People Australia

Hand coloured studio portrait of Sister Edith Blake, 1915-18

Australian War Memorial, P11193.004

Edith Blake (1885-1918), nurse, was born on 22 September 1885 at Darlington, Sydney, first of three children of Suffolk-born Charles Blake, merchant seaman turned carrier, and his Sydney-born wife Catherine, née Canham. Little is known about Blake’s childhood, but by the early 1900s her father’s company, Blake & Co., was conducting business as a vendor for Farmer’s and Dairymen’s Milk Co. Ltd from premises in Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, and the family was living at Marrickville. Subsequently, Charles bought and built on a large waterfront property in Vista Street, Sans Souci. Although not tall, Blake apparently exceeded the five-foot height limit and was accepted in November 1908 to commence four years’ nursing training at the Coast Hospital, Little Bay, Sydney. She was registered with the Australasian Trained Nurses’ Association in 1912, remaining on staff at the Coast Hospital. By 1914 she was a junior sister with an annual salary of £80.

After Australia entered World War One on 4 August 1914,  Blake obtained a reference from Coast Hospital matron Alice Watson dated 12 August and applied to the Australian Imperial Force for enlistment in the Australian Army Nursing Service. She was one of many applicants not accepted into the small initial AANS contingents. When in early 1915 the British offered to accept two hundred Australian nurses, Blake was one of almost 130 AIF applicants allotted to the British Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve. On 4 April 1915 she enlisted as a staff nurse with the QAs. QA reserves signed twelve-month contracts, while AANS enlisted for the unknown duration of the war. Her pay was £40 per annum (although the Office of the Director General of Public Health, New South Wales, agreed to ‘top up’ the pay of the ‘allotted’ nurses to the £60 paid to AANS—an agreement not honoured until 1921, when newspapers reported the Commonwealth had approved payment of a war gratuity to these nurses). 

Blake boarded SS Malwa in Melbourne on 6 April 1915, believing she was headed for England. Instead, she and her colleagues were offloaded at Suez and sent to Cairo. Arriving after midnight on 3 May 1915, she commenced duty at 10am at the former Luna Park ice rink, an auxiliary hospital for 1 Australian General Hospital hastily established to support the Gallipoli campaign. She wrote to her family ‘[t]here are about 800 patients & 4 nurses you couldn’t imagine what it was like & how the nurses welcomed us’ (Edith Blake Papers, possibly 5 May 1915). After two months at 1 AGH she was posted to 17 British General Hospital in Alexandria and realised she was now ‘in a British hospital & I think for all time’ (Edith Blake Papers, 25 June 1915). Blake nursed in Alexandria throughout the Gallipoli campaign, writing during the Allies’ August offensive ‘[t]he Dardanelles must be a large shamble, for the wounds are frightful. All the men in my ward have either lost an arm or leg, & their stumps are so painful’ (Edith Blake Papers, 14 August 1915). 

On 1 October 1916, having watched enviously as the Australian hospitals relocated to France, Blake joined His Majesty’s Hospital Ship Essequibo, which initially plied the Mediterranean, shuttling between Alexandria, Lemnos, Salonika, and Malta. During this time she met survivors of the hospital ships Britannic and Braemar Castle that were respectively sunk and damaged by mines laid by German submarines. HMHS Essequibo was more fortunate. Returning from delivering wounded and sick Canadian soldiers to Halifax, Nova Scotia, the ship encountered a U-boat in the Atlantic on 15 March 1917. The submarine brought Essequibo to with warning shots. After checking the hospital ship was not carrying war materiel in breach of the Hague Convention, the Germans released it, as Blake recounted, by ‘putting up the flags reading “A pleasant voyage”. We answered with flags “Thank you”’ (Edith Blake Papers, 16 March 1917). 

After six months at sea, on 1 May 1917  Blake was posted to a prisoners of war hospital at Belmont, Surrey. Here she witnessed the terror and damage wrought as German Zeppelins and Gotha bombers conducted air raids over England, and the ‘frightening’ sight of London’s barrage balloon air defences (Edith Blake Papers, 7 October 1917). She wrote that feelings were ‘very mixed ... I don't think anybody resented nursing Huns [more] than we did when we first came here’ (Edith Blake Papers, 27 June 1917), but she came to find the Germans generally polite and helpful. Relations between staff and patients were affected by war news. Blake wrote that when the patients heard ‘what happened at Messines … they wouldn’t smile for sour apples’ (Edith Blake Papers, 23 June 1917); after an air raid on London, she reflected: ‘to think I have to nurse these people. I never before felt it, but if I had been near them at that moment I would have killed them, for I had murder in my heart. But Dear me! There I am on duty forgotten all about the bitter feeling I had towards them’ (Edith Blake Papers, 7 July 1917). 

Frustrated with Belmont’s administration, Blake applied for a transfer and on 15 November 1917 joined HMHS Glenart Castle. Stationed in the Mediterranean, Glenart Castle carried a neutral Spanish officer to certify the hospital ship was compliant with the Hague Convention, as Germany’s claim of Britain’s misuse of hospital ships had been a justification for its resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917.

On 26 February 1918 the correctly lit and marked Glenart Castle steamed through the Bristol Channel, bound for France. Just before 4am, the vessel was torpedoed by U-boat UC-56, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm Kiesewetter, in waters where Germany had promised the safe passage of hospital ships. Glenart Castle sank in some seven minutes, with the loss of 153 of the 182 passengers believed to be on board, including the thirty-two-year-old Blake. She is believed to be the only Australian nurse killed in action—on duty on active service—during World War One. 

The letters Blake wrote to her family during her war service reveal her to be intelligent, conservative, practical, earnest, courageous, and a capable and conscientious nurse. In the United Kingdom she is commemorated on the Hollybrook Memorial in Southampton, which is dedicated to service personnel of the Commonwealth land and air forces with no known grave, including those lost or buried at sea. In Australia, she is listed on the Australian War Memorial’s Commemorative Roll, because she was not a member of the Australian armed forces when she died. She is also remembered on a plaque in the Edith Blake Reserve named in her honour near St George Hospital, Kogarah, Sydney.