KING, Agnes Wotherspoon

Agnes Wotherspoon King (1884-1942) was the second daughter and fourth child of Robert King (1843–1919) and his wife Frances (or ‘Fanny’, nee Craig) (1854–1926).

Robert her father was the son of a farmer in Bothwell, Lanarkshire in Scotland. He appears to have travelled to the United States in his late teens and taken up residence in Connecticut (http://www.acwv.info/1-files-veterans-K/king%20-%20robert/A.htm; US Census 1860).

Research by his descendants discovered that Robert King lived in Connecticut at least until 1865. He was initially a factory hand according the 1860 census, then joined the Union Army. His clothing trunk which survives showed he saw action at Snake River. As the Civil War drew to a close, he joined the 6^th Regiment of the Connecticut Infantry in late 1864 with the rank of private.

King’s name does not appear in the US Census of 1870. He resurfaced in England in 1878 – in Cheshire, in Woodchurch near Wirral, when he married fellow Scot Frances Craig whose father managed a nearby estate. According to information from the UK Census of 1881 and Cheshire Electoral Registers, he farmed 130 acres as a tenant and employed three labourers.

Robert and Frances had six children while living at Woodchurch: Robert (b1879), Helen Watt (b1881), Nathaniel Craig (b1883), Agnes Wotherspoon (b1884), Fanny Lindsay (b1886) and Marion (b1889).

Robert and Frances both had relatives who had emigrated and done well in the colony of Victoria: Robert’s cousin Thomas Muirhead, a grazier near Tallangatta, and Frances’s uncle, Robert Craig. About 1888, Craig acquired a farm for Robert and Francis near Mansfield in the foothills of the Victorian Alps.

The King family left England in 1889 on the fast sailing Royal Mail Steamer ‘Doric’ – husband, wife and six children, the oldest of whom was 10 and the youngest a baby in arms. Agnes was five. The six week journey took the family from England via Teneriffe and Cape Town to Hobart.  There the family took another ship to Melbourne, then travelled another 200 kms by train and coach ride to Mansfield.

Mansfield was a well-established town of around 800 people (Victorian Census 1891. It had long had a state school and a hospital, and was about to be connected to Melbourne by rail. Numerous allotments of land in the town and on nearby runs were opened up in the vicinity in the land boom of the late 1880s.

Tragically, the King family arrived as the land boom gave way to the economic depression of the early 1890s. Their benefactor Robert Craig had already left Victoria for the more frontier colony of Queensland where he established new business interests. It appears that Robert King was caught up with thousands of others and lost the farm. Then in 1894 the area endured the worst flood on record.

The Mansfield Rate Books show that he and the family had moved to a cottage in the town by the mid 1890s. Once a tenant farmer and employer, Robert had been reduced to a labourer. By 1903 at the age of 60 he was a labourer and foreman, working on the rail line, where he was injured in an accident. The family suffered the additional sadness in 1898 of the death of the eldest son Robert from typhoid in Queensland, where he had gone to work at the behest of his uncle Robert Craig (Mansfield Courier, 23.7.1898, 30.7.1898). 

Four more children (three surviving) were born to Robert and Frances in Mansfield. Agnes and her school age siblings were presumably educated at the local Mansfield State School.

Opportunities followed the challenges and hardships of the depression. Agnes trained as a nurse at the Mansfield Hospital and achieved her certificate in 1907. The community was proud of its hospital, with its modern facilities and equipment and beautiful grounds (Alexandra and Yea Standard, 3.4.1903). Like teaching (which her sister Margaret took up), nursing provided women with a career and an income as well as opportunities beyond Mansfield. Her mother Frances had established a reputation for assisting people in ‘time of sickness and trouble’ (Mansfield Courier, 16.1.1926), and described herself as a ‘nurse’ on the electoral roll. The lack of medical care for her brother before his death many also have been a factor in her decision.

Agnes was a staff nurse and at some point matron at Mansfield Hospital, bur she did indeed use nursing as a mean of leaving the town. She moved to Melbourne about 1909 and registered with a trained nurses home (employment agency) in Spring St, from where she worked in private homes and/or hospitals in the area such as the nearby facility run by surgeon Fred Bird. But she returned to country Victoria. In late 1909 she was appointed matron of Omeo hospital in remote East Gippsland, where she stayed for almost four years (King, Service Record) despite the hospital often being in a parlous financial condition (Argus, 17.12.1909, 24.5.1911, 25.8.1913). She was also briefly acting matron of troubled Wangaratta Hospital (Service Record; D.M. Whittaker, A Hospital in Wangaratta (the First 100 Years), p35f).

The outbreak of war presented an opportunity to nurse overseas. Agnes formally applied to join the Australian Army Nursing Service on 11 May 1915, and a week later sailed on the Mooltan with doctors, nurses and other personnel as part of the reinforcements for 1 Australian General Hospital in Egypt swamped with a deluge of casualties from the Gallipoli campaign.

Her address on the embarkation roll was ‘East Melbourne’, probably because she was registered with a trained nurses home there. She named her mother as her next of kin.

At that point, the Australian public had little idea of the disastrous injuries inflicted by the campaign. Nor was there any way Agnes or her colleagues could have been prepared for the nature and volume of injuries they would encounter. She had nursed victims of bad farming and logging accidents, but only in small numbers. The hospitals and patients in Egypt, France and later England were to be entirely different.

Whatever the reason(s) that prompted thirty year old Agnes to enlist ­– professional aspirations, the desire to travel, her father’s stories from the American Civil War – she was the first member of her immediate family to join up. Two of her three brothers, stiil in Mansfield, followed her. Nathaniel (labourer on electoral roll; butcher on embarkation roll) joined up in September 1915, after initial rejection because of missing fingers. He embarked for overseas as a private in the 1 Australian Remount Unit the following November. In mid 1916, John followed their path. A bank clerk in Mansfield, he was a gunner with No 12 Field Artillery, he sailed in November 1916.

War Service

Agnes King left Australia in May 1915 and did not return to Australia until February 1919. During those four years she served in hospitals in Egypt, France and England, was promoted to Sister in 1917, and hospitalised on several occasions.

Her service record (naa.gov.au) provides a bare outline only of Agnes’s postings and may not be complete. It records periods of illness but not of her entitlements such as leave.

Agnes sailed with reinforcements for 1 Australian General Hospital in Cairo. 1AGH had opened in April 1915 in the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, a four story luxury facility in the Cairo suburb of Abbassia. 1AGH’s history in Egypt was one 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 mid March 1916, she and a number of other nurses were sent briefly to the nearby 1 Australian Auxiliary Hospital which had been erected on the Luna Park site. Auxiliary hospitals dealt with the overflow of patients, usually those who had progressed to convalescence or required specialized treatment.

By early 1916, the Dardanelles campaign had ended and the fighting focus had shifted to the Western Front in Northern France and Belgium. 1AGH followed.

The unit replaced a British hospital on the Rouen 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. In the period Agnes was there (April to early November 1916), admission numbers fluctuated from 750 in May to 4914 in September. The majority of patients were admitted, treated for evacuation and either returned to their unit or transported to England ­within several days.

Agnes was one of 75 nurses attached to the hospital.

Not recorded in her service record was six months on an ambulance train while in France (Advertiser, 16.10.1935, p35).

In early November 1916, Agnes became unwell. She was sent to No 8 [British] General Hospital in Rouen, then transferred to No 14 General Hospital in Wimereux, 200 kms north and closer to England for evacuation, and finally admitted to St Albans Hospital in London (where Australian nurses were treated) – all within a few days. Agnes was diagnosed with endometriosis and then gastritis, both of which attributed were attributed to ‘strain and stress’ in military service (Service Record). She was deemed unfit for service until late January 1917.

Agnes returned to her unit in France amid the terrible weather of the Somme winter but her stay was brief. In late February she contracted rubella and was once again evacuated and hospitalised in London.

Agnes now had a history of medical conditions attributed to war service in France.

For the remainder of the war Agnes was posted to Australian auxiliary hospitals in and near London, primarily 1 AAH at Harefield, 2 AAH at Southall, and 6 AAH at Moreton Gardens. Staffed predominantly if not entirely by Australian personnel, the auxiliary hospitals developed specialist services for their patients, the majority of whom were awaiting repatriation back to Australia. ‘Harefield became an ENT centre, the centre for a consulting radiologist, for massage (physiotherapy) specialists, for specialist repair surgery, for blinded casualties and general cases not suitable for other auxiliary hospitals’ (Rupert Goodman, Our War Nurses: The History of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps 1902-1988, pp51-52). 2AAH Southall developed expertise in the fitting of artificial limbs for its amputee patients, ‘not an easy task for the nursing staff, confronted with these human tragedies, day after day …’ (Goodman, p54). 6AAH at Moreton Gardens (South Kensington) was a convalescent hospital for sick and wounded officers.

She was promoted to Sister on 1 September 1917.

There were no further reports of ill-health in Agnes’s service record.

Agnes King left England on 15 January 1919 to return to Australia as part of the nursing staff on the ‘City of Exeter’. The ship, which was carrying returning troops including a large number of ‘invalids’ reached Melbourne on 27 February. Influenza cases on board during the voyage led to a three day quarantine but she eventually disembarked at Port Melbourne on 2 March.

She was the first of the family to return home: brothers Nathaniel and John reached Melbourne a week apart six months later. She was 35 years old.

After the War

When Agnes returned to Australia, most of her family ­– father, mother, and several of her sisters and brothers – were still living in Mansfield. Her father Robert died in November 1919, after his three children had returned home from the war.

While some siblings remained always in the Mansfield area, Agnes did not. Nor did she return to managing small country hospitals as she had done before the war. Like many of her AANS colleagues, she spent the remainder of her professional life – another 23 years – in repatriation hospitals, first as a nursing sister and later as matron. Where once she had worked in country towns in Victoria, now she worked in large hospitals in several Australian capital cities.

Agnes’s first appointment on her return was to No 11 Australian General Hospital, subsequently Caulfield Repatriation Hospital. She was on the staff there until 1927. Perhaps feeling free of family obligations after her mother died in Mansfield in 1926, she became matron of the Repatriation Sanatorium in Perth in 1927. She was there six years, during which time she was active in the Returned Nurses Club and a trustee of the Returned Nurses Fund. The local paper, noting that since 1915 she had been ‘continuously engaged in nursing “diggers”’, described her as ‘a soldier’s nurse’ (West Australian, 2.6.1933, p6).

Agnes left Perth to be matron of Keswick Repatriation Hospital in Adelaide, a position she held until she was appointed matron of the Rosemount Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane in 1936. The intrepid woman elected to drive herself from Adelaide to Brisbane, a journey of over 2000 kms. She allowed herself a week for the trip (Courier Mail, 19.10.1936, p21). In the two years she was at Rosemount she found time for her hobby: ‘She is very fond of motoring, and sees a good deal of the country in her own car. Some time ago she made a tour of North Queensland’ (Australian Women’s Weekly, 12.3.1938, p45).

In September 1938, Agnes King returned to Melbourne and to Caulfield Repatriation Hospital, this time as matron. She was still matron at the time of her sudden death from septicaemia, aged 58, on 3 April 1942. The sisters at the hospital paid tribute in the paper to their ‘dear matron and friend’ (Argus, 6 April 1942, p2).

Agnes King, who had travelled Victoria, Australia, Egypt, France and England, was buried in the cemetery in her home town Mansfield. She appointed her two sisters who had lived in Mansfield virtually all their lives ‘executrices’ of her estate. 

Agnes Wotherspoon King featured in the East Melbourne Historical Society's 2015 exhibition, 'Gone to War as Sister: East Melbourne Nurses in the Great War'. Her panel can be seen at Gone to War as Sister - exhibition panel 3