: Family, Class, and Gendering in World War I Britain,” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 128–47.
- 10.
E. Yates, Supply Bill (No. 1) 1919–20, CPD, House of Representatives, 25 June 1919, 10070.
- 11.
In her analysis of French nurses’ memoirs, Alison Fell similarly observed the inadequacy of the discursive tools at the nurses’ disposal to counter accusations of sexual predation when dealing with “the otherness of male bodies of different classes, races and ethnicities.” Fell, “Fallen Angels?,” 46–8.
- 12.
See, for the oblique mention of such rumours and issues, the case of a Nurse Stacey in 1916: E. Yates, Supply (Works and Buildings) Bill (No. 2) 1916–17, CPD, House of Representatives, 28 September 1916, 9103.
- 13.
M.A. Martin, “The Madness at Deolali,” Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps 152, no. 2 (2006): 94–5. “Doolally tap” was British Army slang, referring literally to the “camp fever” brought on by the trying conditions at Deolali—“tap” being the Hindi word for fever—well established by 1916. Thomas O’Toole, The Way They Have in the Army (London: John Lane, 1916), 40.
- 14.
Martin, “The Madness at Deolali,” 94.
- 15.
E. McLean to Lieut. Col. Canon Garland, 12 July 1917, OM71-51-104, Canon David John Garland Papers, 1915–18, 1934, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane.
- 16.
Unsourced document listing Australian nursing staff in Indian hospitals 1918–19, reproduced on website, Jennifer Baker, “Nurses in India,” Looking for the Evidence, accessed 3 March 2015, https://sites.google.com/site/archoevidence/home/ww1australianwomen/nurses-in-india; Janet Scarfe, “Rowan, Eliza,” East Melbourne Historical Society, accessed 19 March 2015, http://emhs.org.au/person/rowan/eliza; “Nurse Back from India,” Weekly Times (Melbourne), 5 October 1918.
- 17.
Ashleigh Wadman, “Nursing for the British Raj,” Australian War Memorial (blog), 28 October 2014, https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/nursing-british-raj; Memorandum, Defence Department, 30 May 1916, A2, 1918/19, NAA; “Nurses for India,” Argus (Melbourne), 15 June 1916.
- 18.
Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages, 143; Rae, Veiled Lives, 220.
- 19.
Wadman, “Nursing for the British Raj”; Rae, “Reading between Unwritten Lines.”
- 20.
See Christine E. Hallett, “‘Emotional Nursing’: Involvement, Engagement, and Detachment in the Writings of First World War Nurses and VADs,” in First World War Nursing: New Perspectives, ed. Alison S. Fell and Christine E. Hallett (New York: Routledge, 2013), 92–6; “Nurse’s Life in India,” Shepparton Advertiser (Vic), 21 January 1918; “Nurse Back from India,” Weekly Times (Melbourne), 5 October 1918; Scarfe, “Rowan, Eliza.” A serious stigma of caste pollution attached to nursing making it an occupation available only to low-caste Indian women with no other options, or women of mixed-descent. Madelaine Healey, “‘Regarded, Paid and Housed as Menials’: Nursing in Colonial India, 1900–1948,” South Asian History and Culture 2, no. 1 (2011): 55–75.
- 21.
“A Nurse’s Letter,” Warwick Examiner and Times (Qld), 3 October 1917. By an odd coincidence, the letter-writer was also named McLean, and from Queensland, but she was not the same woman.
- 22.
“Nursing the Turks,” Observer (Adelaide), 8 September 1917; “Nurse Back from India.”
- 23.
See Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages, 145–9.
- 24.
“Nursing the Turks.”
- 25.
“Nurse Back from India.”
- 26.
Statement of Colonel T.Y. Seddon, 17 May 1918.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
G. Davis to Richardson, 26 May 1918.
- 29.
Evidence of 1st Witness, 17 May 1918.
- 30.
3rd case, 17 May 1918. There is a discrepancy in the records due to several cases of mistaken identity: so that whereas there were in fact only four discrete cases, six were annotated.
- 31.
4th case, 17 May 1918.
- 32.
The “sweeper” was responsible for cleaning latrines and the removal of body waste, and the Sweeper caste as a whole occupied a very lowly position in Hindu society. In Maharashtra the more common caste name was Bhangi or Ghare, but it appears that the British Army used the Rajasthani term “Mehtar” (from the Persian word for “prince,” used derisively) generically for the cleaners in camps and hospitals. Shyamlal, The Bangi: A Sweeper Caste Its Socio-Economic Portraits (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1992), 11–12.
- 33.
6th case, 17 May 1918.
- 34.
G. Davis to Richardson, 26 May 1918. There was at least another similarly hasty marriage at Deolali the following year, although marriages between nurses and soldiers were certainly not uncommon.
- 35.
R. Fetherston, Confidential Minute Paper, 13 December 1918.
- 36.
Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 79.
- 37.
See Harald Fischer-Tiné, “‘White Women Degrading Themselves to the Lowest Depths’: European Networks of Prostitution and Colonial Anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880–1914,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 40, no. 2 (2003): 178; Ashwini Tambe, “The Elusive Ingénue: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of European Prostitution in Colonial Bombay,” Gender & Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 164. See also Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980); Phillippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 159; Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 108–24.
- 38.
Statement of Colonel T.Y. Seddon, 17 May 1918.
- 39.
G. Davis to Richardson, 26 May 1918.
- 40.
Ibid.; 6th case, 17 May 1918.
- 41.
See Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 235–6; Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 215–16.
- 42.
G. Davis to Richardson, 26 May 1918.
- 43.
Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, 163.
- 44.
For white Australian attitudes towards intermarriage between white women and non-white men, see: Victoria Haskins and John Maynard, “Sex, Race and Power: Aboriginal Men and White Women in Australian History,” Australian Historical Studies 36, no. 126 (2005): 191–216; Kate Bagnall, “Across the Threshold: White Women and Chinese Hawkers in the White Colonial Imaginary,” Hecate 28, no. 2 (2002): 9–32; Margaret Allen, “The Deluded White Woman and the Expatriation of the White Child,” in Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field, ed. Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher and Katherine Ellinghaus (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 165–79.
- 45.
Anonymous, extract from letter dated 6 June 1918; G.E. Davis to E. Tracey Richardson, 26 May 1918.
- 46.
Anonymous, extract from letter dated 6 June 1918.
- 47.
Evidence of 1st Witness, 17 May 1918. Bell was in an unusual position, given the Australian government’s restriction on married women entering the AANS. Report of the Director-General, Medical Services Australia Regarding Trained Nurses In Australia, 8 December 1916, A2, 1917/3523, NAA.
- 48.
R. Fetherston, Confidential Minute Paper, 13 December 1918; G. Davis to Richardson, 26 May 1918.
- 49.
Anonymous, extract from letter dated 6 June 1918.
- 50.
Margaret Allen, “‘Innocents Abroad’ and ‘Prohibited Immigrants’: Australians in India and Indians in Australia, 1890–1910,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2005), 111–24. See also, for Australian women missionaries in India before the war, MacMillan, Women of the Raj, 211–12.
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Haskins, V.K. (2017). Australian Nurses and the 1918 Deolali Inquiry: Transcolonial Racial and Gendered Anxieties in a British Indian War Hospital. In: Ariotti, K., Bennett, J. (eds) Australians and the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51520-5_5
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