Bertha McKinnell (1879–1963) was the youngest of five children (four daughters, one son) born to Francis McKinnell (c1839–1904) and his wife Mary Ann (nee Donnolly/Donnelly) (c1843–1927).

Francis McKinnell was the son of Charles McKinnell, a Scottish born wine merchant in London. According to his obituary (Traralgon Record, 20.12.1904, p2), Francis McKinnell came to Victoria from England ‘at any early age’ probably in the mid or late 1850s.  ‘After various wanderings’, he joined the colony’s geodetic survey led by the Victorian Government Astronomer, Robert Ellery. This ambitious project, which ran from 1858 until 1872, surveyed the colony in anticipation of land acquisition for mining, pasture and settlement.

McKinnell was a member of the original survey party in Gippsland, whose responsibility included demarcation of the border between Victoria and NSW. Because of the terrain, the skills required were as much hard physical labour as accurate measurement, and members of the Gippsland party were often recruited locally. McKinnnell, a labourer according to his marriage certificate, was very likely a local recruit.

In 1865 McKinnell married Mary Ann Donnolly in Woodside, a small settlement in South Gippsland. He was Presbyterian and she was Roman Catholic, the marriage rite was from the Church of England. Mary Ann, who gave her occupation as domestic servant, had come from Tasmania where her father Charles Donnolly (b1814) had been a sergeant in the 99^th Regiment of Foot. An Irishman, Charles had enlisted at 18 and risen to the rank of sergeant. He and his regiment had fought in the Maori War. They then came to Tasmania where their role included convict escort and guarding, and ceremonial duties. Donnolly’s rheumatism saw him invalided out of the regiment in 1853 aged 38, but like so many in the military he settled in the colony. He could draw his military pension in Tasmania but may well have found other employment.

Francis and Mary lived for some twenty years mostly in and around the town of Maffra. They had had five children by 1879. Their names appeared in the local press occasionally, Francis undertaking work for the local council, as a shopkeeper and secretary of the local Church of England in Newry; Mary decorating tables at the Upper Maffra parish festivities.

The expansion of settlement and railway lines in South Gippsland from the 1870s saw the establishment of new towns. Around 1883, Francis was appointed the works overseer and rate collector for Traralgon shire (created in 1879). The town was expanding with new brick public buildings and banks, and other signs of permanency and success. Francis was soon a major figure in Traralgon, rising to Shire Secretary. His name was often in the press in connection with local government and community affairs, including the Traralgon Agricultural Society. He died in 1904. Mary was also active in the community, particularly with the Traralgon Ladies Benevolent Society of which she was president (Argus, 14.7.1904, p6).

Bertha was 25 when her father died. Her eldest sister Mary had married the local Church of England minister in 1889 and moved to Rushworth. Her brother Francis Charles had gone to seek his fortune in the frontier colony of Western Australia, and established himself as an auctioneer. Her sister Ada married in 1912.

Francis’s other daughters Amy and Bertha became nurses. They trained at the Melbourne Hospital and registered with the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses Association. Like most in the profession Bertha did private nursing, and ran at least one trained nurses’ home (depot/agency) in inner Melbourne. In 1909, she, her sister Amy and their mother sailed to Western Australia. Bertha did private nursing in Northam where brother Francis was living and making a commercial and community name for himself. Mrs McKinnell appears to have filled in very briefly as the acting superintendent of the Sailors’ Rest Home in Fremantle and then been principal of a registered trained nurses home in 1910–11 (West Australian, 30.11.1909, p.5, 20.1.1912, p.13). In 1912, the three women returned to Victoria from Western Australia on the ‘Kyarra’.

War Service

When war broke out in August 1914, at 46 and 45 both Amy and Francis were too old to enlist but Bertha applied to join the Australian Army Nursing Service almost immediately. As with many other army nurses, she was the first and only member of her immediate family to enlist.

Her attestation papers show her as a tall woman (5’10”), of medium complexion with brown hair (NAA MT1486/1/0). Her service record is very brief with only the bare essentials about her duty with the hospitals and ships in which she served and when, but her service can be reconstructed from a variety of sources.

After a fine farewell from the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses Association (Punch, 26.11.1914), Bertha embarked on the ‘Kyarra’ on 5 December 1914 and sailed from Melbourne with medical personnel of 1 and 2 Australian General Hospitals.  She had had only days in which to equip herself with the necessary uniform and kit. Her address on the Embarkation Roll was Mrs Holland’s Trained Nurses Home at 340 Albert St, East Melbourne, the agency from which she and many other nurses were despatched to private patients.

The nurses of the 1AGH were led by Jane Bell, Principal Matron who as lady superintendent of the Melbourne Hospital had signed McKinnell’s AANS application. The seven week voyage with its seasickness, lectures and deckgames was recorded in the diary of Staff Nurse Elsie Cook (Peter Rees, The Other ANZACs: Nurses at War, 1914-1918, pp. 7-11, 15). 

'Kyarra' reached Egypt on 20 January 1915. 1AGH was set up in the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, a four storey luxury facility in the Cairo suburb of Abbassia. Bertha McKinnell was attached to 1AGH at a time of near continuous high drama. The deluge of casualties evacuated from the Gallipoli peninsula placed enormous physical and emotional demands on the nursing staff which was expanded with reinforcements as the number of beds expanded (see Rees, The Other ANZACS, pp. 44-45, 48-49). In addition, there was the battle for authority between Principal Matron Bell and 1AGH Commanding Officer Colonel Ramsay Smith that led to the recall of both to Australia in July 1915, a formal inquiry and termination of their appointments (Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War, 1992, pp. 34-39). 

In September 1915, McKinnell herself returned to Australia on transport duty aboard the ‘Ulysses’ carrying hundreds of wounded and medically unfit men.  After a month ashore, she sailed again for Egypt on 25 October. Presumably McKinnell was reunited with her mother and sisters. In her absence, her sister Amy and other prominent members of the Australian Trained Nurses Association had publicly raised the issue of the financial cost to nurses who joined the AANS: the government allowance was far short of the funds for mandated uniform and kit, let alone any extras (Argus, 2.8.1915, p6). She may have returned to Traralgon in that time; from August 1915, her name was included on the Roll of Honour of the Traralgon State School published regularly in the Gippsland Farmers Journal.

Bertha was promoted to Sister in 1AGH in December 1915.

In March 1916, 1AGH including Bertha McKinnell packed up and relocated to Rouen in northern France, as the troops and battle fronts moved to the Western Front. The unit’s war diary for April showed the units arriving in Marseilles and the 115 nurses being billeted there for several days pending instructions about their distribution to hospitals in the area. McKinnell was among the 50 sent to British hospitals, in her case 14 Stationary Hospital in Wimmereux, a facility that dealt exclusively with infectious diseases such as typhoid, diphtheria, measles and mumps. After ten weeks there, she rejoined 1 AGH at Rouen.

The unit was camped on the race course. Sick and wounded troops were nursed in huts and tents under the most trying conditions, particularly during the ‘Somme winter’ of 1916-17. The hospital had increased to 1040 beds, around 20 medical officers and between 75 and 90 nurses. In the busiest periods, several thousand sick and wounded troops were admitted each month and a day rarely passed without a death, but there were generally plenty of beds available. McKinnell would have been there when Queen Mary paid an official visit on 9 July 1917.

After 15 months at 1AGH in Rouen, Sister McKinnell was transferred to England. After a fortnight’s leave she reported for duty at the Croydon War Hospital on 11 October 1917. The hospital was spread across local council schools in the area, and many of the nurses were Australian (see Lost Hospitals of London, http://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/croydonwar.html).

Several months later, in January 1918, McKinnell was moved again, this time to 3 Australian Auxiliary Hospital in Dartford, Kent. This was a large hospital with 1400 patients, many of them with ‘nerves’ and shell shock. The commanding officer noted in his report for that month that the air raids and shelling near the hospital made the severe cases ‘100% worse for a few days’ and proposed they be relocated (3AAH, War Diary, January 1918). Many other admissions were for trench fever, gas poisoning and respiratory illnesses. A patient there from Traralgon reported on his experiences there and the ‘locals’ he had met in the hospital, one of whom was McKinnell. He described 3AAH as having ‘a free and easy spirit quite different to the Tommy hospitals’ (Gippsland Farmers Journal, 20.9.1918, p.4).

Hostilities ceased on 11 November 1918, and 3AAH emptied steadily as troops were repatriated back to Australia. McKinnell herself was struck off the hospital’s strength at the end of January 1919, and returned to Australia, which she had last left more than three years before.

After the War

McKinnell reached Australia in March 1919, in charge of the nursing staff on the transport ship ‘Ceramic’. The ship carried 2 000 troops, a few of whom had been stricken with the influenza virus en route. It took three weeks from the time ‘Ceramic’ reached Australian waters till McKinnell disembarked in Melbourne; troops were disembarked in Albany, Adelaide and Hobart before reaching Melbourne.  

McKinnell’s three sisters and probably their mother were living in Melbourne. Her sister Amy had just been embroiled a controversy over control of the influenza hospital in the Exhibition Building in Carlton. Employed as the matron to set up the facility, Amy McKinnell (and some influential members of the Melbourne community) were infuriated when control passed to the nursing order at nearby St Vincent’s Hospital and she and nurses there lost their positions (Argus, 18.2.1919, p4; Argus, 15.4.1919, p6). Amy resumed running the Royal Melbourne Nurses Home, and was a key member of the Prahran Women’s Vigilant Society which sought to protect children from (in modern parlance) ‘stranger danger’ in public places (Argus, 25.10.1927, p20).

Like many army nurses, McKinnell worked after the war in a military hospital. She returned to Western Australia, and was employed at 8 Australian General Hospital in Fremantle from June 1919 until April 1921 as a sister and at times head sister. She was demobilised in April 1921. Her name remained on the books of the Trained Nurses Home at 340 Albert St, East Melbourne, which provided her with a permanent (electoral) address as late as 1924. McKinnell subsequently moved to a flat at 24 Elgin Ave, Armadale (her electoral address from 1931 to 1963).

Between 1936 and 1950, Bertha McKinnell applied to the Edith Cavell Trust Fund which provided sick and needy Victoria army nurses with financial assistance no fewer than 15 times. (McKinnell, Bertha, Index Card, Edith Cavell Trust Fund, Box M291, NAA, Melbourne). The initial applications concerned illhealh, but from 1938 they were pleas for assistance due to 'necessitous circumstances'. The Trust responded each time with £20 - 25. She was awarded a small repatriation pension from 1938, but by 1963 was deemed totally and permanently incapacited (McKinnell, Index Card). 

Bertha McKinnell died on 8 May 1963 of cardiac failure, aged 83. She was cremated and her ashes scattered.